radiant fracture

musesfool posted a poem by Li-Young Lee that I had not read before and that is so beautiful, painful and loving, that in response I'm just going to post another of Lee's poems.

And I'm going to choose it because there's already a Poetry Unbound episode about it, so you can go (re)-listen to that.



From blossoms
Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Aurora

Night fell.
Half a moon loomed
and shrank.

The stars bloomed
and I was still transfixed
by the thought
that I could never repair
the mistakes of even
this afternoon,
let alone the year.

I would have liked
to throw myself away
and start over.

I stared at my phone
until photographs appeared.

I put on my shoes.
I went outside.

The sky
was dancing.

In a literary article that has drifted too far downstream for me to be likely to find it again, I found a quotation from this Rilke poem I had not known before, and was smitten -- I think by the final lines.

I wanted to write a Very Clever comparative analysis of two different versions, but I am tired. Maybe I'll just post the versions and invite comments. Let the analysis be emergent.

( Original German )


(Stephen Mitchell translation)

To Music

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?—: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,—
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

(Scott Horton translation)

To Music

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:
The quiet of images. You, language where
languages end. You, time
standing straight from the direction
of transpiring hearts.

Feelings, for whom? O, you of the feelings
changing into what? — into an audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You chamber of our heart
which has outgrown us. Our inner most self,
transcending, squeezed out, —
holy farewell:
now that the interior surrounds us
the most practiced of distances, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
enormous
no longer habitable.

§rf$

Rain has been pouring on the house since six am. I had to turn on the heat. Through the skylights, the house is bathed in an aqua-silver twilight, though it's the middle of the morning.

The poem in the Poetry newsletter today was about Simone Weil.

I quite liked it. It is sad, a poem of loss.

Poussin

After T.J. Clark


Two underworlds, in Poussin.

The one touched by the force
of necessity, the other
remaining untouched.

Simone Weil makes her way
to the refectory
in Ashford. She walks slowly
down the corridors, with
or without help.

The hem of her gown brushes
the maculate plaster
of the long wall.

She could live forever
inside this moment,
she thinks, or begins to think
(the beginning of a thought).

She is wrong, of course.

The great hand bravely
channels the fear our mouths
have become, so suddenly.

Just the base of the thumb
illuminated, in its
flex, away from the viewer.

Two underworlds,
& the pollen settling
against the washerwoman’s
drying fabrics:

semantic parlor
in which the magic lantern
images flicker.

Weil’s elbow, akimbo
with what’s left of her body,
& Weil herself,
aware of the image
she becomes in the long hall.

It doesn't have to mean
anything, the other patients
who saw her
or whom she saw,
their depleted & depleting
forms.

Ignorance is my true labor.
The text wounds me
into a history
of belief, phrase by phrase.
(The forensics, Weil
might well have stressed.)

The chaste thirst
of the classical
running alongside its own
shadow, its double
it can’t, ultimately, know.

Two underworlds:

the foreshortening
of the prone body, & the cry
that precedes it,
genuflecting
to the fiction that it trusts.

* * * * * *

The poem sounds ekphrastic to me ("Just the base of the thumb / illuminated, in its /
flex, away from the viewer"), but I have not found such an image.

I know Weil almost exclusively through "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," so it's that mind I listen for here, and hear whispers: "two underworlds," "The chaste thirst / of the classical / running alongside its own / shadow, its double."

(Although -- is any thirst of the classical chaste? Mine certainly isn't, though it may be pure.)

Of Weil's other philosophy and theology, I cannot really say whether or how it speaks here. If you know her work better, please chime in.

* * * * * *

You can find the poem on the Poetry Foundation website here. The page includes a recording of Waldrep reading the poem, but he uses Poet Voice, and I cannot recommend it. I turned it off because it was making me like the poem less.

§rf§

[ETA] Note: the T.J. Clark this is after seems to be the British art historian, who writes about ekphrastic poetry in the LRB here.

Oh

Content note: this poem is about processing the body of an animal.

( One morning I, Navajo, wake up in Tiwa country )

I love the way the speaker keeps repeating "buffalo," like she can't get enough of the word.

This feels beautifully paced to me, full of wry observation and joy and ceremony.

{rf}

Today's Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation is "Eclipse with Object" by Ann Lauterbach. I found the poem intriguingly elusive, as befits an eclipse poem, so I thought I'd post it here for discussion.

Eclipse with Object
Ann Lauterbach

There is a spectacle and something is added to history.
It has as its object an indiscretion: old age, a
gun, the prevention of sleep.

I am placed in its stead
and the requisite shadow is yours.
It casts across me, a violent coat.

It seems I fit into its sleeve.
So the body wanders.
Sometime it goes where light does not reach.

You recall how they moved in the moon dust? Hop, hop.
What they said to us from that distance was stupid.
They did not say I love you for example.

The spectacle has been placed in my room.
Can you hear its episode trailing,
pretending to be a thing with variegated wings?

Do you know the name of this thing?
It is a rubbing from an image.
The subject of the image is that which trespasses.

You are invited to watch. The body
in complete dark casting nothing back.
The thing turns and flicks and opens.


( Things I Notice )

What do you notice in the poem? What catches you, moves you, confuses you?

A couple of useful quotations from Lauterbach, cited on her Poetry Foundation page:

I’m much more interested in a more difficult kind of sense-making, and I mean difficult in the sense of complexity, and obscurity, but not willful obscurity, just the fact that there are certain things we cannot penetrate and do not know, we can’t know, we may never know.

I began to give up the use of classical syntax, the logic of cause and effect, of an assumed relation between subject and object, after my sister died. The narrative as story had been ruptured once and for all; I wanted the gaps to show.

{rf}

Posting again for a performance application! (Also, M. used the poem in his class. How cool is that?)

A poem about making art in a bad time.


Vultures

I say vultures are the only poets:
they gorge on the remains
of old age and surprise attacks
treachery, waste, and accident
Cholera, botulism, and anthrax --
They swallow everything, and transmute it
into thick black feathers, into flight.

Let me be like that, unabashed to be seen
naked and hideous and hungry, transforming
in the boiling kettle of my belly
all the poison in the meat,
all the sickness and sour hate
into undigestible beauty.

Maybe you don’t carry
a dark hot mystery in your core

Except the same secret as everyone else:
the heart and its bloody signals
the dank furnace of the intestines
the cooling lungs that pull the world
through the body in currents
the wet seething sorrowful brain

You could tell that;
It might be enough.

In writing group tonight, some beautiful poem prompts, including this, by the only just lost Louise Glück. She is almost still here.


Telescope
Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

* * * * * *

I love moments of displacement and disorientation, though this one contains a lot of grief.

I like how mortality is here as the shadow of the eternal rather than evoked directly. I can feel the precise cold of this night, the clarity of the sky. I have looked through this telescope.

I like the refining of the thought as the poet goes on, in the way of Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Hass -- "not that the image is false / but the relation is false." I would not have said that, would have stayed with the illusion of transcendence, clung to it. Glück is brave to put it away so neatly with the telescope.

{rf}

( https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry/dorothea-lasky-reads-louise-bogan )

This was going to be a podcast-Friday post, but then it was more poem- than podcast-centric, and then it wasn't Friday any more. I liked the podcast episode, but mostly I liked Dorothea Lasky's discussion of Louise Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia's Song."

Imaginary Photograph: Dorothea Lasky laughing apologetically as she changes my brain about poetry and fear.

Lasky has a new collection coming out, The Shining, about her obsession with that film, and so she's been thinking about the poetry of fear.

You know, I hadn't really thought of poems as a source of fear -- even that which evokes fear, or terror, or horror, is transmuted into awe by the aesthetic context. Every angel is terrifying, but also sort of hot.

Emily Dickinson can freak me out -- "I felt a funeral in my brain." There's "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. That has horror. Maybe "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" freaks me out a little?

Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?

Anyway, Lasky convinced me about Louise Bogan. The deepest knowledge I had of Bogan's work until now was from the nine-minute Essential American Poets episode about her. So I was sleeping on Louise Bogan, and now I'll never sleep again.

Lasky chose the triptych "Three Songs," published in The New Yorker in 1967 and in her collection The Blue Estuaries in 1968.

Here's the first of the three, a weird little singsong right out of a horror film:

Little Lobelia's Song

I was once a part
of your blood and bone.
Now no longer --
I'm alone, I'm alone.

Each day, at dawn
I come out of your sleep;
I can't get back.
I weep, I weep.

Not lost but abandoned,
left behind,
this is my hand
upon your mind.

I know nothing.
I can barely speak.
But this is my hand
upon your cheek.

You look at your face
in the looking glass.
This is the face
My likeness has.

Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.

* * * * * *

Creepy.

I don't know whether it was just my mood, but as Lasky read out the poems she'd chosen, I exclaimed aloud in my kitchen (mixing the chocolate and butterscotch and peanut butter chips into the batter) -- "what the fuck." The fear felt so present in the lines as she spoke them -- that uncanny fear of the child and of the unconscious, that which comes from you but is alien to you.

Lasky provides some autobiographical context for the poem; it's just as unsettling. Bogan used to wake up crying uncontrollably, and "Little Lobelia" is the name Bogan's daughter gave "the thing that made her cry." Lasky says that "Bogan thought of it as this child ghost inhabiting her ... and making her cry."

"I've always seen rhyme as having a haunting quality, and not necessarily being innocuous," Lasky said, which is a wonderful thought to turn over and try out.

What's the most frightening couplet one could write, I wonder. Maybe post your chilling rhymes below?

{rf}

P.S.I've remembered a poem -- song really -- that terrified me. "The Worms Crawl In" -- it was in a children's book of creepy things and it ruined me.