Interpreting a translation gives me an appreciation of the distance offered — that path of size from story — the levels within the original palimpsest inherent to the passage. One approach I tried was a homophonic translation created out of the original text which was then merged with the Ashbery translation — a scientific concoction — an elephant as an albatross — over-information as a wake-up call. Too-much added to nothing-new. I revisited Ashbery’s “Convex Mirror.”

Simplify. Is what I felt should happen. The translation needs to be heard. As itself. But don’t just read it. Record it. Okay that’s a start. Movement. While the words are heard. A play. A dance. Too involved. Go back to the text.

Was there a way to subvert the text, to look under its neural activators, and simplify it while keeping it intact? Speaking of simplicity, boys of every age, here in Soho and the world over, have erupted in Springtime, looking down the blouse of anything curvy… like clockwork. Like seasons… in hell. Just an observation.

Okay, so the poem is a fairy tale about a prince who has lost reason in the face of wonder. It came to me that the prince could be life… rather, society. The world and its consumption, its vortexed hunger for media shutting off real human contact. A synopsis came through in the poem, every few lines… a resolve, a map, a chart of humanity’s social progress. One or two words to sum up every few lines of text, for a parallel text.

I could hold that up on a board while the recording is heard. Too Vanna White. Make it the opposite, Satan. But death and vanilla have been done… to death. Disappear. From the stage. From the poem. Hold up each word, as a huckster. An invisible pawn. Entertaining the horde. How would silent Satan gesture his curse? Pilobulos. Cirque Du Soleil.

The recitation is in a dream state against a numbingly massaged music track. The performer wears black shoes, white pants, white shirt, white gloves and a black lace blindfold across the eyes. 5 white boxes, 12 x 12 inches, on the floor. Each side has one or two words in black. The recording plays, each box is ‘floated’ up by the performer’s hands, in extreme mime gesture, showing each side in harmony with the text. At the end, the last box shows one side black, one side white, one side with two dots. The performer places that box down, lowers the blindfold to cover his face, takes out two dice from his shirt pocket… this is timed as one fluid gesture. When last words are heard, the dice are thrown, lights fade.

And where are we from the original text? The translation? The Ur-translation? And what it means to drink in something you know you don’t know?

[the five cubes are below, if you listen to the audio you can imagine where each side of the cube appears]

blessing

curse

reality

Facebook

friend me

defriend me

meet me

give me

hold me

Tweet me

kiss me

online

iTouch

iWorld

iChild

iSlave

iWant

iHear

to dream

to be

to talk

to you

to me

today

home

dust

to dust

[BLACK]

[WHITE]

[SNAKE EYES]

By Cooper Bennett Burt

I am not a toddler, I am a baby.
Why? I think I would rather be
a toddler, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Nathan
is starting a drawing. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a snack,” he
says. I snack; we snack. I look
up. He has pirates in it.
“Yes, it needed pirates there.”
“Oh.” I go and the minutes go by
and I drop in again. The drawing
is going on, and I go, and the minutes
go by. I drop in. The drawing is
finished. Where’s pirates?
All that’s left is just
letters. “It was too much,” Nathan says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a foodstuff: beans. I drop a handful
of beans. Pretty soon it is a whole
mess of beans, on the floor.
Then another bean. There should be
so much more, not of beans, of
words, of how very smeared with food I am,
and life. Days go by. It is even in
pants, I am a real baby. My lunch
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
pirates yet. It’s twelve smears of food, I call
it MMMMMMM. And one day in Nathan’s bedroom
I see Nathan’s drawing, called PIRATES.

My four trips to Haiti gave me images, dreams, nightmares, and the music of poems in the bodies of the people around me. And yet, my greatest companion during these trips were poems I found collected in the anthology Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry (edited by Paul Laraque and Jack Hirchman) of Haitian poems translated from the Kreyol. As I read these poems, I jotted down fragments, snippets, lines that caught hold of me and offered me a way of speaking what I was seeing. I found myself drawn to those moments that seem to have been written for this time.

Below are a few of the selections that have become a part of my notebook. In these poems, we understand the poet as a voice speaking for community even as the poet suffers to find language that is faithful to the world in which they live:

Each time they cheat,
It’s our debt for tomorrow
(Claude Innocent)

…the poor man’s spit is all dried up.
(Claude Innocent)

In the land of Haiti
kids are dreaming
but they only dream nightmares.
They see snakes that are crawling
with little cups of water ‘round their necks.
(Georges Castera)

It’s here also that all the dust coming from the houses
says good-morning to the dead
as if nothing happened.
(George Castera)

Around here, life burns!
(George Castera)

When you cross the border
Don’t leave your machete behind
(Jean-Claude Martineau)

Help! Help! Let’s cry out
Until we’re hoarse
So the sun that destroys germs
Spreads its wings
(Jean-Marie Willer Denis)

When a brave woman’s out walking
she’s Mistress Life’s spitting image
(Michel-Ange Hyppolite)

His voice is licked
but his dreams
are the artillery of words loaded
to uncoil our strength.
(Michel-Ange Hyppolite)

Our dawns drown in ashes
(Michel-Ange Hyppolite)

You can cut me
Weed me out throw me away
You can burn me
Make charcoal of me
Birds won’t stop
Making nests in my roots
Hope won’t stop
Blossoming in my heart
I’m a poet
My roots don’t have an end
(Emmanuel Eugene)

But when a flame-tree
Hemorrhages
All the birds fly the coop

In exile they go singing
On the other side of the water they cry
In sorrow for those left behind
(Emmanuel Eugene)

Each drop of night that drips
Is a cup of bitter coffee in our hearts
Dew flows from our eyes
Staining the coat of powder
On the jaws of early morning
(Emmanuel Eugene)

In a few months, Peepal Tree Press will publish a new anthology of Haitian poetry that I am editing. These are poems written after the earthquake. The promise of these fragments

One of the things that does distinguish European poets from each other (and from American poets) is how they deal with their own national mythologies and the cultural identities that these have give rise to. This is tucked seamlessly into the specific cultures and their provenance in what we might call deep histories, which begin to form in pre-historical periods in Europe and become codified in Medieval Europe, whether in written or oral forms, whether in Latin or in the indigenous vulgates of the fragmenting empire, or in the many other cultural-linguistic variations in early Medieval times: Anglo-Saxon, the peripheralized languages of the Celts and the Picts, Norman English, as well as Medieval Hebrew and Arabic in Iberia. All of this is up front and present in contemporary European poetry since it is still part of the collective imaginations of Europeans – reinforced, as it were, in architecture, the durability or unveiling of ancient constructions and the material landscape generally. Constantine Cavafy is one of the great examples of that capacity for poets to occupy two worlds; or perhaps it is their capacity to see history as a present, layered and living reference. Zbigniew Herbert is another example, with his Mr. Cogito persona, a kind of modern censor-proof René Descartes, very much and Eastern cousin of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.

Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese modernist, was preeminent in understanding, instinctively, the way a slew of styles, predilections, and concerns can well up from the depths of history; how contemporary Portuguese and European politics were inflected by ancient legal codifications; how poetic traditions could range from the Primative to the Romantic to the Neoclassic and cultural leanings from the nationalist to the cosmopolitan. He understood how the fluidity and overlapping of 2000 years of culture could flourish within the imaginários of single individuals. So forcefully did his poetic character embrace the extravagance of history that he actually fleshed it out in a panoply of what he referred to as heteronyms, literally different poets, three or four of whom would have been major poets in their own right.

Like many of her contemporaries Ana Luísa Amaral is steeped in Portuguese and European history as she is in the quotidian realities of a continent perpetually under the stress of competing interpretations. As a scholar and professor specializing in American poetry, she also has the advantage of seeing in from the outside, and addressing her own predicament through a range of Anglo-American filters. She writes as fluently about herself, motherhood and the odd melancholy of the Portuguese psychic landscape as she does about national myths and its cast of characters. The Pessoan trope of simultaneity is almost hers by birthright. It is difficult in her work to disentangle irony from the seriousness and ballast of a copious and ranging style, nor am I sure one would want to.

The poem below takes up the subject of Pedro and Inês, Portugal’s Romeo and Juliet. The story, briefly, is about a mid 14^th century Prince who not so secretly carries on an affair with his wife’s lady-in-waiting, Inés Peréz de Castro, fathering four children with her. When his wife, Constance of Castile, daughter of the King of Castile’s cousin, dies (the marriage had created an alliance between two peninsular powers), Pedro insists on marrying Inês. This is unacceptable to his father, King Afonso IV, since it would have threatened the alliance with the Castilians. Afonso arranges to have Inês murdered by four of his thugs, a task which is brutally carried out in the Monastery of Santa Clara (still standing in all of its imposing grandeur right across the river from where I live). Civil war is the result; eventually the war comes to an end but Pedro is never reconciled with his father. He created two ornate marble sarcophagi that face each other in the Monastery of Alcabaça. Inês’s mortal remains were transferred there and eventually, upon the death of Pedro, he was buried there as well. The tombs, which are set foot to foot, were arranged so that on Judgment Day, when both arise, they would see each other before anything else.

The dignity, seriousness and tragedy of the story are a given, simply because they are part of the common domain, in the possession of every schoolchild in the country, a lot of whom will have seen the evidence for themselves in the twin tombs. As with so much of Cavafy’s work, Amaral is saved from the task of explanation and her story begins in media reis. Her chief expressive weapon is the no-nonsense tone, at once intimate and slightly fed-up, which cuts through the solemnity of a story that usually remains unmediated in the minds of the Portuguese.

Inês and Pedro: Forty Years Later

It’s late, Inês is old.

Pedro’s bunions rule out hunting,

so he spends the whole day gravely grumbling:

“Woman I so loved, the boar is tough!

There are no more descent boars in the demesne

and you lost that passionate touch for seasoning

mixed grill!”

But Inês is not even listening:

not only because her hearing aid is badly adjusted,

but also her exhaustion is vast

and her husband’s weave of words

slides, mournfully, from her knees

which long ago were delights,

but which now

are so reticent with arthritis.

Inês is old, alas,

and Pedro has cramps in his left ankle.

And that wandering fantasy

which attacks him, about being young

(when the flame was high and the heat

swelled in his breast),

of seeing Inês in her coffin

and her hands kissed by ruffians

that has so cruelly stabbed her:

just a fantasy,

some refulgence that he well knows is a sickness

of his imagination.

What he wanted now

was a good steak

of tender boar

(and to be free of this horror of melting

neurons).

Wiser and more prudent (three teeth missing

up front),

Inês is eating oatmeal porridge

in peace.

The story is turned into the story of everyman, or every couple, living out their years, fed on memories. Tragic history is recast as a “sickness of Pedro’s imagination,” an idée fixe, which, even in old age, he is helpless to rid himself of. This is mixed in with the more immediate concerns about Inês’ seeming indifference and of getting a good late 14^th century lunch of wild boar and, probably, though it is not mentioned in the poem, turnip greens.

notes:

This poem (in its original Portuguese, along with my translation) was first published in the magazine Pessoa, in December 2010.

More information about Ana Luísa Amaral and another poem can be found at The Poetry International Web if you follow this link: http://portugal.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=6096

POETS ON ADOPTION launched late last week, and currently features seventeen writers with varying relationships to the subject: from being adopted, to adopting children, to having adopted relatives, to giving up a child for adoption. The site also includes a call for participation, and will continue to add new content.

The format for each post involves three components:
“What is your adoption experience?
How has the adoption experience affected your poetry?
Please share a sample poem(s) addressing (in part) adoption.”

Some writers, such as Dana Collins and Michele Leavitt, describe reuniting with their biological families, while Nick Carbò says he has no interest in doing so. Many of the entries place the experience of adoption within frameworks of ethnicity and class. Christina Pacosz unsentimentally writes, “Now I see clearly that most adoptions are moving from one class to another. From a lack of resources/finances to more abundance and opportunity. This has nothing, necessarily, to do with love.” A number of contributors talk about nation. Marcella Durand discusses what it’s like as a white parent to have adopted an African American child: “Maybe because our story is also political in that we are a transracial family, but with a twist, in that my son, while a domestic adoption, has a birthmother from other colonized and colonizing countries and, because of my connection to the colonizing country, she chose us.”

Along with Pacosz, Sharon Mesmer contributes the longest post—a haunting and vivid narrative about her adopted sister who may or may not have been molested by their father. The piece provides an insight into her work I’d never had before. Susan Schultz provides the most theoretical framework for discussing the relationship between poetry and adoption—and in the process outlines a poetics of adoption: “Just as no poem is utterly original, so no poem is not without its adopted language.” This circles back to Kafka, and the difficulties inherent—or perhaps it’s better to say ex-herent—in positing a language of origin in his work.

Of course, to embark upon any translation is an act of hubris. To claim one will be “faithful” is folly. But much has been written about the difficulties or impossibility of translation; much has been written too about the need for it. Here I’d like to talk about its profits, not to the world of readers, which is obvious, but to the writer, to me as a writer. For as we’ve been working at a certain café every Friday from 9-12, Jennifer has been working at home writing a book on Apollinaire, Reverdy, Char, Ponge, and Fourcade, and their attempts to respond to war and violence, and I have been working at home on poems for a new manuscript I am calling, half jokingly, Alcohol. Over the months, the translating process has found its way into my writing process in more and more noticeable ways. What follows is a description of that bleed.

Here is a draft of the poem “Marriage of Andre Salmon” with our notes left in. Alternate words are in brackets to the right, alternate translations of line three are presented in color:

When I saw the flags this morning I didn’t say to myself

There’s the rich clothing of the poor

Or democracy’s modesty longs to veil its pain   [from me]

Or democracy modestly veils its pain

Or democracy modestly hides from me its pain

Or democracy is bashful and covers its pain

Or modestly democracy veils its pain

Or bashfully democracy conceals from me her pain

Or democracy modestly conceals her sorrow from me

Or liberty is honored now with ersatz                    [imitation/ false]

Leaves O vegetal liberty O the one liberty on earth

There is pleasure in the suspension of choice. Eventually, we will have to decide on just one version of the line and we will have to erase our optional words. But for now, I like reading this poem with all its waverings and uncertainties. I like how all the alternate lines becoming a chorus of possibility. Looking back through the writing I’ve been doing these past six months or so, I see a similar “optioning” occurring. Here’s a bit from a poem called “Labor”:

Labor is dark in the morning cold in the morning is it?

The man insists on his right to a “life”

approached frontally as a body does a stage

A “life” with intricate pen marks

The doors in this house

and they, the two lamps shining—

also a bit of labor hard won but for what

Labor lies darkly in the morning cold now does it?

Barrel with its halo of green

Blue lines in the garden dirt

Dark in the morning in the cold now is it?

And here are lines from “Distillation”

That we were drinking at the table

the blue walls receding

My worry was for the women

who lived alone now without children

Dog in the cold belly to the ground

By nine the walls had darkened

By nine the walls were darkening

Heavy clouds staying put without rain

Car doors slamming on headlights

Dog’s belly cold to the ground

My worry was for the woman

made to seem industrial under fluorescence

At nine the walls darkening

And she was a tired wasp bumping the window

between her top lip and her bottom

no landline no link no account

Drivers considered their destinations

and so I recalled her fear

in the passivity of belonging to an order

she was the first disappearing term

And drivers considered their destinations

considered their destinations to be worthy

Finally: a couple of paragraphs lifted from a draft of a long prose piece:

At the present time, a city opens itself to rain and to the farm workers in their trucks, but not to the man who lit himself on fire in the greenhouse, his son down the road playing. Smoking a cigarette in an elevator, she was carrying her groceries home. My friend on his porch watches the cars park below, backing into their spots with such confidence it astounds him. Good breeze arrives and what are we to do with that, that news and that, that photograph of fire? Living along the borders of roads. At dinner she says, “I figure business as usual is the best approach.” She means, to dying. The kids won’t eat, not one of them, instead, faces flushed from running, riding bikes around the block, or putting on their death costumes with a cowboy hat, their ghost costumes with a blanket. And if scissors and pencils mean I’ve got myself ready, ready for making and destroying, ready for marking and scoring, what not sleeping portends is a kind of edge to the day, a folded edge so that something is always hidden in that fold. A city resembles a forest, resembles a factory, resembles a body. Of a dog. Where that head on that lap is a kind of talisman against the burning of a father, of a husband. One spies in the grocery store an old man stalled at the meats, an old woman with efficient methods for carrying. And if I beg here. A cry pens itself to wreck and truck, to tile and fir. This prying sun on the door makes a target, a target we elevated to face. Her groceries home.

…

A city opens itself to rain and to the farm workers in their trucks. Smoking a cigarette in an elevator the woman lets her grocery bag lean against her leg. Present tense owns such pure confidence on the porch. And what are we to do with that fire? The best or better approach to dying is business and rest, or face flushed and running? Dressing in your death costume with your blanket warming the earth in early spring both marks and scores the edge of the day. A city resembles a resting dog, its head on the lap of that father or husband. A city is an efficient way of carrying, and if I beg here, a cry pens itself toward the prying sun. A target. A wretch. The cars parked each morning like lines from a poem always the same and always misremembered. Each night the cars renew themselves like sleeping children.

*

It’s not new for me to make use of repetition, but what I seem to be gathering from translating is an increased willingness to see the lines as fluid, to re-syntax, re-organize, re-order, and to allow those remade lines to write back, through the poem, to their sources.

The liberty to rethink the link, to allow their multiple versions to coexists is, in the end, just an extension of the freedom that writing gives me in the first place—that release that arrives when language reveals itself to be other than myself, belonging first outside of me, but available to me as an other body. That strange joining of intimacy and distance is one way to describe the pleasure of writing, the reason to write.

Matthew Arnold, speaking through his antihero, Empedocles, describes the self as a “wind-borne, mirroring soul,” which (and this is a complaint of his) “A thousand glimpses wins, / And never sees a whole.” To me, though not to Empedocles or Arnold, this version of the self is stimulating. Language’s kaleidoscopic possibilities keep me moving, “wind borne.” Anne Carson writes that she “came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch.” It seems that the more multiple a line is, the more I can feel it as a flexible, malleable, living thing, the more it, the line, the language, reveals itself to me. The more “lit” it becomes.

At once intimate and distant, or, the more distant the more intimate: the “mother tongue.”

Via The Best American Poetry, John Ashbery reads his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Promontory” from Illuminations. Originally published in 1886, Norton will release Ashbery’s translation in May, though not with his above comments about scholars’ endless attempts to track Rimbaud through Scarborough just because he mentions it in the poem. “He could have just read about it like the rest of us have, at one point or another.”

(More of Ashbery’s Rimbaud translations will appear in the April issue of Poetry, along with an essay by M. Ashbery about his work)

“It was the longest it took for me to translate a poem,” said Racz, who has contributed more than 300 translations of Spanish-language poems to journals and anthologies, “because I had to maintain the numerical value of each line in translation as well as the rhyme while also retaining the meaning of the poem.” It was necessary for Racz to get the translation and numerical value correct because the sum of the lines total 1847, a year that was historically significant in Acuña de Figueroa’s poem.

BOOK SMUGGLERS trailer from ERA FILM on Vimeo.

Book Smugglers is a documentary exploring the risks taken by the Lithuanian “book smugglers” who fought to preserve their language and literature when the Russian Tsar Alexander II banned it from use in 1863. Books, newspapers and educational texts became contraband but the knygnešia kept them in circulation by sneaking them into the country from East Prussia.

Retracing the history of the book smugglers our documentary, presented through the eyes of an Irish-speaking poet, inevitably draws parallels with the decline of the Irish language during the same century, a delicate and sensitive issue far from free of controversy. How is it that a small nation under comparable conditions of occupation and oppression managed to survive and preserve their “minor” national language, to the point where practically all Lithuanians today speak it proudly? And what is the relationship, for them and for us, between national tongue and national and personal identity?

The very notion of what is considered “poetic” is radically different from what newcomers are used to. Panegyrics and satires are marginal forms in much of western literature, whereas they are so central to the classical Arabic tradition that many poets -such as Al-Mutanabbi for one- wrote almost nothing outside of those two genres. It you tell a western audience that one of the greatest Arabic poets of all time (by some accounts the greatest) had basically two themes, and poems written on any one of those two would say basically the same thing in the same format in the same (and only) rhyme scheme with the only variation coming from different incarnations of technical proficiency and inventiveness, it will come across to most as a sign that classical Arabic isn’t worth learning for its literature. Westerners want a poet with more thematic complexity and subtlety than an on/off switch. Put Al-Mutanabbi’s corpus beside those of Robert Frost, W.H. Auden or Ezra Pound (or even those of Ovid and Horace) and there isn’t a commentator in the world skilled enough to prevent a western reader from coming away with a renewed cultural narcissism.

Foreman takes to the comments again to elaborate on how even framing translation as an act of re-writing and philosophically acknowledging that literal translations can’t encompass the full complexity of poetry from any era or region doesn’t even begin to address the problematic nature of this particular genre’s translations. Of course, classical Arabic poetry isn’t alone. Any poetry that’s dependent on “playing with the idiosyncrasies” of a specific language or employing untranslatable phraseology with weighted historical meaning is going to pose similar stumbling blocks, even for those with the greatest expertise and cultural sensitivities. As Foreman puts it, in these cases “translation would at best be only fully intelligible with a shovelful of footnotes.”

But all this is extrinsic to the issue of pre-modern (and especially classical, and of that most especially pre-islamic) Arabic poetry where -aside from the massive technical linguistic issues involved- a whole different aesthetic is at work: and not just thematically or socio-culturally, but materially as well sometimes. No Anglophone English translator/recreator, for example, will be able to find a way to acceptably render Imru’l-Qays’ line about the delicate beauty of animal-dung, without making it not about animal-dung. As most don’t live in a desert or limit themselves to pre-industrial technology, camel-shit and deer-shit just don’t do it for English-speaking readers. No matter how you try and slant it.

We’ll just have to wait and see how well Google’s poetry translator does in communicating perspective. (Hint: Probably not great.)

Poetry magazine recently exchanged e-mails with January cover artist Genevieve Simms, about her work. She says,

Illustration from its beginnings has always been tied to a text. I find with my personal work I am often interested in finding ways to use illustration in place of text entirely. For example, I may have forgotten the words to a song that my grandmother used to sing to me, but I can still try to tell it in pictures since I can remember the gist of it. The attached images are some pieces where I look for new ways to relate words.

Per request, she kindly wrote a little text about each image (meant to replace text).

This image is part of a series from a free-form narrative project done with a friend and fellow illustrator Byron Eggenschwiler. The idea here was that one person would do a drawing, show the other person, then over the next week the other person would do a drawing in response to the first, and so on.

Though this one does have some words on it, the idea is that it becomes its own little story unto itself. What is so interesting to me about this particular way of working collaboratively, is that each person ends up with drawings that are unmistakably their own, yet there is still a loosely woven narrative tying both sets together. The story is also something that remains mysterious to the two makers, a process I would maybe compare to using a Ouija board. The resulting imagery serves as a strange and otherworldly window of communication.

This set of drawings makes an effort to map out a folk song in Russian that my grandmother would sing to me when I was a small child. My understanding of Russian is pretty weak, and my grandmother has passed on. The song is still a favorite, even though the words, sounds, and exact meanings are lost on me. What I do have left is an overall impression of the song, which I try to slowly map out through drawing. I use the word “map” because I feel like I am taking a central point, or origin, in the form of a single image or scene that I think I remember as true to the song, and then try to retrace my steps around that using memory as a guide.

IBS Magazine (International Beauty Saloon Magazine) is an ongoing experimental book project. Each issue attempts to link a wide range of exploratory images and writing loosely based around a central theme. These two images were created for the issue themed on the word “space.” The images work as an exercise in word/image relationships. I remember from a young age having strong visual imagery associated with certain words, and attempt to articulate some of that here.

Translating a haiku? Genzel can preprogram his computer to generate online lines of five, seven and five syllables.

A Shakespeare sonnet in iambic pentameter? The computer can read a pronunciation dictionary, Genzel says, “like you would use to learn another language.” Once it knows where the stress falls in a given word, it can correctly place that word in a metered sentence.

“The hardest thing to do is rhyme,” Genzel says, “because it connects to different places in a sentence,” and because two words that rhyme in English may not rhyme in another language.

In a recent article for The Fortnightly Review, Martin Sorrell identifies the passage that first set him “firmly on the path of imaginative translation,” demonstrating in two words, Dix nuits, the difficulties even human translators face in parsing the original author’s intent. The stanza is from Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, as translated by Samuel Beckett.

Has Rimbaud, or his mad boat, really been keeping count of the nights? Ten, rather than six or seven or twelve or twenty? The answer, in terms of poetic language, is yes, it has to be “dix”, and that’s not because of the number, but the sound. The high front unrounded vowel [dis] is replicated in the noun [nųi]. It must surely be there as the shrill correlative of the boat’s distress, hurled about on crazed seas. (And is there a pre-echo here of the anguished last line of “Aube”, one of the Illuminations: “Au réveil il était midi”?). Beckett’s solution is “Nine nights”, and it’s a wonderful one. A shrill sound it may not be, but the rich rhyme [nain naits] recognises Rimbaud’s real meaning.

Over four years, the comments for the Tuscan milk has filled up with astonishingly well-written parodies in different literary styles: romance novels, military escapades, poetry parodies. Right at the top, for example, you can find a parody of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Nevermore,” beginning like this:

“Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door –
Only this, and nothing more.’”

Even actual books (well, okay, not actual books) are getting the Tuscan Milk treatment these days.

Maybe the best one, though, is the listing for what’s obviously an erroneous Amazon listing, a book called “Hgiyiyi (hgjhjh, hjhk) [Paperback].” The author/translator is listed as “jjjj,” and the narrator is credited as “jjjjj” (). Ohhhh, baby, the people had fun with this one!

“I enjoyed ‘Hgiyiyi,’ but the pacing is a bit slow. It doesn’t compare to Jjjj’s earlier works, like ‘Kquxiuqx,’ or ‘Oooeiaiai,’ or even ‘Nyah-Nyah Ptang.’ I think her recent successes have dulled her edge.”

“When I first read ‘Hgiyiyi (hgjhjh, hjhk)’ I told myself that I was too much of a man to cry. Not to spoil anything, but the part about wwyzwthg is the saddest thing I’ve ever read in fiction or non-fiction. A must read for all fans off Jjjj or sppliyu.”

As a jazz & poetry performer, Jan Erik Vold has been constantly active for more than forty years, since his first album Briskeby Blues was produced. With Jan Garbarek he made three albums 1969–1977, and with Egil Kapstad eight albums 1986–2008. Love, Rain (1974) is a radio play based on the poetry of Robert Creeley. Rainy Day Women (1977) is a translation of 70 Bob Dylan songs, which resulted in the Dylan song album Stones. Rains (1981), in cooperation with blues guitarist Kåre Virud. The Day Lady Died (1986) is an album featuring the poems of Frank O’Hara. Storytellers (1998) brings international poetry by Rimbaud, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Celan, Ekelöf, Szymborska. Enclosed is Jan Erik Vold’s liner notes on Chet Baker.

The final product was the result of Baker, Vold, guitarist Philip Catherine, and Norwegian session musicians. Despite their varied backgrounds and the poems’ performance being entirely in Vold’s native Nowegian, the process was smooth and the album has become “the holy grail of Chet Baker albums” over the years– even though its original title referred to the search for a blue goat.

The original title of the album was BLÅMANN! BLÅMANN!, which refers to a beloved Norwegian folk tune about a young boy’s search for his blue-shagged goat (blåmann=blue body), lost in the hills of Telemark. In Norway, this has been a best-selling album for more that twenty years. The English version of the poems, translated by the poet, was read and edited 2009 in Rainbow Studio, Oslo.

Chet Baker was very happy about the recording sessions in Paris. He wrote to producer Jon Larsen: “Had a great a time, thank’s so much”. To the Norwegian poet: “We must do this again soon”. Of the possibility of translating the poems: Of course, that would give you a much larger audience.”

Many digital poets weave sound into their texts. In Dakota, a piece by the South Korean-based Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, text flashes rapidly on the screen, accompanied by an Art Blakey soundtrack. The rapid-fire sequence of words together with the power of Blakey’s drumming combine to deprive the reader of a sense of control. The effect is unsettling, but it echoes the chaotic journey described in the poem.

Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries are one of those early hyperart adopters who generally work with third party source text, in this case, Ezra Pound. For Jim Nelson, however, the “digital” and “poetry” are inseparable, resulting in the Wall Street Journal calling his work as “alienating as modern art can get” and the occasional death threat.

The form that poetry takes isn’t the only area where new technologies are eliciting strong reactions. Even more practical applications like Google Translate have their naysayers, at least for now.

Some have suggested that the role of the poet will be subsumed, or at least altered, by technology. That may explain the uneasy reaction to Google’s attempt to extend its text translation system so that it can cope with verse. It is a formidable challenge, in part because the translations need to maintain both form and meaning.

I asked Robert Pinsky, the former US poet laureate, to look at the initial output from Google’s software. “These remind me that over the years people have sent me poems generated by computer programs,” he said. “It was amazing how much the computers seem to love cliches: the effect of naivety and conventionality. But maybe next week, or month, or year, something dazzling?”

The British Council’s Wales-India programme in Kerala includes bringing two of Wales’ most famous poets (Menna Elyfn, Paul Henry) together with two of Kerala’s (O.N.V. Kurup, K. Satchidanandan) for a unique and compelling joint reading encompassing poetry in Welsh, English and Malayalam. Poet and dancer Tishani Doshi will read from her debut novel ‘The Pleasure Seekers,’ and National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will discuss her much-loved poetry in a separate session. To wrap up, the five poets attending will explore how poets from Wales and Kerala respond to the different challenges and opportunities of writing across more than one language.

Speaking to The Hindu on the subject of the festival’s ambitions and readers’ actual adoption of translations, Jnanpith Award winner Kurup notes:

Kerala is a land of avid readers, even in the rural areas there are plenty of people who revere the written word. Most of them are keen followers of Malayalam literature and poetry. English is read by a comparatively smaller group of readers. One of the reasons is the prohibitive price of books in English, which pushes it out of the reach of a large number of readers.

Read more about her process at the Maryland Gazette:

There are three basic schools of thought about translation, according to Carlson. One believes that exact translations are paramount, and another places context as most important. Carlson is part of the third, which seeks to maintain the integrity of the poem’s sounds.
French has particular sounds that permeate the language, says Carlson, and she focused on recreating the assonance, or repetition of similar vowels in stressed syllables, in her translations. If this meant choosing a word that didn’t have the exact meaning in English, but had the correct sound, Carlson made the sacrifice.

The themes of Alturas de Macchu Picchu, with its blending of indigenous and Christian values, make the poem particularly difficult to render in English because this mixture of heritages points to the paradox of identity in Latin America. The language transfer is only part of the challenge. An entire value system must be absorbed in Spanish and delivered in English for the poem to work in English. In his book Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, John Felstiner walks the reader through his decision-making processes in translating Neruda’s poem. He also provides a history of Neruda translation, relevant biographical information, and his own theories of translation. Felstiner sees translation as “a process as well as a finished version,” with “that process, with its origin in a strange language and culture, remaining active in the finished version.”

The Globe and Mail reviews Edith Grossman’s new book:

Grossman is well known for her translations of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes and, most notably, Cervantes. She has won several awards, including, this past January, the first Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize. At 74, she would seem to have every reason to feel secure, if not serene.

“How odd, then, to encounter, early on, passages in which she sounds anything but — sounds, rather, as if she were telling us why translators, especially ones named Edith, matter and how they get next to no respect from crass publishers or (oh dear) careless reviewers. The latter are faulted for making mention of translators only to dismiss them with an all too familiar adverb: ‘ably,’ sometimes ‘seamlessly,’ as in ‘ably (or seamlessly) translated by,’ when the criteria for such a judgment are obviously missing, most reviewers not knowing the original language of the book under review. And even if they know it, she says, they tend simply to point out errors and inaccuracies, ‘a useless enterprise that enlightens no one.’

For one thing, it was unapologetic, without that defensiveness poets who work in form are prone too (But I also write free verse!  But I am really not a formalist!  I substitute!  Hide the rhymes!)   For another, everyone was professional and relaxed and super-prepared (not, er, always the case at these things…), kept to their time, came at it from another angle, listened and responded to their fellow panelists. 

Charles Fort spoke about Robert Hayden and how he had not been considered “black enough” in his time—something that in retrospect seems a bit bizarre for the author of the great sonnet “Frederick Douglas.”   In America, use of form has long been an oddly politicized choice.  (Women are sometimes criticized in the same way for using it—that false dichotomy of free verse = democracy and empowerment and progress whereas formal verse = oppression and elitism and kowtowing to dead white males.)    

Tara Betts gave a fascinating discussion of forms invented by African-Americans (as the Bop, see below), and of how we can all use forms invented in other cultural contexts—that they are all open to everyone, and gain energy from cultural cross-fertilization. 

Erika Dawson, who has something like rock star status in the formal world, and who has the presence to go with it (this is a tall woman who has written an ode to high-heeled shoes…), spoke about her relationship to the tradition, tossing off some seriously dead white male influences like Anthony Hecht and James Merrill,and  reminding us of just how raunchy the Metaphysical poets could be.  A decade ago she was told at a recitation contest that “form was dead” but now she has served as judge at that same contest.  She exuded confidence and vindication, taking on the canon in her own terms. 

Allison Joseph discussed among other things how she came to form, her fascination with invented and repeating forms (and forms invented by “women with three names”), and how sonnets, say, helped her handle toxic subjects like grief, how she could say things in form she couldn’t say in her free-verse, how it actually gave you permission to say such things.   Here’s her blog about rondeaus and other forms of repetition, The Rondeau Roundup.

OK, I wasn’t taking notes—this is all from memory—so this is rather a vague sketch—forgive me if I didn’t get it all straight.  But at the same time, rather impressive that so much of it did lodge in the memory!

I was most fascinated, I think, with the discussion of “The Bop.”  Invented at Cave Canem by Aafa Michael Weaver, it partakes of the proportions and perhaps the argument of the sonnet, in stanzas of 6/8/6 lines, which all end with a refrain.  I am particularly fascinated with forms that are extensions of the sonnet tradition, and it seems to me this could be added to the Meredithian sonnet, the caudeated sonnet, the curtal sonnet.  I hope to try my hand at it someday. 

But what was exhilarating was, I think, that what came out of this was that the tradition and form were not about exclusion or elitism or who owns or is allowed to do what.  It was about inclusion and access and taking all things human as belonging to everybody, about the ongoing conversation, dialogue really, of the dead and the living, about owing the canon not an obligation of respect and deference, to put it in a museum, but an obligation to pass it forward, to add to it, enrich it, keep it alive, take it into the future.

So I’ve fallen behind in my life (stranded, in stasis, a guest in my parents’ home) and I’ve fallen behind in my conversation on Harriet. As a devoted reader of Lavinia Greenlaw’s poetry (wherever I can find it — we need more of her work on these shores!), I am delighted to have inspired this post, and will respond to it further. I also have to respond to Praxilla’s cucumbers.

Irony heaped on irony: I was exiled from my home in the U.S. in the midst of the economic meltdown, so went to live, against my will, in Beirut; I needed to do some April readings for my new book so I came to stay in my parents’ home for a few days; now I can’t leave my parents’ home, though my children are waiting for me in our not-real-home, in Beirut, which is essentially the only place on earth I want to be right now.

I can barely write a coherent sentence, much less a coherent post. But this is what I was going to say before I got stranded:

One of the advantages of being in the U.S. right now is that I can walk into a bookstore and pick up the issue of The Nation where this article appears, since it’s not available online. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is—well, something stronger than an ongoing interest of mine, but doesn’t quite qualify as an area of expertise.

There is a dialectic of wandering and homeland at the heart of Arabic poetry. The poets Jordan Davis evokes at the beginning of his article on Darwish were nomadic Bedouin, who would open their famous poems with invocations of lost love at the site of old encampments. These sites were just temporary dwellings, but erotic memories infused them with significance.

In the Levant, several cities boast of being possible candidates for “the longest continuously inhabited city in the world.” The scholar of Arabic poetry, Suzanne Pinckney, wrote in her book The Mute Immortals Speak of the ancient Arab story of “the bursting of the dam at Ma’rib.” “With the dispersal of its people, the Himyarite kingdom became a byword for a failed polity, the moral of their story preserved in the idiom tafarraqu aydiya Saba, ‘they scattered in all directions.’ … It is not surprising, then, that in Islamic terms, the heavenly garden is termed dar al-qarar, the permanent abode, and the Ka’bah at Mecca (and its heavenly counterpart) given the epithet al-bayt al-ma’mur, the (continuously) inhabited dwelling.”

A successful polis makes life more livable for its inhabitants, who in turn sustain the life of the polis. Scattering and exile constitute failure.

Still, some of the most exciting poetry in world history was written by people who were essentially homeless. This homelessness augmented the value of poetry for them—a poem was a “thing” they could essentially carry around in their heads, weighing nothing, and unable to be stolen or lost in transit. Conversely, even a temporary campsite has the heaviness of “home” if what took place there burned itself into the brain forever.

Praxilla was a woman poet writing in the 5^th century BC.  While famed in her time as an equal to lyric poets Alcaeus and Anacreon, she is known now almost entirely for one fragment, that was proverbial in ancient times for its “silliness.”  In it, Adonis is answering the shades of the dead who want to know what he most misses about the upper world.

Finest of all the things I have left is the light of the sun,
Next to that the brilliant stars and the face of the moon,
Cucumbers in their season, too, and apples and pears.
(translated by Bernard Knox).

Somehow ranking ripe cucumbers so close after the celestial bodies was, in ancient times, a ridiculous lapse of taste.  (Is it the humbleness or the phallic shape of the cucumber that makes it so risible?)  Now, this seems charming, and suits our contemporary aesthetic of praising the humble and quotidian.   Doesn’t it seem that every time you open a magazine, someone is praising their morning oatmeal, exalting their suburban cul-de-sac, hymning a cup of filter coffee?

There were so many conversations going on during my tenure at Harriet that, inevitably, some interesting tangents were never followed.  I remembered that Stephen Burt had brought up Michael Longley’s Praxilla poem, but we seemed to have dropped it there.  So I don’t know what Burt was going to say about it.  But I have been thinking about Praxilla and her Adonis lately.

The Michael Longley poem goes thus:

Sunlight strews leaf-shadows on the kitchen floor.
Is it the beech tree or the basil plant or both?
Praxilla was not feeble-minded to have Adonis
Answer that questionnaire in the underworld:
‘Sunlight’s the most beautiful thing I leave behind,
Then the shimmering stars and the moon’s face,
Also ripe cucumbers and apples and pears.’
She is helping me unpack these plastic bags.
I subsist on fragments and improvisations.
Lysippus made a bronze statue of Praxilla
Who ‘said nothing worthwhile in her poetry’
And set her groceries alongside the sun and moon.

Setting her groceries alongside the sun and moon seems exactly right for us—that this is as it should be  Have contemporary poets simply lost a taste for the sublime, the exalted, the majestic?  Ange Mlinko kindly mentioned my Lucretius translation in her recent post on campuses and Epicurean gardens.  Certainly Lucretius is a poet for whom no subject is too grand or too humble—I’m sure he would be as eager to talk about vegetables as lunar eclipses. 

Maybe, too, part of our urge to praise everything is that we are bearing witness to so many disappearances, so many extinguishings—humble but miraculous things like frogs and bats, bees and flowers, things we too often take for granted, underfoot and skittering overhead, vanishing unsung from our lives.   

Were we to discover a new planet tomorrow that had some amoebas or algae on it, would we not be besides ourselves with wonder and amazement?  Yet things infinitely more complex and beautiful are vanishing from our own world every day.

If someone asks us in some sterile afterworld what it is we miss, surely the humblest fruit, sweet and juicy and real, will be equal to the distant constellations.

Someone spoke of your death, Heraclitus, and it moved me to tears, and I remembered how often we put the sun to sleep as we were talking.  You, my friend from Halicarnassus, lie somewhere, long long ago gone to dust; but your nightingales are living, and Hades who snatches everything will never lay his hand upon them.

Or, here is the Loeb translation by A. W. Mair:

One told me, Heracleitus, of thy death and brought me to tears, and I remembered how often we two in talking put the sun to rest. Thou, methinks, Halicarnasian friend, art ashes long and long ago; but thy nightingales live still, whereon Hades, snatcher of all things, shall not lay his hand.

(See the Greek here.)

It is the image of the two friends talking till the sun goes down that brings this to life.  And then the sad reassurance to the dead, and comfort to the living, that his verses (charmingly called “nightingales,” that ancient symbol of poet and song) shall live on.  Callimachus was a poet and scholar of consummate learning and polish (he was librarian at the famous library of Alexandria).  He flourished in the first half of the third century BC.  (Sorry, I don’t go in for the politically correct BCE…)  

The Heraclitus in question is a fellow-poet from, well, Halicarnassus (in modern Turkey).  He is NOT the philosopher who said everything flows.  That Heraclitus lived some 200 years earlier.  I point this out because of the dangers of the internet—there are footnotes all over the place (even some “legitimate” academic sites…) for the Cory poem that explain that Heraclitus was the presocratic philosopher of that name, even though, then, the poem makes no sense.  I mean, surely it could not have come as much of a shock to Callimachus that that Heraclitus was dead.  Really.

But I digress. This poem is more famous in the English-speaking world from the Victorian translation of William Johnson Cory.  Like Callimachus, he was a scholar as well as a poet, and served as headmaster of Eton.  His version goes:

It is a faithful, accurate and instantly memorable translation—and the bold liberties Cory takes are all meaningful and telling.  An indication of its classic status is surely the presence of many excellent parodies.  (Some are here.)

Evelyn Waugh also did a parody, and no doubt there are others.

Cory expands the efficient six lines of elegiac couplets in Greek to eight lines—and, importantly, two stanzas—of hexameter and heptameter couplets in English.  The six-beat line tends to break in two in English, leaving a rest in the middle, so that the seven-beat lines don’t feel longer, they just feel completely filled out.  The two lines that are completely filled out are the points of greatest emotional pressure:  lines 2 and 8.  

In the English, the first line is all Anglosaxon monosyllables besides the mellifluous, resounding and foreign “Heraclitus”—the name is lingered on.  The repetition seems to speak of denial.  And indeed, coming to “dead” at the end of the line is shocking—perhaps, we think for a moment, this is a false rumor—after all, we are addressing this “dead” person. 

Cory has changed the one someone who brings the news in the Greek, to a sinister “they.”  Hewing closely to the Greek, Cory calls the sun “him,” but in Greek, there is no choice but to give the sun a gender.  In English, doing so personifies him.  He becomes a companion to their long conversations, even though he goes to bed first. 

The big shift in the English, though, is between stanzas.  In the first stanza, Heraclitus seems still alive—if  in the past tense, these shared memories have a freshness and urgency to them.  He speaks to Heraclitus directly as “you.”  By the second stanza, Heraclitus has become a dead poet, whose poems survive him.  He is suddenly an archaic “thou,” (there is no such register shift in the Greek), and the repetition of “long, long” (though an accurate rendering of the original) is less about denial than about acceptance.   

In Greek, the nightingales (the poems, of course) of Heraclitus still live, but in the English they are “awake”—it comes to the same thing, but whereas the Greek is a plain and simple, elegant statement, the English is a metaphor—awake and thus singing though the night—the eternal night of death.  (And it foregrounds the contrast of the sleepy sun in the first stanza with the wakeful nightingales.) 

I often hear that the cardinal sin of translation is adding something, but I think this is often misconstrued.  Translation isn’t a word for word operation.  A phrase may sometimes explain something that is actually contained or latent in one word of the original.  “Thy pleasant voices” is not in the Greek, but in a way it is contained in the etymology of nightingale, which in Greek is cognate with the Greek verb for singing.  The “handful” of grey ashes is not exactly in the Greek either, but one wonders if Cory wasn’t influenced here by the end of the Greek poem:  grasping Death shall not lay a “hand” on his friend’s poems.

The synonym of “Carian” for Halicarnassian is metrically useful—it gives Cory more space to work with in the line.  But is there not also some vague hint to the ear here of “carrion”?  (Or I am going to far there?  Maybe.)  Death becomes the ultimate archaizer, or rather maker of timelessness, as indicated by the grand and old-fashioned “taketh,” and the slightly inverted syntax of the close, hammered home by alliteration, repetition and meter.  The poem begins in denial and ends in defiance. 

The Greek here of Callimachus has an elegance and restraint that we associate with the classical.  The translation gets that feeling across; but it is also more highly colored (the alliteration and internal and end rhyme for instance, the repetition of “bitter” in line 2, which is Cory’s own interpolation) than the original, more emphatic, more emotional.  More, well, Victorian.  But what it loses in that anonymous elegance of the Greek Anthology it makes up for in other ways.  It becomes (arguably) a great English poem in its own right.  The Greek is like pure, transparent spring water.  The English is like a vintage claret.

In any of its incarnations, though, it embodies beautifully our feelings towards our departed poet friends.  Our fond memories of our conversations, when we sent the sun to bed.  And our hope that their poems will live on, singing through the night.  Many poet friends and acquaintances have left us these past few years, translated out of time, and when I think of them, this poem pulses through my mind.

I wanted to say a few things about a recent Transnational Poetics panel in which I recently participated at UC Berkeley with fellow author and blogger, Javier O. Huerta, as well as local poet and performer, Maya Chinchilla.

Regarding my own apparent status as a poet from a transnational community, my interest is in that space between nations and homes, and how nation and home aren’t always geographical spaces. I think instead of languages, and the space between languages. There are many Englishes, and Javier tells us too, there are many Spanishes. If my primary language is not English, and if it is not Tagalog, then it is code switch, an ongoing process of negotiating who understands me, who’s down with my system, and/or who I want to be in on what I am saying.

I think of what Johannes Göransson has commented here in the recent past, about teaching Poeta en San Francisco; how do readers who do not know Tagalog respond to its non-translation. I wonder whether the belligerence at finding no translation comes from an unwillingness to decenter “standard” “American” English, and a related unwillingness to consider that for many people, our primary identity is the transgression of borders. The poet is a “we,” in migration, like Nate Mackey’s Andoumboulou, moving through waking and dreamtime. That’s another transgression of border, writing as a “we.”

I think also of how we experience the space between traditions, and here I mean oral and literary traditions, storytelling traditions. In his lecture, “A Natural History of Chicano Literature,” maestro Juan Felipe Herrera says many awesome things, most notably (to me):

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you – the speakers around you – and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers. If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker. If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. And that’s who informs our poetics.

I am glad the graduate students who attended this panel were interested in the validity of oral tradition, that it has a place in a discussion of transnational poetics. Maya discusses her use of the testimonio, in which a person’s direct experiences are a part of a larger historical memory, and which connect a person to the politics of a place.

So then, the transnational poet is always crossing borders, and as Javier points out, a person who can cross or transgress the borders regularly is one who the has the privilege to do so, the documents to do so, the languages to do so.

So that’s where I am this morning. Happy Easter Sunday.

“Writing is never wasted. I tell my students this, urging them to throw away a draft and start again…difficult to do, to trust. I have variously taken drafts and burned them, tore them into tiny shreds, let them go…the old drafts become the texture and resonances in the new.”  — Lemon Hound/Harriet comment stream. (Sina Queyras.)

“Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.” — Frances Farmer Is My Sister. (Kate Zambreno.)

“Bhanu, the red, letting it soak back in (still thinking of Pamela Lu’s de-red-ing), I think of your earlier statement about killing the character in your project, but now with this idea of the rose, your impossibility of destruction, I am reminded of how, in physics, matter cannot be eliminated, just changed.” — Harriet comment stream. (Amy Catanzano.)

“The notebook is non-reproductive. You could say it is a mutation that is never seen and only becomes available, in a more formed condition, in the book. But the book depends upon the notebook.  What’s in the notebook.  In fact, the larger the non-reproductive store of a population is, then the more rapidly its outer limit, that dotted line, evolves. So for species, if you have a large number of mutations that don’t become built structures, that never emerge, that’s good.” – - E-mail.  (Andrea Spain.)

Then I met Jarvis Fosdick at the cafe.  Jarvis is someone I can text with the words PANTHER MARTINI? and he’ll text back YES.  Jarvis makes quilts; we became friends when it turned out he had Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge‘s “Concordance” in his car.  We both had it in our cars.  In Colorado, you need a car. I hope this does not sound too boring if you are reading this in a city.  I once had a lover who texted me: NATURE KILLS AND SEPARATES.  A text I still have.  Jarvis said: “How do the words get to the page?“  We were talking about fire and water as purgative mediums.  About the painting, pre-quilt, that nobody sees, embedded beneath the layers of silver oil; the notebook – -a diagonal line across the page: its casual and brutal NO.  Jarvis said: “If you destroy the words, if they are never seen, what calls them back?” Luckily, Jarvis scrawled some rapid notes towards the end of our coffee (easily substituted for a drink) and so, apparently (according to his little yellow notebook), I replied:

“The page is an attractant.  It’s sticky.  For those of us who love theory, we get it, that the dirt and glitter of the border appears in these books in another form.  Displaced.  Projected.  So that we’re writing back to the page from these flecks.  This is not retrieval in a duration. It is entirely spatial.  So that part of it is aperture, stance…and part of it is an occult practice.  You have to prepare the page.  You have to empty it out or darken it.  And the book you write will not, perhaps, be verdant. This is not that book.  It is not “a book for you,” for example.”

……………..

The thing about theory sounds insane out of context.  Let’s just ignore that, if at all possible, and go with these questions instead:

1.How do the words get to the page?  2. What attracts them?  3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river?  5. What book do you have in your car, rucksack, kitchen, suitcase, etc, in case of emergencies?  6.Where’s the aperture?  7. What regenerated?  8. What survived the fire?

I occasionally start with a chronological arrangement when getting into any particular body of material, though I have also kept notebooks without dating entries and with a semi-random blank page-selection process. This recent completion is infected with dates so I may have to figure out how to get around them in order to get this stuff right. I have a “feeling” the material is unlike where I’ve been previously, but this is based on…..? Wishes, lies, dreams. The in of being in new time. One wishes to be detached and intimate among company. At any rate, there is no sample size at the moment, which is a slant on freedom from expectation. The question isn’t about order, anyway, it’s about finding an order to replace the first order, which is itself a recasting of perception whether the materials be generated externally or internally.

About the first thing I learned to do as a poet was get the line off the margin. I already knew how to use words that were in the air, on a sign, in a song, caught in someone’s throat, etc., mumbled in fine print, all them other webs. Spontaneity in that sense is heavily scripted and available – kid’s games often seem to me an amalgamation of classicisms and collage dosed by that mind or minds’ sensibility-in-formation. Dreams, without the neon lights pointing to vacancy. Speech balloons to white out and rewrite. It took years, though, for me to figure out that “Anselm is a cunt!” said very emphatically in the household when I was eight or nine wasn’t actually a reference to me, but part of a bawdy kids’ game played by adults, i.e.: all people can basically be categorized under “prick” or “cunt” (feel free to be self-defining in this regard).

This sentence in Wallace Stevens’ essay The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words struck a chord with me on some combination of airplane and BART train a few days ago: “I suppose that the present always appears to be an illogical complication.” The suppose/appears allitero-potty moment in there assuages the pressure on reality exerted by present as “illogical complication” just enough to let me make use of the sentence as an invisible epigraph to entering work. It’s my own tendency to discuss a mechanics of the writing operation while leaving the prepositional hooks into the writing checked at the literal door. I can’t take or do judgment these days when it comes to discussing the art. I have no idea what anyone is really talking about most of the time. None of that seems to get in the way.