2008 April : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Gee, Gosh

speaking of G, here’s a poem by Ish Klein:

G.
I have been told to talk to You with my head down
if I did not avert my eyes , you would not hear. Weird,
I thought, for the maker of heaven and earth to be so insecure
or to be living here, amidst the stink. Let me start again,
I come in peace, in a way, being on the side of Life; I am a fan
of your handiwork: flowers, flytraps, burrowing frogs…
But this is not about that, it is about the demons:
Does everyone have them all the time? Like viri or viruses
which flare when the hope is low?
Or is their manner of attack more bacterial?
Incapable of mere occupation. I guess it digests us.
Laying waste attractions and attachments
with their propaganda campaigns.
A moment while I mourn my blown bridges.
(sigh) all right I’m done.
What do the demons see in me? Me, a notoriously poor host;
in my house we sleep on the floor and eat on the floor
but we do not step on the floor; as this is a sore spot .
Maybe they think I want company.
I do not want any company
not that kind.
After I dreamed the demon was taken out of me, tornadoes hit Tennessee; which is where the
man who helps with demons lives
He said they wanted to get me
But why? Am I so weak?
Or am I bad? What if I can’t love because of them?
What if they are the only thing designed to love me?
You are responsible, G., I am applying again for assistance.
I believe my ground down teeth and busted guts are acceptable indicators of my plight as they
are listed in column A
of this application. Which is the fourth I have filled out,
by the way and why is that?
Have I been redistricted to Hell?
Yes? So, that is the point? But you are still at the Helm.
This application is still valid, yes?
I have a right to know what is holding me up!
G., I am tired of living in ignorance with voices and meaningful dreams after days where
everything happened already. This is the expose that may put better minds than mine to these
questions.
This is not a joke. Sure I may say it loud; indecorously before
a room of strangers; but that is part of my plan. After all,
they may know something as to this; hitherto unconsidered by me.
Thugs of the spirit world they are!
And you may be the biggest crime boss of all.
Taking care of the people in heaven with their better things
to do; who will sacrifice blood for you; and think nothing of it.
Of course you own the system; you were the one who forced us into particular bodies initially.
To play with. To infiltrate.
To pay you back. It’s called manipulation, by the way,
those who do it are Creeps.
You see, I am on the wheel beneath your world
the demons are inside me.
The other people do not believe it; this is not their district.
You made it this way; G., you big bully.
I tell you, you will never, NEVER get away with it!

[first published in Philadelphia Independent]

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Don Share

Who rained on that parade?

The poet-critic gets no sympathy, and considering the charge-sheet against him — adversarial, addicted to dicta, motivated by an axe-grindingly acute sense of right and wrong — why would he? He is, in most eyes, a hyphenated hothead. Until recently, however, that hyphen was still a badge of special authority, so that practitioners writing critically about their craft were regarded as poetry’s ideal readers. Not everyone agreed (Northrop Frye thought poets made bad critics because they were too obsessed by their own processes), but Alfred Kazin summed up the standard view in 1967 when, with considerable professional envy, he described the poet-critic as always “right in the middle of the parade (and if he is good enough, he will be leading it).”

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Daisy Fried

On the Floor With Kitschy Rumi

I didn’t have one of those blissed out pregnancies that some women do, but I did love my pre-natal yoga class. Besides the fact that it was good exercise and good relaxation, I got to go be pregnant with a bunch of other pregnant ladies. The first part of the class was spent saying how we felt, so the teacher could gear the class to what ailed us. One time everybody started saying what they refused to give up. The woman with tattoos wasn’t giving up sushi. The carpenter wasn’t giving up manicures. I refused to give up soft cheese. Camembert every day was my motto. (I also drank coffee and a glass of wine a day, and Maisie came out fine, of course.) Then we did the poses and vinyasas modified to accommodate our large bellies and got lots of energy and the kinks in our necks dekinked.
The only drawback of the class for me was that during the final relaxation, the teacher would read a poem. She’d let us commune with our fetuses, our third eyes and our narcissistic tendencies to our heart’s content for five minutes, and then, out with the poem, after which we were supposed to zone out again. Everyone else loved this part, but it drove me nuts. Prior to the poem I’d be going, “oh, no, here it comes.” Then she’d read Rumi. And my brain would start up. “Is that a good poem?” “Is that a good translation?” “What about the syntax?” “I wonder if you just switched those two words if it would work better.” We were supposed to meditate on what the poem said, and so of course I’d get onto my little mental soap-box and start railing against people who think of poems as mini-philosophy lectures. It was even worse if she picked a poem I liked. One time she read something by Wendell Berry which seemed perfectly made, a poem of great clarity. I was pleased by it. And when I hear a poem I like, I want to sit up, square my shoulders and get to work, not lie there melting into the ground.
I never relaxed until I got out of the room of warm soothing colors, away from the gentle supportive voice of the yoga teacher, the mystical truths of the poet, down into the street and the everyday world of bitchy, blissful prose.

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Linh Dinh

Into the Night

In an earlier post, I mentioned a Pound translation, deformation of an O.V. de L. Milosz’ poem, where he converted the French poet’s “Symphonie de Novembre” into “Strophes”:

Strophes
It will be as it is in this life, the same room,
Yes, the same! and at daybreak, the bird of time in the leafage,
Pale as a dead woman’s face; and the servants
Moving; and the icy, hollow noise of the fountain-taps,
Terrible, terrible youth; and the heart empty.
Oh! it will be as it is in this life; the poor voices,
The winter voices in the worn-out suburbs;
And the window-mender’s cracked street-cry;
The dirty bonnet, with an old woman under it
Howling a catalogue of stale fish, and the blue-apron’d fellow
Spitting on his chapped hands
And bellowing like an angel of judgement,
It will be exactly as here and in this life, and the table,
The bible, Goethe, the ink with the same temporal odor,
Paper, pale; woman, white thought-reader!
Pen, the portrait,
It will be the same,
My child, as in this life, the same garden,
Long, long, tufted, darkish, and, at lunch-time,
Pleasure of being together; that is—
People unacquainted, having only in common
A knowledge of their unacquaintance—
And that one must put on one’s best clothes
To go into the night—at the end of things,
Loveless and lampless;
It will be the same as in this life,
The same lane in the forest; and at mid-day, in mid-autumn
When the clean road turns like a weeping woman
To gather the valley flowers,
We will cross in our walks,
As in the yesterday you have forgotten,
In the gown whose color you have forgotten.
[from The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster]

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Linh Dinh

The Art of Misnarration

Movietelling, also known as neo-benshi, is the art of (mis)narrating a film. I encountered it for the first time in January of 2007, when I saw David Larsen’s “Paris of Troy.” The setting was Philadelphia’s Powel House, named after the city’s first mayor, Samuel Powel, who bought it in 1769, four years after it was built. George and Martha Washington dined there. So did John Adams. Projecting 11 minutes of the film Troy (2004) onto a dining room wall, including its windows and yellow velvet curtains, David Larsen narrated this Hollywood version of the Iliad, book 3:
It is the clitoral tip of Asia.
You don’t believe me?
that’s a Hittite word, Assuwa
for the windy NW corner of Anatolia
where stood gleaming Tarawissa
the Hittite word for Troy

[…]
She stands there for 60 seconds exactly
which you would know if you were
sitting there with me
watching and re-watching this scene from Troy
wearing out the remote control
That’s Paris on the right, the
dreamy abductor
his brother’s trying to tell him something
Yeah whatever
[…]
oh wow
what a bad scene
I just realized I’m going to die learning
about myself in the hardest way
this is no pony party
actually it kind of is, is
what makes it all so horribly real
as if the sound were cutting back in
how much more time is this
going to take
my heart is in my ears
its every report a separate agony
the fight is in my heart
my heart is upside-down

[…]