Love, The City of Brotherly

poetry mural

 

The Huffington Post has a list of 31 reasons Philadelphia is underrated. While the HuffPo definitely hits some of the highlights, I wanted to compile my own,  personal – and completely random – list.

  1. You can cross Delancey Street and say to your friends, “Hey, look. I’m ‘Crossing Delancey.’ ” [Caution: Joke only works with persons aged 38 to 68.]
  2. “La la la, just passing through, LOOK AT THAT FUCKIN AWESOME MURAL!!” happens on a regular basis.
  3. Those pretzels are completely incomprehensible to me. Which is good. Every city should be known for at least one surreally unappetizing food.
  4. Whatever facet of modern life you may be discussing, you can say, all casual-like, “Yeah, Ben Franklin invented that,” and be right 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, most likely no one will question you.
  5. What other city has an Ivy League college whose name sounds like a state school?
  6. And speaking of which, Kelly Writers House.
  7. “The Sixth Sense.” I have no idea whether that guy ever made any other movies, though.
  8. We have a world class art museum… with a statue of a Sylvester Stallone character on the front lawn.
  9. Oh here, have another world class art museum.
  10. And we liked this one so much we decided to steal it from the suburbs. Geez, Philly, now you’re just showing off.
  11. A statue of a giant clothespin  stands in the middle of the financial and governmental center of the city, which I find totally, delightfully subversive.
  12. Finally, and most importantly, Philly is one of the stand-ins for Arrow’s “Starling City.”

 

Ganesh
Statue of Ganesha in the PMA

Adrienne Rich, political poetry, and a confession

shadow

A debate on the qualities of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and an even bigger debate on the nature of political poetry.

Ange Mlinko’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems is here.

And Carol Muske-Duke’s spirited defense of Rich is here.

I don’t totally disagree with Mlinko’s assessment of Rich’s poetry: it is cool, careful, intellectual. But it also cares intensely about women’s experience of the world. I was lucky to read Rich in college, and while I didn’t fall in love with her writing, I took away something perhaps more valuable: a sense of respect for women’s intellects. Rich was serious: she took her thoughts seriously and she opened up the possibility that I could take my thoughts seriously as well. I can’t overstate how important this was for me as a twenty-something-year-old woman.

Did I think Mlinko was trashing Rich? Not as much as Carol Muske-Dukes did. But Muske-Dukes gestures towards perhaps a bigger issue: what she sees as a particular style of writing poetry – “indeterminacy” or “playfulness,” manifesting as apolitical poetry.

It’s a debate that certainly resonates for me. Even as my admiration for women poets was cemented by Adrienne Rich and the anthology No More Masks, I was aware that my own poetry was hardly ever explicitly feminist in either subject or theme. As a college student, I wrote about rejected love, and depression, and family drama. My own assessment of my work was that it was all too inward, too minor. Those women poets who wrote to all women were my heroes; I felt I didn’t measure up.

Twenty years later, I think it’s time for me to stop feeling like a failure.* I mean, I’ve been a feminist for as long as I’ve had a coherent thought in my head; everything I write comes out of that viewpoint. Feminism means I get to take my thoughts seriously; but it also means I get to take my sensitivity and my ambivalence seriously.

I am thinking of two poems that found a home in a small literary magazine** this past year. Both were about the experience of being a teenage girl. Yes, I did the emotional work of writing about difficult memories. But I also did the intellectual work of making those fragments into poems – bringing to bear whatever skill I have to make them accessible, well-shaped, and true. These two kinds of work are both necessary to the creative endeavor; each is pointless without the other. And sometimes, finding ways to talk about the political turns out to be the same as finding ways to talk about the intensely personal.

*About this, anyway.

**Shameless promotion of a very nice journal.

How shall I live? A short list of favorite poems.

this water dropping

In honor of National Poetry Month, I wanted to share some of my favorite poems – poems that have stuck with me for years, that I never get tired of re-reading. Some folks have works of religious or spiritual guidance; I have poems. How shall I live? is the question. All these poems answer: With as much kindness and wonder as you can.

I did a little research on the ethics of posting other people’s poems to one’s amateur poetry blog. Ahem. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry states

an online resource (such as a blog or web site) may make examples of selected published poetry electronically available to the public, provided that the site also includes substantial additional cultural resources, including but not limited to critique or commentary, that contextualize or otherwise add value to the selections.

What I have to say about these poems is “I love this” and “This makes me happy” and “Smiley-face.” So in fairness, I don’t think I should reproduce them here; follow the links instead.

Mary Oliver – “Wild Geese”

Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift”.

Ted Kooser manages to be accessible and still a subtle, inventive, and original voice. And the guy just comes off as awesome in interviews. “After Years”

I’ve already talked about Tennyson’s work – “The Splendor Falls”

And a new favorite, Mark Strand’s “The Night, the Porch,” courtesy of Knopf’s Poetry Month emails.

This Octavio Paz poem was posted all over the walls of my college when Paz won the Nobel in 1990. I took one of the copies* and memorized the poem just through constantly reading it. And I can’t find it online anywhere in its intended format (aside: Internet, we need to talk about the impulse to center-align poems that shouldn’t be center-aligned. NOT OKAY.) So I’m breaking the rules because I think reading Paz is good for the soul. Thank you, Internet Diety of Obscure References (aka, Google Books).

*I hope that was kind of what you intended, anonymous Paz-sharing member of the administration.

Madrigal

Más transparente
que esa gota de agua
entre los dedos de la enredadera
mi pensamiento tiende un puente
de ti misma a ti misma
Mírate
más real que el cuerpo que habitas
fija en el centro de mi frente

Naciste para vivir en una isla.

English translation:

Madrigal

More transparent

than this water dropping

through the vine’s twined fingers

my thought stretches a bridge

from yourself to yourself

                                                    Look at you

more real than the body you inhabit

fixed at the center of my mind

You were born to live on an island

I love that Paz recognizes this quality of  soul, of being “born to live on an island.” I’ve often felt that way. But really, the whole poem is just perfect – the spare image, the haiku-like turns, the surprising conclusion. This poem is a thing I have loved for over twenty years, which is pretty incredible.

Happy National Poetry Month, all. May you find many poems to love.

Falling in love, age sixteen

Albert_Bierstadt,_Among_the_Sierra_Nevada_Mountains
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains

It was in my English textbook, tenth grade. We didn’t even cover  it in class. I found it by skimming forward in the book, because I was bored. I don’t remember what I was supposed to be focusing on.

I only remember the feeling of transported joy. The poem seemed to me a perfect thing. It said something I had always wanted to say. It encompassed a feeling that I couldn’t really describe, but that I also looked for in the fantasy novels I was fond of. The feeling you get from the paintings of the Hudson River School. The idea that the world is full of the sublime – in its full meaning of “beautiful” but also frightening or awe-inspiring.

The Splendor Falls

The splendor falls on castle walls

    And snowy summits old in story;

The long light shakes across the lakes,

    And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,

    And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O, sweet and far from cliff and scar

    The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,

Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

    They faint on hill or field  or river;

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

    And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

 – Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Our echoes roll from soul to soul” – there in the middle of this fantastical lyric is this serious statement about us, the little humans who haven’t even appeared in the poem up till now. What a hopeful assertion – that the echoes of us “grow forever and forever.”

Anne Carson, master of strangeness

Anne Carson is a delight, as always. Here’s the New York Times interview; her new book is  Red Doc>. The bracket is part of the title.

Carson is the human equivalent of the Garfield Randomizer. She is to poetry what David Lynch is to film. And of course the band Sigur Ros had to somehow be involved.

Sample quote:

I made up ice bats, there is no such thing.

Well, there should be, Anne. There should be.

 

I want them.

 

^Here’s what showed up when I image-googled “Red Doc.” The angle bracket is necessary. Which in itself sounds like an Anne Carson statement… Anne Carson is everywhere. And I am happy about it.

Accessible poetry? Part 3. (And no closure whatsoever.)

accidental green lights

Here, have a weird photo while you read about difficult art…

As I was thinking about the idea of accessibility in poetry, I came across this. Harold Bloom breaking down the types of difficulty:

“Hart Crane is a difficult great poet, but very good, even great, poetry need not be overtly difficult. A. E. Housman is a clear instance, and there are many others. There are also difficult poets who at first look easy, but are not. Walt Whitman proclaims his accessibility, but his best poems are subtle, evasive, Hermetic, and call for a heightened awareness of the nuances of figuration.

Difficulty in great poetry can be of several, very different, kinds. Sustained allusiveness, as in the learned poetry of John Milton and Thomas Gray, demands a very high level of reader’s literacy. Cognitive originality, the particular mark of Shakespeare and of Emily Dickinson, requires enormous intellectual agility as the reader’s share. Personal mythmaking, as in William Blake and William Butler Yeats, at first can seem obscure, but the coherence of Blakean and Yeatsian myth yields to familiarity.

I think that poetry at its greatest – in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake – has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode for expanding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness. Owen Barfield was one of several critics to bring forth strangeness as a poetic criterion. For him, as for Walter Pater before him, the Romantic added strangeness to beauty: Wallace Stevens, a part of this tradition, has a Paterian figure cry out: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” Barfield says: “It must be a strangeness of meaning“… ”

from “The Art of Reading Poetry” in The Best Poems of the English Language (emphasis Bloom’s)

I hope you’ll forgive me for relying on these quotes of Bloom’s and Keillor’s, but they do synopsize well, as two ends of the spectrum. And it’s not a coincidence that Bloom is writing from inside the academy whereas Keillor is a humorist, radio host and popular author.

Here’s the thing: I agree with both of them. I wonder what they would have to say to each other if they were in a room together. I would like it if they would both show up and have a great big intellectual throw-down in my comments section.

Portrait of the critic as a young woman

Until then, happy writing.

Accessible poetry? Part 2.

Here's poetry-advocate Garrison Keillor:

America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicsim is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put into perpetual fiscal crisis, meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement, and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out — what mustn't be lost, in the dank time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty — the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history — and when this spirt is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naive, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience — think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouses: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the  past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter — poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure — all that matters about poetry to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness.

from Good Poems for Hard Times (emphasis mine)

Accessible poetry? Part 1.

Accessibility. It's either a dirty word or a delightful word, depending on your point of view (and perhaps your relation to academia). I've been kicking around the idea of accessibility, especially as it relates to why people avoid poetry.

I suspect that a vast swath of Americans come away from high school or college exposure to poetry both scarred and skittish. There's an idea that poetry is essentially coded, oblique, elusive, and snobbish. Self-referential to a fault. Requiring a Cliffs Notes. That it's only for insiders.

You know, that's sometimes a fair assessment. I can't blame anybody for avoiding those poems. I'm sometimes tempted to avoid them myself.

But meanwhile, there's a huge amount of poetry, past and present, that does consider its – if you will forgive the marketing term – its "target audience." Wonderful poetry, whose hoped-for audience is the average thoughtful reader.

Ted Kooser's "Selecting A Reader."

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

A short list of the best books for creative writers

Well, it's a very specific list -  books that help the creative writer understand their creative practice better.

I know there are people who just do it, and don't do things like stop writing for months at a time, or have to examine why they stop writing for months at a time. Ahem. But for those of us who do benefit from insight into how we work and why we create at all, these can be amazing resources.

The Artist's Way – Julia Cameron

Cameron has written a lot of books about creativity since, but this one is still the gold standard for creative recovery.

Fearless Creating – Eric Maisel

After you've been gently coaxed by Julia Cameron's warmth, Maisel is a nice brisk kick-in-the-pants. He's particularly insightful about how to successfully manage the anxiety of the creative process.

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg

The best for turning off your inner editor and getting first drafts down on paper.

If You Want to Write – Brenda Ueland

“I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”

Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft."

 

Any that I missed? Please share in the comments! 

The deep work of translation

Text of Li Shang Yin's poem

The full text of Li Shang Yin’s poem

I came across a poem recently in a Walter Jon Williams book. It was lovely and wistful and I thought I’d post it here, but when I went looking for the name of the translator by way of Google, what I found was five different translations.

Here’s one version, author unknown.

Sent North on a Rainy Night
Li Shangyin

You ask me what time I’ll return, but I cannot give a time,
The rain in the hills of Ba at night overflows the autumn pools.
When can we trim the candle together by the western window,
And talk together of the rain in the hills of Ba at night?

It’s evocative, but the arrangement of words in English is a little clumsy, especially the last line with its four prepositional phrases.

Here’s version two, translated by Francis Chin:

You ask when I’m coming, I do not know

It’s autumn and the night rain

is flooding the mountain pool.

When can we trim the wicks again by the window

When can we talk all night while the

mountain rains?

This one was obviously translated by a poet; it’s got a repeated structure (“When can we / When can we”) and I especially like “while the/mountain rains.” Chin helpfully presents two more options, one by Lien Wen Sze and Foo Check Woo:

You ask the date of my return

I know not the date

On this mountain

the night rain

brims the autumn lake

When shall we

By the west window

Together trim the candle

And recollect this moment

A rainy night in the mountain.

This one takes advantage of English words with near rhymes: date/lake. But the word “date,” in English, is kind of – well – quotidian, unpoetic. It pulls you out of the lyricism of the poem. On the other hand, “When shall we/By the west window/Together trim the candle” has a nice staccato punch.

And this one, by Witter Bynner: 

You ask me when I am coming, I do not know
I dream of your mountains and autumn pools brimming all night with the rain
Oh when shall we be trimming wicks again, together in your western window
When shall I be hearing your voice again, all night in the rain?

Where before, the narrator and the listener “spoke,” now the narrator misses something specific: “your voice.”

And finally, translator Catherine Platt wrote in detail about her process of translation here.

Sent North on a Night of Rain
By Li Shangyin

You ask when I’ll return

I don’t yet know

In the Sichuan hills it rains tonight,

Autumn pools overflow.

When will we trim the candle

By the west window again,

Recollecting this time,

The Sichuan hills, this night of rain?

Platt notes, ” ‘Ba Mountain’ refers to the ancient kingdoms of Ba and Shu, which were situated in Sichuan. Since ‘Ba’ doesn’t carry any resonance in English, I translated it as ‘Sichuan.’ ” What does she mean by ” ‘Ba’ doesn’t carry any resonance in English”? I think she made the decision based on its syllabic count. “In the Sichuan hills it rains tonight” does have a lovely rhythm in English, but the name “Ba” also has a sonorous authority quite different from “Sichuan.” What I love about this translation is those last two lines; now the two people are not speaking at all, but recollecting. Their silence is deep with longing.

Are you still with me after falling down that rabbit hole? And which one did you prefer? Did the one you liked best seem like the most honest translation?

Each of these translators has had to make numerous compromises and artistic decisions about these four lines of poetry. If nothing else, my little Google experiment highlights how complicatedthe work of literary translation really is. Once a piece of writing goes through this process, it’s really not a singular entity anymore; it’s two things, or more – it’s manifold, multiplicitous. It has acquired facets or pocket universes like the eleven dimensions in string theory. It can’t be reduced back to one thing. And for those of us who will never read Chinese characters, there’s a powerful element of ambiguity in our appreciation of the work.

This reminds me of a debate I had with my mother about one of my favorite books, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne). I first read, and love, the Tiina Nunnally translation, but my mother could never get into it.

Høeg’s prose, via Nunnally’s translation, is both crystalline and elliptical, and that’s of a piece with the subject matter: the structure of ice, human venality, and biracial identity (along with a lovely idea called “absolute space” – seriously, I adore this book). After not much caring for the book and giving up on it, my mother stumbled across an earlier translation titled, more literally, “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.” In this translation, the language is dry and straightforward, and the magic, for me anyway, is completely gone. When I started comparing the two, I felt queasy and betrayed; my attachment to the Nunnally translation was that strong. My mother, on the other hand, found this version much more readable: it was the difference, perhaps, between a murder mystery and a mystery/meditation on liminal spaces.

So here’s my dilemma: which version is more truly Peter Høeg’s book? Is my impression of Høeg’s themes really just an artifact of the translator’s work? Going by Høeg’s other books, I feel pretty comfortable asserting that he really was writing about liminal spaces using liminal techniques. But can I be sure? No. Not unless I learn to speak, and think in, Danish. And is the version my mother likes any less valuable? I’d argue that if it allowed her into the book, then that version was more valuable to her.

Translation is complicated. It is an act, simultaneously, of intent and of self-effacement on the part of the translator. It is an act which adds layers to a work of literature, which complicates it irrevocably. Ultimately, the very fact that translation leaves so much uncertainty is part of its pleasure. A difficult pleasure.

I never did locate the exact translation of Li Shang Yin’s poem that Williams quoted. Was does it do to my perception of the poem that I read that version first? Can I come to the poem anew? There’s something impossible about the whole experience. The more I explored, the more confused I became, the more nuanced an idea I had of the original. And yet, I can never really get right next to the original text. This experience of translation, I think, is part of the experience of poetry. Perhaps it’s the other side of how, in the writing of poetry, it’s impossible to ever say exactly what you mean. We embrace both as part of poetry’s difficult soul.

You ask when I will return

The time is not yet known.

Night rain overspills the autumn pools

on Ba Shan Mountain.

When shall we trim a candle at the western window

And speak of this night’s mountain rain?

 

Postscript.If you love speculative fiction / poetry crossovers, you must read Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven.

Post-postscript. The Walter Jon Williams book is, appropriately enough, Implied Spaces.