January 2009
Poems by C.K. Williams, Kim Addonizio, Anne Winters; previously unpublished Langston Hughes, introduced by Arnold Rampersad; Michael Hofmann on Bishop and Lowell.
the shifting of the earth’s axis, no? the collapse of the scaffolding on 4th of November Street, no? the landslide on Ischia, no? a pain on the ribs, no? the success of your last film, no? he was the son of an egyptian, from the first century, no? as elena walks by they turn around, no? a mouthful of air in mexico city, no? spike tried to get up, no? they checked the troubled breathing, no? the nurses were ready for the tracheotomy, no? the journalists arrive in small bunches, no? december hinders the ambulances, no? everyone frantic for presents, no? dust from the sarcophagus, no? she has already disappeared through the back door, no? the room spinned and the light went out, no? driving a taxi the wrong way against a check point he shot and was hit, no? they kidnap people arriving at the airport, no? there’s nothing to be done, no? now they go to notify the relatives, but there aren’t any, no? take a look, not even friends, no? the wife went out the service entrance, no? he only had beauty, no? not very brave but armed, no?
Written at the request of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, who's compiling an anthology of "micro essays about approaches to teaching poetry":
Hoard your time, since you’ll need it to be alone to think and to write.
Be frugal, since it’ll allow you to work less and have more time to think and to write.
Try, as best you can, to have an overview of what’s possible in writing, the various strategies attempted throughout history, throughout the world.
Identify the writers or works you admire the most, and read them very slowly, as many times as necessary.
Have faith that you will get better at thinking and writing, and that people will notice it, even if stingily and reluctantly, since you’re not entitled to any attention.
Before the internet, writers interested in weird, amateurish or specialized lingos had to scrounge for them in used book stores and porn shops. There was no Google to barf verbiage onto your lap. I used to spend hundreds on magazines with names like Over Fifty and Fabulous, K.O., Soldiers of Fortune, Flying Saucer Digest and Teen. Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin' planet, stretching your horizon, dude. In the visual arts, one artist in particular, Jim Shaw, alerted us all to the weird, goofy world of amateur creativity. He collected thrift store paintings and arranged them in installations. His 1991 show at Metro Pictures, NYC, was declared by critic Jerry Saltz as "one of the most important shows of the decade [...] it brimmed with dementedly entertaining art [and] unlocked the doors to scores of dead, forgotten, or otherwise devalued painting genres. It was a gold mine of overlooked pictorial information, a mother lode of untapped graphic imagination and pictorial possibility." Sounds like flarf to me. It was flarf, flarf, flarf, before there was flarf.
an anonymous blog inspired by Félix Fénéon’s Nouvelles en trois lignes:
In the middle of a reading, the last on his Bretagne tour, M. Antin caught fire. This was at the beach house of Mme Scalapino and family, in the middle of a long sentence. “His reputation as a literary figure is forever assured,” said Mme Perloff, in tears.
According to bystanders, M. Simic was, for unknown reasons, walking and whistling down a dark street in a questionable neighborhood of Nancy. The homeless poet known locally as Fork-Face jumped from the shadows, stabbing him fifty-four times in the legs.
The poet Mme Peacock was sitting in a beauty parlor, with a large metalloid cone upon her head. When she reached inside to scratch her scalp, one of her numerous rings caught a faulty wire, blacking out the whole arrondissement. This according to the Coroner.
A nervous graduate student addressed the Professor: “How is Language poetry really radical, etc. when it’s now the most academically dependent formation since the New Criticism?” Down rushed M. Perelman from the dais, biting off the little rat’s ear.
A while back, I received an email soliciting a poem for a webzine I'd never heard of, but new journals sprout up all the time, some of them even good, and I almost always contribute when asked by an editor. After a week, however, she wrote that she could not print my piece because, well, she had an aversion to certain words. I told her, "Don't worry about it," but I was frankly annoyed since she obviously had never read my poetry. If she had, she would immediately see that I embrace every word in the English language, as many as my untrepanned skull can hold, that I freely mix high and low in the same reasonably-fragrant-yet-still-funky tub, that I believe there is the right place and time for every utterance. So here's a friendly suggestion for editors: Don't solicit poems from people you haven't read. Is that too unreasonable? Also: Don't dictate how a solicited piece is to be written. Poets aren't advertising writers! I bring this up because a curator recently asked me, for chump change, $200, to write a 200-to-250-word essay, press release to "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," a group show opening on January 23 in Chelsea, Manhattan. "It would function as another art work in the exhibition, creating a loose narrative or atmosphere for the physical objects," he explained. After I sent my piece, however, he responded, "I fear it may run antithetical to the exhibition, which explores interior and meditative states. It's true that the world is falling apart and far from calm, but does it not make the desires expressed in Stevens' poem even more urgent and necessary?" I told him to forget about it. To waste less time, I should learn how to say no more often. My short take on the Stevens:
To do five readings, I went from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Portland, then back to San Francisco. I slept in five homes, two hotels and two trains. I saw old friends, made many new ones. The sweetness and generosity I encountered upset my habitual guardedness. On an Amtrak between Klamath Falls and Eugene, I chatted with Jack D. Fir, not his real name, who worked in a sawmill in Florence, on the Oregon Coast, for 31 years before it went out of business, thanks to the spotted owl brouhaha, he said. “These environmentalists live on the East Coast, never been out here, so they don’t know how much forest we have. Just look for yourself," he indicated with a nod. "You can cut them responsibly, and they’ll grow back.”
Many old growth trees are already rotted in the center, he explained, his right index finger drilling into a C formed by his left hand, so a storm would knock them all down. Wasted. “Since our logging industry is mostly dead, we have to buy lumber from overseas, from people who really don’t give a hoot about the environment.” With sawmill rotting by the river, Jack got hired by Safeway, but business is down, the town depressed and what’s worse, many people would rather drive 60 miles to shop at a Walmart. The fishing industry is also kaput. Without logging and fishing, the town opened a retirement home, a golf course and a casino, tried to attract tourists, which worked for more than a decade, but thanks to high gas price and the national recession, few people visit anymore. At 60, Jack has two years of mortgage left. “I just hope Safeway doesn’t go bankrupt. At my age, it will be hard to get hired again. I don’t want to move to the city to find another job.”
Sitting in the lounge car, we stared through large windows at the blonde fields, viridian evergreens and another snow-tipped mountain. Canadian geese suddenly infested a small patch of sky. The winding lake seemed short of water. Even at four thousand feet in November, there was no snow, which wasn’t right. "They might just turn me into a wafer, you know, a cracker," Jack chuckled. "Do you know that Charlton Heston's film, 'Soylent Green'?"
There are many rich people here, many fine, even spectacular houses, but also modest bungalows and cottages. For a town of 57,000, Santa Cruz has an astonishing variety of architectural styles, with conical towers, shingled turrets, spindled porches and lacy bargeboards hanging from gables. There are tiny apartment complexes sharing intimate, narrow courtyards, and a streamlined moderne doctor’s office with a fluted, tiered tower shaped like a one-candled birthday cake, with weathervane in place of flame. Here, the rich surf until sunset, the poor stroll, while sea lions lounge on crossbars under the not too tacky pier.
A day after the Phillies won the World Series, unleashing a reasonably benign celebration that left only a few windows smashed, a dozen planters destroyed, negligible looting, a tacky bronze statue of a businessman tottering and 76 people (symbolically?) arrested, I took a bus from Philadelphia to Allentown to do a reading at Muhlenberg College. Amra Brooks had invited me. I've been in Philadelphia off and on for 20 years but that was my first visit to the Lehigh Valley, a mere one-hour-drive away. It's hard to motor when you don't own a car, and each time I boarded a train, it was headed to either New York or Washington.
The views on I-476 were lamely monotonous, so I dozed until 309, between Quakertown and Coopersburg. Looking out the window, I remembered a bus ride from Cromer to Norwich in East Anglia, where I sat in front of a middle-aged black man who debated with himself continuously. At first, I thought he was on his cellphone. I also address myself, OK, but only briefly, mostly in expletives, and never in public. “You’re an idiot,” I’d mutter with genuine disgust. During a World Series broadcast, a commentator said of Harry Callas, “If I had a voice like that, I’d just stay home all day and talk to myself.” Eventually, his meaty hand appeared on the window pane, just behind my face, and he left it there, mostly immobile, for a minute or two. In the village of Aylsham, this strange man got off, and I could see that he was wearing an old tweed suit and toting a brief case. Looking serious and confused, he approached a girl and a boy and asked them something. On another occasion in Aylsham, I saw the most beautiful gardens in my life, with all sorts of roses and tulips. I also examined a magnificent lich gate and the 17th century Black Boys Inn, with a carved black boy, sure enough, grinning on its cornice, flanked by two very pink female nudes.
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
--from Primo Levi’s preface to his Holocaust memoir, translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf
An archaic definition of "to strike" is to lower a sail, since disgruntled sailors formerly struck sails to disable a ship. Thus, to remove from production any tool, including one's own body, is to go on strike.
One retaliates, flails at the man by doing nothing, since this refusal is the most convenient weapon at one’s disposal. A striking worker is not dissimilar to a sulking child if not an abbreviated saint. Withdrawing into myself and becoming immobile, I’ll not play, chatter, buy anything or fuck anybody any more.
No one wants to hang with you anyway, asshole.
From every fresh or foul mouth, an invitation, every dusky door, lolling, expectant figures on some funky couch. Fingers beckon. I see bright teeth. In this come-on universe, it takes strength or satiety to just say no and turn away, but many have never been invited to the gorge now, pay-later-with-interest bash. Worldwide, a billion people live in slum conditions. In 2005, the wealthiest 20% accounted for 76.6% of private consumption. The poorest fifth, 1.5%. Ten million starve to death each year, thirty thousand a day. Enough already, stop getting so righteous. Who do you like in the World Series? I say Phillies in six games. They’re hungrier.
In "Doctor Brodie's Report," a 1970 short story by Borges, there's an Amazon tribe with no notion of cause and effect and no sense of the past. N. T. di Giovanni translates, "Since they lack the capacity to fashion the simplest object, the Yahoos regard such ornaments [produced elsewhere] as natural. To the tribe my hut was a tree, despite the fact that many of them saw me construct it and even lent me their aid. Among a number of other items, I had in my possession a watch, a cork helmet, a mariner's compass, and a Bible. The Yahoos stared at them, weighed them in their hands, and wanted to know where I had found them." And, "The words 'Our Father,' owning to the fact that they have no notion of fatherhood, left them puzzled. They cannot, it seems, accept a cause so remote and so unlikely, and are therefore uncomprehending that an act carried out several months before may bear relation to the birth of a child."
The Yahoos' numerical system stops at four. "On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb." Yet even more stingy and sublime are the real life Warlpiris, Australian aborigines whose language only allows for one, two, then many. Eternity snaps into being with one's middle finger. There are also the Pirahas. Numbering less than 350 souls, this Amazon tribe has no creation myths, no fairy tales, no arts, not even tattooing, no words for colors and no numbers except hói, which means either "one," "few" or "small." Compared to the 112 phonemes of Taa (spoken in Botswana and Namibia), 40 of English, 30 of Italian, the Piraha language only has ten. They also have no concept of the past. According to linguist Daniel Everett, the Pirahas believe that "everything is the same, things always are," and nothing matters but the present.
--"Of Money" by Barnabe Googe
Cool, the American stands on two legs, favoring neither left nor right, his weight equally distributed. No contrapposto wuss, he declines to lean on stumps, cherry trees, walls, chaise longues or, god forbid, another man. In his mind at least, one or more babes could be seen draping themselves, melting, practically, all over his dry solidity. For a casual yet don't-mess-with-me equilibrium, his feet are set slightly wider than his hormone-bred, steroid-fortified shoulders.
"The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetic nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem [...] One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women [...] Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall."--Walt Whitman, from his preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855.
Whitman's projection of the poet's central and celebrated role in American society never came to pass, obviously. Many of our best have been ignored, angry drunkards, suicides or madhouse inmates, while others groomed themselves into clowns, not wise fools, mind you, just giggly or lugubrious. (But clowns are born, not made, you're huffing, slamming your wireless mouse on the table.) Eliot changed his citizenship.
With his desolate blog and countable band of readers, identifiable by name, face and even favorite beer if not deodorant, the American poet lives in a forgotten dwelling furthest away from the corridors of money and power. Each morning, brushing his uninsured or just barely tenured teeth, thank god, the American poet is glad and relieved to be reintroduced to his best and only attentive reader. Speaking of arithmetic, Don King said, "If you can count your money, you ain't got none."
On December 3, 1937, Attila József, age 32, scissored his right sleeve, lay down, draped his arm across a rail and stared at the train arriving on time to kill him. It was his second attempt, the first pointless and disappointing because someone else had been wheeled over up the tracks. József knew his train schedule. He also wrote:
To shove this chair away from here,
to sit down in front of a train,
to climb a mountain with great care,
to shake my bag into the valley,
to feed a bee to my old spider,
to caress an old, old woman,
to sip a delicious bean soup,
to walk on tiptoes in the mud,
to place my hat on railroad tracks,
to stroll around the banks of a lake,
to sit all dressed up on the bottom,
[from "To Sit, to Stand, to Kill, to Die," translated by John Batki]
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."--George W. Bush, 9/13/01
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."--George W. Bush, 3/13/02
"Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."--George W. Bush, 9/17/02
Sure we can. Among major American poets, only Amiri Baraka and Clayton Eshleman have challenged the official version of 9/11. On Hunger Magazine, 2003, Eshleman was asked by J. J. Blickstein: "How are you addressing the current events on the world theater, 9/11, the imminent 'War for Oil' with Iraq, the North Korean conflict, in your work?" He answered:
My initial response to the 9/11 assaults, as a reader/investigator, was to start making myself more aware of what we might have done to others, beyond our borders, to instigate such action. I read William Blum's Rogue State, and am now reading his Killing Hope. Learning of Bush's bizarre and utterly irresponsible immediate response to the assaults (he continued listening to school children read to him in a Sarasota grade school for nearly a half hour), I also began to learn more about him by reading Mark Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon. Then Gore Vidal alerted me to the considerable possibility that the official version of what happened on 9/11 was bogus. Vidal's information was based on Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War on Freedom which I studied for several weeks, at the same time checking its information with the numerous 9/11 sites (e.g., Paul Thompson's The Complete 9/11 Time-site). I have not found any information that contradicts Ahmed's. There is additional material in David Icke's Alice In Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster, but one must ponder it in a context that is Blakean and obsessed with global fascist conspiracy controlled by reptilian "entities."
After studying the Ahmed book, I wrote "The Assault," which opens with compressed time-line data on some of the evidence that contests the official 9/11 version. Part II is my own lyric response, written out of the angry indignation I associate with Robert Duncan's "Uprising," the key declaration by a poet during the Vietnamese War. My poem can be read on the Skanky Possum web site.
Solipsism n. 1) the theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its blog. 2) the theory that nothing exists or is real but one's blog.
In 1984, there's a telescreen in each room that can never be turned off, only dimmed. A sort of two-way mirror, it studies us as we watch it. Before writing his diary, an act punishable by death, before he could blog, so to speak, the protagonist, Winston, had to hide in an alcove, out of view of the telescreen.
In 2008, we love to stare at a screen as we share with a bored, restless and concurrently blogging universe an endless stream of our disconnected, autobiographical factoids; political, philosophical and literary half-thoughts; reading and publication announcements; digital self-portraits, sometimes crotch shots; and hasty poetic skits to be ignored if not sensibly deleted a day later.
I took a four-hour train ride from Rhinecliff to Philadelphia, with a switch in NYC. I sat on the right side to take in the Hudson's wide span, cliffs, bridges, canadian geese and an eccentric faux castle on a shaggy islet, but I was too drowsy, my mind drained from teaching a month at Bard College. Talking one-on-one with dozens of writers, artists and musicians, I had tried my best to be useful and encouraging. I didn’t jive, I don't think. I never recommended books I had only glimpsed on amazon.com. Rarely did I say something, mention John Zorn, for example, and thought later, "?!" Kidding aside, I inspired confidence and awe with my expansive, expansionist, imperialistic and full-spectrum knowledge.
There had been a gristly crime the day before. On a Greyhound bus from Edmonton to Winipeg, a Chinese man had stabbed, decapitated and started to eat his dozing seatmate, a young carnival hand going home. They didn't know each other and there was no argument. The killer was simply insane. "Please kill me," he would mutter at court. The murderer had arrived in Canada only four years earlier. Married without children, he swept dirt from a Baptist church, levered a forklift, seared and flipped slyly perfumed, frozen beef patties for the golden arches multinational corporation. I'm lovin' it. He also tossed plastic-sleeved, tightly rolled bullshit onto lawns, porches and driveways, depriving some pedaling boy of a summer job.
Gori, population 50,000, is in the news because of the escalating war between Russia and Georgia. Its most famous son is Joseph Stalin. In Gori, there is a Stalin Avenue, a Stalin Square, three Stalin statues, including a giant one in front of town hall, and a Stalin Museum, the town's main tourist attraction. Its exhibits mention no Great Terror purges, gulags or mass starvation. The dictator is still a great man in Gori but likely nowhere else, although his cult was once widespread. When Stalin died in 1953, Communist Vietnam's most celebrated poet, Tố Hữu, wrote a hysterical elegy. I translate:
Stalin! Stalin!
A mother showed to her child
A picture of Stalin with a young child
His shirt is white against red clouds
His eyes are kind, his mouth smiling
On an immense green field
He stands with a little child
Wearing a red scarf round his neck
Towards the future they both look
Stalin! Stalin!
How I loved my child's first word
When he said the word Stalin!
The milky fragance of a baby's mouth
Is like the dove of peace and a limpid moon
Yesterday the field speaker blared
Tore my stomach to shreds
O how the village convulsed
O how can it be... He's dead!
O Stalin! O Stalin!
Without you, are there still sky and earth?
The love for my father, mother, wife
The love for myself are but one tenth
Of my love for you
The love for my child, country, race
Can't be greater than my love for you
Before there was only barren desolation
Thanks to you there's brightness and joy
Before only torn clothes and hunger
Thanks to you our rice pots are full
Before only torment and shackles
Thanks to you we have days of freedom
When people have land to till
When independence comes tomorrow
Who will we remember with gratitude?
This gratitude I'll bear on my shoulders
One side for Uncle Ho, one for you
My child, you're still so clueless
But you'll learn to thank Stalin for life
Loving you a mother vowed in silence
To love village, country, husband, child
Although you have disappeared, gone
Your crimson footsteps are forever
Today on the village road at dawn
Incense smoke curled up everywhere
A thousand in mourning white, joined
In wrenching eternal remembrance of you.
Vũ Trọng Quang’s restaurant, Trống Đồng [Bronze Drum], is where poets hang out in Saigon. It’s located on Lê Quý Đôn Street, not far from the old Independence Palace. Show up any day of the week and you’re likely to see a dozen poets, writers and hacks congregating at the different tables.
Unless a wordsmith or two have had too much to drink, when insults will be flung back and forth, the mood is relaxed and fraternal. Fortified by Tiger beer, people will chatter on about life, love and literature. Or they will flirt with each other. At a large gathering recently, Khánh Trường, a California-based fiction writer and the editor of the influential journal Hợp Lưu, eyed actress/playwright/fiction writer Nguyễn Minh Ngọc and said, “If I weren’t married, this one would fall in love with me!”
One poet, visiting from Hanoi, shouted love poems in my ear as her hand brushed rhythmically against my thigh.
Since January, I've taught at the University of Montana, Naropa and Bard College. Interacting with roughly 70 students, about half of whom were MFA creative writing candidates, I discussed or recommended these writers, artists and works:
Poetry
-Michael Palmer.
-Myung Mi Kim.
-Harryette Mullen.
-César Vallejo's The Complete Posthumous Poetry, as translated by Clayton Eshleman.
-Pablo Neruda's "Walking Around," as translated by W.S. Merwin, and his half great, half awful "Ode to the Sea."
-Attila József's "The Seventh."
-Nazim Hikmet's "On Living."
-Miroslav Holub's "Man Cursing the Sea."
-Jerome Rothenberg's anthology, Technicians of the Sacred.
-Clayton Eshleman's "The Assault."
-Amiri Baraka's 2005, Naples recording of "Somebody Blew Up America."
-Antonin Artaud.
-Henri Michaux.
-Arthur Rimbaud, in particular "Phrases" from Illuminations.
-Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen.
-André Breton's "Free Union," as translated by David Antin.
-John Ashbery.
-Joseph Ceravolo.
-Paul Violi's index poem.
-Ron Silliman.
-Kenneth Goldsmith.
-Bern Porter.
-K. Silem Mohammad's Breathalyzer and Deer Head Nation.
-Drew Gardner's "Chicks Dig War."
-Kent Johnson's Homage to the Last Avant Garde.
-Jeff Clark's The Little Door Slides Back.
-Tracie Morris' MP3s, "Black but Beautiful" and "Chain Gang."
-Christian Bök.
-Angela Rawling's reading in Iceland.
-Vietnamese proverbs.
by Eleni Sikelianos, as presented during a panel at the Naropa Summer Writing Program, June 2008:
In this very room, Robin Blaser once quoted from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community: “The coming being is whatever being.” The “whatever,” or latin quodlibet, Agamben notes, means both “it does not matter which,” and, cleaving to its opposite, “being such that it always matters.” Agamben elects the second meaning as the essential one.
Let us be in a place, a community of private thought and collective thinking, as we are now, that reminds us that every thing, whatever it is, “always matters.”
Each cab driver
Each partridge-feather plant
Each plastic bag
Each piece of water
I try to web my private community of thought around that thinking, but my thoughts drift…
I forget and remember and forget. My thoughts drift … among communities; some I have elected and some I have not, and would not, but each contributes to generating my surface and interior life.
To follow up on Travis Nichols' post, "Think of the Stamps!", I want to point out that Wales already has a female poet laureate, Gwyneth Lewis, the author of this protest against the Welsh Rugby Union:
A Wooden Spoon for the WRU
(A druid speaks)
I have consulted the mistletoe,
stared at starling footprints in snow:
the time is ripe for your overthrow.
I give you a spoon I shaped of ash
because you didn't nurture the flash
of play but thought, maybe, of cash.
Here's a dip I turned from oak
but look, in your hands, it slips into smoke.
You've made our last Grand Slam a joke.
Actual rugby can never redeem
your backroom moves of dodge and scheme.
It's you who need to raise your game.
How can a committee always outlive
coaches, players? It’s hard to forgive
shadowy men with hands like sieves.
Here's the last spoon, I carved it from gall:
it's you, not the team, who have dropped the ball.
Hang this up, with shame, in your hall.
D.A. Powell's mention of Etheridge Knight had me reminiscing: In 1984, when I was 20, I hung out at a Philadelphia bar called the Bacchanal, especially on Mondays, when they had their poetry readings. I had written so few poems, I could memorize them all. During the open readings, I'd recite my poems without paper, clutching a bottle of beer, with my eyes closed. The applause I got gave my confidence a big boost--like Gertrude Stein said, "What an artist needs most is praise." After a few weeks of this schtick, the organizer scheduled me for a feature reading with, trumpets and drumroll, please, Etheridge Knight! Shit, man, here I am hobnobbing, featured, dude, name on the same flyer with a legend, mind you. Universal fame then decades of creative intensity and fertile, gestating leisure, not to mention endless nookies, can't be too far away, I thought. Minutes before the reading, as I was drinking a Rolling Rock at the bar, Etheridge walked over.
"You ready?"
"Yeah."
"Are you a poet?"
Annoyed, I stared at the man, "I'm reading with you and I'm not a poet?"
"Just answer me. Are you a poet?"
"Of course I'm a poet!"
"OK, so let's go read then!"
It didn't take me long to realize Etheridge had no money. A visit to his apartment confirmed it. He was living in Logan with his girlfriend, and I bought a yellow tin of jasmine tea as a present. We had dinner that night. The fact that Etheridge managed to exist outside the system was very inspiring to me, C.A. Conrad, Tom Devaney and many other young poets in Philadelphia. We also admired his life experience. Etheridge would jokingly call me, "professor," although I had no college degrees and was also dead broke. I was a filing clerk, an office and house cleaner, a window washer, a gallery technician and a house painter. I didn't get my first teaching job until four years ago, when I was hired by Bard College. Since then, I've taught at U. Penn, Naropa and the U. of Montana. So I became a professor, after all. Etheridge also turned academic when he earned a bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice from Martin Center University, in 1990, the year before he died. Knowing Etheridge was very sick, I phoned him in Indiana.
A 42-year-old Asian man was found hanging by the neck, suspended by a rope attached to the raised shovel of a John Deere model J D 410, diesel powered, backhoe tractor. He was last seen alive by his parents, the prior evening at 10:30 when he walked out of their shared rural home. Shortly thereafter they heard the tractor engine start, as they had on prior occasions, but they investigate no further. The following morning the father noticed that his son's bed had not been slept in, and he heard the tractor engine idling. When he went out to the yard, he found his son dead, stiff, and cold.
The decedent was suspended in a semi-sitting position by a cloth safety harness strap wrapped around his neck and clipped to a rope that was hooked on the raised shovel of the backhoe tractor. A towel was between the loose-fitting strap and the victim's neck. A long piece of plastic pipe was connected on one end by conduit tape to the hydraulic control lever of the shovel in the operator's compartment of the tractor. A broomstick was taped to the other end of the pipe and was partially under the decedent's buttocks. The hydraulic shovel could be easily raised or lowered by pressure applied to the broomstick. The decedent was fully clothed and his genitals were not exposed. No pornographic materials, women's clothing items, or mirrors were at the scene.
The decedent was a self-employed engineer who was unmarried and had always lived with his parents. He owned his own successful company and was actively involved in several hobbies, including two high-risk sports. He regularly contributed volunteer work to a charitable organization. His medical history was remarkable only for Reiter's syndrome with ankylosing spondylitis and clinical urethritis. He had no known psychiatric illness.
Two years before his death he had bought the backhoe tractor as a Christmas gift to himself and named it "Stone." He used the backhoe on occasional ditch-digging jobs. He wrote about it in a Christmas newsletter to friends, in which he enclosed Stone's picture. He also wrote about his tractor in a long poem, which alluded to flying high in the sky with his friend, Stone.
[from Amok Journal, an excerpt from "Autoerotic Fatalities with Power Hydraulics" by Ronald L. O'Halloran, M.D., and Park Elliot Dietz, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., originally published in Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 2, March 1993.]
Gas makes things go.
From here to there
Is a long way.
Gas makes things go.
"I" like it because
It gets "me" around
Real easy. It lets big trucks
Drop my greens
At the grocery store.
Gas, you makes things go
So I won't know
A walk in summer heat.
No one believes it
Will go away. Gas,
Please don't go. I want
Everyone to be okay.
Especially my friends
Who live in far-off sub-
Urbia. And others like me
Who await deliveries
Of things from far away.
(Gas, remember
That great nose hair trimmer
You brought me from China!)
When it's hot I like
Cold beer from Pacific
Northwest breweries.
We know who to thank
For such hopsy convenience.
And Gas, while I'm at it,
I can't imagine
Austin to Phoenix
Without you. I love too
Flying with you
In a Boeing engine
Across the dust-parched
Topos of New Mexico.
Gas, you're great and
You keep the show alive.
What would we do without you?
Curl up with a goatboy
In some itchy grotto
To weave our own clothes or
Make plastic garbage bags?
Hey, Gas, sometimes you
Make me feel creepy.
Are you my friend?
You hardly call anymore. Do
Bovid features turn you on?
There he goes, bah-bah
In the green patches of
Desert pasture. Gas,
Go on. Mount
His back and do
Your thing, if that means
You still like "me." O
Promise me that you'll come
Again tomorrow!
Six Contemporary Arab Poets
Chosen and translated from the Arabic by Tahseen al-Khateeb, with editing by Linh Dinh
YOUSEF AL-KHAL (Lebanon, 1917-1987) was a poet, critic, playwright, journalist and translator. He is the author of more than eight books, among which are: Liberty (1944), Herodia (1955), The Deserted Well (1958), Modernity in Poetry (1978), and The Second Birth (1981). He is also the translator of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1958), Selected Poems by Robert Frost (1958) and the anthology, The Divan of American Poetry.
Prayer in the Temple
I
The stone speaks. It becomes wine, becomes bread, it becomes.
The stone is a sky, blessed is he who has wings.
O how I love you tonight.
I embrace you like this for the first time. I undress in you, for the first time I am this stone-sky.
Your eyes, your whole body is a child swimming. I love the child and the water; the water and the child.
And in this wasteland, with but a stone to get along with, which bolsters and comforts despite its hardness.
Let this moment be for the two of us. The stone is a sky and we are its wings.
II
When I awake, the river awakes and flows and fills the plain. I'll hoist the day's mast. Alone. The companion I wait for has not come.
When I awake light sits before me. Why don't you rise up O foolish wound and carry your bed and walk?
The walls are vanishing. The air flutters its eyes. The feet are stomping the street's waist. There's no whispering in the light. Screaming is the only password.
When I awake, my love awakes with me.
III
My legs are of reed, I'll find myself a cane.
I found it: a thread of blond silk.
Now I'll walk to the end of the earth. In the plain, in the mountain. In the night. In the day. I'll walk like a dream fulfilled by wakefulness.
My love is with me. My whole body is with me. My God is with me. Rise up O destiny and make room for me.
IV
From afar my oak shades me and takes care of me. Stretches out its arms to me. In its branches a nest with two sparrows.
Here I am singing. In the temple's courtyard an apple tree, its fruits are oil for my throat.
I'm crazy about my oak. For it I am here. For it I am singing.
During the day I dream of my shadow, and in the night I embrace it and slumber.
I'll raise the sun on my wings. I'll nail it down, so it won't move. The oak's shadow is my only bliss.
V
Tonight, I climbed the ivory towers. Your blue hair is my ladder.
Ah, and on your altar I offer sacrifices: a pair of doves, and an ewe fattened to be sacrificed. And here I am ascending the slope with my only child. The wounds of joy scream, my days are as silent as a hand.
At dawn, I will shepherd my sheep, and, in the evening, I will sing to them the songs of return.
Let me now scream.
My body departs me. Leaves me like a stranger, like a knight I've never seen.
VI
Your eyes are two creeks beckoning. How sweet is your child-mouth. Your tongue makes the body, and your panting gives the breath of life.
Ah, what a god you are. Your paradise is not leading astray. All its fruits are for me. And I am its first man.
Embrace me O felicity. On your body I steer my boat. Its oars are of eternal desire.
Let the tempest blow as much as it desires.
I am an ancient mariner and my boat is a cedar of love.
Embrace me O my little god. Close your horizons on me. Love me more than love. My history is a deep, bottomless wound.
VII
Don't shut your dress like this. Let it enter. Let it ascend. Your breasts are two summits. Their descending is tempting, opening the dreams of the body.
In your garden, I'll plant a stem of rose.
And if I lived until autumn, I'll pull down the hedge of boxthorn and erect one of wind and light.
Let's be happy today.
For a long time my tongue didn't swarm and crawl around honey. My nails are still blunt.
Stand naked opposite me and I will show you the keys of life.
O let it enter!
The light of life is small. Its presence is an eternity of posterity.
VIII
The window by your bed is stuck in the cloud. Do you open it, like this, and disappear?
Who sets the table today, spreads the cloth of happiness, embraces my solitude in the shadow and protects me from the blackness-of-the-face?
My presence is a wave of mystery your strange body unfolds.
Neither odalisques in my ships nor slaves. Nor pines. Nor jewelry of glass and stones.
In my ships a word and one little deed.
And here is the city, surrendered. Its walls begin to fall down.
And I am like July. My blood is a salvation from drought, and my body a feast for lovers.
We are all hungry for the body, and thirsty for the juices of the soul.
Anima Female souls, from the roots an, "heavenly," and ma, "mother," recalling a time when all souls were supposed to emanate from the Heavenly Mother. In the 16th century A.D. Guillaume Postel said every soul had male and female halves, the animus and anima. The male half had been redeemed by Christ, but the female half was still unredeemed and awaited a female savior. This was a new development of the old Christian view that only males had any souls at all. The third canon of the Council of Nantes in 660 A.D. had decided that all women are "soulless brutes."
Alchemist applied the word anima to all "spirits" considered female: Anima Mercury, Anima Mundi, etc. The Spirit of the World was connected with the elements of earth and water, like Eleusinian Demeter, "Mistress of Earth and Sea." One reason alchemists were suspected of heresy was their notion that the World-Soul was a female anima.
Carl Jung revived the terms animus and anima to describe reasoning and intuitive parts of the mind (i.e., left and right hemispheres). Every person's anima is "often symbolically connected with both earth and water. She is pictured as timeless and profoundly wise... Each man's first and formative experience of the anima is with his mother. Her true function in the mind, according to Jung, is creativity. [From Barbara G. Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets]
animism 1866, reintroduced by Sir Edward Burnett Taylor, who defined it (1871) as the "theory of the universal animation of nature," from L. anima "life, breath, soul." Earlier sense was of "doctrine that animal life is produced by an immaterial soul" (1832), from Ger. Animismus, coined c.1720 by physicist/chemist Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) based on the concept of the anima mundi (q.v.). [From Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary]
[Betty Boop in Snow White, 1933, as animated by Roland C. Crandall]
--Bruce Springsteen, from "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" (1992)
I came to the US in 1975. Back then, Americans had four television channels to kill their time: ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS, not 500 like today. During football season, you could watch three NFL games a week, two on Sunday, one on Monday. Now, you can stare at six games simultaneously, if you go to the right bar or if you have enough televisions. In Vietnam, there were two channels, one in Vietnamese, one English, both of them broadcasting for only half a day. With little on screen, people entertained each other by talking face to face, at home, in the café and in bed, where up to four bodies might lie together. Story telling was a much appreciated skill, developed early. People didn't read but recount tales they'd heard, made up or modified. As a young child, I yearned to hear and experience more so I'd have many more stories to tell. For kids, the old standbys were folktales such as this:
cười (v) to laugh, smile or chuckle. cười ầm (v) to laugh with a booming voice. cười bò (v) to laugh while crawling on the ground, usually said of children or drunkards. cười bối rối (v) to laugh nervously while confused. cười buồn (v) to smile wanly or in grief. cười cầu tài (v) to grin while kissing ass. cười chảy nước mắt (v) to laugh oneself into tears, usually from some absurd situation. cười chê (v) to laugh in contempt. cười chúm chím (v) to smile or laugh modestly or coquettishly, without showing teeth, said of young women. cười cợt (v) to laugh while goofing around. cười cười nói nói (fig of sp) laugh laugh talk talk, i.e., to be loquacious. cười dở mếu dở (fig of sp) to half laugh, half wear a twisted face, i.e., to be in an awkward if not impossible situation. cười duyên dáng (v) to smile charmingly, said of young women. cười đến chết (v) to laugh oneself to death, i.e., uncontrollably. cười điệu (v) to smile rehearsedly and exaggeratedly, while picturing oneself smiling, of course, said of young women. cười đùa ngả ngốn (fig of sp) to laugh and joke while staggering around, i.e., to be frivolous. cười gằn (v) to laugh with curt, half-swallowed sounds as one's eyes flash hatred, contempt or anger. cười giòn (v) to laugh in loud, crisp, echoing bursts. cười góp (v) to laugh because others are laughing, without knowing why. cười ha hả (v) to laugh shamelessly in deep, sometimes inane satisfaction. cười hềnh hệch (v) to laugh contentedly or smugly, with mouth wide open. cười hì hì (v) to laugh with moderate mirth and slitty eyes, making hee hee sounds. cười híp mắt (v) to laugh with eyes nearly shut. cười hô hố (v) to laugh uninhibitedly, sometimes rudely or vulgarly, making ho ho sounds.
khóc (v) to cry or weep. khóc âm thầm (v) to cry or weep almost silently, (fig) in secret. khóc dạ đề (n) the infant proclivity for crying at night. khóc dai (v) to cry for an impossibly long time, stubbornly, with determination. khóc dở mếu dở (fig of sp) to half cry, half wear a twisted face, i.e., to be miserable. khóc đứng khóc ngồi (fig of sp) to cry while standing and cry while sitting, i.e., to cry all the time, to habitually cry. khóc gào (v) to cry while screaming. khóc gió than mưa (fig of sp) to cry about the wind, bitch about the rain, i.e., to whine and be a royal pain in the ass. khóc hết hơi (v) to cry oneself into exhaustion. khóc khàn cả tiếng (fig of sp) to cry oneself hoarse. khóc lén (v) to cry while hidden or while no one is looking. khóc lóc (v) to cry while sniveling and whimpering, (fig) be a crybaby. khóc mếu (v) to cry while trying not to cry, with face contorted. khóc mướn (v) to cry for money, be a professional mourner at a funeral. khóc ngất (v) to cry until one's nearly unconscious. khóc như cha chết (fig of sp) to cry as if one’s father has died. khóc như mưa (fig of sp) to cry like the rain. khóc nỉ non (v) to cry softly, which, from a certain angle and if the light’s too bright or dim, may not seem like crying at all. khóc nức nở (v) to cry convulsively, in rapid waves, with hiccuping sounds. khóc oà (v) to loudly burst into tears. khóc oe oe (v) to cry or wail while emiting pitiful yet charming oe oe sounds, said of babies. khóc oe oé (v) same as above, but a bit more shrill. khóc ròng (v) to cry for a very long time, even intermittently for weeks. khóc rống (v) to cry while howling. khóc rưng rức (v) to cry endlessly but without making much noise. khóc sụt sịt (v) to cry with a runny nose. khóc sụt sùi (v) to cry while trying to hide grief. khóc sưng mắt (v) to cry until eyes are swollen. khóc sướt mướt (v) to cry bitterly and theatrically. khóc than (v) to cry while lamenting. khóc theo (v) to cry because others are crying. khóc thương (v) to grieve. khóc tức tưởi (v) to cry bitterly and uninhibitedly. khóc xì xụt (v) to sob with a runny nose.
In 2000, John Balaban published Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. On the cover is a bare-breasted woman, presumably Oriental, hiding her face behind a gong or a wok. Introducing her, poet, not the hot chick, Balaban writes that "for her erotic attitudes, Hồ Xuân Hương turned to the common wisdom alive in peasant folk poetry and proverbs," and that "common people [...] could hear in her verse echoes of their folk poetry, proverbs, and village common sense," but Balaban never admits that these Hồ Xuân Hương poems are really a part of the folk tradition. I should point out that the average Vietnamese is also unwilling to let go of the legend, the juicy tale of a concubine penning racy and even proto-feminist poetry, but the facts don't support it. Who was Hồ Xuân Hương?
I hope you'll enjoy Missoula--it's an interesting place to live for a lot of reasons, particularly as the locus for various collisions and overlaps-- like the "redstate" libertarian / progressive-environmentalist overlap, and the liberal conservationist / hunter-fisher overlap, and the semi-wilderness animal habitat / suburban-urban development overlap, and so forth and so on. Makes the East Coast seem positively banal. [Youna Kwak in a 1/15/08 email]
I think Missoula is a great little town -- it's also where I got the largest audience of my life, debating Baudrillard in front of 600 people. [Ron Silliman in a 3/5/08 email]
Do poetry readings represent the dying or the mourning? Do they affirm the power of community? Or do they affirm the total indifference the world feels towards community, i.e. affirming the futility of gathering? [Brandon Shimoda in a 5/14/08 email]
I just spent four months at the University of Montana as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet, teaching two classes. Before coming to Missoula, population 60,000, I knew next to nothing about it. The temperature was -4F when I arrived, but it was a dry cold and not really that bad. Except for a compact, walkable downtown, the town seemed spread out, a suburban sprawl surrounded by snowy mountains, smooth and moderately sloped, not rugged and vertical like those on Montana postcards. Arriving from flat eastern Pennsylvania, I thought they were dramatic enough. Say Montana and many people will think of General Custer, Evel Knievel and the Unabomber, but David Lynch was also suckled, awed and (de)formed by it. Born in Missoula, Lynch remembers growing up in the Northwest Inland Empire:
I have come from Europe, bearing the dolphins!
I tell myself: “Oh say can you see, you could have
saved a lot of money - these are mere cinema replicas -
the grocer is korean, the streets are hassidic
and the skyscrapers are huge - the poets
are playing dolphin-God, while showering
in splendour the muffins have arrived"
except of course
if the animated Bambi debate arouses pastoral passions
as dr. Jafre A. Dollar helps you develop godly character
and the movies are cheaper
soothingly, for lo I have come,
bearing you all the dolphins!
Of the three poems below, guess which one was composed by a student:
Tears
When the male prostitute started to cry,
I knew right away something
unusual was happening. Something I could
not have foretold that morning, when I passed
my toothbrush under water,
before applying the paste, or zippered
up my bluejeans or took the first crisp
bite out of a hot toasted bagel, spread
with cream cheese. I had been
sucking him off, as
usual, and his cock was
wonderful, very hard. He was
barely moving, as I had asked, kneeling and I,
too, on my knees, bent. First I heard the muffled
catch, loud gurrump in the throat I took
for coming. A loud, clucked swallow—I
stopped. No, he said,
keep going—then
gulped, slung low in
the windpipe. My palms touched
floor before I felt the cold
droplet and looked up and he was
crying. He cried,
and cried and would not tell me. What,
I asked him, what? He had said,
before, his name was Todd. What,
Todd, what?—I kept asking,
but he only cried. I told him no matter
what the dreadful thing was,
nothing could be
that bad and not to worry. Then looked
around for my purse, which had
Mace in it—I’ve read
about these guys, who one day
just snap, like a fist punched through
the universe, and suddenly the world
unstarred and awry and who knows
whose neck they’ll wring next. Quietly,
still crying. Gurgling
din. Coursed
polluted streams across the torso. Drone
ribbon of the ages, what, Todd,
what?—I stopped asking.
And a cool shade
of dullness set in, identical
to the dullness before, the clean grey
walls, bristled nonsmell of
carpet, the dullness of even-tuft, sheerness
of sheets, identical as before but for
the low, persistent white caw of his tears.
I will come out and say it. I’ve been thinking about you constantly. Please don’t tell anyone about this. This is just between me and you, OK? I’ve been meaning to say this for a very long time, for an eternity, actually. I want you. I mean, I want you to want me. Please don’t laugh at my insolence and desperation. I can see you giggling already. Even across time zones, I can hear you howling. Is my nudity so ridiculous? I cannot keep this terse and cute, sweetie. I must go on babbling because “Orders are always short and brief, and every master is monosyllabic to his slaves, whereas supplications and lamentations are lengthy," so wrote Demetrius.
As haughty slaves, poets are no strangers to supplications and lamentations, since they must bow, defer, accede and give in constantly, they must 1) Refer for judgment or consideration 2) Put before 3) Yield to the control of another 4) Hand over formally 5) Refer to another person for decision or judgment 6) Yield to another's wish or opinion 7) Accept or undergo, often unwillingly 8) Make an application as for a job or funding 9) Make over as a return 10) Accept as inevitable. It sucks to submit, I know, and I've been on both ends of these undignified transactions. More than a decade ago, I received a letter from one miffed submitter [click on image to enlarge]:
A day before the Federal Reserves cut interest rates yet again, astute and straight-talking social commentator, Mike Whitney, wrote: "The stakes couldn't be higher for Ben Bernanke. If the Fed chief decides to lower rates at the end of April, he could be condemning millions of people to a death by starvation [...] Bernanke, with one swipe of the pen, now has an opportunity to send more people to their eternal reward than Bush." When Bernanke first came on, the Seattle Post Intelligencer commented that "he will have to get into the habit of parsing his words extremely carefully as he moves into a job where the wrong head tilt or inflection can make or lose millions." What kind of a job is it where a tilted head or an inflection can cause fortunes to evaporate? Where one swipe of the pen will kill millions? The New York Times' Richard W. Stevenson wrote about Alan Greenspan, Bernanke's predecessor: "his every phrase will be transmitted instantaneously to stock and bond traders worldwide and [...] his merest inflection can send markets stampeding." As poets, we spend our lives massaging inflections and tilting heads in front of empty chairs, but no one shudders, no money appears and no family goes hungry.
I have been told to talk to You with my head down
if I did not avert my eyes , you would not hear. Weird,
I thought, for the maker of heaven and earth to be so insecure
or to be living here, amidst the stink. Let me start again,
I come in peace, in a way, being on the side of Life; I am a fan
of your handiwork: flowers, flytraps, burrowing frogs...
But this is not about that, it is about the demons:
Does everyone have them all the time? Like viri or viruses
which flare when the hope is low?
Or is their manner of attack more bacterial?
Incapable of mere occupation. I guess it digests us.
Laying waste attractions and attachments
with their propaganda campaigns.
A moment while I mourn my blown bridges.
(sigh) all right I’m done.
What do the demons see in me? Me, a notoriously poor host;
in my house we sleep on the floor and eat on the floor
but we do not step on the floor; as this is a sore spot .
Maybe they think I want company.
I do not want any company
not that kind.
After I dreamed the demon was taken out of me, tornadoes hit Tennessee; which is where the
man who helps with demons lives
He said they wanted to get me
But why? Am I so weak?
Or am I bad? What if I can’t love because of them?
What if they are the only thing designed to love me?
You are responsible, G., I am applying again for assistance.
I believe my ground down teeth and busted guts are acceptable indicators of my plight as they
are listed in column A
of this application. Which is the fourth I have filled out,
by the way and why is that?
Have I been redistricted to Hell?
Yes? So, that is the point? But you are still at the Helm.
This application is still valid, yes?
I have a right to know what is holding me up!
G., I am tired of living in ignorance with voices and meaningful dreams after days where
everything happened already. This is the expose that may put better minds than mine to these
questions.
This is not a joke. Sure I may say it loud; indecorously before
a room of strangers; but that is part of my plan. After all,
they may know something as to this; hitherto unconsidered by me.
Thugs of the spirit world they are!
And you may be the biggest crime boss of all.
Taking care of the people in heaven with their better things
to do; who will sacrifice blood for you; and think nothing of it.
Of course you own the system; you were the one who forced us into particular bodies initially.
To play with. To infiltrate.
To pay you back. It’s called manipulation, by the way,
those who do it are Creeps.
You see, I am on the wheel beneath your world
the demons are inside me.
The other people do not believe it; this is not their district.
You made it this way; G., you big bully.
I tell you, you will never, NEVER get away with it!
In an earlier post, I mentioned a Pound translation, deformation of an O.V. de L. Milosz' poem, where he converted the French poet's "Symphonie de Novembre" into "Strophes":
Strophes
It will be as it is in this life, the same room,
Yes, the same! and at daybreak, the bird of time in the leafage,
Pale as a dead woman's face; and the servants
Moving; and the icy, hollow noise of the fountain-taps,
Terrible, terrible youth; and the heart empty.
Oh! it will be as it is in this life; the poor voices,
The winter voices in the worn-out suburbs;
And the window-mender's cracked street-cry;
The dirty bonnet, with an old woman under it
Howling a catalogue of stale fish, and the blue-apron'd fellow
Spitting on his chapped hands
And bellowing like an angel of judgement,
It will be exactly as here and in this life, and the table,
The bible, Goethe, the ink with the same temporal odor,
Paper, pale; woman, white thought-reader!
Pen, the portrait,
It will be the same,
My child, as in this life, the same garden,
Long, long, tufted, darkish, and, at lunch-time,
Pleasure of being together; that is—
People unacquainted, having only in common
A knowledge of their unacquaintance—
And that one must put on one's best clothes
To go into the night—at the end of things,
Loveless and lampless;
It will be the same as in this life,
The same lane in the forest; and at mid-day, in mid-autumn
When the clean road turns like a weeping woman
To gather the valley flowers,
We will cross in our walks,
As in the yesterday you have forgotten,
In the gown whose color you have forgotten.
[from The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster]
Movietelling, also known as neo-benshi, is the art of (mis)narrating a film. I encountered it for the first time in January of 2007, when I saw David Larsen's "Paris of Troy." The setting was Philadelphia's Powel House, named after the city’s first mayor, Samuel Powel, who bought it in 1769, four years after it was built. George and Martha Washington dined there. So did John Adams. Projecting 11 minutes of the film Troy (2004) onto a dining room wall, including its windows and yellow velvet curtains, David Larsen narrated this Hollywood version of the Iliad, book 3:
It is the clitoral tip of Asia.
You don’t believe me?
that’s a Hittite word, Assuwa
for the windy NW corner of Anatolia
where stood gleaming Tarawissa
the Hittite word for Troy
[…]
She stands there for 60 seconds exactly
which you would know if you were
sitting there with me
watching and re-watching this scene from Troy
wearing out the remote control
That’s Paris on the right, the
dreamy abductor
his brother’s trying to tell him something
Yeah whatever
[…]
oh wow
what a bad scene
I just realized I’m going to die learning
about myself in the hardest way
this is no pony party
actually it kind of is, is
what makes it all so horribly real
as if the sound were cutting back in
how much more time is this
going to take
my heart is in my ears
its every report a separate agony
the fight is in my heart
my heart is upside-down
The best way to criticize an imperfect translator is not to shoot, then bury him in a picturesque forest, but to do a better translation. Doing this, you'll make the flawed, offensive translation, which you've sucked on and tweaked only slightly, disappear forever from the face of this earth.
The many resistances in the source poem force the translator to compensate and invent, enriching the language he is translating into.
Vietnamese poet/critic Trịnh Thanh Thủy: “Influenced by the peculiarities of foreign languages and cultures, Vietnamese texts written overseas do not lose their strengths but gain new dimensions through awakened, previously latent capabilities."
In both cases, you have one culture or language trying to accommodate another. This meeting point, this border, this collision of avant-gardes, is where the new, improvised and unexpected can happen.
I’m not a translator so much as a tightrope walker between two unreliable dictionaries.
It's not entirely true that translation is just thin jism on a moonless night, eggdrop soup minus the egg, or a thin man chasing a fat man's shadow.
My apartment in Philadelphia is three blocks from Geno's Steaks, famous for the sign, "This is America, when ordering speak English." The owner of Geno's, Joey Vento, is a little guy with a big attitude. (Vento is Italian for "wind," by the way.) Joey has a Hummer and several Harleys, which he displays in a store front with his confederate flag, Elvis figurine and a Frankenstein manakin wearing a T-shirt that says, "I'm an American, so I order in English." Geno's is a tourist magnet, so it attracts plenty of foreigners, but the sign makes little sense, since what language would anyone order in but English? Of the roughly 6,900 languages in the world, hundreds are endangered, with one disappearing every two weeks. Approximately 600 became extinct in the last century. English is not threatened, obviously. It is the most dominant and ubiquitous language ever, more than Latin, French or Spanish, so there's no need to harass anyone into learning it. People worldwide are already hounded and seduced into memorizing, at the very least, "Yes. No. Thank you. Sexy. Excuse me. I'm sorry." Conversely, Americans overseas seldom bother to order their foods and drinks in anything but English. Just across the street from Geno's is Pat's, the original Philly cheesesteak joint and Geno's rival. Its slogan: "Don't order a misteak." Unlike Vento, Pat Francona is lowkey, a Democrat, like most folks in Philadelphia, and even a multiculturalist, "We serve everyone here. It doesn't matter if you speak English or any language. If you need help getting through a cheesesteak order, we'll help you. This is a multicultural neighborhood now. We have a range of different people now. We have to teach them. We can teach them to say cheesesteak."
In 2006, I spent two of the best months of my life in Marfa, Texas, thanks to a residency from the Lannan Foundation. While there, I drove several times to the sleepy, charming, dentist and drug-infested Ojinaga, explored the raw, alarming Ciudad Juarez, which reminded me a bit of provincial Vietnamese cities, discovered the bluesy, heartbreaking voice of Lydia Mendoza, goofy reggaeton and the Tejano corrido, which predates certain aspects of gangsta rap. I ate Mexican goat, tripes, drank good, cheap Carta Blanca, "old school," someone told me, shook hand with the brave photographer JuliánCardona, whom I met through poet Bobby Byrd. I also rode four buses to get from El Paso to San Ysidro, crossed into Tijuana, where I was given a tour by David Ungerleider, Jesuit priest and founder of the Universidad Iberoamericana. He showed me the US/Mexico border fences, then sent me these images:
