poetry

“Like an ermine mantle tossed over someone’s shoulder”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

This week, I’m departing from Shakespeare only to find him again in a short poem, “While Reading Hamlet” (1909), by Anna Akhmatova, the foremost Russian poet of the twentieth century. She’s perhaps best known for her long cycle Requiem, an outcry against Stalinist oppression, which claimed the lives of two of her three husbands.

This little poem is much lighter in tone, though the menace of the cemetery lingers. I wrestle with reading poems in translation, because to me it tends to feel almost like voyeurism, peeking in at something I don’t really have the right to know about or understand. No-one can speak all languages, though, polyglots notwithstanding, and so I must resign myself to translation if I want to read Milosz or Szymborska or Rimbaud or the great Anna Akhmatova.

I’m reading from my copy of the Norton edition of Akhmatova’s poems translated by Lyn Coffin; you can find it here.

“Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

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After we turned the television off last night, and let the quiet seep in, we were no less sad, but we had the space to feel the sadness of the day, and great thankfulness and joy in our ordinary lives.

Walt Whitman

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

“Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

for Eric

I don’t have anything new or insightful to say about death.

In the last five years, I’ve dealt with death by reading poetry. First I read poems to choose the ones other people would read at the funeral. Then I kept reading. I’ve read elegies and sonnets. I’ve read poems about the dead who died too young, about dead poets, about dead lovers, dead friends. And I’ve read poems that aren’t, ostensibly, about death, but that speak to me about the dead anyway.

Sometimes it helps, sometimes not.  Two poems that have meant something particular to me are “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman, and “Lycidas,” by Milton, of course (despite his egotism, the last twenty lines are amazing). I’ll be re-reading them tomorrow.

And I read “Dirge Without Words” by Edna St. Vincent Millay last week. I love Millay’s work, but I’d never read this poem before, and in its rage and futility and acknowledgment of all the customary tropes, it’s perfect.

“Silver dust, / lifted from the earth”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

It is, perhaps, premature to offer a spring poem from my chair in New England. But the crocuses are blooming — yesterday we counted twenty-one next to the garage — and I wish I had an orchard (romantic, I know, and all the orchard-growers out there will tell me how much work I’d be in for), so this week I’m reading “Pear Tree,” by the Imagist poet H.D. (less mysteriously, Hilda Doolittle).

And, with a pithiness that I hope befits the poet, that’s that.

“Your hands hold roses always in a way that says / They are not only yours”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

The end of a long story of mine is that I own the poetry collection of someone I loved very deeply and who died much too young.  In the beginning I kept our collections separate, and thought that someday I’d try to read through them as a way to work through my grief. But over time the project receded, and our collections have melded together so thoroughly that often I don’t know the provenance of a particular book.

This morning, my little son, H, and I were looking over the shelves to find a poem to work on this week, and I was drawn to Richard Wilbur’s New and Collected Poems (1989), which won the Pulitzer (Wilbur’s second). It’s a thick volume, and I found several promising poems, full of sly wit and concrete images, but nothing that shook me by the shoulders and said “This one!”

Until, that is, as my son fell asleep in my arms, I read the title of the last section: The Beautiful Changes, the title of Wilbur’s first book of poetry, published in 1947, when he was twenty-six (oh, to have the touch of genius!). My hands shook a little; I know these poems, “Cicadas” and “O.” I’ve read poems that talk to them.

And the last poem in the book, in the collection, is “The Beautiful Changes,” and it expresses, for me, what has happened since I lost this person I loved, whose fingers turned these very pages. Through the madness and the crushing weight of sorrow, the images that I cannot un-see, life and consolation reached out and found me.

I knew, without looking, that if I opened the inside back cover, I’d find three angular initials, and that they wouldn’t be mine.

But now the poem is ours.

“We get our danger from the lord”

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

One of the best side effects of this little project is learning a little about those poets whose names I’ve come across time and again but whose work I’ve never read. Case in point: Heather McHugh.  I want to run out to the bookstore and buy all of her books right now, but I won’t, because, you know, responsible-saving-for-house-and-H’s-summer-wardrobe/adult-life stuff.

[If, however, you wanted to run out to a bookstore and buy her books, and you happen to live in Metro Boston, I highly recommend Newtonville Books. It’s owned by my friends Mary and Jaime (full disclosure) and they are wonderful people who love writers and readers — a love that shows in their well-appointed store.]

Anyway, back to Heather McHugh. I’m reading “Etymological Dirge” this week, a short, smart poem that melds etymology (as you might expect) and emotion. I’m a sucker for word origins, despite my barely-there Latin and Greek, and this poem is just deliciously brilliant. Go ahead and give it a read here.

“so sweet / and so cold”

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I know it will seem like cheating, since this poem is so short, but I’ve always wanted to really know William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just To Say” — and I’ve never made it past the first two lines. I’m hoping to learn it well enough that all my notes, in future, will have the same apologetic, wistful clarity.

“in signs / We would smooth out like imprints on a bed”

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This week I found myself unprepared with a new poem to memorize, so I turned to The Poetry Foundation’s website for a fresh read. I found there a profile of Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and I loved the few poems available on the site to read.  I chose “Signs” to memorize (length, always length, alas). It’s sharp, unexpected, and fast — wheeling from palm-reading to a formation of geese to an airplane crash to a “housefly’s panicked scribbling on the air” without time for the reader to catch a breath.

“Signs” appeared in the June 1974 issue of Poetry.

“Dios padre sus miles de mundos / mece sin ruido” // ” God the father his thousands of worlds / rocks without sound”

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Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, so you’d think her poems would be easy to find, since, you, know, she’s pretty darn awesome.

Not so.

I comb bookshelves on a fairly regular basis, and in, say, the ten years that I’ve been on the lookout for one of her books, I’ve never found one.

But the interwebs is a blessing, despite its many flaws, and on Powells.com I found a true gem: a third printing of a 1957 volume of Mistral’s poetry translated by Langston Hughes. THE Langston Hughes. Doubly awesome.

The book’s shortcoming is that it doesn’t include the poems in the original Spanish, but after ten years, I’ll take it. Of course, those ten years took most of my fluency in Spanish with them, but c’est la vie. Sorry. Es la vida. If you’d like a side-by-side translation, you might check out Ursula K. LeGuin’s newer edition, also on Powell’s.

These past few weeks we’ve been watching our son make an speedy transition from babydom into boyhood, and I’m feeling a little nostalgic, so out of the many lovely poems in this volume, I’m learning “Cradle Song” or “Meciendo” in Spanish, which means “rocking.” It’s sweet without becoming treacly, and, as you’d expect, it’s quite rhythmic and repetitive. Underneath the poem runs a current of power and tragedy, which presages, I think, Mistral’s later, dark work. “Meciendo” comes from her early volume Desolacion.

I’m going to try to learn the poem in Spanish. As far as I can tell, Hughes’s translation is less literal than Le Guin’s, but each has its own advantages. I might try my own translation — I’ll post an update next week.

“The flash across the gap of being”

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Howard Nemerov is a poet whose work I’d like to know better. He’s the favorite poet of one of my poetry-inclined uncles, and when I took the time to flip through The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, I was amazed by the versatility, the breadth, the sheer variety of his work. It’s meaty poetry, the kind that requires many days of reading and re-reading to achieve an understanding.

It was difficult to choose a poem to memorize, since so many in even this small collection are appealing, but I landed on “Moment” for its length (just fifteen lines) and the way the simplicity of the title underscores the complexity of the thought within the poem, which juxtaposes some dozen images with the repeated word “now.” What begins with “Now” and a “starflake” crescendoes to “the mind of God” and the inevitable “now.”  The poem is one sentence, and I found the moments when I needed to take a breath underscored the “nowness” as well. And I’m a sucker for good linebreaks, if you couldn’t tell, and here’s one for the ages: “And now is quiet in the tomb as now / Explodes inside the sun, and it is now” (10-11).

What a mind at work. I’ll be back for more.