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.

§rf§

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.

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.

From writing group today, a very small poem sort of thing.

* * * * * *

Look
My faith
Can move
Very
Small
Rocks
               and
I will not claim
I can heap them
Into an alp

Nor that I could
Wear a mountain down
One POCK
At a time

But I promise
For the very likely nothing
That it’s worth
I will keep moving them.

I will keep
Moving them. One by one.

Harbinger
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

What does it mean that I’ve been dreaming
about sunlight moving through old houses

again? Vine-shadow on wood floors, endless
rooms, the sound of wingbeats without birds.

Pittsburgh wisdom says you need a week in Florida
when you can’t get out of bed. I up or down

my dose of antidepressants when the clocks change.
In the dreams, I wear a white dress, dust dragged

along its hem. The houses are dis-inhabited
but I know I've lived in some version of them.

In real life I try to leave the past empty, open;
a good mother haunts her life only in forward motion.

When the nerves at my right hip shriek down my leg,
I know it means my body needs to stretch.

I should exercise, drink more water, rest—
but I get through winter reading Gothic horror;

I trust myself with only so much selfishness.
In this city, potholes become a sign of character

as much as of neglect. I remind my children all is still well
when the bridges sway. In traffic, we count turkey vultures

circling in the steel gray and call it soaring.

+ + + + + +

This poem came as a prompt in my inbox, and I liked it. The language is quiet; I keep feeling that it might drift towards prose, and then the images will arrest that: "I wear a white dress, dust dragged / along its hem."

I like the play of line breaks: "I up or down / my antidepressants."

I felt this: "I should exercise, drink more water, rest— / but I get through winter reading Gothic horror," only I think if I took up more Gothic horror it would probably improve my winters remarkably.

What do you hear here?

§rf§

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.