Tangled Rope

Obsession

by Charles Baudelaire

Woods, you terrify as if you were cathedrals;
you bluster like an organ, and in our damned hearts
-- rooms of eternal mourning where ancient rales reverberate --
echoes respond to your De profundis.

I hate you, Ocean! your bounding and your tumult,
I recognize my soul in you; that bitter cackle
of the vanquished man, full of sobs and insults,
I hear it in the immense laughter of the sea.

How you would please me, Night, without those stars
whose light speaks a familiar language!
For I seek the void, and the black, and the bare.

But the blackness is itself a canvas where live,
springing from my eyes by the thousand,
extinguished beings with understanding looks.

I translated that from this:

Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathédrales;
Vous hurlez comme l'orgue; et dans nos coeurs maudits,
Chambres d'éternal deuil où vibrent de vieux râles,
Répondent les échoes de vos De profundis.

Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds et tes tumultes,
Mon esprit les retrouve en lui; ce rire amer
De l'homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d'insultes,
Je l'entends dans le rire énorme de la mer.

Comme tu me plairais, ô nuit! sans ces étoiles
Dont la lumière parle un langag connu!
Car je cherce le vide, et le noir, el le nu!

Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles
Où vivent, jaillissant de mon oeil par milliers,
Des êtres disparus aux regards familiers.

I know there are plenty of good translations of Baudelaire, so this isn’t really an attempt to add anything to the body of work. But I do like to attempt a translation on my own every once in a while, (1) to exercise a fast-fading ability to read and write in French, and (2) to re-emphasize the inherent weaknesses and powers in the art of translating poetry.

Les Fleurs du mal has staked an ardent claim on my poetic memory, and this particular poem seemed relevant–and far more expressive of my own point of view–in context of a private discussion I’ve been having with friend Chris via letters.

Without thinking about it, I’ve broken an unplanned fast from blogging. It didn’t take much of a taste to bring me back with (at least temporary) fervor.

And with it being National Poetry Month, and not finding a lot of really exciting poems in BAP11 to share or comment on, I decided to commit to a handful of poetry-related activities that sample all aspects of poetry, from writing, to editing, to translating, to critiquing. So, in the next 3 weeks expect me to post:

1. A short essay on a favorite “new” poem (new to me, anyway)
2. A translation of a poem (most likely French to English)
3. A suggested edit/review of a poem written by a friend (Chris, I think you’re going to have to pony up)
4. A new, original poem of my own construction (no guarantees)

I will still post a few selections from BAP11, but only those that were really striking, those that I won’t forget after a week.

During the month of April I plan to share some of my favorite selections in the 2011 Best American Poetry anthology. Though BAP is not something I turn to in order to find the actual best American poetry, it is a convenient source of poems that I’ve probably not read in the year, and, anyway, the format provides a tidy way to think about and explore contemporary poetic writing to an extent.

At least, I tell myself, it’s better than nothing.

I just realized that in my first BAP11 post I mentioned that I recognized a poem from 2010, but didn’t say which poem it was. Here it is:

Toadstools

by Charles Wright

The toadstools are starting to come up,
                                                     circular and dry.
Nothing will touch them,
Gophers or chipmunks, wasps or swallows.
They glow in the twilight like rooted will-o’-the-wisps.
Nothing will touch them.
As though little roundabouts from the bunched unburiable,
Powers, dominions,
As though orphans rode herd in the short grass,
                                                   as though they had heard the call,
They will always be with us,
                                          transcenders of the world.
Someone will try to stick his beak into their otherworldly styrofoam.
Someone may try to taste a taste of forever.
For some it’s a refuge, for some a shady place to fall down.
Grief is a floating barge-boat,
                                            who knows where it’s going to moor?

I’m keeping this pretty informal, ’cause that’s all I have time for. Here’s some of what I like about this poem:

1. Clear imagery
2. Sound, e.g., consonance in “glow in the twilight like rooted will-o’-the-wisps” and “try to stick his beak”, “try to taste a taste”; phonetic stops in “As though little roundabouts from the bunched unburiable, / Powers, dominions,”
3. The dichotomies that may or may not include false dilemmas (“Nothing will touch them” and “Someone will try…”, life and decay, power and lowness, “refuge” and “grief”)
4. Quietness, irresolution

Chris Lott has kicked off National Poetry Month in a beautiful way, by posting some of his favorite poems as handwritten notes. There’s a brilliant elegance to that simple act that I really appreciate.

Chris and I have reviewed Best American Poetry anthologies for a few years now, typically as an end-of-year activity in December. We didn’t in 2011, so I was glad when Chris agreed to add that to his month’s activities.

In his BAP11/12 kick-off post, Chris mentioned how odd it is to read poetry from 2010 in a “Best of 2011″ anthology in the year 2012. It doesn’t really matter, I guess, since the date range itself is not typically meaningful or significant, but I actually recognized one of the poems in BAP11 this time around.

Before I get to the poem, I need to both lament and celebrate that statement, because it is unusual.

First, it means I don’t read a lot of poetry, period. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read poetry when I can, when I get around to it, between fiction and non-fiction, which themselves are crammed between work, travel, and family. So, yeah.

Second, I don’t read a lot of contemporary poetry. Probably 3/4 of the poetry I read is over 5 years old, and at least half of it is over 40 years old.

It should be no surprise, then, that I can read through most of an anthology such as this and not recognize more than one poem. There is the possibility that I’ve read more than one of the poems in this year’s BAP, but, if so, they weren’t memorable enough to trigger a reaction.

And yet I don’t find this to be necessarily indicative of either the vulgarity of my lifestyle, or of the general quality of contemporary poetry. Rather, it reminds me of the wealth of writing that is available to me, if only I were to reach out and touch it. I can’t guess whether the US is producing more poetry than ever before, but I would guess it’s producing about as much per year as ever. And maybe the general reading public is ignoring poetry more and more, in favor of more accessible entertainment and sources of enlightenment.

So, as I begin NaPoMo12, and I dive into BAP11 (and, hopefully, some additional work in the craft) I’m not entirely sure of my surroundings, and, as Chris also expressed, nowadays I feel less certain of my own ability to read, understand, and appreciate poetry than perhaps ever before. But unlike Chris, who seems to have been reading more than ever, I’ve been reading less than ever, and I planned to blame my weaknesses on that. But diving back in I feel that this place in general feels right; it feels more open and richer in opportunities than the places for poetry that I’ve either dwelt or built in the past.

I encountered this bright and brief poem this afternoon, courtesy of Chris‘s recent lightening of his library:

Risk

by Robin Becker

The kildeer nested on the ground--
seconds from the horses' hooves
and the graceful arcs of the canter.
Each time we rounded the turn, she stood
over her speckled eggs (I could
see them from my horse's back)
and made a display
of her fierce white feathers.
How I admired her! Audacious
before the iron shoes!

The NYT featured an interesting op-ed by poet and critic David Orr on the restrictions of copyright law and the well-known fogginess of Fair Use when quoting poetry (“When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse”, Sept 8, 2011). Orr rightly points out that the unofficial standard used by poetry critics is often to include the entire text of a poem; however, legally speaking, this practice oversteps Fair Use.
“As things stand, poets and critics are at the mercy of an incoherent system,” Orr writes. As we in higher ed are too well aware, one could easily replace “critic” with teacher.

Personally, I have no shame about having shared entire poems here, on this blog–in part this is because one can hardly talk about a poem without having access to the poem, but also because I believe that poets, along with many other classes of artists, benefit from open sharing of their work.

I enjoyed posting on select poems from The Best American Poetry 2009 last December, and planned to do the same this year. We’re clearly a week into December with no posts or poems, which says a lot about how I follow-through with Good Ideas. Chris mentioned he might record selected poems from BAP 2010 and post them with commentary; I think that’s a great way to reinvest myself in podcasting literature, personalize this year’s BAP reading, and save myself the trouble of retyping the poem accurately.

Before I begin (or, really, because I haven’t begun) I want to share my first-pass shortlist of dog-eared poems from BAP 2010:

Todd Boss – My Dog Has No Nose
Anne Carson – Wildly Constant
> David Clewell – This Poem Had Better Be about the World We Actually Live In
> Billy Collins – Grave
Peter Davis – Four “Addresses”
Lynn Emanuel – Dear Final Journey,
> Vievee Francis – Smoke under the Bale
Sonia Greenfield – Passing the Barnyard Graveyard
Corinne Lee – Six from “Birds of Self-Knowledge”
> Hailey Leithauser – The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon
> Jeffrey McDaniel – The Grudge
W.S. Merwin – Identity
> James Richardson – Vectors 2.3: 50 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
Charles Simic -Carrying on like a Crow
David Trinidad – Black Telephone
Derek Walcott – 21
> Catherine Wing – The Darker Sooner
Mark Wunderlich – Coyote, with Mange

> Indicates a poem that was also on Chris’s first-pass list.

There’s not a chance that I’ll cover all of these poems this month–I’ll be lucky to hit my five favorites. But for one reason or another I found these poems noteworthy enough to take a second or third look at, and it is likely from this pool that I’ll release some totally unauthorized audio recordings.

An early, but not unwelcome, arrival. I haven’t had time this past summer for many of the literary endeavors that I strive for and enjoy, but autumn may give me a chance to read and write about The Best American Poetry 2010′s selections (as Chris and I did in last year’s BAP09 project).

This narrative poem, sent to me via an e-mail, deserves attention and dissemination.

Of the Parrat and Other Birds that Can Speake

Nick Lantz, We Don't Know We Don't Know.  Graywolf Press, 2010.

It is for certain knowne that they have died
for very anger and griefe that they could not
learn to pronounce some hard words.
—Pliny the Elder


When you buy the bird for your mother
you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it does anything except pluck the bars
with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”

 Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,”

that this is now the preamble to all
of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have been paying the bills,” and you
believe her until you find a cache

of unopened envelopes in the freezer.
More things are showing up where
they shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one evening you see craters

in her yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out with a trowel and excavate
picture frames, flatware that looks like
the silver bones of some exquisite

animal. You worry when you arrive
one day and see the open, empty cage
that you will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven mitt and left in a drawer,

but you find it sitting on her shoulder
in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned to open the cage himself.”
The bird learns new words. You learn

which lies you can ignore. The stroke
that kills her gives no warning, not—
the doctor assures you—that anyone
can predict such things. When you

drive home that night with the cage
belted into the passenger seat, the bird
makes a sound that is not a word
but that you immediately recognize

as the sound of your mother’s phone
ringing, and you know it is the sound
of you calling her again and again,
the sound of her not answering.

Poem in my pocket is printed manuscript copy of Whitman’s “Live Oak, with Moss”: