radiant fracture

Another from Poetry Unbound -- "A Portable Paradise" by Roger Robinson. It felt fitting for conversations I've been having and witnessing.


A Portable Paradise

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I'm speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can't steal it, she'd say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room - be it hotel,
hostel or hovel - find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.


* * * * * *

I like Ó Tuama's commentary because he moves seamlessly between context -- the poem appears in a collection that talks about the catastrophe at Grenfell; the biography of the poet, who lives between Trinidad and England; Ó Tuama's own responses; the derivation of words ("paradise" was first a Zoroastrian word!); and the uses of poetic devices like assonance.

Here is an example of his mobility of ideas:

a poem can issue many invitations, particularly invitations to identify with a character. A person might identify with the speaking voice of this poem, or with the grandmother. Someone might read something and see their lives open. In bringing my full self to read Roger Robinson's poem, I want to honour the part of me that's suffered, but I can't pretend I'm ever going to read this poem as anything other than a white man. Therefore, I ask myself what behaviours I've been part of that have taken other people's paradises, requiring them to seek shelter from me.

This might be one I choose to teach this summer.

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I was trying to use the word "sillion" in a word puzzle, which meant that I had to pick up Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is always close to hand, so that's what you get today.

It might as well be "The Windhover," source of the sillion (which means dirt), though I think I have posted it before.

(A windhover is a kestrel.)

You really have to read it out loud to hear the great sweeping wingbeats of it.


I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

This one was hard. This is the second version I did. The first one came out so lumpy and messy I was worried I'd never paint again. The second one was like that too, until I remembered that paintings always feel like that halfway through.

Pileated woodpeckers are gorgeous in coloration, but super dinosaur-looking close-up.




ETA: I know the movement (smell?) lines are super silly, but I ran out of blue paint so I can't fix them.

I am reading Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation for the BISR course that begins on Wednesday night.

I'm in Book III just now, when Telemachus is visiting the neighbours for news of his father and hears instead of the fates of Agamemnon and Meneleus. After an evening of talking, Telemachus and Mentes/Athena rise to leave. Nestor insists they stay the night. Athena refuses, making one of her dramatic exits:

bright-eyed Athena flew away, transformed
into an ossifrage.

Now, on further investigation, it seems like ossifrage can refer to several different birds, but the first hit I got was this:

The bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), also known as the lammergeier and ossifrage, is a very large bird of prey in the monotypic genus Gypaetus. The bearded vulture is the only known vertebrate whose diet consists of 70–90% bone. (Wikipedia)

Hi amazing. Bone specialists! So metal.

The bearded vulture doesn't have a bald head, but it does have a fantastically acid stomach. And it's got an amazing kind of glam biker look.

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In-person if you're in Welland, Ontario, and Zoom if like me you live in the tiny cracks in the world-machine:

Join us as we host a virtual visit with Rachel A. Rosen, an activist, graphic designer, a high school teacher and co-author of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Sat, Mar 22
2pm Eastern Time
Seaway Mall Branch

Sign up here!

The internet tells me that the average monthly cost of living in Welland is exactly $4 higher than the average income.

This is so apposite that I will choose to report those statistics without further investigation.

I plan to attend! Maybe we'll see black boxes with each other's names in them there!

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Two poems by Lucille Clifton. The first one came up on Instagram and the other I found at the Poetry Foundation.

night vision

the girl fits her body in
to the space between the bed
and the wall. she is a stalk,
exhausted. she will do some
thing with this. she will
surround these bones with flesh.
she will cultivate night vision.
she will train her tongue
to lie still in her mouth and listen.
the girl slips into sleep.
her dream is red and raging.
she will remember
to build something human with it.




here rests

my sister Josephine
born july in '29
and dead these 15 years
who carried a book
on every stroll.

when daddy was dying
she left the streets
and moved back home
to tend him.

her pimp came too
her Diamond Dick
and they would take turns
reading

a bible aloud through the house.
when you poem this
and you will she would say
remember the Book of Job.

happy birthday and hope
to you Josephine
one of the easts
most wanted.

may heaven be filled
with literate men
may they bed you
with respect.

( Notes and discussion )

It seems to me there are such powerful principles in these poems, told in such intimate, personal scenes.

What do you hear?

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Including in-jokes about the weird scholarly treatment of ancient Mesopotamian epics.

1. A Helle of a Dissertation (sorry sorry sorry)

In dawdling about the Internet preparing for a conversation on Gilgamesh, I stumbled across Sophus Helle's dissertation.¹

The dissertation is not itself about Gilgamesh, but about authorship -- Helle's other great interest being Enheduanna as the first named author of an ancient text.

I am engaged by his thesis, which suggests that authorship -- which is not a universal among pre-modern and early modern texts -- arises out of cultural crisis, the need to condense identity from a shared cultural body of literature into a single figure.

From the committee's notes:

Helle’s main argument is that authorship rose to prominence in an otherwise anonymous culture during times of cultural crises .... demographic, linguistic, and political upheaval that threatened the authority of cuneiform scholarship. Tradition had to be protected, and to do so, it had to be condensed into the figure of the author.

I have not read the entire dissertation -- only the preliminary notes so far! -- but I find this at least an interesting and in some ways a congenial thesis.

From the committee's notes again, Helle's approach seems both sane and useful:

Arguing that authorship in the ancient world should be studied as cultural narratives rather than as an empirical reality, Helle demonstrates that narratives of authorship are “a crucial and often overlooked source of information of how literary texts were perceived, categorized, and evaluated” (67).

The overall response of the committee is rather what I would expect of commentary on a dissertation by Helle: that the work is inspired, even brilliant, but also a little bit scattershot and neglectful of detail.

Here it is if you want to look at it too.

2. The Operatic Gilgamesh

There is a new opera based on Gilgamesh!

It's Australian. From 2024. The images associated with it appear to include Enkidu and Gilgamesh smearing (bull's?) blood all over each other.

Now I have to try to figure out whether there is a recording and if so, how I can see it.

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1. If you don't happen to be a ridiculous Gilgamesh fentity, I'll note that Helle is a current rock star of ancient text translation and the creator of my fave version of Gilgamesh. And, as Jasmine points out, his website is an academic thirst trap.

2. I do need an Ancient Texts icon of some kind.

(Edited as I go)

1. When The Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Singing Hills Book 2)- Nghi Vo

An excellent Scheharezadesque fable -- the Lady and the tiger. The tigers are very tigerish. The novella length is perfect. I have put more on hold.

2. The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Singing Hills Book 1) - Nghi Vo

I got this on Kindle because I was so impatient to read another book in the series. (I quite like reading books in a series out of order. A habit from growing up with network television and libraries.)

I liked this a lot. I like the convention of the objects as a means to tell the story, and they were very beautiful objects. I liked that I knew a secret was going to be revealed, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. Feeling myself set up deftly, but also allowed to see the setup from the corner of my eye. And I cried a little at the end of the story. I'm not even sure why. Something about recognition.

As I said to yarrowkat , I think I like the tigers best so far, but that might just be because I read them first.

3. A Fine and Private Place - Peter S. Beagle

I thought this would be my first book finished of the year. It's been on my list a long time in a vague way. I liked the ghostly premise, but for me, the execution bogged down in pontification. I did like the ending; I certainly felt a kinship with Rebeck's inability to live in the world.

( older notes on A Fine and Private Place )

I also thought my first book might be Day of the Triffids, but its misogyny and its version of human nature are even more irritating than the flaws of Place. Don't know yet if it's a DNF or a FWA (Finished With Annoyance).

4. Into the Riverlands (Singing Hills Book 3) - Nghi Vo

Book 3! This was vivid and fun, full of cartoony action and immediately vivid characters. Each of the books in the series is about how stories are told and transmitted. I think this book is about stories that are fragmented, interrupted, and multiple -- and that's also how the book is structured. So that was clever! But in the end, when the stories all came together, I thought: hmm, I don't think I understand why this is supposed to have weight for me. So I went back over the book again – you can do that with novellas – and I saw most of the moving parts, but I still didn't really understand quite what the point was.

I think possibly that while the novella form was a strength for the first two books -- they used the confined space flawlessly, made it feel vast -- brevity may have been a limitation to this one. For me, this would have been a richer experience if I'd gotten more backstory and motivation for several characters (who are the sworn sisters? How did they get sworn? What is it that's driving the bandits so powerfully?)

Still, really glad to have finally encountered these books.

5. The Brides of High Hill (Singing Hills Book 5) - Nghi Vo

I started Book 4, Mammoths at the Gates, but I wasn't connecting to it, so since this came in at the library, I skipped to it and read it in a morning.

I think I liked this. The story structure was quite interesting. What happens when one story of oppression is false, but it masks a deeper story of a more complex conflict?

( spoilers )

6. Mammoths at the Gates (Singing Hills Book 4) - Nghi Vo

Do you ever use one book to help you with another? I started reading The Bear and the Nightingale, and was enjoying that quite a bit, and when I switched back to finish this I liked it better.

I liked the core idea here. It seemed like a fairly direct analogy for being trans and having that identity rejected by your family, but that's not really where Vo took it, which I liked.

I was very tired when I finished it, and rushing a little. I found the solution clever but not emotionally compelling. I thought Cleric Thien's secret was oddly generic and I'm not sure I think it was fully emotionally addressed.

There were a couple of places where I thought the copy-editor had missed a step -- a pronoun switch, and a weird timeline.

7. good woman: - Lucille Clifton

t is a quiet pleasure to watch Clifton's voice evolve, to see her refining the tools of her work. I think I can see that incredible ethical command of language that she will later show, taking shape across these early collections as she experiments with syntax, with repetition, with expanding and contracting her lines.

And these collections come bundled with a lyrical memoir, a braiding of her family's history back to her great-great-grandmother, who held in her memory their family history back to before slavery: "the woman called Caroline Donald Sale born free in Afrika in 1822, died free in America in 1910" (223).

Often telling the story in the voice of her father, Clifton layers short chapters to build up the story of her father's funeral, of his great grandmother, of his grandmother, his father, then Clifton's mother and finally herself and her two sisters.

8. The Bear and the Nightingale - Katherine Arden

I've discussed this book in more detail elsewhere. I think Arden is incredibly good at creating a setting and a cast of characters within it. The figures were as vivid to me as in the best historical novels.

The plot I found a little less sure-footed -- it never felt quite in focus. I ended up enjoying the book, but I don't feel a lot of propulsion towards the rest of the series.

9. True Grit - Charles Portis

I did think this was well-written and gripping, though I didn't fall in love with it the way many people seem to. @

10. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

A reread. Incredibly readable and satisfying. I do have some questions about it which I may address in another post. I went over at this time and wrote down some notes about the structure, since it works so perfectly.

11. Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Iona Datt Sharma, Katherine Fabian

Ably written cozy fantasy, but not for me. I appreciated the focus on networks of care in queer communities. It's not these authors' fault that I dislike plot developments where the characters pretend to be somebody else to gain access to some institution. Still, I feel like some of the choices were weird. (The book spends almost no time in fairyland and quite a lot in a church. The two biggest emotional scenes happen offstage.)

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Wrung out in mid-December,
I grasp the wrong words
when I greet the ordinary objects
of my life.

Hello calendar, I say to the candle.
Well, they both burn down.

The year is a stub, sputtering,
almost out. The candle is new.
Tobacco and saffron, with a cedar wick,
a low blue flame glowing by my right hand
in a clay cup,

which needs to be turned now and then
so that the soft wax
will melt evenly
all the way out to the edge.

I am too tired
to make a metaphor of this.
I care for the candle,
turning it in the cool air
from under the door.