pō’ĭ-trē

Robert Fagles

Listen to Fagles’ Homer lecture that is filled with excerpts from the Iliad (in mp3, in .rm for folks on dialup access)

The lecture is approximately an hour long. Fagles is an excellent storyteller who sprinkles the lecture with readings from his translation, the original Greek text and some very funny comments. Do give it a listen.

His translation at Amazon.com.

Rudyard Kipling

Listen (to Slaybaugh sing)

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

‘Er petticoat was yaller an’ ‘er little cap was green,
An’ ‘er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen,
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,
An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:
Bloomin’ idol made o’mud –
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd –
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

When the mist was on the rice-fields an’ the sun was droppin’ slow,
She’d git ‘er little banjo an’ she’d sing “Kulla-lo-lo!”
With ‘er arm upon my shoulder an’ ‘er cheek agin’ my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.
Elephints a-pilin’ teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

But that’s all shove be’ind me — long ago an’ fur away,
An’ there ain’t no ‘busses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay;
An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ‘eed naught else.”
No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay . . .

I am sick o’ wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and –
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be –
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

Ludwig writes,

Confessing to liking Kipling (i.e. the works) is not the most prudent thing to do. Depending on what company you are in, you may end up seeing people pull themselves together and become a bit more stiff and formal; maybe some of them will even begin to edge away from you as though they’ve found a snake in the bathtub. But what’s to be done, if you discovered Rudyard (”Kim” and “The Jungle Books” especially, but the rhymes also) before you acquired a political conscience, is it possible to not fall in love with the tales and the language? Even after the tinted glasses of political correctness have been donned, his oeuvre is compelling in the manner of the Ancient Mariner. Even if the claw like hand has dropped, the glittering eye will hold you.

So we freely confess, we like Kipling, his politics and weltanschauung be damned (if they actually do deserve to be, that is). The man had a way with language and imagination, animals have never been anthropomorphized the way they were in “The Jungle Books” (”Lion King”s may come and go…) and never will be. Above all, he had a touch for sheer _atmosphere_ that is perhaps unsurpassed. “Mandalay” is a serviceable example.

You can read it in at least a couple of ways. Directly, we dispense with the one we close our eyes and ears to and in general go “lalalalalalalalalala” at. This is obviously the political/cultural studies reading, where the poem is about imperialist exoticization of the Orient; male chauvinism; and yada yada yada.

There, that’s done. What remains is a very lyrical, very singable, enjoyable and evocative poem. Part of this admittedly has to do with the way Matt Slaybaugh sings it, the raspy drawl itself adds to the look and feel. Then there’s the language, the construction of phrase (”the temple-bells they say”, “dawn comes up like thunder”, “Ship me somewheres east of Suez” etc.), the attention to metre etc. about which someone more articulate and knowledgable should be able to hold forth on. There’s also the somewhat touching love story, of this man separated from a sweetheart and a land that he seems to be genuinely very fond of. There’s the echoes from Innisfree, about wanting to go back to a simpler happier life, and all that jazz.

All in all, we likes, and we submits for due consideration at pō’ĭ-trē. Flames may be kindly lit in the comments section, and/or directed at choultry[AT]gmail.com. Meanwhile, we’ve got to go off and so some serious daydreaming, see if we care…

some links:

[1] Commentary at The Skeptic Tank

[2] Frank Sinatra’s rendition of On the Road to Mandalay from Come Fly with Me. When the album was first released in the British Empire, this song was replaced by “Chicago”, due to objections from the Kipling family.

[3] The poem on wiki (with a couple of helpful hyper links)

[4] The Complete Collection of Kipling’s poems here.

[5] The Nobel bio and presentation speech from 1907.

Finally, Kipling on pō’ĭ-trē. Anyone wants to read my old favourite for us now? :)

[blackmamba]

Jack Gilbert

Listen (to Gilbert read)

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Who hasn’t hoped for lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can? Most of us, at one time or another, have breathed life into words, only to see them turn into monstrous Frankensteins that get it all wrong. Isn’t lovely then to be convinced that what we feel must not be something unique and inexpressible but amber or cinnamon?

The reading is from the most recent poets.org Poetcast.

[blackmamba]

David Kirby

Listen (to Kirby read)

Running down the Via degil Annibaldi
I hear Aretha say
my momma said leave you alone
and as I hurry up the steps
of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli
I hear her say my daddy said come on home
and as I turn to go down the right aisle
she says my doctor said take it easy
and then I stop right in front
of Michelangelo’s Moses:
oh but your loving is too much strong
for these chain chain chains
which were used to bind St. Peter in Palestine
and are themselves preserved under glass
in the church. Moses is angry;
he’s just seen the Israelites
dancing around the Golden Calf
and now he twists his beard with his right hand
and shifts his weight to the ball of his left foot
so he can jump up and smash the stone tablets
with the Ten Commandments on them.

I’d like to be that angry just once –
or, like Berini’s St. Teresa,
to pass out from pleasure! I think of Bo Diddley
as I scurry down the Via XX Settembre
and up the steps of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria
with its great Baroque sculpture
in which the angel smiles at the saint
as sweetly as a child would, yet his copper arrow
is aimed between her legs;
God might as well have told Teresa
he walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
got a cobra snake for a necktie
and a house by the roadside made out of rattlesnake hide
because, really, the only question is,
Who do you love?

- From Big-Leg Music, 1995

Reading Kirby is like doing multiple things at the same time - reading a witty poem, refreshing your memory of or learning about spectacular art or literature, listening to your iPod and free associating while you are at it. Doing all this in one poem seems hard, but making it all seem effortless is what makes Kirby amazing.

This poem isn’t really a favorite. But it is the one reading he features on his website, so have fun. Rest assured, there will be a lot more of his poetry featuring here soon.

Notes:

[1] David Kirby’s website.

[2] Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools ( YouTube)

[3] Bo Diddley’s Who do you love?(YouTube)

[blackmamba]

Susan Birkeland

Listen (to Clara read)

Love is no matter what
Mercy is no matter how
Justice is no matter who
Hope is no matter when

Love is no matter how
Mercy is no matter why
Justice is no matter where
Hope is living here and there at the same time

Absolution is cool water in a heat wave
Restitution is the gravitational intention of a compassionate moon
Conversation is sex before bodies
Evolution is the tail of a jaguar in the rain
Love is no matter what

Crime is a fist pointed outward
Sadness is my fist in my own face
Longing is how strangers become friends

Silence is a warm room on a cold night
Reverence is the first touch of my fingers at your waist
Forgiveness is the inevitable scorecard of easy neighbors

Problems are a leg up onto a horse that rides around the sun
Solutions are new wheels on a rusty bike
Wine is the juice of crushed romance

Romance is the time it takes to remember
Remembering is the return of fresh eyes
Fresh eyes are the flashlights of innocence
Innocence is the circle by which

Love is no matter what
No matter when
No matter why
No matter how

Your hand in my basket
practicing scales on a pink piano
folding around
inevitable
inconceivable
you.

Clara writes,

“Susan Birkeland passed away last year - a great loss to the San Francisco poet community.

Her readings were always dramatic, pulling the audience into her world. The Flashlights of Innocence is a good example. One cannot read this poem ‘poorly’, because the language will not allow it to happen.”

[blackmamba]

Xu Zhimo

Listen (to Clara read the original - Cantonese)

Listen (to Clara read her translation - English)

 Chance

Tr. by Clara Hsu

I am a cloud in the sky,
by chance it casts a shadow in your heart.
Don’t be surprised,
or happy,
in an instant it all vanishes.

We meet at sea, in the night,
traveling in different directions.
You may recall,
but perhaps it is better to forget
the glow when we cross paths.

The long promised Xu Zhimo is finally here!

Clara, our new guest contributor, is a mother, a musician, a philanthropist, an activist, a purveyor of Clarion Music Center (a world music shop of exotic musical instruments), a traveler, host of the Poetry Hotel and ultimately, a poet.

When Mjbesq put us in touch, she was in Marrakech, on her way to a couple of days in a desert. After a couple of months, of diligently tagging by email, we finally met and she recorded a couple of poems for me. Here is the first - Clara reads Chance by Xu Zhimo and her translation of the same.

Clara writes,

Xu Zhimo (1897 - 1931) is one of China’s most distinguished 20th Century poets. Xu brings raw emotions into his poetry to express human love and yearns for its eternity. His poems are revolutionary coming out of a culture that encourages conformity and suppresses individual’s innermost feelings. This short poem, however, is more in tune with classical Chinese poetry in its simplicity and philosophical outlook.

[blackmamba]

Ryan Alexander

Listen (to Dore read)

She came to me skittish, wild.
The way you’re meant to be,
Surrounded by cruelty.
I did not blame her.
I would do the same.

A pregnant cat, a happy distraction
Some sort of normal thing
Calico and innocent.

The kittens in her belly said feed me.

And I did.

She crept with careful eye,
body held low to the dirt,
snagged a bite,
and carried it just far enough away.

She liked the MREs
the beef stew, the chicken breast, the barbeque pork,
But she did not like canned sardines.
I do not blame her.
I would do the same.

She came around again and again
finally deciding that I was no threat
That this big man wasn’t so bad.

I was afraid to touch her as the docs warned us
Iraqi animals were carriers of flesh-eating disease.
I donned a plastic glove and was the first to pet
This wild creature who may be

The one true heart and mind that America
Had won over.

After a while I forgot the glove and enjoyed
The tactile softness of short fur,
Flesh-eating bacteria be dammed.

Her belly swole for weeks
And she disappeared for some days
Until her kittens were safely birthed
In the shallow of a rusted desk
In the ruins that lined the road behind us.

She came around again slim
With afterbirth still matted to her hind legs
She was back again, but not quite as often
She came to eat and for attention
But there was nursing to be done.

One day she crept up with a kitten in her mouth
She dropped it at my foot and stared up at me
She expected something, but there was nothing I could do
The young black and white kitten was dead
It’s eyes not yet opened.

It looked like some shriveled old wise thing
Completely still, mouth puckered
Small body curled and limp.

She let me take the baby without a fight
She knew, but seemed unaffected.

She fetched me a gift,
A lesson,
among the worried nights
Shot nerves from poorly aimed mortar rounds:

Everything dies
the evil, the innocent
Her baby and
me

I thought I should say a prayer and bury
This poor little thing
But I did for it what will be done for me

I laid it in the burn can amongst the ash
And said I’m sorry.

Ryan Alexander
3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division,
Stryker Brigade Combat Team
Mosul, Iraq

I couldn’t have found a better poem to follow the Levertov and the Komunyakaa. The Cat complements both poems beautifully. It takes you inside the mind of a solider and it gives a voice to the other side in Levertov’s poem (then I must learn to distrust/ my own preference for trusting people).

So many elements in this poem can be interesting metaphors - the pregnant cat, the gloves, the MRE food supplies. Though the slow and hesitant, but trusting relationship between Ryan and the cat, in the midst of all the fear and destruction is deeply moving in itself.

Thanks for the poem, Dore!

Welcome our new guest contributor Dore! He hosts Tangents (a radio program that explores the bridges connecting various styles of music, such as world and roots music, and creative jazz hybrids). If you live in the San Francisco bay area, you must check out his Tangents Parties.

[blackmamba]

John Berryman

Listen (to Hoon read)

He lifted up, among the actuaries,
a grandee crow. Ah ha & he crowed good.
That funny money-man.
Mutter we all must as well as we can.
He mutter spiffy. He make wonder Henry’s
wits, though, with a odd

…something…something…not there in his
flourishing art.
O veteran of death, you will not mind
a counter-mutter.
What was it missing, then, at the man’s heart
so that he does not wound? It is our kind
to wound, as well as utter

a fact of happy world. That metaphysics
he hefted up until we could not breathe
the physics. On our side,
monotonous (or ever–fresh)—it sticks
in Henry’s throat to judge—brilliant, he seethe;
better than us; less wide.

- from: “The Dream Songs”, #219
Hoon adds,
An equivocating eulogy, saying almost as much about the author as the one eulogised, but perhaps this is in keeping with Stevens’ own solipcism — as well as his rugged commitment to truth, and against self-delusion.

The actuaries alludes to Stevens’ employment in the insurance business. An attorney, he rose to the position of vice-president at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The grandee crow, of course, refers to his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (although given Berryman’s penchant for drinking it may also be an allusion to Old Crow bourbon whiskie as well).

What was it missing, then, at the man’s heart so that he does not wound?

While bringing Barryman’s own troubles into the circle of the poem, it also points out a problem that many readers have with Stevens’ style. Its abstractness, lack of references to other people inhabiting the universe, interpersonal relationships, love. This is a valid point. Perhaps any particular style cannot possibly suffice to fulfill all of one’s literary interests and desires. History gives us what it has.

A point of fact though, Stevens could wound. He got into a fight with Hemingway once in Key West. It was mainly Stevens, though, who got wounded; needing to take extra vacation time to allow his face to heal. Although Stevens was a large man, he was in his fifties at the time and Hemingway was twenty years his younger. Drinking was undoubtably involved.

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

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.

Hoon writes,

I can remember reading this in the lit books and thinking, “Eh?”. I think when you’re young you expect art, especially high art, to reveal something to you about life, instead of thinking of it as simply its own kind of artificial experience that occupies and hopefully improves the passage of time. So while “13 Ways…” deals with a serious subject, death let us say, the poem may not have a great deal to say to us other than: “Hey, this is a poem. Enjoy!”

Stevens seems to have posed himself the problem of whether a series of thoughts, impressions, he used the term sensations, sharing a common theme, but without clear logical continuity, could be somehow arranged to form an aesthetic whole, and enjoyed both as a whole but also as a disconnected, kaleidoscopic set. A verbal collage. What is needed to achieve then the barest sense of unity we might ask? While not saying much, and perhaps not to be agreed to by all, we will still assert that temporal art needs an opening, a progression of impressions or ideas, and a close. For a poem this can be achieved either semantically or phonetically, usually both. “13 Ways…” opens with a  winter scene and closes with, let us say, the same scene. A certain degree of cohesion is thus achieved. In between the episodes expand and contract, and move through various moods, rhythms, and associations. The sections are brief, haiku-like, but perhaps self-consciously so, and not to be taken too seriously as such. (”A man and a woman are one. …”)

The almost inevitable theme, given the large number of sections, is that death is everywhere, surrounding all we do (stanzas: 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13), in sex and love (stanzas: 4 & 7); and cannot be avoided (stanza 11); but possesses humor (stanzas: 2, 4, 5 - a blackbird whistling!), and like many of Stevens’ own poems, a quiet, austere beauty (stanzas: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 13). To fail to see the humor in “I was of three minds./like a tree /in which there are three blackbirds”, and to search for some greater meaning there, well you might as well try to explain what semolina pilchards are. Many of the lines and sections end on unaccented syllables and this gives the work as a whole a generally unsettled feeling, which does resolve though quite effectively in the final verse. While a scansion of the poem is beyond the range of this discussion, such a metrical analysis would show such a wide variety of rhythmic patterns that the poem may be viewed as a study of metrical techniques. As such it deserves close reading, listening, study.

The work is anthologized a lot, so seems to achieve a satisfaction for a great number of readers, and has surely been imitated frequently, but I think that the failure of many of its imitators to achieve its level of popularity points towards the difficulty in finding an audience for this kind of loose associative structure (although I’m sure there are a lot who would disagree with that assertion).

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Hoon adds,

Stevens’ verse, as I found it in the various lit books I was brought up on, was always a puzzle to me. Nothing in it seemed to make sense. It all seemed lacking  in purpose and, for lack of a better word, beauty. Much later in life, when I began to record poetry, my main motivation was a belief that hearing a poem recited, especially a difficult poem, makes it more comprehensible; since a certain amount on the meaning is encoded in the interpretation, in the prepared inflections of the reader. Thus it was natural that I should turn to a poet whose work I never felt I understood as a source for material to test this proposition. It was. then, a considerable and pleasant surprise to me that I should become so taken in with Stevens’ work. But what surprised me even more than my being able to understand the stuff was the sense of lyrical delight that comes with reciting Stevens. The works are clearly conceived with much more than just a regard for semantics, but with a deep appreciation for the sound and rhythm of words. It was “A Postcard…”, from IDEAS OF ORDER(1936), it’s rhythm and phrasing, which first opened my ears to how carefully Stevens composes in this regard.

And so on to the semantics.

I hate to discuss the meaning of this poem since it seems so much better that the reader/listener should engage the poem repeatedly and have its meaning revealed, reconstituted, in such a slower, more personal and self-reliant way; and I encourage the reader to break off reading here to pursue such a course. But Stevens can be difficult, and not just for the novice reader.

Edward Hirsch in his book Poet’s Choice(2006) gives a miserable interpretation of the poem under the chapter heading “Poetry Responds to Suffering”. Responding to the “Volcano” mentioned in the title, and phrase “gutted world” near the end, he reads the poem as “a prophetic elegy for a civilization that will be destroyed”. The sense is of a civilization in decline, but hardly destroyed.

The notion of a future generations handling, desecrating, our bones is not new. Hamlet’s graveyard scene comes easily to mind. The ignorance with which these future children do so leads directly to, is subsumed by, the general naivete that they bring to past culture, the words of the past, “the look of things”, their whole cultural inheritance. Indeed the central metaphor of the poem is the dilapidated mansion, which stands, quite simply, for this collective culture, but especially poetry. (Stevens’ symbols can be frequently, and somewhat surprisingly, stiff and conventional).

Their miscomprehension of the past takes place in a physical world that is itself devoid of a sense of aesthetics, that “cries out a literate despair”, eclipsing even the children’s naivete. The children though are “still weaving budded aureoles”, still growing halos of holiness and innocence. They walk past, presumably, the mansion on their way to school, and encounter it in their studies, where they may well “speak our speech and never know”: will only dumbly come to terms with their inheritance, but will dimly sense in it a haunted, lingering, “storming”, presence, the presence of the poet, the creative spirit of the past. This is the Volcano. The children’s neglect is, of course, something that recurs with every generation. Similar to how Wallace himself, let us say, disdained the Romantics. This would be all quite depressing, especially to the restless dead; or the under-read, unappreciated poet of the present; were it not partially compensated-for by the ever rejuvenating presence of the sun which copiously “smears” the mansion, and the whole landscape, with the same spirit that originally informed the poet. (This triumphal compensation is the surprise that the poet has been setting-up all along).

So did Stevens foresee the destruction of civilization?
Certainly he saw the radio, and the telephone, and the movies that they
made, and these things, in their own ways, destroy or erode literary culture-
I think he foresaw that.
—

There will be more Stevens this week. And, Xu Zhimo.

[blackmamba]