Category: Notes on Reading

Moon Solo

With Jules Laforgue.

You gave voice lessons to your followers, reminding them back to the poetic possibilities of their own idioms. You knew the absurdity of lovesickness, the hopelessness of waiting, and the dogged persistence of stubborn hope. You lamented time’s slow passage even when you found it making still too quick an interval between before and after.

How do you catch a heartbeat? Build a poem to break everything, until what is left is the syncopated feeling of forest voices, to polish the mirror where the Unconscious seeks itself. What escapes the lover’s reach?

You knew the maddening moon, your death, beneath the dripping branches, the work of the web undone; you heard the tragic anthem of the unattended sun . . . like a gland ripped from the throat, and still. You could not keep from singing.

***

It’s the birthday of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), French symbolist poet whose work strongly influenced T.S. Eliot’s development, and who championed the expansion of free verse. The opening line of this post references an enthusiastic comment of Eliot’s, soon after he encountered Laforgue’s early work in an anthology of symbolists. Much of Laforgue’s later work was not published in his lifetime (he died at the age of twenty-seven, of tuberculosis). This morning, I read Moon Solo: The Last Poems of Laforgue, published by William Jay Smith in a 1956 issue of The Sewanee Review. Some of the images (and italicized phrases) above are from these poems.

Lovers in Time

A triptych.

In the land where time is a circle, I meet you again and again, always with a rush of recognition–– the lilting wave that beckons hello, stranger. It seems I have known you before, and each time I lose you, it is with the shocking pain of the first cut.

In the land where time is water, a tiny rivulet of this becoming will sometimes turn backstream, and any creatures, debris, soil, falling branches, or conversations will find themselves suddenly in the past.  In this world, we know even after our most recent reunion, of the loss that comes next, because we learned this when we lived in the land where time was a circle.

In another world, two times exist concurrently. One is mechanical, its form a massive pendulum of iron, back and forth. The other is of the body, bodies, the body of the living planet and its teeming forms. It squirms, wiggles . . .  makes its mind up as it goes along. Most reject one or the other form of time. But the worlds have a way of colliding. The collision tends to create a desperate state, because everybody knows that you can make a world in one or another time but not both. This is because each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

***

This morning, while waiting for the coffee to brew, I was delighted to discover Einstein’s Dreams, a slim novel by Alan Lightman, hiding in plain sight on a bookshelf. Although I do not remember buying this book, it is easy for me to imagine why I would have wanted to, upon learning that the premise is based on a series of dreams that the young scientist had before arriving at his theories of relativity.  I wrote today’s post while reading the opening twenty pages of the book, using three of the worlds Lightman describes. Italicized phrases are Lightman’s.

Ask the Oracle

The weight of remembrance.

In the days of constant violence and plagues, when the crops are dead with drought and fire and even the shade trees are gone, the citizens gather. The cry is help, and the answer calls to mind a riddle and a mirror, and who is the most mysterious of all?

––And the mirror answered back with a reflection, the face of the king and all behind him. But what does it take to read a body’s history? 

Ask the oracle, she’ll tell you again: not until there is justice, will you know peace in your homes and shade for your children. The old questions return: whose death continues to echo within the city walls; whose blood stains the soil of these charred acres? What severances between life and the living continue to bleed.

Bring in the blind prophet to remind the assembly of the weight of this knowledge and what it means to have it, where no gain can come except through the death of a timeworn dream. 

Nevertheless, they resisted.

***

I am inspired by the work of Brian Doerries and Theatre of War in placing Greek tragedies at the center of community discussions around central challenges of the moment. I jotted these notes while reviewing his translation of the Oedipus Trilogy and related notes.

Music to Wake the Dead

Orpheus to Eurydice, overheard.

You were tired of tired imitation, wanted something real. Only the unreasonable would do. Okay, I said, and tuned the strings at the joint in the forked paths, from which one would lead home and the other to a forever road. Let me play you a burning thornbush. Your mother floats halfway between the bed and the ceiling in your sleep. We love a riddle, and the ones we can’t solve tend to linger, like the notes of the last dance, like the earth ringing now in my ears.

***

Inspired by a comment that director Andrey Tarkovsky makes in Sculpting in Time. Paraphrasing Paul Valéry, he notes how “the real is expressed most immanently through the absurd.” The last line is adapted from images in Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem “Eurydice.”

Rivers to the Sea

With Sara Teasdale.

Afterwards, amid the autumn dusk, 

I shall not care. 

Let it be forgotten by February twilight, 

these faults.

My heart is heavy with old love.

Love, this is not a word, but an epitaph.

What do I care, in the morning?

Says a voice around me now,

here in this spirit’s house.

***

Today is the birthday of American lyric poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). The lines above are composed with some of her poem titles. The title of this post references a collection she published in 1915.

Elegy in Blue

For Robert Hayden.

Your preference for the long view was balanced by an exquisite attention to the ragged, beating heart of the impossible moment. You called history a long, bloody becoming toward what might finally be, this beautiful, terrible, needful thing, still stirring.

You were moved by the idea that against failure after failure, something wars, something goes forward, something lights a match, and remembered the winged man of the laughing, longing night.

You kept your eye on the sharp sails that flayed the albatross and on a promise that it was yet possible to walk back home over Galilee’s waters to be washed of the effluvium of living death.

Your own aches bent elsewhere, you trained your eye toward life upon these shores, to study the deep immortal human wish amid a timeless yearning for the good old days that had never been good.

You studied the choreography of spirit hanging on, dancing its own shelter with an intensity bright enough to shine through the sordid and cruel deniers of hearts, of lives, of life itself.

You argued that a poem is an action unto itself, a catalyst of compassion, a weight to bend the moral arc ever slightly toward a softer hand, toward community, toward home.

You knew despair could seed a song to raise the roof and the hard loving of laughter in bed with misery and as a constant reminder you drew heart-shapes in the constant dust, as if to mark this side of heaven.

Even as you mourned the moaning empress of the blues, four bullets in her heart, you lifted us up with ostrich feathers to feel her still shining forward, to look with you, through the transience of loss, to the way they would rise early next Sunday, even against the next fistful of snow.

What did any of us know, anyway, of love’s austere and lonely offices?

***

On this day in 1913, American poet Robert Hayden (d. 1980) was born. The title of this post is adapted from an article Frank Rashid published in the Winter 2001 issue of Callaloo, “Robert Hayden’s Detroit Blues Elegies.” This post is composed using ideas and phrases from Hayden’s work and interviews, as well as a line (italicized above) from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, a work that moved and influenced Hayden, particularly his historical vision. Where possible, I have linked lines above to the works from which they are adapted.

Stranger Still

Through a glass darkly.

In love with an unknown intimate briefly glimpsed, the stranger moved so steadily towards the source of longing that he became transparent with time. Suspended in its liquid, the desert salts of his waking form dissolved in her waters until he knew himself at once known in the shadow of the apocalyptic cherub.

I am surveyed, he admitted, but it was good to be untethered from the demand to be any sort of self in any of the atomic cities, to join the games with no winners, to keep company instead with a chorus of loss, its abundant ache seeded in the silence of this elsewhere when the voices that will be heard choose themselves. 

***

Inspired by various morning readings, including Thomas Merton by way of Richard Rohr. Italicized phrases above come from Thomas Merton’s “Day of the Stranger,” first published in The Hudson Review, summer 1967.

Out of Exile

For Vladimir Korolenko.

You knew the blind musician, leaning in to hear birdsong and river stones, the murmur of distant water, and you brought him the shepherd’s pipe. You knew that to play it well meant knowing love and sorrow. You knew the dying peasant’s dream of heaven, bad company and the children of the underground, and how to abide for the day of atonement. Above all, you knew your unknowing, ceaselessly seeking some light within darkness, to heat against the killing cold. Leaning always toward the glow of truth, all of this danced with you, joyful and alive in your open hands.

***

Inspiration: Today is the birthday of Vladimir Korolenko (1818-1868), a Ukranian-born Russian writer, humanitarian, and human rights activist devoted to serving the poor and maligned. He spent a period exiled in Siberia for his criticism of tsarism and is best known for his short novel The Blind Musician (later, he was also silenced by Stalin for his critique of Bolshevik hypocrisies). I consulted available translations as well as Natalia M. Kolb-Seletski’s article, “Elements of Light in the Fiction of Korolenko” (The Slavic and East European Journal, Summer 1972). Some of the phrases above come from the titles of Korolenko’s short stories.

A Soft Touch for Depths

For the seeker in the dark.

You weren’t always sure you were writing poetry, only that your words could mean something to the truck driver, the soldier, and the one closing the bar. You had harsh words for critics too quick in judgement to listen to what they were not expecting to hear. With both feet in soil, you celebrated the ancient of ancients, and were not too proud to honor what eluded your knowing.

Prone to embrace strangers far and wide with a gaze bent on honoring how the best of the wonders each carried was in tune with an old and ancient song, you could not stop yourself from humming as it moved through your working bones––that which stains dark and touches soft, with a flair of great loneliness, those also softly treading, searching in the dark.

***

Over coffee, I noticed that on this day in 1967, the American poet Carl Sandburg died (born 1878), and I decided to spend some time reading a journal article Sandburg published in February 1916 edition of Poetry Magazine, praising the (often misunderstood and maligned, at the time) work of Ezra Pound. I find that a person tends to reveal a great deal by the bend and texture of their admiration. I borrow some of Sandburg’s phrases (italicized) above, praising Pound, and blend these with ideas commonly attributed to Sandburg’s work.

Fear and the Living

Wicked naming conventions.

Flourishing life tends always to be irregular and unruly, thwarting efforts to tame its abundance in the name of the gods of progress and reform. Contrast the fecund jungle with the neat lawn. One of these thrives.

They called our disorder ungodly, our love a danger. We called it nothing. It was more action than word. Show me a fish with a word for water.

We were often depicted in the company of cats, those mysterious shapeshifters, notoriously hard to catch and easy to love (for the loving), famously resistant to authority.

It was an art, how we lived, but the enforcers of absolute power renamed it. Not art, but craft. Not sister, but witch. To rhyme with a popular slur. 

One way to remake what you fear is to recast it in caricature. So, they made us: black, dark, weird, dangerous. Sure, love and life were all of these and more, but they would have none of it. The dangerous alchemy of a tiny morsel of knowledge in a boundless pool of self-righteous confidence.

We loved and protected. They guarded, refused. We grew; they took. We watched, waited, listened, shared. They announced, stockpiled, amassed.

Our most transgressive act, as some saw it, was the giving of a familiar spirit to the daughter or granddaughter, along with strategies for survival.

And, that we lived. In loving community. In later caricatures, one of us will be pictured as ancient, outcast, poor, and alone. She was our great-grandmother. She raised and taught us. When they burned our village, she was in the field. She survived.

Our detractors persist. Always in the name of progress, reform, order. We know them by their obsessions with mechanized gadgets and purity; acquisition and the order of lawns. And we know them by their mistrust of music, dance, the wild and untamed arts––and cats. And by the names they call those who challenge their systems of order, and their fear of women (and numerous others) who speak against authority.

***

This morning, while looking into the work of the American scholar and artist Deborah Willis, I came across an article by another scholar of the same name who seemed (to me) to be exploring parallel lines of interest to the Willis I was looking for, albeit in different focus areas. The article is “The Witch-Family in Elizabethan and Jacobean Print Culture” (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Winter 2013). As (the other) Willis explains, the idea of the solitary witch was preceded by a longstanding suspicion of witch families. Matriarchal and poor families were especially prone to suspicion, and mother-daughter bonds created “a special locus of anxiety.” Pamphlets warning of witchcraft tended to correspond with a growth of Protestant handbooks on the godly household, as part of a (patriarchal, colonial) effort to make “family central to a vision of absolutist rule.” I found the discovery timely on many levels.