Category: poetry

Embodied Poetics

Years ago, amid a different terror, one concern was a sort of numbness. I remember what the poet said about attention to the senses. This is an act of resistance, he said. To survive the war and still do poetry, this is defiance of the death machine.

It can be done without a pen. You want to know what poetry in motion looks like? The poet asks.  A man walks to safety from an active bombardment zone. . . His two cows walk with him.

I am thinking of this as I am noticing how there comes a point of being saturated with images of shelled buildings, bodies in the street, and I observe the creep of a familiar numbness. I walk from the screen to put my nose in the fur of our cat, run fingertips across my daughter’s watercolor painting. Birds at sunset.  A mind can say live, but a body needs so many reminders, all of them in the senses: this is why, and this, and this.

When I return, it is to celebrate a mother who lost her father the day before the invasion, who drove with her husband under sirens and past tanks, making arrangements until it was time to leave with the children and the dogs. How they left the car to walk the last ten miles, how the walk was hard on the oldest dog, Pulya, who kept falling. How she carried Pulya, how he let himself be carried over her shoulder, with silent acceptance. How the husband stayed behind in a village with no water or food, using firewood to heat the home, tending for the old ones who can’t leave.

It is our love, this woman said, that gives me strength now.

***

Inspired by the wild love of those persisting in the face of horrific violence, and by poet Ilya Kaminsky’s recent observation about poetry in motion, italicized above. I first encountered the story of Alisa Teptiuk, who carried her dog to safety, in this article.

War Mothers

Open mouths, long lines.

History was the broken lines between mouths and the breasts they once held before they knew the word for danger. When was that? We couldn’t remember. It was a story vague as Genesis, but some of us carried it on the road. There was a line of thought we wanted to follow, because we knew it before we knew thoughts should get in lines and it was this: once it was good, and us with it, and then came everything after, and then a long dark and at the end of it were these mouths at our breasts.

Without a Word

To hold against this.

Fire from the sky, man thunders again.

Why do you scream? 

To check that I still live. 

Hold your head. This will hurt.

Ground is what trembles us.

Will you go under it?

Is that where it trembles less?

No. The windows will shatter next.

See the child, carried through smoke.

Children take the blasts for granted,

learn to wait between them.

We cry out, throwing signs against

the noise when we see no target.

What is another word for too much? 

We try blood, fire, smoke.

We try terror, revenge, help. 

Oh God, we say, touching a wound.

Oh God, we say, unable to keep

from testing for some other now.

Piercing the Veil

A poet’s manifesto.

“We do not fly, we ascend only such towers as we ourselves are able to build.”

Osip Mandelshtam

When it comes to discussions of art, let’s balance our excitement with restraint. A worldview is a hammer, but not the end. Use it to shape the art. The only pride, for an artist, is existence.

In a poem, the reality is the word, and yet. Consider how signs and symbols so often fulfill their purpose without words. Let’s have the word no longer creeping on all fours, hulking accepted logic on its back. Let it rise, instead, to enter a new age.

The architect must be a good stay-at-home, having genuine piety before the three dimensions of space. To build means to hypnotize space against the dreaded emptiness. Consider the anger of the bell tower, as if to stab heaven.

To love the existence of something more than itself­­––including your own––here is the highest commandment. A poet’s greatest virtue is the ability to feel surprised. If logic is the kingdom of amazement, let us dance to the music of proof.

***

The war in Ukraine has drawn me more deeply into the poetry of one of my favorite living poets, Ilya Kaminsky. I’ve been following his regular updates about the needs and concerns of his family, friends, and fellow poets in Ukraine. At his recommendation, I have been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, composed during Stalin’s Great Terror. Akhmatova was part of the Acmeist movement,  and this morning, while reading Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa, I came to “Musica Humana” (an elegy for Osip Mandelshtam, a leader among the Acmeists) and realized I wanted to know more about Mandelshtam, and found a translation of his Acmeist Manifesto. This morning’s post collects ideas and found phrases from this text, as translated by Clarence Brown. 

Human Shield

Mothers in wartime.

Speaking of the universes inside us now, of silenced griefs, do you wonder if this new fear has come to meet our weak refusals to acknowledge its magnitude? An inherited idea: us as defenders of the first official bodies of an emerging something––and yet, we couldn’t see it, not all the way. We missed the point, didn’t we, when we called it safe.

They gave it borders and called it done. Who could blame them? Had I known better, I might have done the same with my own form when I could, but even a broken body can learn, when it comes time for offerings, to be one. 

You can hear the official mandates all around: ours, ours, no trespassing, but try claiming something from a body whose primary substance is the fluid it sends and receives, through these acres of unknowns, and eventually we challenged them to go ahead, see if they could find a place to plant their flag. This took no words; just as well when these were the first to flee.

***

Inspiration: On March 6, 2022, Krista Tippett, whose excellent On Being Project I have long followed, tweeted: “There is a universe inside each of us now of unarticulated fear and unmarked grief.” As with many of her observations, this one resonated a particular truth of this moment.

And of course, the images we all know by heart now, and in our bones, of mothers in wartime.

Valley

Between us.

Between being and becoming, a valley holds the wasted lives of a time when we thought we could not know what we were except by testing hot fire against some idea of what it felt to be a god, before the end of the world, and we are in this valley now, still with this longing, and what can it be but nostalgia for the days when it was possible to imagine anything but this relentless fragility with its incessant reminders, that there is no becoming beyond this? Instead of a world, see this baby, head bandaged from the last strike, another attempt by a would-be god of our own making, to make some urgent point, but there is no scorecard without a world to rule, only this child looking up, eyes glazed and the dead all around.

Souls

In conversation.

Some will deny them altogether. It’s almost easy to do this, with so many ways to stop the ears. For others, these are what sweat, cry, laugh, dance, sing;  being made of fluid form means to be forever leaking, absorbing the drips, sounds, and reverberations of an ongoing other, to become our strange strangers, waving Hello, hello! Who are you?

before an embodied response, 

like this one here, arms out,

cry spinning drops of body 

in every direction. 

Come, they are calling, it

is almost and before, it is

the never you feared and 

the someday you painted 

like sunset with your 

watercolor pulse, into

this awake.

Dormancy

When the poets took cover.

Hiding a generation in our bones, we sipped from the ancients, but as they swelled our rhythms against the tempo of our moment, one common side effect was dizziness. Some took to bed, but there were other ways. 

We called it consolation. We called it our time out of mind. For many, the vertigo was so intense that we called it nothing for a long time.  When we woke, our sheets would be wet with memory and before these had a chance to dry someone with an official title would come inspecting, demanding some explanation. 

Invariably, our answers confirmed their suspicions, and they would make notes certifying their opinions that we were likely dumb, possibly also deranged, which tends to be the official response to any negative capability. But when the empire of certitude began to crumble, we were stirring.

Then came a mind up from the bottom of history, and this was our moment, and in those basements between buildings we were clearing our throats, this specter among us said, Time.

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