I’m following last week’s Marianne Moore offering with a poem by another of the “major US modernists,” & a poet whose work Moore admired—in fact Moore & Stevens were long-time friends & allies in the poebiz wars of the Modernist days.
“The Plot Against the Giant” comes from Stevens’ 1923 collection Harmonium (but since it was first published in 1917, it is in the public domain.) I have had a long-running discussion with myself about Stevens’ poetry. There have been times that Stevens has taken a place high on the list of my favorite poets; there have been other times where his aesthete pose & underlying conservatism have bothered me no end. I also will be so bold as to say that his more explicitly philosophical/theoretical works generally don’t stir me these days.
But at his best, as in many of Harmonium’s lyric poems, it’s difficult not to come under his spell, even as the “Giant” will no doubt come under the spell of the “Three Girls.” Of course, in this regard it’s worth noting that Stevens’ nickname at Harvard was “Giant.” Certainly, whatever else “The Plot Against the Giant” may represent, it discusses or perhaps more accurately, creates an atmosphere descriptive of poetic inspiration & creation.
It’s a wonderful poem—hope you enjoy it!
The Plot Against the Giant
First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
Wallace Stevens
A happy Thursday to you! As regular readers know, things are in more than a bit of upheaval at Robert Frost’s Banjo central, especially during the month of July. Despite this, I’m trying to keep the blog itself going mostly without interruption, & it does appear that this will remain true throughout the month.
However, since I’m a bit displaced these days, I’ve found it difficult either to arrange for writer interviews or to do book reviews for Writers Talk. So I’m resurrecting an old Robert Frost’s Banjo tradition: the Poem of the Week. Each Thursday at least into early August I’ll be posting a poem that’s in my head at that particular time.
This week, as soon as I thought about the return of Poem of the Week, the wonderful opening of Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” came to mind. What that says about where I’m at—well, I’ll leave that to speculation!
Ms Moore’s work has always held a strong appeal to me—her attention to detail, her wit, her intriguing system of lineation (much of it dictated by syllable count), her insistence on the particular all show her to be a poet of very high order, & to my mind she takes her place with the best of the U.S. modernists. You can read more about Marianne Moore here at the University of Illinois’ website.
In the meantime, please enjoy “Poetry.”
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Marianne Moore
Happy Friday evening, folks! I’m a bit ahead of time on the Weekly Poem post because I think it’s been a bit confusing the last couple of weeks with the Weekly Poem coming up Saturday morning & Sepia Saturday posting on Saturday afternoon. At least one blog friend briefly thought I might be related to Stevie Smith! So Sepia Saturday will be posted tomorrow morning & will be the post of the day.
Which brings me to another subject. I’ve been running the Weekly Poem series since Robert Frost’s Banjo started in the summer of 2008; I’ll be honest—I got the idea from another blog, Haphazard Gourmet Girls which, also to be honest, influenced a few structral aspects of Robert Frost’s Banjo. That blog is no longer in existence however; its founder has gone on to different things, quite important in their own right.
Anyway, having given credit where credit was due, I should say that at this point I’m suspending the Weekly Poem series after this week. It’s great having all this poetry on Robert Frost’s Banjo, but at this point between my poems & B.N.’s poems & L.E. Leone’s poems & the Weekly Poem—well, that’s a lotta poems & not so much banjo, so to speak. I know the blog vacillates between more or less poetry & more or less music depending on where my head is at, but it seems pretty far to the poetry side right now, & hey, I'll be a performing musician again in 6 weeks, so I need to get my musical brain kick started too!
Frankly, I’m also somewhat concerned with copyright issues. Most of the poems posted as part of the Weekly Poem series are copyrighted works, & while I could make the argument that any accompanying write-up would make this “fair use,” that rarely holds water; the argument that posts such as this might actually increase an author's sales overall seems inescapably valid, but has no standing. I may consider posting a Poem of the Month, since less frequent posts might fly a bit more under the radar.
So this is not only the wind-up of our look at Stevie Smith, but also a wind-up of regularly scheduled “name” poetry here for a bit at least. & it’s a great one to end on—we can even ask: is it a poem at all? That’s one of my favorite kinds of poems! It is a beautiful piece of writing & meditation on the Ars Poetica. Hope you enjoy it!
My Muse
Here are some of the truths about poetry. She is an Angel, very strong. It is not poetry but the poet who has a feminine ending, not the Muse who is weak, but the poet. She makes a strong communication. Poetry is like a strong explosion in the sky. She makes a mushroom shape of terror and drops to the ground with a strong infection. Also she is a strong way out. The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out. The passage out that she blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood; but she can come out softly. Poetry is very light-fingered, she is like the god Hermes in my poem ‘The Ambassador’ (she is very light-fingered). Also she is like the horse Hermes is riding, this animal is dangerous….
Poetry does not like to be up to date, she refuses to be neat. (‘Anglo-Saxon’, wrote Gavin Bone, ‘is a good language to write poetry in because it is impossible to be neat.’) All the poems Poetry writes may be called, ‘Heaven, a Detail’, or ‘Hell, a Detail’. (She only writes about heaven and hell.) Poetry is like the goddess Thetis who turned herself into a crab with silver feet, that Peleus sought for and held. Then in his hands she became first a fire, then a serpent, then a suffocating stench. But Peleus put sand on his hands and wrapped his body in sodden sacking and so held her through all her changes, till she became Thetis again, and so he married her, and an unhappy marriage it was. Poetry is very strong and never has any kindness at all. She is Thetis and Hermes, the Angel, the white horse and the landscape. All Poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet.
Stevie Smith
(Those who are curious can read more about Thetis & Peleus here & here). I once wrote a poem on the subject, but it was one of those early works best to refer to & not to proffer!
Good morning everybody. Yours truly is kind of bushed from various travels over the past week, but I’m (more or less) up & running for the Weekly Poem, & will also be contributing to Sepia Saturday later today—probably early afternoon out here in the forgotten time zone, Mountain Standard.
Our look at Stevie Smith continues with a lyric poem—the title piece to her 1938 collection, Tender Only To One. This poem, which is a particular favorite of Eberle’s, transforms the children’s flower game of “he loves me, he loves me not” into a rather chilling exercise—Death was one of Smith’s most often treated subjects, & in this case it becomes the occasion for producing a love poem. In fact, Smith had what some might consider a morbid fascination with death—she described death in other poems as “the only god who must come when he is called” & claimed to look on death as a consolation & release.
To my mind, there’s considerable power in the directness & apparent simplicity of Smith’s language in this poem, & the five line stanza with the unrhymed refrain is also quite elegant. Hope you enjoy it, & hope to see some of you later on for Sepia Saturday!
Tender Only to One
Tender only to one
Tender and true
The petals swing
To my fingering
Is it you, or you, or you?
Tender only to one
I do not know his name
And the friends who fall
To the petals’ call
May think my love to blame.
Tender only to one
This petal holds a clue
The face it shows
But too well knows
Who I am tender to.
Tender only to one,
Last petal’s latest breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.
Stevie Smith
If it's Saturday, it must be the Weekly Poem—& indeed it is. If you checked in last week, you know that February is all Stevie Smith all the time as far as the Weekly Poem series goes.
Last week’s offering was “The Bereaved Swan,” a poem from Smith’s 1937 collection A Good Time Was Had By All; this week’s poem, “The Frog Prince,” is the title poem to a 1966 collection—so we’ve moved from the very beginning of Smith’s poetic career to a point quite near the end (she died in 1972). Interestingly, the poem again inhabits a fairy tale landscape, at least on the surface. However, while “The Bereaved Swan” delighted in language & humorous rhymes, the voice in “The Frog Prince” is considerably more matter-of-fact—tho the subject matter runs quite deep (certainly much deeper than “The Frog Prince” himself seems to realize). The italicized instances of heavenly give us a clue that “The Frog Prince” is not only about the illusions of romantic love—in typical Stevie Smith fashion, she also moves on to religious love & poses the same questions: what is this truth of this transformation we believe we await? & is our waiting, our belief in the story of transformation, fatuous. Should we be content, each of us, with our lot as frogs.
This will be a busy day on Robert Frost’s Banjo, because this afternoon (2:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time) I’ll be posting a Sepia Saturday entry—with more of Dad’s Photos! Hope you can check back in then, but in the meantime, hope you enjoy this marvelous poem.
The Frog Prince
I am a frog
I live under a spell
I live at the bottom
Of a green well
And here I must wait
Until a maiden places me
On her royal pillow
And kisses me
In her father's palace.
The story is familiar
Everybody knows it well
But do other enchanted people feel as nervous
As I do? The stories do not tell,
Ask if they will be happier
When the changes come
As already they are fairly happy
In a frog's doom?
I have been a frog now
For a hundred years
And in all this time
I have not shed many tears,
I am happy, I like the life,
Can swim for many a mile
(When I have hopped to the river)
And am for ever agile.
And the quietness,
Yes, I like to be quiet
I am habituated
To a quiet life,
But always when I think these thoughts
As I sit in my well
Another thought comes to me and says:
It is part of the spell
To be happy
To work up contentment
To make much of being a frog
To fear disenchantment
Says, it will be heavenly
To be set free,
Cries, Heavenly the girl who disenchants
And the royal times, heavenly,
And I think it will be.
Come then, royal girl and royal times,
Come quickly,
I can be happy until you come
But I cannot be heavenly,
Only disenchanted people
Can be heavenly.
Stevie Smith
It’s February, the month of St Valentine’s, & yet I’ve chosen one of the least romantic poets I can think of to feature this month in the Weekly Poem series. Who might that be? The great Stevie Smith.
Ms Smith, who has appeared on Robert Frost’s Banjo a couple of times in the past, was British & wrote from the mid 1930s until her death in the early 1970s. Her poetry defies easy categorization—a sort of very much female, very much mid 20th century Alexander Pope might give the uninitiated some sense of her technique & vision.
But Smith was not a “mere” formalist, tho she wrote during a period in which formalism reared its head quite virulently with the work of the “New Critical” poets—writers like John Crowe Ransom, William Empson & Yvor Winters, among many others. Her dark vision didn’t spring from the ivied halls of the academy—for starters—but rather from feeling & experience, even when it can hardly be called “autobiographical” at all (witness today’s poem). Still, some call her work confessional—interestingly enough, the most famous “confessional poet” of all, Sylvia Plath, was a big fan of Smith’s work—but if she is, she takes the art of confession from the landscapes inhabited by Plath or Sexton, or Lowell or Berryman, & makes of it an opportunity for serious play.
In fact, this gift for play—even in the midst of a sometimes mordant darkness—is one of Smith’s great strengths & something that sets her apart from many of the other formal poets of her era. William Carlos Williams once famously attacked the sonnet (& by extension, poem in strict form) as a “fascist” construct. As someone who has written in form myself—even if often reconfigured rather drastically—I’ve thought a lot about that statement since I first heard it quoted by poet Greg Orr around 25 years ago. From my viewpoint, a “form” of poetry—whether “formal” in the usual sense or partaking of the typical constructs of English language free verse as practiced over the past 100 years—becomes “reactionary” when it abandons play. This Smith never does.
“The Bereaved Swan” is an early poem—it comes from Stevie Smith’s A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937. Hope you enjoy it!
The Bereaved Swan
Wan
Swan
On the lake
Like a cake
Of soap
Why is the swan
Wan
On the lake?
He has abandoned hope.
Wan
Swan
On the lake afloat
Bows his head:
O would that I were dead
For her sake that lies
Wrapped from my eyes
In a mantle of death,
The swan saith.
Stevie Smith
January is mercifully slipping into the sunset—sorry to any southern hemisphere readers—so this brings our look at poet Kenneth Patchen to a close. I’ve really enjoyed the comments this month, & I’m gratified that I’ve been able to introduce Patchen to some folks who’ll appreciate his work. He is woefully under-read, under-taught & under-rated. As I’ve discussed in the past, leftist poets have not fared well in the 20th century English language canon. I’ve also seen it speculated that Patchen’s status as a conscientious objector during World War II harmed his reputation.
The poem “Each is Alone, Each is Everything” is from Patchen’s 1946 collection, Panels for the Walls of Heaven. With surreal eloquence, Patchen examines I/Thou, time & eternity, & the “big questions”—it’s a beautiful poem, & a tour de force.
Hope you enjoy it!
Each Is Alone, Each Is Everything
O ghost in the bluehearing grove
More tongueless than pity.
Quiet as a breast. Alive above the noisy killing of men. A red red rose and the patient hands of the snow. O tranquil forest under the darkening sky.
Half-lived and unintent the poor lives of men.
The listening souls of twigs.
O starry weather lofts a bird and in that profound cave our father sleeps. Hey creatures! forgive us!
Conditions are Queen. Fullswirl care in the gadgets of being.
Flesh cottages.
Crowing pigflowers spray at the castle wall.
Rundown it’s five o’clod. The more ways the samer way.
Eternity is kinder
Than any clock.
Harmony always rejects power.
Each cottage holds the world.
Horizons always end somewhere too. Vice in art, as in life, is not looking at what cannot be seen. The beautiful brutal hours fondle alike the thoughts of snakes and the lusts of angels. The garments of Shakespeare hang in the closet beside the fool’s—each with the marks of the loom upon it, neither altering the set of the shuttle in any fashion whatever. O ghost in the heartseeing grove tell me are there any coats at all that will fit the life of a man in this world?
As meaningful as love!
Peaceful as a breast. Alive above the terrible agony of men. No really I’d prefer not to. Have more of it, that is. Feeling, caring… My own bit of cottage. Why should I always return to where I haven’t been! Let you now—I am speaking to myself—come a little nearer to where I am. It may be true that that is a better place to be. Wonder, anyway, is nicer than any name.
I’m all sold on the Beautiful.
I hate with all my guts this bloody crawling cell they’ve turned the world into. I can’t get any of these damn coats to fit any part of my life.
Kenneth Patchen
On the surface, Kenneth Patchen’s poetry contains seemingly contradictory elements—while he was a truly great love poet & someone who could evoke great tenderness & compassion with his words, he had a savage & brutally matter-of-fact side. Just consider some of these poem titles: “I don’t want to startle you, but they are going to kill most of us”; “Eve of St. Agony or the Middle Class was Sitting on its Fat,” “Nice Day for a Lynching” or “"May I Ask You A Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?" Of course, the visceral outrage expressed in these & other poems goes hand in hand with the compassion—Patchen saw a world torn apart by war & ravaged by cruelty & the worst forms of injustice. When he saw these things, he expressed his outrage, openly & directly in his poetry.
Today’s poem, “The Orange Bears,” is an example of this outrage. Patchen grew up in Niles, Ohio, & his father worked in a steel mill in nearby Youngstown. This provides the poems context. In those days, the strikes were broken up by the National Guard—now it’s all done with much less physical violence—management taking photos of the workers on the picket line (I’ve seen this myself in San Francisco when the hotel workers went on strike) so they can identify employees for reprisal, or simply having the President of the United States fire all the members of the Air Traffic Controllers Union.
I thought Dominic Rivron made an astute comment on the first Patchen poem this month, saying that Patchen walks the line of being corny, but never falls off. It’s a big artistic risk to speak plainly & emotionally. Patchen is an example to us because he didn’t shirk that.
The Orange Bears
The Orange bears with soft friendly eyes
Who played with me when I was ten,
Christ, before I'd left home they'd had
Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs
Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting
Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped
Out, and I went down through the woods
To the smelly crick with Whitman
In the Haldeman-Julius edition,
And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail
Into the cover—What did he know about
Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal
And the National Guard coming over
From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates
With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers?
I remember you would put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they'd be so covered with soot
You couldn't tell what they were anymore.
A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!
Kenneth Patchen
I’ve decided to make January’s Weekly Poem series all Kenneth Patchen, all the time—no particular meaning or reason in this other than my admiration for his poetry. Today’s offering is one of his beautiful, & beautifully transparent, love poems. There isn’t much I can add in terms of commentary, but I can tell you that there’s a recording available of Patchen reading this & 27 other poems: it’s Smithsonian Folkways’ release Kenneth Patchen Reads His Love Poems. I haven’t heard this, but I have heard recordings of Patchen reading (including a recording backed by the Charles Mingus band!) & I’m confident this would be a wonderful recording to have around—there’s really nothing like hearing a poet speak poetry in his/her own voice.
A couple of blog news items before we move on to the poem. I’ve become quite intrigued by the idea of series that appear in alternate weeks—I first started this with the Tuesday mix of my translations & B.N.’s poems. As a result, I think I’ll be doing a lot more of this in the future—I’d like to get a bit more variety in the posts, & frankly, I think in my case at least, the blog has to keep re-creating itself to remain vital. I don’t know all the details on this myself yet, so we’ll all have to stay tuned! The Weekly Poem series will continue to appear each Saturday, & I will (as you'll read in a moment) have a weekly Sunday series (or a sort); otherwise, I think I'll be going to the alternate week format as the rule rather than the exception.
The other piece of news is that Sunday will be more or less an off day here; I do intend to post a Photo of the Week (with a descriptive caption), & the Sunday post also will have a link to my poetry blog, The Days of Wine & Roses. This blog has a poem from my San Francisco days posted each Sunday—a few of these have appeared here in the past, but most of them will be new to Robert Frost’s Banjo readers. For those of you who haven’t visited there yet, The Days of Wine & Roses is the current version of a poetry manuscript I’ve been working on since around 1990; it may be a book at some point, but for now it’s a blog. Hope to see some of you there!
In the meantime, hope you enjoy the poem.
Creation
Wherever the dead are there they are and
Nothing more. But you and I can expect
To see angels in the meadowgrass that look
Like cows—
And wherever we are in paradise
in furnished room without bath and
six flights up
Is all God! We read
To one another, loving the sound of the s’s
Slipping-up on the t’s and much is good
Enough to raise the hair on our heads, like
Rilke and Owen.
Any person who loves another person,
Wherever in the world, is with us in this room—
even though there are battlefields.
Kenneth Patchen
For the first Weekly Poem of the New Year I decided to post a piece by a favorite poet, & one who’s appeared several times on Robert Frost’s Banjo, Kenneth Patchen. Patchen’s humanity & lyricism , his emotional candor & his knack for the perfect, understated image are all on display in this work.
If you haven’t read much of Kenneth Patchen’s work, I’d encourage you to check out his poetry or his beautiful, poetic novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight. A search on Robert Frost’s Banjo will take you to several more poems, & there are some good dedicated Patchen poem sites online—you might try the Kenneth Patchen Home Page here, which not only has poems but also links to a number of other sites, as well as some bibliographical information & a biographical timeline.
In the meantime, hope you enjoy this poem, & hope everyone’s new year is off to a good start.
Crossing on Staten Island Ferry
I'd like to die like this...
with the dark fingers of the water
closing and unclosing over these sleepy lights
and a sad bell somewhere murmuring goodnight.
And a girl would stand beside me,
her hair lifted out like a hand against my face;
and I'd say "I'm going to die now."
And she'd answer "All the guns are still:
for men have learned to love one another."
Then a star would nose the water, like a weary gull
which had flown a long way and come at last to rest.
And, when I'd lift my face to look again on the God
I had found for myself
the girl would say "You're not going to die."
And she'd not mean me at all.
Kenneth Patchen
We’re having a real holiday here, as proved by the timing of blog posts! I expect to be back on a normal schedule tomorrow, with the final installment of Dad’s Photos.
This month the Weekly Poem series has featured works in translation; we’ve had some great poets: Vallejo, Bachmann & Saba. I’ve been thinking about this week’s selection for awhile, & have been considering poems by two great Russian poets, Anna Akhmatova & Marina Tsevetayeva; the problem was, I just couldn’t settle on a poem by either. This morning as I was looking thru their works, still trying to make a choice, poems by another poet with whom I was unfamiliar, Bella Akhmadulina. As it turns out, I should be familiar with Akhmadulina, & I’ll take steps to correct this in the very near future.
Bella Akhmadulina was born in 1937, & has been called the greatest living Russian language poet by Joseph Brodsky. Early in her career, her poems were suppressed because, like Akhmatova’s, they were considered too personal & intimate. Since the 1980s, however, she has received recognition, including a term as laureate.
Hope you enjoy this wonderful poem—& do seek Akhmadulina out online, where there are a number of translations, or in your local bookseller.
Winter
Winter, to me your gestures are
cold and careful: yes, in
winter there is something
gentle as medicine,
or why else would sickness
put out trusting hands
into that season, from its own
torture and darkness?
Weave your magic then
my love, let the kiss
of one curl of ice
brush over my forehead.
Soon I shall trust any
deception, and look without fear
into the eyes of dogs, as I
press close to the trees:
And forgive, playfully, with a
run, turn and jump; and
after a bout of forgiveness
forgive again,
become like a winter’s day:
empty and oval, though
in comparison to such
presence, always small.
I shall turn to nothing, and
so call over the wall,
not some shadow of myself, but light
I shall not block at all.
Bella Akhmadulina
Translated by Elaine Feinstein
This summer when I was playing at the local farmer’s market, the nephew of the florist shop’s owner (who hosted the market) liked to let loose a red balloon at the end of each day, & as I was packing up my gear I liked to take a minute to watch it rise up in the sky over Council—each time, I was reminded of this lovely poem by Umberto Saba.
Poet/translator John Frederick Nims produced a well-known version of this in blank verse, but as I was preparing for this post, I found the following version online. With apologies to the renowned Mr Nims, I really like the more simple & free lines in this version & so I’m offering it instead.
Umberto Saba is the nom de plume of Umberto Poli, who lived from 1883-1957. His poetry wasn’t received well until relatively late in his life: he didn’t begin winning critical acclaim until after World War II. Since Umberto Saba was Jewish, he had to spend much of the late 1930s thru the mid 1940s in hiding because of the “racial laws” in Fascist Italy. Saba also struggled with severe depression throughout his life.
This is such a wonderfully transparant lyric poem that it needs no further comment. Hope you enjoy it, & have a beautiful Saturday!
A Winter Noon
Who in the moment of my happiness
(God forgive my using a word so grand,
so terrible) reduced my brief delight
nearly to tears? No doubt you'll say: "A certain
beautiful creature who was walking by
and smiled at you." But no: a child's balloon,
a blue, meandering balloon against
the azure of the air, my native sky
never so clear and cold as it was then,
at high noon on a dazzling winter day.
That sky with here and there a wisp of cloud,
and upper windows flaming in the sun,
and faint smoke from a chimney, maybe two,
and over everything, every divine
thing, that globe that had escaped a boy's
incautious fingers (surely he was out there
broadcasting through the crowded square his grief,
his immense grief) between the great facade
of the Stock Exchange and the café where I,
behind a window, watched with shining eyes
the rise and fall of what he once possessed.
Umberto Saba
translated by Geoffrey Brock
After posting Vallejo’s “Piedra Negra Sobre Piedra Blanca” (“Black Stone Lying on a White Stone”) last Saturday, I decided the theme for December’s will be poetry in translation. Of course, this excludes my translations from the French, so you can expect 20th century poems from other languages.
Today’s poem is by German poet Ingeborg Bachmann, another true great of the last century. I posted her poem “Fog Land” here last year, & I’m happy to post another—her poem “Die gestundete Zeit,” translated by Peter Filkins (whose translation is the one I used) as “Borrowed Time” & by Michael Hamburger as “The Respite.”
Bachmann is a poet who can pare a landscape pared down to very basic elements & then embue it with meaning & emotion. Both this poem & “Fog Land” (“Nebelland” in the original German) create a sort of fairy tale/folk song landscape that is rendered harrowing & harsh.
I’d encourage readers to check out more of Bachmann’s work; she really was a masterful lyric poet—it would be worth knowing German just to be able to translate her work. In the meantime, hope you enjoy this one.
Borrowed Time
Harder days are coming.
The loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon.
Soon you must lace up your boots
and chase the hounds back to the marsh farms.
For the entrails of fish
have grown cold in the wind.
Dimly burns the light of lupines.
Your gaze makes out in fog:
the loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon.
There your loved one sinks in sand:
it rises up to her windblown hair,
it cuts her short,
it commands her to be silent,
it discovers she’s mortal
and willing to leave you
after every embrace.
Don’t look around.
Lace up your boots.
Chase back the hounds.
Throw the fish into the sea.
Put out the lupines!
Harder days are coming.
Ingeborg Bachmann
translation by Peter Filkins
Some months the Weekly Poem is programmatic; this month they’ve been a hodge-podge. In fact, this poem by one of my most favorite poets, Kenneth Patchen, was really a last moment whim. The poem this week was supposed to be “The Desolate Field” by William Carlos Williams—oddly, this would have been the good doctor’s first appearance in the Robert Frost’s Banjo Weekly Poem (not that his reputation is suffering from that). I’m sure Dr Williams will appear in this space somewhere down the line. In the meantime, please enjoy this lovely poem by Kenneth Patchen.
AS SHE WAS THUS ALONE IN THE CLEAR MOONLIGHT, standing between rock and sky, and scarcely seeming to touch the earth, her dark locks and loose garments scattered by the wind, she looked like some giant spirit of the older time, preparing to ascend into the mighty cloud which singly hung from this poor heaven
so when she lay beside me
sleep’s town went round her
and wondering children pressed against the high windows
of the room where we had been
so when she lay beside me
a voice, reminded of an old fashion:
“What are they saying?
of the planets and the turtles?
of the woodsman and the bee?”
but we were too proud to answer, too tired to care about designs
“of tents and books and swords and birds”
thus does the circle pull upon itself
and all the gadding angels draw us in
until I can join her in that soft town where the bells
split apples on their tongues
and bring sleep down like a fish’s shadow
Kenneth Patchen
Happy Saturday everyone! It’s been a very hectic week around here, with much of our time spent heading to various places in all the cardinal directions. One more trip later this morning, & then we get to settle down for a few days.
& a good thing, too, because we’re going to have some exciting happenings starting on Monday—as I’ve mentioned, just stay tuned to this channel over the weekend for more news on that, both later today & tomorrow. I will say this is pretty much Eberle’s weekend on Robert Frost’s Banjo, so what better way to start things off than with a poem Eberle suggested for the Weekly Poem series. It’s by Emily Dickinson & is such a marvelous exploration of longing & fulfillment.
Hope you enjoy it, & do stay tuned!
I had been hungry, all the Years
I had been hungry, all the Years—
My Noon had Come—to dine—
I trembling drew the Table near—
And touched the Curious Wine—
'Twas this on Tables I had seen—
When turning, hungry, Home
I looked in Windows, for the Wealth
I could not hope—for Mine—
I did not know the ample Bread—
'Twas so unlike the Crumb
The Birds and I, had often shared
In Nature's—Dining Room—
The Plenty hurt me—'twas so new—
Myself felt ill—and odd—
As Berry—of a Mountain Bush—
Transplanted—to a Road—
Nor was I hungry—so I found
That Hunger—was a way
Of Persons outside Windows—
The Entering—takes away—
Emily Dickinson
For our Weekly Poem today, I’m taking a one-week sabbatical from the lesser known poets & poems that I generally love to post, & am posting a well-known poem by a well-known poet—Wallace Stevens, long a personal favorite poet, & also a long-time personal favorite poem. It’s simply a marvelous poem, & that’s ‘nuff said, because you knew that anyway. Enjoy!
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens
It’s Weekly Poem time again, & this week’s selection is one I first came across as an undergraduate in a now out-of-print anthology called The New Naked Poetry. As folks who’ve followed the blog for awhile probably know, I’ve hardly ever met a poem written in repetitive form that I didn’t like. I do believe that Charles’ Simic’s “Errata” was one of the first contemporary poems I read that made such use of repetition, & as such has probably been in the back of my poetical mind, especially when I was writing, for many years. I know the lines “Remove all periods/They are scars made by words” is one that flutters quite satisfactorily into my consciousness from time to time.
“Errata” comes from Simic’s 1971 Dismantling the Silence, also out-of-print (& as of November 6th, available used at Amazon for a mere $150—I mean, I like Simic a lot, but give me a break!) The poem is in his Selected Early Poems, however (published by George Braziller).
Hope you enjoy it!
errata
Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
Charles Simic
It’s All Hallows Eve tonight, & what more can you ask for from today’s Weekly Poem than that its author dedicated it to Edgar Allan Poe? This is the case with today’s poem, written by a poet I think should be more widely read, Charles Henri Ford.
Ford had a long career, beginning the lit mag Blues in the late 20s at age 16; not long after this, he moved to Paris & became a part of Gertrude Stein’s salon, where he became friends with a number of writers, including Djuna Barnes. He & Parker Tyler co-wrote The Young & the Evil, which Stein called, “the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation,” & he was the partner of dancer Pavel Tchelitchew until the latter’s death in 1957. Ford continued his work as poet, novelist, film-maker & general man of the arts practically until his own death in 2002.
Ford’s poetry is surrealist in nature, & he was aligned with the “capital S” surrealists as editor of the literary magazine The View. His poems certainly evoke the marvelous, with their uncanny imagery; they also often deliver a great deal of poignancy & feeling & the sense that the author is moved by the beautiful, even when the beautiful takes on truly strange forms.
Hope you enjoy today’s poems.
The Bad Habit
for Poe
Drug of the incomprehensible
engenders the freaks of desire.
The bleeding statue, the violin’s hair,
the river of fire:
the blood grows, the hair flows, the river groans,
from the veins, from the skin, by the home of the child
pulled and repelled by Bloody Bones;
renewal of the swoon
mastered, the raw egg of fear,
doped with mystery, the hooded heart:
perpetually haunted, hopeless addict,
herding unheard of cattle!
Rider on the bat-winged horse.
Charles Henri Ford
It occurred to me the other day that we haven’t posted any Emily Dickinson poems here on Robert Frost’s Banjo for some time, & so I began the sometimes daunting task of flipping thru Dickinson’s Complete Poems—I always mean to dip into a good selected volume like Final Harvest, but somehow my hand always reaches for the more familiar if also more formidable tome.
The poem below—number 656 (composed around 1862 & standing just before the more well-known “I dwell in Possibility” in the Complete Poems) is a rather spectacular evocation of autumn; Dickinson could evoke more in 12 lines of her highly compressed verse than practically any other English language poet: we have the color red—a typical feaure of New England autumn—transformed to a vivid & disturbing memento mori, as the falling leaves become the blood from a severed artery. The final couplet is a pleasing poetic enigma: has this autumnal bloodflow been transformed to a rose that carries us off to some “better place?”
I find this poem quite fascinating. Hope you enjoy it too.
The name—of it—is “Autumn”—
The hue—of it—is Blood—
An Artery—upon the Hill—
A Vein—along the Road—
Great Globules—in the Alleys—
And Oh, the Shower of Stain—
When Winds—upset the Basin—
And spill the Scarlet Rain—
It sprinkles Bonnets—far below—
It gathers ruddy Pools—
Then—eddies like a Rose—away—
Upon Vermilion Wheels—
Emily Dickinson
The picture shows the Dickinson Homestead
