April 8 - The Cunning Optimism of Language

Oh man, sorry about no Sunday post. Once I got back from Long Beach, my day became a series of naps and episodes of Metalocalypse. But I’m back today, right? I decided to use a poem today that I came across in The Best American Poetry 2010. For anybody out there interested in learning about some of the poetry currently being written in this country, the yearly anthology series is a friendly place to start.

Today’s poem is by Bob Hicok, a former teacher at my alma mater (though I couldn’t get into his workshop due to underclassmen late-ass registration requirements). One of my favorite aspects of Hicok’s poetry is his ability to use humor in his verse without it feeling forced or tired. Anyway, here you go.

The Cunning Optimism of Language

by Bob Hicok

She made me Overlord of the Sewers.

It was a quiet ceremony before bed, consisting of,

you are Overlord of the Sewers. I’m unsure

what my powers are, though clearly absolute,

I thought as we kissed good night. Waking

in this state, I found coffee tasted the same.

I’ve left a note to my underlings: make

everything better. I’m particularly curious

about raisin bread. How can raisin bread

be improved? Not the cheap shit

but the good stuff. This is love, I tell you,

the random bestowal of a title. Anything else

is fraudulent. Now you have something, sort of

like a tag, by which to gauge if your love is real.

As our beds will tell you, do not remove the tag

under penalty of law. Such stern cops, our beds.

Go to sleep, they tell us, make love, they tell us,

die. If your lover makes you Overlord, don’t ask,

of what? These are one-time offers, I fear,

just as the lightbulb that burned out

last night gets one chance to fail.

I have these minutes, all these chances to fail,

I must be many lightbulbs. It’s well-lit

except in the corners, this life.

I love the conversational tone of Hicok. It seems like a far cry from the vaunted language of some of the more stereotypically “poetic” poets. Hicok goes a bit of the Hemingway or William Carlos Williams route by using casual language to discuss events and themes are great importance, probably. There’s a certain mystery in everyday language here. Is it all tongue-in-cheek, or is there some larger matter beneath the crust of the raisin bread? Are you comfortable accepting both?

April 6 - Power

Power

Living    in the earth-deposits    of our history

Today a backhoe divulged    out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle    amber    perfect    a hundred-year-old

cure for fever    or melancholy    a tonic

for living on this earth    in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered    from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years    by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin    of her finger-ends

till she could no longer hold    a test-tube or a pencil

She died    a famous woman    denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

Today’s poem is by Adrienne Rich. It was a great loss when she died just over a year ago. Here’s a link to her page on Wikipedia. Usually, poets have sort of crap biographies on Wikipedia, but hers is pretty good. She’s a real interesting life to learn.

So let’s talk about this poem a bit before I head to Long Beach. It seems to me that one of the primary studies of feminism, and for that matter most -isms, is the relationship we as ethereal neural impulses and frail, flesh-bag bodies deal with the distribution and consequences of power.

How then to begin to talk about it, but to look to the past. The first line, “Living    in the earth-deposits    of our history,” rearranges the usual idea of history, as something we find buried in the earth, I’m thinking Pompeii, for example. Instead, “earth-deposits” are found in history. Using “deposits” also denotes that earth is not present in all of our history, but exists like geodes in the crust.

Then we move on to a backhoe, not something we use normally for archaeological excavation, more of a blunt-force trauma than a brush. Anyway, we can reasonably conclude that this is some situation of earth-moving associated with construction of something new to follow, or of simply sweeping away something old. This means that unearthing the bottle is incidental to what the backhoe is there for.

An amber bottle, not unlike the amber of prehistoric tree sap, which always reminds of Jurassic Park (now back in theatres!). A preservative of whatever is inside, be it a mosquito with dino DNA or a concoction of snake oil meant to cure what ails you, from the physical (fever) to the mental (melancholy).

This panacea held great power for the people buying it, despite the fact that, in all likelihood, it at best was either a mild sedative or did nothing allowing the body or mine (placebo effect) to cure itself. At worst, it would have only exacerbated the original problem or even caused altogether new ones.

Also today, the speaker reads about Marie Curie, the famous Polish scientist responsible for the discovery of radium, radon, polonium and numerous other scientific advances. Here’s how important she,and her French husband, Pierre, are: Curium is the ninety-sixth element on the periodic table. It’s one thing to have a random species of animal named after you, but an element? I mean, that’s big time. She’s up there with Einstein, California and Thor.

Curie made her discoveries prior to our understanding of the harmful effects of radiation, and as such eventually died from radiation poisoning. In fact, her notes, even her cookbook, are still kept in lead-lined boxes because they are still too radioactive for a human to handle without protection. On that note, “suppurating” means discharging pus or festering, that’s makes for an awkward handshake.

In order to maintain her public standing as a great scientist, she had to deny the danger of the discovery she had made. Perhaps because the male-run scientific community would have found a way to refute the importance of the work because she, as a woman, had made a mistake?

So what is power? Does it come from within or without? Are we powerful because others agree we are powerful? Maybe it is a more personal state. We can see from the pairing of the bottle with Marie Curie that there is power in the thing, or external, such as the bottle as artifact and in its own time as remedy as well as Curie’s international renown as a scientist and a person capable of refusing the tragic effects of radiation poisoning.

Power is also internal. It is not the amber of the bottle that was important to patients, it was what it preserved that mattered. Is the same true for Curie and her decimated mortal form?

This is both true and not true, I believe. Rather than get philosophical, let’s take a look at the actual text of the poem. Lines are broken midway by spaces while other words, which can exist independently, are forced together by hyphens to form something new. The language is at once separated and conjoined. OK, I have to catch a train to Compton. Ack! No time for proofreading, but I’ll check it on the light rail.

April 5 - San Onofre, California

So, my original plan for today didn’t work out for reasons that are singular and stupid. Anyway, I’ll have it ready by Monday. In trying to come up with something new, I realized I’ve yet to post anything by a female poet, which is total bullshit on my part and I apologize.

Considering I took a poem from an anthology put together by Carolyn Forche, and the fact that she is one of our best living poets as far as I am concerned, I’m going to talk about a poem included in her second book of poetry, The Country Between Us. The poem appears in the section of the book titled “In Salvador, 1978-1980.” The title of the poem is a beach a bit north of San Diego and the U.S.-Mexico border.

San Onofre, California

We have come far south.

Beyond here, the oldest women

shelling limas into black shawls.

Portillo scratching his name

on the walls, the slender ribbons

of piss, children patting the mud.

If we go on, we might stop

in the street in the very place

where someone disappeared

and the words Come with us! we might

hear them. If that happened, we would

lead our lives with our hands

tied together. That is why we feel

it is enough to listen

to the wind jostling lemons,

to dogs ticking across the terraces,

knowing that while birds and warmer weather

are forever moving north,

the cries of those who vanish

might take years to get here.

I love the use of enjambment in this poem. Enjambment, so I can sound smart, is when a poet chooses to end a line prior to when the reader would expect. It can create surprise, tension, multiple meanings, and even humor. e.e. cummings was one of the best enjambers (which is also the perfect name for a basketball team made of poetry MFAs).

Take “Slender ribbons / of piss” as an example. By enjambing this, we at first imagine slender ribbons, pretty things we’d see at a party or celebration with ribbons hanging from the wall mentioned at the beginning of the line. Of course, our image is greatly changed by the words “of piss.” Now we are left to imagine the parabolas and tangents of urine humans create, made all the more jarring by the joyful scene we had begun to construct.

OK, lemme jump back from technical stuff. What we have just read is one of my favorite examples of how to make a political poem without being overly political. Politics is something we are constantly affected by in at least a passive way. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that our lives are political lives.

One of the strengths of this poem, to me, is its ability to discuss the politics of the time and place without leaving the realities of our lives. We are all always affected by politics, but for the people of this poem, politics has become an active, fickle, dangerous and shadowy intruder.

The first image of this poem, “the oldest women shelling limas into black shawls,” does a wonderful job of being quotidian and ominous at the same time. Full Disclosure: I had to look up what a lima was, but am so glad I did. (If you have a smartphone, I highly recommend the Dictionary.com app.)

Clams, yo.

A lima, as evinced by “shelling,” is a kind of clam. However, the word itself is, in a kind of roundabout way, a Spanish corruption of an Incan word meaning “to speak.” This goes back to the history of the Peruvian capital, and the use of language by those in power.

The oldest in Korea can still speak Japanese, the oldest Vietnamese can still speak French. I knew a guy from Azerbaijan and woman from Ukraine whom spoke Russian to each other.

Despite what may be a bit of a stretch, this idea that the oldest women are literally disarming speech and tucking it into black fabric creates an immediate image of death and censorship thriving just below the surface of food and prosperity, and not unlike how a clam lives inside a shell and just under the surface of the sand.

Oh my, I could write about this poem all night. Considering it’s Friday, I ain’t got no job, I ain’t got no money, and I got shit to do, I just may. I’ma abruptly end here.

April 4 - Forced March

Try this: Finish the poem and reflect on it a bit before reading the bio. Then read the bio and see how your understanding changes. Is it enhanced? Tainted?

Forced March

The man who, having collapsed,       rises, takes steps, is insane:

he’ll move an ankle, a knee,       an arrant mass of pain,

and take to the road again       as if wings were to lift him high;

in vain the ditch will call him:       he simply dare not stay;

and should you ask, why not?     perhaps he’ll turn and answer:

his wife is waiting back home,     and a death, one beautiful, wiser.

But see, the wretch is a fool,       for over the homes, that world,

long since nothing but singed       winds have been known to whirl;

his housewall lies supine;       your plum tree, broken clear,

and all the nights back home       horripilate with fear.

Oh, if I could believe       that I haven’t merely borne

what is worthwhile, in my heart;       that there is, to return, a home;

tell me it’s all still there:       the cool verandah, bees

of peaceful silence, buzzing,       while the plum jam cooled;

where over sleepy gardens       summer-end peace sunbathed,

and among bow and foliage       fruits were swaying naked;

and, blonde, my Fanni waited       before the redwood fence,

with morning slowly tracing       its shadowed reticence....

But all that could still be—       tonight the moon is round!

Don’t go past me, my friend—       shout! And I’ll come around!

Been thinking a bit more about the contextualization problem of posting these poems. On the one hand, I worry about detracting from the work itself by bogging it down with “facts.” For example, if I said a poet were right handed, then posted a poem in which the speaker eats a taco with his or her left hand, you might end up focusing on that fact rather than the obvious symbolism for the taco (tacos always mean the economy, duh).

Of course, I can go the art gallery approach. Am I the only one who is always bothered by the fact that most museums and such only provide you with a little white card saying the title, year of creation and the materials used? As a non-painter, I always feel a bit cheated by lack of information. Maybe that’s how they make their headphone tour money.

I ain't examining nuthin', I'm just waiting for a spot to open up on the damn bench.

J.R.R. Tolkien detested the idea that an artist’s life would be required to understand an artist’s work. This has apparently made getting tourism to his old home a bit tough on the local city council. In fact, if you think of the Lord of the Rings universe nowadays, you’re probably imagining somewhere in New Zealand. But shouldn’t a work of art be able to stand alone? We do plenty fine with lots of works created simply by Anonymous.

The most-best solution I can figure is to stay flexible. Sometimes shit needs a little ‘splaining before you toss a reader into the deep end. Other times, a bit of drowning is what’s required.

Remember to move closer to the water before letting go. Ulysses is tough enough without broken legs.

Today’s poem is “Forced March” by Miklós Radnóti (translated by Emery George). I’ll give you some biographical info on him and the poem afterwards. You will, of course, have noted that the poem is way back at the top. The first sentence of this paragraph is the first mention of the poet himself. Anyway, instead of writing a bio myself, Carolyn Forché has done a much better job than I ever could, so I’ll use hers. Also, I should note, the poem as I found it is from her fantastic anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, which I highly recommend, and from which this bio also is taken (I’m sure I’ll be taking more out of there before the month is over).

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944)

Radnóti, orphaned by age eleven, enrolled at the University of Szeged in 1930, the year his first book of poetry appeared. For his second book, Radnóti was tried for “effrontery to public modesty and incitement to rebellion,” and found guilty, whereupon his books were confiscated. He was called to forced military labor intermittently from 1940 until his death. In 1944 he was sent to Yugoslavia to construct a railway, but was force-marched with three thousand other men back to Hungary because of the advancing Red Army. In early November 1944, Radnóti and twenty other survivors of this march were put in the hands of Hungarian noncommissioned officers, who, unable to place their charges at a local hospital, shot them. Radnóti’s body was exhumed from a mass grave in 1946. His widow, going through his pockets, discovered a notebook full of poems, which included “Forced March,” “Letter to My Wife,” “Picture Postcards,” and “Seventh Eclogue.”

April 3 - Memory of the Graves

Poetry follows the conservation of energy as much as anything else. An undergrad professor once told our class that she had learned Italian specifically to read Dante in the original. Speaking only one language myself, the idea of this has always entranced me. Considering the fact that poetry often challenges native speakers with its language, fluency at that level requires considerable work. I’ve taught poems in ESL classes before, like William Stafford's Travelling Through the Dark, with mixed results.

Why does Teacher Kevin want to kill deer?

More so than any other art form, translation must inherently change the original in some way to mold it into a new set of grammar, idioms and connotations. Considering how much Korea has been in the news, I figured some Korean poetry would be nice today (I’ve kinda given up on only using Americans. I like a good mix.)

Anyway, Korean poetry can be exceedingly difficult to translate into English. The languages have little in common, unlike English with Romance or Germanic languages. Even spelling can cause trouble. “Cheju Island,” for example, is more commonly spelled Jeju now.

To return to the transmutation of poetry once again, reading foreign language poetry can sometimes open new corridors into our understanding and use of our own language. Perhaps, this it what happens to the original rhythm and other energies of the poem. Rather than simply vanishing, what is lost in translation is really recycled into something else. It’s a double-edged sword, but danger is important.

Rather than go on much more about a subject I have little formal study in, I think I’ll just put a poem here. This is Memory of the Graves by Ko Eun...who you can Google to find out biographical info on. He’s really interesting, but his life is not currently required. It’s a constant struggle to decide how much contextualization I should include with each poem. For this one, you aren’t getting much. Translated by David R. McCann.

Memory of the Graves

As a youth I was obsessed with graves.

There are six-hundred-and-eighty-nine

mounds in Hwandung Cemetery.

At Sarabong graveyard on Cheju Island

I would on the way every night

to sleep by the graveside.

Word spread that I was a ghost

residing in that cemetery.

A lucky day it was

when someone died and his grave was dug.

I would say with joy,

So, you have come here at last?

What can be a better place

to come to than this one?

At day’s end once

drunk as could be I fell asleep

somewhere among the graves

and was stung by a scorpion.

For a week I wore a piece of pumpkin

bandaged to my cheek,

all swollen, in deadly pain.

And again, as a novice monk

on my way to Marae Temple

in T’onggyong, I once spent half a day

in a graveyard, forgetting

the errand for my master,

a lapse that cost me dear.

A few decades drifted past

until I came to realize

wild animals have no graves!

Animals are better than man;

they are superior to God!

They do not leave their graves behind.

They are far better than myself.

Have I been infatuated, crying and weeping

over graves, in order to awaken

to this simple truth?

April 2 - The Great Poet Returns

Mark Strand was actually born in Canada, on Prince Edward Island, though he has spent most of his adult life teaching in American universities. Yes, he is still alive. In fact, he is widely regarded as one of the premier American poets, having won enough awards to allow for such a subjective claim. Oh, and it’s Canada’s National Poetry Month in April, too (representin’ for my northern brethren). Anyway, I’m more interested in talking about Strand’s poem:

The Great Poet Returns

When the light poured down through a hole in the clouds,

We knew the great poet was going to show. And he did.

A limousine with all white tires and stained-glass windows

Dropped him off. And then, with a clear and soundless fluency,

He strode into the hall. There was a hush. His wings were big.

The cut of his suit, the width of his tie, were out of date.

When he spoke, the air seemed whitened by imagined cries.

The worm of desire bore into the heart of everyone there.

There were tears in their eyes. The great one was better than ever.

“No need to rush,” he said at the close of the reading, “the end

Of the world is only the end of the world as you know it.”

How like him, everyone thought. Then he was gone,

And the world was a blank. It was cold and the air was still.

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?

Can anyone die without even a little?

OK, I admit I also chose this because yesterday was Easter (and Cesar Chavez Day, but I’ll get to that later). Also, I’m doing my own interpretations here based solely on the poem itself, to the exclusion of any biographic or other supplemental information I may have access to.

The Great Poet character in this poem is rife with Judaeo-Christian associations to a divine being. He has “big wings,” generally denoting an angel, and his limo as white tires and, absurdly, stained-glass windows. He also appears with a beam of light from the heavens and “whitened” the air when he spoke. Put that with the poem’s title, and he could be a Jesus figure as well.

It wasn't until Jesus made partner that the whole shamrock metaphor really came together.

Now, imagine this in your head: what color is the Great Poet’s suit? His limo? It doesn’t explicitly say, but I had to check the text again to make sure they weren’t white. My own image of the poet at first was white suit, white ride, good guy. Surprise, surprise, I want to side with the poet. But I look at him some more and I get suspicious.

For one, I imagined the limo coming out of the clouds in the beam of light, but the text doesn’t support that. The images and language used have a way of providing us with a detail here and there, while we tend to fill in the other, less-descriptive language, with our own assumptions. “Coincidentally,” this always ends up making the Great Poet look better. Now that I’m paying attention to this, the Great Poet appears more like a Jerry Falwell character, and I would not buy a ticket to that reading (although I’m always tempted by free wine).

Here’s another detail: The narrator starts out as one of the crowd, “we knew the great poet was going to show,” but abruptly separates himself by saying “There were tears in their eyes” rather than “our” eyes. Why? Has the narrator realized something? Why aren’t there tears in his eyes as well? (Also, I’m just using AP style for my pronouns here, so hush). The narrator stays in a role of commentator rather than active participant from then on, even giving his own thoughts for the final two lines.

He's fine so long as you keep his headset on him.

OK, this is getting a bit long so let me try and get this straight: Great poet is kind of a fraud, the audience is oblivious (aside from the narrator), he tells them to not worry about the end of the world; i.e., death, because it is only the beginning of something else (possibly, but not necessarily, heaven).

The crowd seems to take this heart, or at least the “worm of desire,” which reminds me of the snake in Eden, has bored into their hearts. By the way, if the worm is the snake and the snake is the gateway to the Tree of Knowledge/Sin, then the poet is telling the crowd to stay ignorant and blissful, right?

I hear a knock at the door.

Upon his departure, the world is at once “blank.” This negative and positive to this. A clean slate always seems like a great way to improve your life mid-way through (ask Catwoman), but erasing all context/past means we lose what made us who we are in the first place. There’s no warmth, no wind. The world is stagnant and sterile.

Oh, to allow for a rebirth of originality! Except it would be a lie, considering my knowledge of the past does not dictate what actually happened, or does it?That leads to the final lines of this poem. The poet wants to leave us with answers, but the narrator forces us to end with questions. Is it better to believe and be saved/lost? What about aware and miserable? “What is poetry anyway?” Given the constant religious language associated with the poet and his reading, isn’t poetry just another form of religion? (Albeit, one a bit more flexible and evolving.) Why does the poet whiten the air and leave the world blank?

“Can anyone die without even a little?” Without, what, reading Dante? I’m sure plenty have. Actually, this line flips the expected language. People usually refer to art in general as a way of living, not dying. Can anyone live without even a little seems the usual sentiment. How can poetry help me die? Perhaps life is just building exhibits to display in your own presidential library, or Facebook. Hmmm...this may be something you should answer for yourself. Thanks for reading. Apologies for typos I missed.

UPDATE: I'ma quote something Jenny Liou wrote on Facebook cuz my response got too long for a comment. (sorry for truncating)

""Actually, this line flips the expected language. People usually refer to art in general as a way of living, not dying." Really? But what about Montaigne (following Cicero): "to philosophize is to learn how to die"? Or (joining the 20th century, if not the 21st) Robert Penn Warren's "Bearded Oaks"?

That's a really good point. Oh dag, that coincides nicely with the Great Poet's quote in the poem. "No need to rush...the end of the world is only the end of the world as you know it." By which I mean to say that the Great Poet remains a suspicious figure in the poem. His sermon to the peoples provides them with a false sense of security. "How like him" they think as he thoroughly meets their expectations. His philosophy leaves the people alone in a chill wind without helping them to deal with it.

Now I'm looking at all that white the Great Poet creates and getting a feeling of death, an entropic wind, even. The people are stuck under the clouds just like they were before, right? The Great Poet offers stability, security, comfort. He whites out the conflict that, as a vaccine gives us strength through attack, allows people to grow. Is he giving the people what they want (a philosophy of life) when he ought to be giving them what they need (philosophy of death). He'd make a terrible Batman.

April 1 - Casey at the Bat

Since the beginning of National Poetry Month coincides with opening day this year as well as April Fool’s, a poem by the little-known Ernest Lawrence Thayer seems appropriate. You probably haven’t heard of this writer, but you have most likely heard the poem.

It's been recreated in a famous Disney cartoon, recited by James Earl Jones, and even performed by Penn & Teller (Teller escapes from being hung upside-down in a straight jacket before Penn can finish the poem).

Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888, is one of the few poems to remain popular in American mainstream culture throughout the modern era. 

De Wolf Hopper, a popular comedian of the time, gave the first public performance of the work in August 1888, a few months after its publication. From there the poem gained immediate and lasting popularity, becoming eventually, as said by Baseball Almanac, “the single most famous baseball poem ever written.” 

One of the major themes of this poem, and one it shares with the sport of baseball, is the community of loss. The poem is told through an omniscient third-person narrator and presents only a few characters: the umpire, the pitcher, the few players preceding Casey in the line-up, Casey himself, and the crowd. 

Throughout the poem, we are privy to the inner thoughts of the mob in the stands while the narrator gives a dramatic play-by-play, uniting the reader with the fans. This culminates in Casey’s eventual strikeout, in which we all feel the excitement and expectation of the crowd, whiffed out of existence by Casey’s failure to connect, his fall from baseball demi-god to fallible human.

Couple notes: Mudville may or may not be based on an actual town. There are arguments that it may be Stockton, California, or Holliston, Massachusetts, though I feel it is a bit like the Anywheres-ville nature of the town of Springfield in The Simpsons. Also, Casey may not be based off any actual player, but if he were, it would most likely be Hall-of-Famer Mike “King” Kelly.

Despite the addition of some lines, I’m going to present this poem in its cartoon version. That’s how I first encountered it, and that’s likely how I’ll always remember it. If you don’t have ten minutes to watch a video, you can read the poem and find out more from the Baseball Almanac, and I highly recommend listening to Darth Vader recite it, too.