radiant fracture

Since I am to have an impromptu connection with Norway, here is a poem by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel Laureate.

Full text on the Granta website. I had not heard of him before exactly now, and I like this.

* * * * *

( From Dreamed in Stone )

* * * * * *

What I like here is the gentle surrealism, the negotiating of an experience that seems both concrete and numinous, the almost-prose uplifted by detail and repetition rather than conventional lyricism.

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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.

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Some notes on my morning's wander through Indigenous poetry.

This morning I have a very fun task -- searching for poems by Indigenous poets for the next writing workshop at the friendship center. I had originally thought to use Abigail Chabitnoy's "If You're Going to Look Like a Wolf, They Have to Love You More than They Fear You" and
dg nanouk okpik's "If Oil is Drilled in Bristol Bay," -- both northern poets, Chabitnoy Alutiiq and okpik Inupiaq-Inuit.

These are wonderful poems -- I'd like to do a post on okpik's, which is new to me -- but I was chatting to the co-ordinator about themes (last time happened to fall close to Louis Riel Day and so reading Métis poets was natural) -- and when I asked her for ideas, she suggested that we look for spring poems and poems about indigenous plants. She said, "let's save the northern poems for the summer, when we're all hot."

I thought yes, I like that better, so now I am looking for spring poems and poems about plants.

Kimberly Blaeser (Minnesota Chippewa) is a naturalist. Here's "The Way We Love Something Small," and "The Where in My Belly." There are seasons here, and plants and animals, but I think I can get closer if I keep going.

This is cool -- a collaboration between Blaeser, Molly McGlennan, and Margaret Doodin, "Meshkadoonaawaa Ikidowinan: Exchanging Words."

The second poem or reflection there is very much the sort of thing I think the co-ordinator meant. The action here is the weaving of a sweetgrass basket.

wiingashk—sweetgrass

How she stitched the rim, gashkigwaadan.
Leaf blades and needle fingers circled,
smallest curve, waaganagamod, of song—
endless like the scent.

Held, there are, atenoon, some parts
one cannot see—
but she knows, gikendaang, what they hold.
Words from bogs and marshes.

Heaven fits neatly, mii gwayak, under
the snug lid, shut tight as lips
long used to gaadood, keeping secrets
of grandmothers and crane companions.


I think that's one to keep, yeah?

Here's an essay on how the poets wrote it.

Now I'm over here on poetryinvoice looking at the poems they chose, and Nehiyaw poet Jessica Johns' "How Not to Spill" isn't what I'm looking for today but damn.

And here's one about land by Lakota poet Trevino L. Brings Plenty, "Will," that takes my breath both with its exploration of land loss and its spot-on evocation on what it's like to eat Curiously Strong Peppermints -- hey, I just counted lines and that's a sonnet, so it can come on over and be part of Sonnet Day in my general literature course.

That's the great thing about this wander -- if the poems don't work for the writing group, they can still come be part of other courses and conversations.

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Excellent shark valentines from james have arrived! One with a sticker!

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Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop, slightly Canadian poet, whom I nickname Liz Bish solely because it pleases me. I own The Complete Poems, in a sun-faded dust jacket where a yolk-yellow swathe has faded to white below a less delible still-navy arch. It must have sat in some window a long time, maybe stacked under another book for display or from indifference. However, Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments is my cherished artifact -- also, I see, a little faded in the spine now, as if in companionship.

I would have heard about this book's release on Bookworm, when the show and Michael Silverblatt were at their zenith, in 2006.
It's edited by Alice Quinn, the real one, former poetry editor of the New Yorker, and it contains a little more -- though still only such a small amount -- of Bishop's queer life, the comical juvenalia of "I introduce Penelope Gwin" and the concentrated eroticism of "Vague Poem (Vaguely Love Poem)":


Vague Poem (Vaguely Love Poem)

The trip west.
—I think I dreamed that trip.
They talked a lot of “rose rocks”
or maybe “rock roses”
—I’m not sure now, but someone tried to get me some.
(And two or three students had.)

She said she had some at her house.
They were by the back door, she said.
—A ramshackle house.
An Army house? No, “a Navy house.” Yes,
                                        that far inland.
There was nothing by the back door but dirt
or that same dry, monochrome, sepia straw I’d seen everywhere.
Oh, she said, the dog has carried them off.
(A big black dog, female, was dancing around us.)

Later, as we drank tea from mugs, she found one
“a sort of one.” “This one is just beginning. See—
you can see here, it’s beginning to look like a rose.
It’s—well, a crystal, crystals form—
I don’t know any geology myself …”
(Neither did I.)
Faintly, I could make out—perhaps—in the dull,
rose-red lump of, apparently, soil
a rose-like shape; faint glitters . . . Yes, perhaps
there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside.

I almost saw it: turning into a rose
without any of the intervening
roots, stem, buds, and so on; just
earth to rose and back again.
Crystallography and its laws:
something I once wanted badly to study,
until I learned that it would involve a lot of arithmetic,
that is, mathematics.

Just now, when I saw you naked again,
I thought the same words: rose-rock, rock-rose . . .
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—

* * * * * *
That last stanza. That last line.

For queerness, there is also the tenderness of "The Shampoo, " which made it into the Complete Poems but was rejected by the New Yorker poetry editor for being too indiscreet, which, I ask you --


The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.


* * * * * *

I think I have, or had, some letters, too, between Bishop and the New Yorker. Love letters of a kind, I guess.

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Grumpy Postscript

(I'm still having trouble with Dreamwidth doing weird things to my formatting. I go over to HTML to add some non-breaking spaces to create stable lineation in the poem, then switch back to Rich Text to look at it, and when I switch back to HTML the spaces have been deleted (!!).

When I check the box for "Disable Auto-Formatting", thinking that must be the trouble, all of my line breaks vanish. (Which is not surprising, but also not helpful.) I did not need this change and do not find it useful.

You can tell me this always happened and I can't prove it didn't but this frustration is exciting and new.)

Our Zoom writing facilitator has been finding incredible poems lately. Here I am trying to tease out what makes tonight's poem so brilliant.

Content note: grief, death


Miss You. Would Like to Take a Walk with You.
~ Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

* * * * * *

Again, I would read it out loud to hear your own voice say these things. And thoroughly break your own heart. Why else read poetry?

So the big gesture Calvocoressi is going to make us notice is the way she chops off sentence parts, especially the subjects (I) and auxiliary verbs that indicate tense or mood (would). She beheads her sentences, peels her verbs.

This is direct speech, but truncated, like a text message or a note -- an utterance simultaneously direct and at a slight remove from the person being addressed.

Isn't that first line incredible?


I imagine someone so decentred by loss that they can't speak from "I" but only from the emotion itself. To say "I" is to say "I-without-you" and this is impossible -- the whole address is to the you.

In fact the form of this first statement blurs from the declarative into the imperative -- "Do not care" could be an instruction, "don't (you) worry if you arrive in your skeleton --

In your skeleton! --

I do not think that's what the speaker means, but I like the way the verb collapses the I/you -- whose verb is this? -- and that slight priming may come in handy later.

In a similar way,


relies on the previous fragments


--to make us, the readers, assume the "would" in "love to feed you," (We assume the speaker means "I would love to feed you.")

But!

Dropping the auxiliary verb also allows this love to remain in the present tense: I still do love to feed you, even though truly I can't. Yet I do.

The tender alliteration of "little roasted tomatoes." The whole sound of "little roasted tomatoes / covered in pepper and nutmeg." I feel like I'm chewing as I say it.

"Bring the ghost dog," is sweet, but "you can tell me about the after" is perfect -- not afterlife, not afterworld -- no promise of continuance. You may have gone into oblivion. Come back and tell me all about it.


Oh god.

This could be stuttering, a failure to complete a thought because of pain -- "Wish you. Wish you would come back" -- but "wish you" is also a whole thought in the way "miss you" is.

(Have you wished someone? Me, I have wished several yous in my time.)
What I really care about here is the infinite tenderness -- the skin sack that parallels the skeleton, the contempt for any worries about the body and decay -- the material is immaterial. I'll know you.

Oh god.

But there is something else I notice:


Hey, the "I" comes back into grammar once the moment of facing you again is imagined. If you come back, I can come back. "You can tell me" -- and suddenly there is a me again.

We many of us thicken as we get older, but "bigger" is so purely descriptive, so neutral. A tree gets bigger, a city. Things just grow. It sounds like the speaker may have become monumental, more than human. A stone.

Look at that -- the I-less speaker ("know", not "I know") can yet speak about the I of the past ("I told you," not "told you") -- maybe because in that past the you was still -- just -- alive.

(Or, just to allow the counter-argument, maybe because "[I] know told you" would truncate the sentence past useful ambiguity into incoherence. English only allows certain kinds of interference.)

The wish to rewrite the message: I said it was okay to go (that is the thing you say), but now I want to say something else. I want in our long entanglement the space to change my mind. I want to send a text saying "Don't want you to go. Not okay."

The little tender rhyme there (leave/believe) like a fragment of song sung at a graveside or while crying and washing the dishes.

The ending. What can I say about the ending? Oh, maybe this:


So yes, the refrain of "miss you," with the assumed "I," and then here's that "would" again, so that we carry both of those over, assume that what's being said is "[I] [wish you would] stare out from the mirror."

But -- that imperative, that order from way back -- "do not care" -- isn't that imperative now fully activated, though it wasn't before? Isn't this ending also an invocation, a summoning, a cry?

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PS. "Come through the door" is a human action; "stare out from the mirror" a ghostly thing; "come through the pipes" -- monstrous, or elemental? I'm not sure.

PPS I don't know about the leaves and the blue jacket. What do you think?

PPPS I didn't even get to enjambment.

I have done several chores and even some work, choosing close reading passages from the novel, but I have not written any poems today, or not yet, so here is one of Rilke's, in two versions.

Sunday night was charcuterie and white wine with J., -- the Gewurztraminer from Emandare Vineyards, which she shared with me in a gesture of nearly divine generosity.

She also loaned me Don Paterson's Orpheus: A Version of Rilke.

Normally I don't hold with any translations but Stephen Mitchell's luminous transubstantiations, and I feel deeply suspicious of anything that calls itself a version (even though, of course, every translation must be only that). However, the one flaw I'll admit in Mitchell's translations is that he doesn't capture Rilke's rhyme, which is heavy and insistent; in Mitchell, this becomes elusive slant-rhyme, must more palatable to a contemporary English-language ear, but not so sonorous.

Anyway, I opened the book to the first sonnet and immediately felt compelled to read it out (both drunk on language and, you know, drunk). Here's Paterson's version:

A tree rose from the earth. O pure transcendence –
Orpheus sings: O tall oak in the ear!
All was still. And then within that silence
he made the sign, the change, and touched the lyre.

One by one they crept out from the wood,
emptying each set and form and lair;
and looking in their eyes, he understood
they’d fallen quiet in neither stealth nor fear,

but in their listening. Growl and bark and roar
died in their breast as each took to the clearing.
Before this day, there hadn’t been a shack

that might have held the song, a plain earthwork
hollowed by their most obscure desire:
today the temple rises in their hearing.

Here is Mitchell:

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind –
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

Notes

So the first things I notice are some differences of sense.

First, the disappearing shack. In Paterson, there is no shack; in Mitchell, merely a shack, or "makeshift hut".

I'm afraid I have no German, but if I plug the original into Google translate, for "Und wo eben / kaum eine Hutte war," I get "where there was scarcely a hut," which makes me a little dissatisfied with both versions, but preferring Mitchell's, which seems to me to make more sense: the animals have only a shack, cognitively speaking, a poor apparatus of perception and understanding, with which to appreciate the sacred; Orpheus transforms this into a temple.

For this reason, I prefer "You built a temple deep inside their hearing," to the more ambiguous "today the temple rises in their hearing."

Okay, fine details.

Paterson likes to make Rilke's imagery more concrete and specific. I think as a line I might like Paterson's "a tree rose from the earth" better than Mitchell's elegant but diffuse "a tree ascended there," though there is no earth in the original. Similarly, Paterson gives us an oak in the ear (snort) where Rilke has only "baum," and I don't find a lyre in the original first stanza.

So, a version, as Paterson announces. He does do better by the rhyme.

I like Paterson's incantatory O over Mitchell's exclamatory Oh, but Mitchell gives all three of Rilke's original cries and keeps the exclamation point.

I like Paterson's rendition of the turn a lot:

and looking in their eyes, he understood
they’d fallen quiet in neither stealth nor fear,

but in their listening.

I think that lands better than Mitchell's take and is the one place where Paterson's translation feels like it better captures Rilke's peculiar science, the way the poet dreamily condenses actions and ideas into objects of his gentle regard. As against that, I think Mitchell's "Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright / unbound forest" is one of my favorite lines and a really fine bit of enjambment.

I'd like to know if "Seemed small inside their hearts" is an idiom Mitchell is rendering literally (in which case Paterson is probably right to change it to an English idiom) or Rilke's own invention.

Since he likes the concrete, I'm surprised that Paterson removes the striking direct address to "you" in the last line and renders it in the neutral third person instead. The line is the equivalent of the poem suddenly turning to face the reader -- I want to look over my shoulder and see if Orpheus is standing there -- and I much prefer Mitchell's final line.

My favorite moment is Rilke's own, that enjambment between the octave and the sestet that forces you to take a breath before "but in their listening."

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