pō’ĭ-trē

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]

Denise Levertov

Listen

A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light–facets
of the forming crystal.

What I love about this poem is the way it takes an idea - the idea that even to conceive of true peace, peace as something more than the absence of war, is a task that requires the kind of skill and imagination that goes into the making of a great poem - and proceeds to develop it so exquisitely. Levertov takes us deep into the heart of the way a poem is written - the uncertainty, the difficulty of knowing what you want to say until you’ve said it, the seemingly endless possibilities, none of them quite satisfactory, and then that inexpressible moment of fluency when the poem just flows and you know you’ve got it right. This would be a feat in itself, but Levertov turns this description into a metaphor for the painstaking process of constructing peace, turning an abstract idea into a tangible, living exercise, that ends with that luminous and delicate image of ‘vibrations of light’ shining from a crystal as it forms. What’s extraordinary about this poem is the way you can hear it coming together, can feel it, through all the pauses and hesitations, starting to gain momentum. So that even though some of the metaphors Levertov uses early on are a little raw (”restructured the sentence our lives are making” Really?) that only adds to the sense of a force slowly gathering, preparing to pulse “stanza by stanza into the world”.

[falstaff]

Note: The phrase “imagination of disaster” comes from Henry James.

Jaroslav Seifert

Listen

I am a hunter of sounds and a collector
of tape recordings.
I listen to huntsmen sounding their mort
on very short waves.
Let me show you my collection.

The nightingale’s song. It is fairly well known,
but this nightingale
is a kinsman of those to whom Neruda was listening
when he turned the heads of Prague’s young beauties.
Added to the recording is the amplified sound
of a bursting bud
as the rose petals begin to unfold.

And here are a few gloomy recordings:
A person’s death-rattle.
The recording is absolutely authentic.
The creaking of the hearse and the rhythm
of the horses’ hooves on the paving stones.
Then the solemn fanfares from the National Theatre
at Josef Hora’s funeral.

All these I acquired by swapping.
But the tape
‘Frozen earth on my mother’s coffin’
is my own recording.

Then follow Chevalier and Mistinguette,
the charming Josephine Baker
with a cluster of ostrich feathers.
Among the younger ones the graceful Greco and Mathieu
with their new recordings.

And finally you shall hear the passionate whispering
of two unknown lovers.
Yes, the words are difficult to make out,
you only hear the sighs.
And then the sudden silence
ended by another -
the moment
when tired lips are glued
to tired lips.

It is a restful moment,
not a kiss.

Yes, you may be right:
the silence after love-making
resembles death.

[translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers]

The first time I read this poem I knew we needed to feature it on Poi-tre, if only for the thrill of having a recording of a poem about recordings. Besides, we didn’t have any Seifert on the site .

You know how we’re always talking about how this or that poem vividly conjures a scene or an image? Seifert here goes one better, switching from the visual to the aural, but managing to describe sounds that conjure up their own images, their own scenes. What you experience, as you read this poem, is thus a double effect, words evoking sounds and those sounds in turn, evoking scenes. In characteristic Seifert style the prosaic rubs shoulders with the lyrical here, so that the official fanfare of Hora’s funeral is followed by the (inaudible?) sound of earth on his mother’s coffin, which in turn gives way to Chevalier. And all of that is conveyed with conversational immediacy, Seifert’s narrator a pitch-perfect impersonation of the proud collector, so that reading this poem it really feels like you’re engaged in a conversation and listen more attentively to the sounds Seifert is describing as a consequence. I particularly love the sleight of hand of the last three lines, by which Seifert makes you the originator of this comparison of the two silences, holding himself back in reluctant and provisional agreement.

[falstaff]

P.S.: While we’re talking about Seifert, see also his Nobel Prize Lecture on the role of lyricism and pathos in poetry.

Yves Bonnefoy

Listen

The mirror and the river in flood, this morning,
Called to each other across the room, two lights
Appear and merge in the obscurity
Of furniture, within the unsealed room.

We were two realms of sleep, communicating
Through their courses of stone, where the untroubled
Water of a dream dispelled itself,
Forever recomposed, forever broken.

The pure hand slept beside the unquiet hand.
A body shifted slightly in its dream.
Far off, upon a table’s blacker water,
Glittering, the red dress lay asleep.

[translated from the French by Emily Grosholz]

The original:

Le miroir et le fleuve en crue, ce matin,
S’appelaient a travers la chambre, deux lumieres
Se trouvent et s’unissent dans l’obscur
Des meubles de la chambre descellee.

Et nous etions deux pays de sommeil
Communiquant par leurs marches de pierre
Ou se perdait l’eau non trouble d’un reve,
Toujours se reformant, toujours brise.

La main pure dormait pres de la main soucieuse.
Un corps un peu parfois dans son reve bougeait.
Et loin, sur l’eau plus noire d’une table,
La robe rouge eclairante dormait.

I know, I know, I’ve been away for ages. But I’m back, and to make it up to you here’s a gorgeous short piece by French poet Yves Bonnefoy. I love this poem because of the surreal, dreamlike quality of its imagery, and because of the incredible skill with which Bonnefoy sets off a sequence of reflection and counter-reflection, of images toujours se reformant, toujours brise, capturing between the flood and the mirror, between the pure hand and the unquiet hand, the restlessness of sleep disturbed by dreams, and yet rendering a poem of such luminous richness that the very words seem to shimmer with light.

[falstaff]

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]

Les Murray

Listen

Against the darker trees or an open car shed
is where we first see rain, on a cumulous day,
a subtle slant locating the light in air
in front of a Forties still of tubs and bike-frames.

Next sign, the dust that was white pepper bared
starts pitting and reknotting into peppercorns.
It stops being a raceway of rocket smoke behind cars,
it sidles off foliage, darkens to a lustre. The roof
of the bush barely leaks yet, but paper slows right down.

Hurrying parcels pearl but don’t now split
crossing the carparks. People clap things in odd salute
to the side of their heads, yell wit, dance on their doubles.
The sunny parallels, when opposite the light, have a flung look
like falling seed. They mass, and develop a shore sound:
fixtures get cancelled, the muckiest shovels rack up.

The highway whizzes, and lorries put spin on vapour;
soon puddles hit at speed will arch over you like a slammed sea.
I love it all, I agree with it. At nightfall, the cause
of the whole thing revolves, in white and tints, on TV
like the Crab nebula: it brandishes palm trees like mops,
its borders swell over the continent, they compress the other
nations of the weather. Fruit bumps lawn, and every country dam

brews under bubbles, milky temperas sombering to oils.
Grass rains upward; the crepe-myrtle tree heels, sopping crimson,
needing to be shaken like the kilt of a large man.
Hills run, air and paddocks are swollen. Eaves dribble like jaws
and coolness is a silent film, starring green and mirrors.

Tiny firetail finches, quiet in our climber rose, agree to it
like early humans. Cattle agree harder, hunched out in the clouds.
From here, the ocean may pump up and up and explode
around the lighthouses in gigantic cloak sleeves, the whole book
of foam slide and fritter, disclosing a pen shaft. Paratroops

of salt water may land in dock streets, skinless balloons
be flat out to queue down every drain, and the wind race
thousands of flags. Or we may be just chirpings, damped
under calm high cornfields of pour, with butter clearings

that spread and resume glare, hiding the warm rain
back inside our clothes, as mauve trees scab to cream
and grey trees strip bright salmon, with loden patches.

Have been meaning to include some Murray on the site for a while now, so finally got around to doing it. I really love the vividness of this poem, the way every image in it is clear and memorable. Murray makes you both relive your memories of rain, and reimagine them, and he does it, as always, with a richness of sound and a precision of vocabulary that anyone who loves language can’t help but delight in.

[falstaff]

Hart Crane

Listen  (to Hoon read)

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty–

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Talking about why he chose this poem, Hoon writes:

“The poem is also noteworthy for its intriguing mixture of modernism and elizabethan style, its use of the archaic pronoun Thou in its varied forms, the standard iambic pentameter that it’s written-in, but even beyond that, a rhythmic style, grandeur or solemnity, that sounds and feels Elizabethan, derived from King James. And so provides a venue to learning or review about the iambic line, in action as it were. Its probably useful to compare Crane’s Proem with a short speech from Shakespeare, say, Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like it. “

You can read more of Hoon’s thoughts on this poem, as well as a delightful poetic paraphrase of the poem here.

Hoon also provides a version of the text marked for prosody, accent and metrical scansion (plus an evocative background image) here, so you may want to listen to the poem while reading along with that.

Finally, for additional commentary on the poem see Minstrels here. You can also check out the other Hart Crane poems on poi-tre here.

[falstaff]

Constantine Cavafy

Listen

When suddenly at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts -
do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
your works that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was only a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared for this, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who are worthy of such a city;
approach the window with firm step,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

[translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven]

“Fortune and Antony part here; even here / do we shake hands”

- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, IV.12

We all know, or think we know, when the Fates turned against Antony. The coast off Actium, Cleopatra’s ships retreating into the fog, taking his hopes with them. It’s an incredibly dramatic moment: a betrayal at once political, military and personal; a battle whose outcome will set the course of Roman history for decades to come, prompting no less a poet than Virgil to place it at the very center of Aeneas’ shield.

It is characteristic of Cavafy that he turns away from this grand scene, and chooses to focus instead on a quieter, more meditative moment, replacing public abandonment with private self-knowledge, the cry of arms with the piping of an “invisible troupe”. This is the true defeat of Antony, the moment when he faces the truth about the future, walking up to it the way one walks up to a window and looks out. Everything that has gone before has led to this, everything that is yet to come will follow, it is here, in the quiet of the Alexandrian night, that the break is made.

Paradoxically, that break is also the acme of Antony’s glory, the point at which, by accepting the inevitable, by not stooping to vain hopes but acting “as if courageous” (such a beautiful phrase!), that Antony truly becomes heroic, takes on all the Sisyphean dignity  that a mortal can claim. It is by breaking free of History that we become individuals. That is why Antony, with no god to support him, is more real a champion to us than a thousand Octavians.

Not that Antony is the first hero to be forsaken by the Gods. On the contrary, in recognizing that the beloved city is lost to him, and that he must play his part out to the bitter end, he becomes the poetic successor of Hector and Turnus. Cavafy understands better than anyone the stuff that myth is made of, the creed of tragedy and its heroes, and deploys that knowledge here to devastating effect.

This is an incredible poem - a testament to the simplicity of perfection that is the mark of true genius. It’s not just his talent for melancholy, his ability to bring history to life, to make us inhabit the myth, his knack for honing in on the one critical moment, or even the exquisite craftsmanship with which, for example, Antony’s doubts and weaknesses are laid out for us by a kind of verbal reflection, that make Cavafy a great poet. It’s the way his poems, this one included, move off the page in two directions at once: the first horizontal, making us think of the before and after of the story the poem is taken from; the second vertical, leading us into the land of metaphor, where Antony’s Alexandria can be lover, ambition or life itself.

Joseph Brodsky writes:

“Cavafy did a very simple thing. There are two elements which usually constitute a metaphor: the object of description and the object to which the first is imagistically, or simply grammatically allied. The implication which the second part usually contains provides the writer with the possibility of virtually endless development. This is the way the poem works. What Cavafy did, almost from the beginning of his career as a poet, was to jump straight to the second part: for the rest of that career he developed and elaborated upon its implicit notions without bother to return to the first part, assumed as self-evident.”

This is the real magic of Cavafy, the reason his poems can seem so rich in wisdom. “Heard melodies”, Keats reminds us, “are sweet, but those unheard /are sweeter” . By leaving his metaphors unheard, Cavafy allows us to populate them with our own imagination, our own emotion, our own memories. By simplifying the historical to its most basic components, by stripping it down to the universal, to the poetic (for what is poetry, in the end, but our shared imagination), Cavafy makes it possible for us to see the myth in our own terms, apply it to our own lives. And that, after all, is what myth is for.

[falstaff]

Tukaram

Listen

To arrange words
In some order
Is not the same thing
As the inner poise
That’s poetry

The truth of poetry
Is the truth
Of being.
It’s an experience
Of truth.

No ornaments
Survive
A crucible.
Fire reveals
Only molten
Gold.

Says Tuka
We are here
To reveal.
We do not waste
Words.

[Translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre]

He really doesn’t waste words, does he? Here it is, the creed of the poet distilled down to its very basics; the poem allowed no more than a single image, one that melts effortlessly back into its principle; the confounding of purity with simplicity to arrive at the gleaming metal of the truth.

[falstaff]

P.S. More about Tukaram - a seventeenth century Marathi saint-poet, part of the Bhakti movement, here and here. Today’s poem comes from Says Tuka (Penguin India, 1991)

Anna Akhmatova

Listen

I called death down on the heads of those I cherished.
One after the other, their deaths occured.
I cannot bear to think how many perished.
These graves were all predicted by my word.
As ravens circle above the place
Where they smell fresh-blooded limbs,
So my love, with triumphant face,
Inflicted its wild hymns.

Being with you is sweet beyond mention,
You’re as close as the heart I call my own.
Give me both hands, pay careful attention,
I beseech you: go away, and leave me alone.
Don’t let me know where you make your homes.
Oh, Muse, don’t call to him from above,
May he live, unmentioned in my poems,
Ignorant of all my love.

[translated from the Russian by Lyn Coffin]

In his introduction to the collection that this poem is taken from (Anna Akhmatova: Poems, W.W. Norton & Co., 1983), Brodsky writes:

“Naturally enough, poems of this sort couldn’t be published, nor could they even be written down or retyped. They could only be memorized by the author and by some seven other people since she didn’t trust her own memory. From time to time, she’d meet a person privately and ask him or her to recite quietly this or that selection as a means of inventory. This precaution was far from being excessive: people would disappear forever for smaller things than a piece of paper with a few lines on it.”

It’s ironic, isn’t it? For centuries poets have been promising their beloveds immortality in verse. “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”, Shakespeare writes, and the sentiment recurs again and again throughout the ages that follow. And yet here we are, in the Russian police state, and suddenly the act of naming has turned fatal, the poem guaranteeing not eternal fame but instant execution.

Akhmatova wrote this poem in 1921, the year her first husband, poet Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed by the Soviets. In the years to come, she would suffer much at the hands of the state - the arrest and death of her friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam, the arrest and death of her third husband, Nikolai Punin and the arrest of her and Nikolay’s son, Lev, whose incarceration would become the subject of her incredible ‘Requiem’.

Knowing the trials that lie ahead, this poem seems prophetic, but even without that context it is a heartbreaking poem. The exquisite violence of that image of love as a scavenger, conveying so perfectly the horror of something as tender as a love poem turned into an instrument of betrayal; the grief and guilt of the first stanza perfectly balancing the self-denial of the second. If there was ever any doubt about Akhmatova being one of the finest lyric poets of all time, today’s poem should put it to rest.

I could go on, but I’ll leave you with another quote from Brodsky, who says it so much better than I ever could:

“her verses are to survive whether published or not: because of the prosody, because they are charged with time in both [mundane and metaphysical] senses. They will survive because language is older than state and because prosody always survives history. In fact, it hardly needs history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that.”

[falstaff]