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“that borrowed form is already gone/I don’t speak.”
– Dolores Dorantes, tr. Jen Hofer, upon whose (Hofer’s) knitted spirogyra/amoeba kit I bid at an auction and won; I now wear the longer experimental biological specimen around my neck, which is so wrong, though I’ve received many compliments. It’s a graduated pink.
My late morning report is that I wrote to Jen Hofer last night and asked her to respond to the line of Dolores Dorantes that she had translated, in Septiembre; to draw a ruined thread from “I don’t speak” to the day. She replied:
“Dear Bhanu –
This question is more difficult for me, at this moment, than you might know. I keep wondering — now in the context of Haiti — why poetry matters, why poetry matters. Why do we do this? Why this? And why this now? And then again, how can a more humane response to a situation like Haiti’s (more humane meaning — do not assign an imperialist torturer to be the head of a relief effort (I’m referring to Bush here, in case that’s not clear)) be developed without poetry, without the particular understanding and illumination and compassion that art-making can awaken?
Perhaps it is simply disappointment at my own uselessness that plagues me. Certainly (if not entirely) it is that.
In any case, you probably noticed that I highlighted the line you asked about in my translator’s note to the book (p. 114 is the specific reference) — so I’d direct you there, first of all. And then beyond that, I’d say this.
We live in borrowed forms. Our bodies, borrowed forms, are transitory (in constant flux, never the same as themselves no matter how familiar they may seem) and temporary. We will inherently disappear, are disappearing. In Dolores’s poem sequence, the borrowed form that was the body of a beloved person is gone. In the presence of this absence, in the non-presence this you now is, I don’t speak. I cannot speak. As I utter (textually) this poem, I declare my non-speaking.
And we live in borrowed forms. We inhabit constructs attached to bodies, to genders, to racial markers, to what are called nationalities. These forms are borrowed, not lent to us because we asked for them but imposed at the entrance: veils or shrouds or skins we cannot remove, though it is possible, thankfully, to move around within them. That borrowed form has already gone — has shape-shifted into some other form or formula — and I don’t speak. It is not “I” who speaks, but something borrowed that speaks for me, through me, in me.
Perhaps it is life that is “a deeper death” — life in this borrowed form, life unspeakable, within you and without you. In this death, “we walk.”
I’m not sure I am able to speak of Dolores’s work as separate from my own. Of course I can recognize that the two are distinct in many ways (for one thing I love Dolores’s work unequivocally, and equivocate about everything having to do with my own), but my poetics and ethics have been so deeply informed by my practice as a translator, and my exploration of what it is to be a poet and an activist has been so inflected by my textual and actual conversations with Dolores, that I’m not sure I can separate what I think about her work from what I think about my work, in terms of poetics and forms (borrowed and otherwise) and speaking. Perhaps this is appropriate, insofar as poetics is a relational art — it is what happens in the space between what you make and what I make, in that intermingling.
I can speak to my understanding of Dolores’s work, but I cannot speak for Dolores’s work. If you want to ask Dolores any questions directly, please feel free to use me as intermediary/translator at any point — just cc me your questions or comments to her and I’ll translate them, and her answers to you, if you need me to.
Love,
Jen
P.S. If you find any of these sentences useful, you may use them in any way you wish.”
Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 by Bhanu Kapil.
Comments (21)
A lovely post, Bhanu. Thanks.
Thanks Jen.
There are some achingly mental thought-pictures and scenes in the eloquent sentences, useful because bodies live in constant flux, borrowed forms and transitory, the same beloved name a language-ghost, ourselves inhabit eight-four-two-one, our derbfine of temporary matter chained by the present mind to an inherited form the bodies of people, disappearing in sequence, each a physical poem, brought to every one of us: veiled at the entrance in shrouds of skin, we cannot remove our beginnings in the non-presence of this absence, you now, the big bang eye that cannot measure, only print ‘I’ that cannot speak separate from one’s own course.
You recognize two distinct ways from the many one things you love, unequivocally appropriate, you’re poetically everything, all moments gone that makes a lineage not so much you, but the multitude who went before and live as you, in translation, not lent, borrowed, nor asked for, but imposed by an active force within, mirroring without, in perfect balance, in the space between what you make and what I make, in that intermingling reflectional the text and conversations with Dolores – I think about her work in terms of my own poetic form, borrowed speech of the other, wise perhaps this is, insofar as poetics is a relational art — it is what happens, utterance declared, not ‘I’ who speaks, but something borrowed that speaks for me, you who inhabits what construct, attached to our race of human s/he, is that genderless marker of formless state, reason formed which thus, because it is possible, to move thankfully around within, they are us and we them, already gone — who shape-shifted into us, ineffable form and formula few speak. It is through them life comes. The dead make us thus.
One2
02
We’re the sidhe alive, buried silence of a faery troop, airing, fourteen streams of poetry composing me and you, they’re us.
02
G4
8-great-grandparents, it’s who we are, fourteen streams of poetry make a derbfine, the bass of clan-measure, cards, people marking who we are, all potential as the first and fifteenth roll, Danu’s dice decides.
bhanu-
i have had many thoughts about nodes since returning to michigan from vermont, also of geography and loyalty and knowing. when fall first arrived, deb the farmer lent me many pairs of wool socks, which i, somehow, lost, found, lost again, mismatched, finally gave back, but a few never returned. this is what comes to mind when you speak of inhabiting borrowed forms: i am only warm through the kindness of others; maybe this is a way of thinking about poetry also. (although i don’t always understand what you are saying so there is a good chance my associations sound stupid)
i feel the question of the animal is ever-present if concealed. especially in these cases of the Other (with all its associated irony-of-tone) and natural disasters, cf mainstream coverage of hurricane katrina and the bias towards the violence, looting et cetera portrayed as “instinctive” “animalistic” “barbaric” what have you…a radically kind reappropriation of evolutionary psychology might be just what is needed, in the ideational realm, when coupled with the physical/material/tangible relief
i want to believe there is a place for poetry everywhere.
“The question of what vanishes before it even appears.” is the shape of all disaster, social conflict, antinomy, aporia–it seems to me. did Haiti disappear to appear catastrophically, as if through its second death (USA and allies had already killed it through foreign debt). I guess I am speaking through a structure of trauma. I like here very much how Jen is speaking of Dolores’ work as being inseparable from her own. tho I do not translate, I have a similar feeling with many of my own contemporaries and writers who precede me who I constantly feel are speaking through me. for someone obsessed with imitation or killing the parent generation–typical Bloomian psychomachias– this might disturb them, but I feel quite empowered by it. call this discourse, call it history, these conversations–Sina’s “lines we carry”–get in the blood. Duncan spoke of the blood and muthos (the myths of our mouths–what they say–how they say it). he keeps coming up for me at this forum for the ways he was thinking about the body in relation to poetry’s imaginary…
There’s something very off-putting in the easy, knowing assertion that the “USA and allied has already killed it through foreign debt.” There are relationships between the two tragedies, of course, but to use the earthquake and real sufferring happening right now to snort with an academic marxist “told you so” is distasteful.
please feel free to complicate my assertion Joshua. I’d really like to know the root causes of this disaster…
History of a Hatian Holocaust at Nomadics:
http://pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=2946
Deleuze argued from Hume that it was the in-ability of the mind to perceive reality that made consciousness possible. An invert. What if the Heart was inverted? What if art? So that the power of the Heart was it’s ability to show truth to a mind that warped it? An attack on economic thoery.
An illogical proof:
“We live in borrowed forms…. As I utter (textually) this poem, I declare my non-speaking”
A list evaluates from the inside out:
(a = I had a dream there. (b = Actually when I was sleeping it was more like 10am).) // Would read b then a.
Thus:
” I studied with Marxists (okay, just one — John Lucas; he wrote a book of poems, “Studying Grosz on the bus” [the political cartoonist, not the Deleuzian feminist]) in the British midlands. ”
translates to:
the political cartoonist, not the Deleuzian feminist, okay, just one — John Lucas; he wrote a book of poems, “Studying Grosz on the bus” = I studied with Marxists in the British midlands.
Makes Possible:
(read b, a)
(How I Painted a Quilt (apply “strike keys” (Piano (played by me)) (repeat “Sounds” (came as objects)) )
Asks the Question:
” life in this borrowed form, life unspeakable, within you and without you. In this death, “we walk.” ”
Does the beauty of this line come from,
1. Your Heart?
2. Human Thought?
Jarvis, at the exact moment that you prepared this formidable and ecstatic quilting logic, I erased the chunk of my blog that you’re referring to. I read it again and saw that Jen’s letter was lost to the Philip Larkin/Donna Haraway/British Rail emphasis: so, ciao Monsieur Larkin, you had your moment in the sun, and though I liked what you said about “days,” too much of my late adolescence was spent reading your poems. Great. Now I am addressing dead poets directly in the comments section of a blog. But, what I love here is your quilting method. Jarvis. Not Philip.
And…the earlier exch. betw. Joshua and Thom…it made my blood drain from
my head. I smoked a Cuban cigar today. Maybe that was part of it too. Thom, thank you for the Nomadics link. Thank you, Kristen, Eric and Wendy. Eric, I passed your letter on to Jen; maybe you already know her and drink chai with her every Tuesday in Los Angeles. Kristen, give the socks back to the farmer and start crocheting your own! No, it is Wendy who crochets. It is Kristen who has embarked upon an informal study of GIS technology.
Your “ciao Monsieur Larkin” seems funny, since Larkin hated the notion of leaving Albion. Other poets have liked what he said about “days” as well. Since you’re mixing languages here’s another one to add to the mix.
Dias
Para que servem os dias?
Os dias são onde vivemos.
Eles vêm, despertam-nos
Uma vez todas as vezes.
Para estarmos felizes neles, eles servem:
Onde poderemos viver senão no dias?
Ah, a resolução deste problema
Traz consigo o padre e o medico
Em seus longos casacos
Apressando-se.
….translated by Luís Quintais, a wonderful young Portuguese poet. You can find more of him here http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007May/20quintais-earl.pdf
and here http://portugal.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=6455
Larkin is being picked up again by young European poets in all kinds of weather. Your “day in the sun”, aside from being the kind of platitude that professors of “poetry and thinking” should never let into their prose, belies Larkin’s perfect use of the sun in a country that has little of it.
Martin
I loved Philip Larkin. Did you go to Hull? It was freezing bloody cold. I went there to see where he sat. I loved him that much. Also, I think you are saying here that my English is somehow not up to scratch. Right. I’ll work on that next.
No, I think your prose is extremely sharp. “Animaux” was razor-like and delicate and tough, all in the same breath, just fabulous. This statement about Larkin doesn’t ride well with your short surgical discussion of “cliché” at the beginning of that previous post. There I felt I was learning something and getting pleasure out of the reading. Reading this statement on Larkin seemed like I was unlearning what I’d first learned, or that you were not listening to your own wise questions. “How do sentences attract? What kills them? Or perhaps you were showing us how to kill.
Larger question: what killed Larkin for you?
I did. I simply edited the post — this post — to take out the paragraph on Larkin; I also had Marxist education in my paragraph, as well as British Rail and architecture. My comment about Larkin was, to summarize, a joke — and perhaps I should not, in retrospect, have deleted the body of my post. When I saw it on the screen, it seemed inelegant; it dominated Jen’s beautiful letter. Well, Martin Earl, take it easy. Make sure to slather on that sunscreen or to slip into full-length waterproof outer wear before you venture out today, whether its sunny or not. Because it could rain. It always does.
Oh non Mademoiselle Bhanu: merci beaucoup – because the borrowed form physical body-poetic you’ve been musing on here, has been at the centre of my own thinking since I began dabbling myself, not so long ago, in the ignoble art of ditty-making.
The idea of a physical self being, as Jen says: ‘transitory (in constant flux, never the same as themselves no matter how familiar they may seem) and temporary. We will inherently disappear, are disappearing.’
Though I cannot recall the exact moment of the thought’s appearance, the first time it fell from my mouth in a logical statement, was in semester six of my primary learning, during a Friday afternnon Poetry and Poetics session. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it would have been during that period of training and transition where one segues from foclo (novice) into macfuirmid (son of composition): in a nemeton founded on the Modernist principles of various American poets, distilled via the philosophy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E prophet Chuck Bernstein, into a pedagogic reality 3000 miles away.
Our six semester hike through the range of contemporary AmPo, began at a base camp of Imagism, where we were issued the all in one Ezra Pound (go in fear of abstraction, treat only the Thing) poetic bible-blueprint, trail-guide and survival pack; filled with instructions and ingredients for, hopefully, constructing our own poetic philosophy over the course of the next three years.
For three hours a week and six in the final year, we traversed the landscape of American modernism from our college classroom, journeying through the foothills of Black Mountain poetry to the summit of Charles Olson’s projective verse (which most of us failed to grasp), and the chronology of our studies mirrored the chronology of material looked at. With only our Ezra-packs to sustain and show our minds how to travel through space and time, we ventured from North Carolina to San Francisco; teleporting to the City Lights bookshop looking for clues. We mopped up Ginsberg and Kerouac with a map of pink tinged toilet paper, which turned increasingly neon when our class adjourned to the New York School, where we met Ashberry, Koch, O’Hara et al. Finally we felt our way through queer theory, touched on Amiri Baraka and terminated at the gates of Langpo.
The accumulative wisdom of which we were to distill into a final document on exiting, which summed up our stance on the world as trainee poets, and so, theoretically, leave as fully operational linguists equipped to sell our Dream fare in a modern and crowded market place.
I was articulating an instinctive belief to the ollamh of the school – a professor in the discipline of contemporary American poetry – shortly after discovering Seamus Heaney’s prose collection, Government of the Tongue (not on any of the voluminous reading list of the poetry course), in the final months of attendance at our out-post, far from the spiritual source of the Buffalo grove where many of our most copped-on American avant-poetry profs first immerse into their professions.
The body-form poetic instinct brought was, that we are only the sum total of all those who went into making us. Everyone is made by two people, a mother and father, who were made by four people, who were made by eight, and so on and so on, ad infinitum.
For poetic purposes, I draw the circumferential limit to the great-grandparent stage, because in bardic culture, the smallest socio-political clan-unit of that society, was the derbfine, which comprises of the off-spring over a four-generation group, who share a common set of great-grandparents.
That gives us 14 people and 15 including ourself.
And it was reading your pieces here, which gave me the opportunity to further clarify this root-aspect of somatic learning.
So, thank you.
Neon. Somatics. Human relationships: multiple mothers. Friday afternoons. For me, it was Tuesday mornings with Tony Piccione. I get your Chuck. Take care of yourself. Drink some soup. This is the unasked for advice portion of the comment stream.
Plus, and this is separate, Jarvis: discuss: stitching. You said something about Andrea Rexillus, and then after her name you put a question mark, but I can’t find where you said that and put it next to the question of the quilt.
On an unrelated note, I am eating rajma and basmati rice, home from Naropa, where somatic learning is…oh dear, can’t think of the word for “it is everywhere.” At the farm the other day, the farmer said to soak the black radish in honey, then eat it. Like that.
Ubiquitous.
1 kilo of carrots
1 very large onion
chop and boil adding garlic – ginger – salt – sugar – herbs – spices.
After an hour add
2 fistfuls of coriander
after another half hour, take off the boil and blend into six servings of soup. Pour into portion-sized containers and freeze.
A week of healthy living for less than five euro.
Mmmm, yummy.
You are psychic. I just got carrots and onions from the farm, and was wondering how to make them into something other than a mixed vegetable curry! Thank you!
Prophecy and the light of foresight is the poetic goal in our game of guessing what comes next; and your response allows me to try and tease out another poetic concept I’ve been pondering on since year three Mademoiselle Kapil. One of three which a bard began taking on around year/s seven/eight, when at grade five Clí (ridgepole), or Anruth (great stream) sixth of the seven one need pass through in the bardic curriculum, before the terminal (seventh) grade of ollamh (poetry professor) was reached, around year 12.
Díchetal do chennaib, ‘extemporised incantation’ also glossed as (spontaneous composition) ‘from the tips’ (of the fingers, tongue), along with the practices of Imbas Forosnai (Light of Foresight)and Teinm Laéda (Illumination of Song) – we are told in a gloss to a passage on the seven poetical grades contained in the Utraicecht Becc (Small Primer), are the three (extemporised) compositional practices one must learn before becoming a poetry professor (ollamh) in that bardic tradition. As the Nemed (celtic equiv. of brahmin) judgement states:
‘Three things which dignify the dignities of a poet: teinm laéda, imbas forosnai, díchetal do chennaib.’
I first stumbled across the terms for these three strands that make the improv-poetic, in the same sixth semester already referred to in the above comment – and it was all just gobble dee gook to me then. Any skeletal-sense of this 1200 year-in-print tradition, was still two years off being delineated. Only instinct (and the weight of poetic logic underpinning this 1200 year tradition) made me think it important to accord the three significance and carry on the intuitive training blind, unconsciously plodding along to whatever destination lay ahead: trying to juggle a mass of myth most others avoid, in favor of a less impenetrable poetic.
~
Four years later: after familiarizing the intellectual bass from a mass of poetic study-material and lore that seemed never-ending when I began nine years ago – a tentative poetic grasp of the extemporisational concept behind díchetal do chennaib (and the other two methods), began clarifying itself into consciousness, around 18 months back.
The three compositional methods of the ollamh (poetry professor) ultimately relate to the vatic, otherworldly, or ‘prophetic’ side of a poet’s practice. Being able to articulate this side is really nothing more than speaking from the deeper reaches of our intellect and – if reached – indicate a level of eloquence that will set you apart from others.
And not vatic in a mumbo jumbo, Gypsy Rose Lee way, but in the Robert Frost, purely literate mode of turning up at the page not knowing what you’re going to write, and in the act of spontaneous writing, we are led to some knowledge we did not previously posses. Not unlike Columbo in the final scene, pulling all the evidential clues together and extemporising an answer by the combination of skill, experience and instinctive judgement – inhabiting that moment and acting intuitively in print. The ultimate free writing.
Learning to trust in the first thought best, to go with our inner flow and not halt to smooth out our mind for the readers who know – it’s only Poetry and not life or death; just an extemporised dive into the unknown, bringing back whatever appears for whoever reads returned spoil from a dig into self. Uncensored, alive, the inner child in a circle of magic-swish and swoosh, pretending like no one is watching, switching out the audience in the purest disembodied form of bluff.
@Eric: Jesu Christi, finally something in this thread really made sense for me. I quoth ye: “And not vatic in a mumbo jumbo, Gypsy Rose Lee way, but in the Robert Frost, purely literate mode of turning up at the page not knowing what you’re going to write, and in the act of spontaneous writing, we are led to some knowledge we did not previously posses.”
F&*k yeah, baby. Gnosis is a kind of weather – stay outside long enough…
PG
Thanks Peter.
There is a wealth of bardic lore out there now, and increasingly accessible via English translation. It is a fascinating tradition. One that ran from 500 to 1700 AD; twelve-hundred years in print, over twice as long as the modern English poetic tradition, and suffering a quick death not long after Shakespeare, due to Irish society imploding in the aftermath of the Tudor Plantation.
The first (short) text to read, attributed to the Irish equivalent of Hesiod and Homer – Amergin – was first translated only in 1979, and it offers the neophyte dabbler a short-cut through the woods of confusion, to a creative and intellectual source that is all but unknown to most practitioners of the vatic verbal art.
It has no title, I am guessing, because it needed none, as it would be among the primary texts a first year foclo (beginner) would be presented with when they pitched up to their first semester at bard-school on Samhain eve (Halloween, deep in the woods.
It asks a question: what is Poetry? – and then proceeds to answer it with a delightfully ingenius and wholly poetic answer.
The text is dated to 7C Old Irish, and (I am guessing) was one of the earliest pieces of ancient poetic lore to get written down by the newly literate bards, who had segued into that role from an oral-druidic one, when Literacy arrived in Ireland with the spread of Christianity, coterminous with the final centuries of the Roman Empire.
The transiton from oral to literate in Ireland was very smooth. Ireland had not been colonized by Rome’s and her culture became a beacon of light and learning when the rest of the Roman Europe imploded at the Fall. The Dark Ages of 5-9C Europe, were Ireland’s Golden Age, and her written vernacular language was ‘the earliest voice from the dawn of West Europe’.
This definition stating what poetry is, from a druidic mind of the mythical Amergin, written down by an anonymous 7C bard, was a cornerstone in the filidh (poets’) education for 1200 years, and totally unknown in English until 1979. It is worth taking a look at, logic suggests, because at the time it gets written down, it has the weight of centuries of oral tradition behind it, and 1000 years of poetry tradition in print, ahead.
Though it has no title, it has drawn the name cauldron of poesy.
Cheers.