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radiantfracture: Small painting of Penguin book (Books post)
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§
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
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.
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] 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.
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
 I have done nearly nothing for poetry month, but here is a small quick poem in answer to one of [personal profile] yarrowkat 's on friendship:



With a lost friendship we lose parts
of the world's scaffolding, I think -- open air gapes
where the sturdy, slowly assembled
framework once contained us, though
sometimes it turns out, in that sudden
gush of sky, in our lurching out over forgotten space
that the view has changed for the better



I call this Snarky Mary Oliver mode.

{rf}

radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
This one, a little unusual for Oliver, spoke to me today:

The Poet With His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water-fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

* * * * * *

That's from the new poems at the beginning of Volume 2 of the New and Selected. Poking around, I find that it was published in the New Yorker on April 4, 2005.

For fun, I search "New Yorker poem April 21" and the April 21, 1967 issue comes up. The only poem I find is called "The Committee" by Ann Stanford. The New Yorker cannily won't let me read more than the first half of the first line without logging in. Here it is:

Black and serious, they are dropping down one by

I judge this to be a poem about crows.

(There is also a great typo in the Talk of the Town title, "LOMG-WINDED LADY," foreshadowing the future's acronymic speech.)

As it happens, I used to have an account with the New Yorker, and I really should be able to access their archive, but at some point or another my data was purged.

Stanford has an entry on poetryfoundation.org, but not for that poem. So here is another in its place, "The Messenger," published in Poetry in 1963.

The Messenger


I don’t deny that I believe in ghosts
Myself being one. No, not the ultimate last
Spirit, I mean, but this a messenger.
Soft, soft, last night half falling into sleep
I rose like smoke, up, curving past the window
Floating, a grey cloud seaward, slow and pale.

And then, the wings!

Did you hear the birds piling against your window?
A snow of wings, crowding and gentle, crying
Over and over, each with the single errand
Light cannot bring, nor ever my tongue would say.
Archaic doves, rustling your sleep, and calling
Crowding upon you, drifting and crying love.

* * * * * *

I liked that the best of the poems of Stanford's I found. The first stanza has that rather stiff Shakespearean echo, but after the turn I like it very much (an overwhelm of the senses being My Thing) and though it's not similar in sentiment, there is something Oliverish about the accretion of imagery.

{rf}

radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
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."

{rf}
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
(April 3-4)

Well, if not love, then
love -- a giant pacific octopus
twelve feet long
can slip through the ring
of your thumb and forefinger
like a skein of silk, shifting
even its shining mind
to siphon through. Heart,
be like that.

You and I will live
only by changing shape again
and again.

Take the form offered you
and escape.

Contract and expand.

Touch everything at once
in eight directions.



NOTES

1. I am probably exaggerating slightly about the octopus, unless you have pianists' hands.
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
(ETA: On reflection, I split these up into two posts to give each poem room to breathe.)

(April 1-2)

As I was going up the stair / I met a man who wasn't there! / He wasn't there again today, / Oh how I wish he'd go away! -- William Hughes Mearns


The other day on those wooden steps cut
Into the tree-dense hill to mark the trailhead
Worrying about meeting grouchy new-risen bears
I met a man, or nearly did, instead.

First I saw his broad back in a brown jacket
His bald patch a beacon in his barky hair
He was labouring a little on the ragged stair
But I knew that old king. Bad knees, both of us

These days. Are you leaving or arriving,
I called up to him. He paused, harrumphed,
lifted his shoulders, lumbered on.
I followed, for there was only one way.

I gave stumbling chase, but could not catch him.
Was he rushing from the field in fright
or hurrying to it, late? I listened:
Bird-alarms, beautiful, and a crow counting off.

At the top of the hill was the highway
Or a field full of flags, a boy with a big stick.
We stumped on, up the down escalator
towards and against the end.
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