Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the poetry category.
Übermensch of the early 21st century
What Kind of a Person
“What kind of a person are you,” I heard them say to me.
I’m a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I’m a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I’m not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.
I’m not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.
Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.
I’m not a car, I’m a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.
– Yehuda Amichai
Glimpse of a beautiful mind
A few months ago, in Harvard bookstore, I picked up a thin pocket-sized volume titled This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. It waited in my bag for a proper moment since about two weeks ago and I finished it just today. For a book of mere 121 pages it certainly took me a long time to get through – and the reason was not it being tedious or difficult to read, quite to the contrary. The book is actually a transcript of six lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967, recordings of which were only recently discovered in an archive. In his talk, Borges masterfully strikes this elusive balance between simplicity and sophistication – in fact he shows convincingly that it is not at all necessary to compromise between the two.
However, there is one thing that makes those otherwise quite remarkable lectures on poetry (and literature in general) truly amazing. Borges had been gradually losing his eyesight and by 1960 he was almost completely blind. This means that those six lectures were delivered without notes, simply by walking up to the stage and starting to talk. And reading them one cannot but marvel at how Borges picks up a thread and then effortlessly follows it, without ever losing his bearings or repeating himself. While doing so, he often quotes lines poetry and entire passages by Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Tennyson, Rossetti, Frost, Cummings, Chesterton, Manrique, Omar Khayyám, Yeats, Coleridge, Whitman, Quevedo and countless others in English, Spanish, German, Arabic, German and Old English. The only comparable feat of erudition and command of the subject I can think of must be Auerbach’s tour de force and magnum opus “Mimesis” that was written in Istanbul, where the author was in exile without access to library – and thereby the veritable study of Western literature from Tacitus to Proust and Woolf was written similarly “blind” and out of memory, without taking a look at source texts or anything else that had been written on them. Giants such as Borges and Auerbach stand as towering monuments to the art of reading and imbuing, immersing oneself in literature with a seriousness and dedication that almost scares me.
Borges concludes his series with a deeply personal and intimate creed, by looking back to a long life lived with, in and by literature. He opens his last lecture by saying:
I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes – yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.
He reminisces a scene from his childhood, when he first heard his father reading “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by Keats, and describes an effect that this experience had on him:
I have toyed with an idea – the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face. I suppose when Judas kissed Jesus (if he indeed did so), he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. /…/ When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience. I have been feeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment I thought myself as being “literary”.
I don’t think I’ve had a moment like this, and I probably never will. I suppose most of us never will. And maybe this is the thing that ultimately separates us mere mortals from those few that are truly great.
Master at work
I have been a fan of Newspaper Blackout Poems for quite a while now. It is an ingenious idea – when poets have traditionally started with a blank page and then filled it up with their words, Austin Kleon does the opposite: he takes a page of a newspaper and blacks out all the words he doesn’t need, and the results can be quite stunning. And here, take a look at another of my favourites – but there are literally hundreds of such gems to be found on the site.
Below is a time-lapse video of making of this particular poem, check it out, it’s beautiful.
Black girl power
As it turns out, since 1996 April is the national poetry month in the US and this means that there are all kinds of related events (such as poetry readings, sales, book signings or all of those combined) to be found everywhere. Yesterday I went to one of those in a bookstore just off the Emory University campus entrance – and it was great fun. The event in question was a poetry reading by Nagueyalti Warren, who is an acclaimed poet in her own right but she also lectures at Emory on African American literature and recently edited an anthology of Africana women’s poetry titled Temba Tupu! - which is swahili for “walking naked”. This collection ended up being the centerpiece of the evening, with her reading some 20 different poems from the book. And again, as could be expected, white male population was massively underrepresented among the small but very friendly audience.
The collection is great, covering in some 700 pages enormous swaths of time and space – from Queen of Sheeba to American contemporary hip-hop poetry. I include a couple of the poems here, but there is no way for me to convey the experience of having them performed by a confident, spirited black woman in front of an enthusiastic audience in unashamed, thick Georgian accent – it was quite something.
Prayer for the Nineties Woman and the Natural Woman Too – by Tamara Madison
These iron-pumping, track-jogging, Jazzercise-stepping, food-starved, anorexia-nervous, bulimia-bitten, thyroid-thumped, lipo-sucked, cosmetically-cut, electrolycized, bikini-clad women with their cropped shoulders, propped balloon-breast and seiftly-searched spines can kiss my café au lait, never-girdled, swivel-hipped, untamed behind that rumbles with its own rhythm, five foot eight, 200 pound, strech-mark strumming, AAA grade, no artificial flavours, sweeteners or preservatives, 100% natural woman entire ass.
Amen.
miss rosie – lucille clifton
when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up
For Willyce – Pat Parker
When i make love to you
i try
…..with each stroke of my tongue
……….to say
……….i love you
to tease
……….i love you
to hammer
……….i love you
to melt
……….i love youand your sounds drift down
…..oh god!
…..oh jesus!
……….and i think
……………here it is, some dude’s
……………getting credit for what
a woman
has done
again.
Girl power
Leaving Boston on Monday I spent a few days in NY, crashing at Jan’s (a guy we met with in a seminar at ACLA conference) place. We met in the “Masters of Universe” seminar and somehow clicked immediately – and as a result have spent most of the last week together. In addition to being a PhD student in comparative literature at Columbia Jan is also a font nut and as a result I have received a crash course in typography over the last few days, among other things.
So yesterday I moved on to New Brunswick, to visit an old friend of mine who runs an Institute of Women’s Studies at Rutgers. There was a lecture by Uma Narayan yesterday and a graduate seminar today – and I feel very underrepresented gender-wise, being, for the most of the time, in possession of all the y-chromosomes in the vicinity. I really haven’t looked into gender, feminist and queer studies much at all, apart from an odd dip into works of Judith Butler and few other chance encounters, so in fact it is both useful and interesting. I will be here over the weekend and fly over to Atlanta on Monday.
On the vein of gender and feminism – Jan introduced me to this poem by Bertold Brecht along with a translation and some critical commentary. You need to know German, and actually know it quite well (so I would really advise against trying to figure this particular one out with the help of online translation engines), in order to be able to appreciate what it really is about – and what precisely is the feminist/gender/queer connection here – but if you do it is just great.
Über die Verführung von Engeln
Engel verführt man gar nicht oder schnell.
Verzieh ihn einfach in den Hauseingang
Steck ihm die Zunge in den Mund und lang
Ihm untern Rock, bis er sich naß macht, stell
Ihn das Gesicht zur Wand, heb ihm den Rock
Und fick ihn. Stöhnt er irgendwie beklommen
Dann halt ihn fest und laß ihn zweimal kommen
Sonst hat er dir am Ende einen Schock.Ermahn ihn, daß er gut den Hintern schwenkt
Heiß ihn dir ruhig an die Hoden fassen
Sag ihm, er darf sich furchtlos fallen lassen
Dieweil er zwischen Erd und Himmel hängt —Doch schau ihm nicht beim Ficken ins Gesicht
Und seine Flügel, Mensch, zerdrück sie nicht.
Confessions of a bookworm
I am beginning to wonder whether there is such a thing as re-hab for book addicts, as my so far relatively benign bibliophily shows some threatening signs towards the development of full-blown bibliomania. Today I spent again another half a day in bookstores at Harvard and at times it is really difficult to tell if I’m even enjoying it. Of course, I do like to leaf through books, read a few stories or poems and all that, but standing up against a wall full of books running for tens of meters in both directions where I can everywhere spot some novels that I know I’d like to read and others that I already should have read.. it kind of makes me anxious. Anxious because when standing there, the realisation that you will never be able to read them all hits you with full force and undeniable clarity. All the books are there, ready to be picked from shelves, opened and read – and indeed, I could take any one of them and read it through, and this is precisely what makes it feel so desperate.
Walter Benjamin has written is his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library”:
For a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
I can fully relate to this – and although my own library is something that can probably still be packed and unpacked within a couple of hours, its growth (rather healthy nonetheless) has so far been limited only by application of some iron discipline and the fact that we keep on running out of shelf space back at home. After my last shipment back to Estonia from Malta, Helelyn informed me in her ever sweet way that with this we are, yet again, fully booked. And here I am barely a 100 pages into David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” which means that there is still about 1000 more pages to go before I can get started with another one of the six more unread books waiting in my bag.
Speaking of “Infinite Jest” – it is a truly enjoyable read. Paraphrasing a movie review that I read several years ago – it’s a kind of a book that kicks your ass, takes your wallet, checks your address, comes to your home, knocks on the door, and when you open it – kicks your ass some more. One particular part early in the book, with two burglars and a certain pair of toothbrushes with enhanced-focus handles, got me laughing out aloud in a commuter train. And the amazing part is that, although the book is a veritable door-stopper, it is on every page as precise and sharp as a short story. There’s not a gram of fat, nothing superfluous. It cuts like a surgical instrument. Here is a sample for you, from another book, of what Wallace can do with a few lines. In a way, it reminds me a lot of Robert Creeley, a similarly surgical American poet.
On another front, I was admitted to Cornell summer school with full tuition scholarship – yay! Of course, this will mean further piles of reading before mid-June and then six weeks of hard core critical theory among some 80 other similarly inclined strange people who have decided to spend a better part of their summer musing over what have Agamben and Badiou said on conservativism and religion or Žižek on opera. Which is one one hand slightly disquieting. But while I do recognise that there is a real danger of theory-related OD looming, right now I am very much looking forward to it.
And finally, another find from bookstores today, this time a poem by one of my long time favourites Yehuda Amichai. It goes out to a friend of mine who has, quite appropriately for the season about to begin, fallen madly in love. You know who you are.
Ab initio
A few weeks ago I stumbled across an article about a study carried out in 2006 on how do people read on the internet. It turns out that the resulting pattern looks very much like a letter F: people read the first paragraph in full, the second with a slightly shorter span and then simply scan the rest of the text vertically. The upshot of this is that, at least on the internet, if you want people actually read your point you better make it straight away.
Now, with books you’d expect that readers would have a bit more of a patience – but this is something that you really can’t always count on. I’d venture a guess that most of the books are purchased (or left unpurchased) without opening them, solely on the basis of the back cover publisher blurbs. And if those aren’t enough, you will read the first page. This is especially true when buying books from amazon where, in case of most books, it is only the few first pages that are available.
So this will lead to an important if rather unsurprising conclusion that beginnings do matter, even off-line.
Last week in London at Picadilly Waterstone’s I ended up with a pile of nine books that was certainly too much, considering that I will have to carry everything I buy along with me. One of the books that I had to decide upon was a collection by Evelyn Waugh, titled Work Suspended and Other Stories where the first story happened to be Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing that begins with one of the most celebrated first sentences of in British literature:
‘You will not find your father greatly changed,’ remarked Lady Moping, as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.
To think of it, it is quite amazing how much punch does this hilarious and deceptively simple line pack. In addition to leading us into the story that follows, it also sets the mood and tells us a great deal about Lady Moping and her husband, Lord Moping, as well as their relationship. It also implies the presence of two more persons – a child to whom the sentence is directed plus a silent driver. With one short sentence, Waugh has managed to sketch two characters and tell us a whole story of their past. And this kind of an economy is something that most, if not all, of the great opening lines share.
For instance, consider this:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
- another stellar example of opening a novel, this time from Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. Like in previous quote, here as well a great deal has been left unsaid but is nonetheless understood by a reader. Archbishops do not simply walk from door to door in afternoons, and even without this unexpected visit it is obvious that the person telling the story is quite peculiar. Many readers (that also included me) will have to look up the word “catamite” in order to fully appreciate that – and this will make the situation (i.e. the bishop’s visit) even more curious.
Yet another writer justly famous for his ability to completely capture the attention and imagination of his readers with a single first sentence is Gabriel García Márquez. His One Hundred Years of Solitude opens in an incredibly many-layered way:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
First, there is the delicate temporal structure – it meshes the past, present and future all into seamless one. In the sentence Márquez doesn’t describe the heat nor the calmness of the Colonel when facing his death, he only has to mention ice. Again, like in Waugh and Burgess, one sentence can branch out into many different directions, create tensions and set up questions – and as a result we’re hooked without even noticing it.
By the way, here it is interesting to take a different kind of a approach to beginnings – if you look hard enough, you can find whole chains of first sentences, linked with each other over what can sometimes be decades and different continents. For instance, the line by Márquez is a continuation on the theme set by early Latin American classic Machado de Assis in 1881 book The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (which is itself heavily indebted to Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, dated 1759 – but let’s leave it there for now)
The Death of the Author: I hesitated some time, not knowing whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, i.e., whether to start with my birth or with my death.
Machado de Assis has been a hugely influential writer, first and foremost in his native Brazil but also in the whole Latin America, and it is virtually certain that Márquez was familiar with his works. But there is more. Read this:
In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the very moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands of lives were lost, a young Spaniard by the name of Jeronimo Rugera, who had been locked up on a criminal charge, was standing against a prison pillar, about to hang himself.
What do you think when and where might have this sentence been written? If you guessed 20th century and Latin America then you’re pretty far off – it’s an opening sentence from a story called The Earthquake in Chile, from the collection The Marquise of O and Other Stories by a German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who died in 1811.
And now, two hundread years later, take a look at the beginning of a Pulizer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, published in 2000
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
The One Hundred Years of Solitude echoes right through that sentence, to the extent that it can be considered a homage. And there are yet another kinds of links – Kafka, for instance, has linked his novella The Metamorphosis
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
with his own The Trial:
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
And finally something different and altogether more subtle – Daphne du Maurier and her truly sublime, magical and lingering opening line of Rebecca
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Although I haven’t actually read the book – and I have a sneaking suspicion that I even wouldn’t like it if I did – I have picked up Rebecca in bookstores for countless of times simply to open the first page and read this line, like reading a poem. In fact, it IS poetry – it’s a perfect iambic hexameter with a dibrach in fifth foot.
Today at the New York Public Library I spent again about an hour and half among the shelves, opening books, reading their first pages and then putting them back. In London I ended up reading the first sentence of Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing and then all the subsequent sentences of the story until the last one – it was a great story. And then I put it back on the shelf. For the next reader.
What the hell?!
Apparently Electronic Arts, one of the world’s leading video game producers, is gearing up for the release of a new action adventure game that is based on the first cantiche of Dante’s Commedia – Inferno. The aficionados of medieval poetry are bound to get upset by the news – and indeed, at first thought it is difficult to imagine how could Dante’s allegorical masterpiece possibly be converted into a video game format without a major butchery. The trailer has a distinctive Lord-of-the-Ringish feel which will probably further deepen the suspicion that the end result will not be up to the notch. The Divine Comedy has became one of the central and sacred texts of the Western literary culture – something to be awed by, studied and treasured, looked but not touched. Commedia is kind of a perfect example, something that can’t be improved and every attempt to translate it to another medium, such as prose for example, will inevitably leave out something fundamentally important. And even if it wasn’t Dante – there is a fair amount of general scepticism in whether video games are intrinsically suitable for conveying anything but the most primitive of narratives. Also, there is certainly not much in terms of successful examples of great works of literature having been successfully converted into video games – or vice versa, for that matter.
This led me to approach the same issue from the other end – the so-called adventure games actually do have a genre of sorts. Of course, it depends on what exactly does one consider as “adventure games” – I think most would agree that Indiana Jones’ series rightfully belong there, while I would personally be hesitant qualifying Tomb Raider as such. Also, many MMORPG-s draw heavily from the original adventure game genre while doing away with the scripted storyline for the most part (in-game quests or missions being an important exception here). And then there are the likes of Myst or Diablo and Neverwinter Nights.
However, if I were to try and bring one analogy from the literature in order to summarise what adventure games are like, I would probably pick bildungsroman. Adventure games are usually in third person (although many also allow first person perspective, if not for anything else then for combat parts) and usually consist of more than just a string of puzzles – they are about character development. At their best, adventure games have actually came pretty close to literature in creating both the narrative and the ambience - Benoît Sokal’s Syberia is probably the best example of this, but there are several others. Best adventure games employ clear stylistic elements – Syberia draws from steampunk, Max Payne from film noir and hard-boiled detective genre, Silent Hill from horror, etc. And while I must agree that so far I haven’t came across a computer game with a story-line remotely as gripping as a good novel can be, there is a lot more to good literature than gripping plots – or even plots in general, as Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma demonstrates. So maybe it is not the problem of video games after all. At the time when Lumière brothers screened their first short movies about workers leaving the factory or train arriving at the station it was no doubt difficult to imagine how could that medium ever tell a gripping emotional story or be a form of high art.
All that being said – The Divine Comedy is certainly a challenge on many different levels. In that regard I’d say that Don Quixote would have been much safer a bet. It remains to be seen whether the project will prove successful, and, even more interestingly, SHOULD it prove successful shall it have a sequel – Dante’s Commedia certainly has a potential for that. A video game based on Paradiso – now that would be really interesting, although I’d be ready to lay my money on the fact that it will be a complete flop in commercial terms.
