Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures

Sower for Theo

Is this what you intended, Vincent
that we take our rest at the end of the grove
nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration
saying, who and how am I made better through struggle.
Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum
this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision
the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree.
O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that
or if you can indeed hear what I might say
heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty
of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection.
To not be naive and think of silly answers only
not to imagine answers would be the only destination
nor is questioning color even useful now
now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.
That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
that the sun can do this to everything inside
the broken light refracted through leaves.
What the ancients called peace, no clearer example
what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.
Leaves shine in the body and in the head alike
the sun touches deeper than thought.

Letters to Theo Sower

O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing
to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world.
There might be nothing greater than this
nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within
like in the middle of the flower I call your name.
To correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff
to toil and to reflect and to home and to paint
father, and further, the migration of things.
The homing action of geese and wood mice.
The ample evidence of the sun inside all life
inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too.

But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.
The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity
but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.
The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun
at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.
The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside
and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that
the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time
in the time of pictures and refracted light.
Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night
the animal proximity of another and of nigh.

To step into it as into a large surf in late August
to go out underneath it all above and sparkling.
To wonder and to dream and to look up at it
wondrous and strange companion to all our days
and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us.
The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light
the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers
to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing.
The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it
the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms
these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge.

Now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.
To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane
and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.
The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression
making so much more of itself here than where it signals
the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing.
Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing
thought nothing might be the final and actual expression of it
that nothing at the center of something alive and burning
green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet
into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone.

Letters to Theo

But what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar
the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling
what of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line.
To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.
The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever
the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint
into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight.
That light was my enemy and one great source of agony
one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.
The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear
the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun.

The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun
the fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear
one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass.
That light was my enemy and one great source of agony
into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight
the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint.
The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever.
To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die.
What of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line
the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling
but what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar.

Into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone
green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet
that nothing at the center of something alive and burning
through nothing might be the final and actual expression of it.
Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing
the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing
making so much more of itself here than where it signals.
The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression
and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread.
To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane
now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter.

Letters to Theo walking

These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge
the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms
the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it.
To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing
the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers.
The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light
and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us
wondrous and strange companion to all our days.
To wonder and to dream and to look up at it
to go out underneath it all above and sparkling
to step into it as into a large surf in late August.

The animal proximity of another and of nigh.
Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night
in the time of pictures and refracted light
the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time
and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that.
The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside
at least what the old books called science or bowed down to.
The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun
but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true.
The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity
but felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect.

Inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too
the ample evidence of the sun inside all life
the homing action of geese and wood mice
father, and furhter, the migration of things.
To toil and to reflect and to home and to paint
to correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff
like in the middle of the flower I call your name.
Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within
there might be nothing greater than this
to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world.
O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing.

Willows for Theo

The sun touches deeper than thought
leaves shine in the body and in the head alike
what our fathers called the good, what better celebration.
What the ancients called peace, no clearer example
the broken light refracted through leaves.
That the sun can do this to everything inside
that the sun can do this to us, every one of us
now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons.
Nor is questioning color even useful now
nor to imagine answers would be the only destination
to not be naive and think of silly answers only.

Of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection
heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty.
Or if you can indeed hear what I might say
O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that
the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree
this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision.
Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum
saying, who and how am I made better through struggle
nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration
that we take our rest at the end of the grove
is this what you intended, Vincent.

 

Peter Gizzi, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures,” in The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press, 2007)

*
Note:  On February 27th, 2013, Peter Gizzi was in McCosh Hall to read and discuss his recent work with students and faculty at the invitation of the Contemporary Poetry Colloquium.

 

 

Paradise Lost: A Reading Marathon

On Friday, February 8th, 2013, the largest blizzard of the season wasn’t enough to deter a hardy group of undergraduates, graduate students, and professors from gathering in McCosh Hall for Prof. Russ Leo’s challenge: a marathon reading of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. With the Hinds Library packed to capacity, the reading got underway at 6pm and continued…until 4 o’clock in the morning, when a devoted band of readers emerged to find a snowy world was all before them.

IMG_6702

IMG_6699

IMG_6695

IMG_6703

Big thanks to Russ Leo for organizing and leading this special event, and to Andrew Miller for these pictures.

 

Spring Poetry Courses this Semester at Princeton

From the Course Catalogue, Spring 2012-2013

 

ENG 558   American Poetry – Ezra Pound and Modern Poetry
Joshua I. Kotin

 

ENG 563   Poetics – Continuing Pastoral
Susan A. Stewart

 

ENG 553   19th Century Poetry & Poetics: Historical Poetics
Meredith A. Martin

 

ENG 315 / THR 315    Shakespeare and Performance
Michael W. Cadden

 

ENG 321   Shakespeare II
Jeff Dolven

 

ENG 325   Milton
Russell J. Leo

 

ENG 312   Chaucer
Andrew Cole

 

FRE 525    French Modernist Poetry
Efthymia Rentzou

 

SLA 518    Major Russian Poets – The Silver Age
Nikolay A. Bogomolov

 

CLA 533   Vergil – Eclogues
Yelena Baraz

 

LAT 335   Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Denis Feeney

 

CLG 108   Homer
Michael E. Brumbaugh

 

GER 515   Heinrich Heine und Sigmund Freud
Sigrid Weigel

 

JPN 404    Readings in Classical Japanese
Keiko Ono

 

Program in Creative Writing – The Lewis Arts Center

 

ATL 496/CWR 496   How to Write a Song

 Paul Muldoon and John Wesley Harding

 

CWR 202   Creative Writing (Poetry)

Tracy K. Smith, Sarah J. Manguso, Paul B. Muldoon, and Michael C. Dickman

 

CWR 302    Advanced Creative Writing (Poetry)

James Fenton

 

 

‘The Avant Gardener’: Ian Hamilton Finlay at the Tate Britain

Ian Hamilton Finlay, The World Has Been Empty Since the Romans, 1985
*
The Tate Britain currently has a show highlighting their collection of works by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), the Scottish concrete poet, sculptor, and landscape artist, perhaps best known for his Little Sparta, an Arcadian garden of sculpture and concrete poetry he carved out in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh with his wife Sue Finlay. Nick Thurston has an excellent piece over at Bomb Magazine’s blog that considers some of the problems with reconciling Finlay’s postmodern aesthetics and his often reactionary political or moral worldviews. The exhibition is a chance to review these often collaborative works, and perhaps to consider how Finlay’s use of form and poiesis is in dialogue with other contemporary poetic appropriations of pastoral or antiquity, like those in the work of Anne Carson or Geoffrey Hill.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Shenval Christmas Poem / Print 1971
*
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Poster Poem (Le Circus), 1964
*
Ian Hamilton Finlay with Richard Healy, Two Trees / Woodcuts 1982
*
recto /
verso
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gateway to a Grove, 1985

‘Requiem’ in memoriam Lêdo Ivo (1924-2012)

The Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo passed away December 23rd, 2012, during a visit to Seville, Spain. Ivo is considered a major figure in Brazilian poetry of the last century, and a member with Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto, of the “Generation of 45” who advanced an ideal of Concrete poetry anchored in modernist poetics, anti-lyricism and social realism. His first collection, As Imaginações was published in 1944. ‘Requiem’ is a late work composed between 2004-2006 after the death of his longtime companion, and published with other poems in a collection of the same title in 2008. It is a long monologue written in eight parts and begins with a bare, Giacometti advance into the light: ‘Aqui estou, à espera do siléncio.’ [Here I am, waiting for the silence.] The entire poem, translated into English by Kerry Shawn Keys (with help from José Carlos Dias) and published in the literary magazine The Drunken Boat with the translators notes, can be read here. In memoriam, this is part V of ‘Requiem’ in the Keys translation followed by the original Portuguese in italics.

 

from Requiem ‘V’

 

Happy are those who depart.

Not the ones who reach the rotten ports.

Happy those who depart and never come back.

 

For I stay always half way

and my journey remains unfinished.

Happy are those who don’t know the final station.

 

Happy those who disappear in the fog,

those who open windows at dawn,

those who light the lights of the airfields.

 

Happy are those who cross the bridges

when the afternoon lands among the refineries like a bird.

Happy those who possess an inattentive soul.

 

Happy are those who know that, at the end of the passage,

Nothing awaits them, like a scarecrow in a corn field.

Happy those who only find themselves when windborne or lost.

 

Happy are those who have lived more than one life.

Happy are those who have lived countless lives.

Happy those who vanish when circuses pull up their tents.

 

Happy those who know that each fountain is a secret.

Happy are those who love storms.

Happy those who dream of illuminated trains.

 

Happy those who loved bodies and not souls,

who heard the hoot of white owls in the silence of the night.

Happy are those who found a lost syllable in the dew of the grass.

 

Happy those who crossed the obscure night and the untimely fog,

who saw the crackling fire dancing in the big bonfires of June,

happy those who watched the sky open like an altar cloth

to welcome the flight of the falcon.

 

Happy those who live on the outlying islands

and are surrounded at nightfall by a cloud of leaf-cutter ants.

Happy those who just sat around and then one day left.

 

V

Felizes os que partem.

Não os que chegam aos portos apodrecidos.

Felizes os que partem e não regressam jamais.

 

Que eu esteja sempre no meio do caminho

e a minha viagem seja inacabada.

Felizes os que não conhecem a estação final.

 

Felizes os que somem no nevoeiro,

os que abrem as janelas quando nasce a manhã,

os que acendem as luzes dos aeródromos.

 

Felizes os que atravessam as pontes

quando a tarde pousa entre os gasômetros como um pássaro.

Felizes os que possuem uma alma distraída.

 

Felizes os que sabem que, no fim da travessia,

o Nada os espera, como um espantalho num milharal.

Felizes os que só se acham na perda e no vento.

 

Felizes os que viveram mais de uma vida.

Felizes os que viveram vidas inumeráveis.

Felizes os que desaparecem quando os circos vão embora.

 

Felizes os que sabem que toda fonte é um segredo.

Felizes os que amam as tempestades.

Felizes os que sonham com trens iluminados.

 

Felizes os que amaram corpos e não almas,

os que ouviram o pio das corujas brancas no silêncio da noite.

Felizes os que encontraram uma sílaba perdida na relva orvalhada.

 

Felizes os que atravessaram a noite obscura e a bruma inoportuna,

os que viram o fogo crepitante nascer nas grandes fogueiras de junho,

felizes os que assistiram ao céu abrir-se como um pálio para acolher 

                                                                          [o vôo do gavião.

 

Felizes os que moram nas ilhas periféricas

e são rodeados ao cair da noite por uma nuvem de tanajuras.

Felizes os sedentários que um dia foram embora.

Ledo Ivo

 

Dom Sylvester Houédard from The Cosmic Typewriter

Rick Poynor over at Design Observer reviews a new book, Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter, about the British Benedictine monk, scholar, translator, concrete poet and artist Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–92). An excellent occasion to get a glimpse of a neglected master of Concrete and Visual Poetry.

Poster for a lecture at the Royal College of Art, London, March 1964. Designer unknown

 

Dom Sylvester Houédard, 69, 1964. (Collection: Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry)

 

Dom Sylvester Houédard, a particular way of looking, 1971
(Collection: Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry)

 

Dom Sylvester Houédard, comment le present ouvrage suscite ces questions critiques, 1971
(Collection: Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Celebration of James Schuyler

 

 

February

 

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can’t see
making a bit of pink
I can’t quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can’t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we’d gone to see.
One green wave moved in the violet sea
like the UN Building on big evenings,
green and wet
while the sky turns violet.
A few almond trees
had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes
out of the blue looking pink in the light.
A gray hush
in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
into the sky. They’re just
going over the hill.
The green leaves of the tulips on my desk
like grass light on flesh,
and a green-copper steeple
and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.
I can’t get over
how it all works in together
like a woman who just came to her window
and stands there filling it
jogging her baby in her arms.
She’s so far off. Is it the light
that makes the baby pink?
I can see the little fists
and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.
It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly.
Two dog-size lions face each other
at the corners of a roof.
It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.
It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.
It’s a day like any other.

James Schuyler, Collected Poems, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1993

 

 


Frank O’Hara, John Button, James Schuyler, and Joe LeSueur watching television, ca. 1960.

 

 

 

Letters from Italy, Winter 1954–55,  from James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara
in Jacket Magazine nº29, April, 2006

 

Nov 7, 1954
American Express

Rome, Italy

 

Dear Frank,

Just a note to tell you that I’m taking your note to the local tapestry works, where I’m going to have it copied in Parker blue on Sphinx typing paper gray, wall-size. And my idea of wall-size is the northern flank of the UN Building. You’re cute, that’s what you are.
     Anguillara didn’t work out for beans, so I’m established in a somewhat meager, but pleasant, little hotel in Rome. My days are full, fair and fine, but my evenings barren of any sort of intercourse. I’ve become a moviegoer again, if not a bug or fan; it’s like being an opium addict without getting any lift. Let’s see, I’ve seen: Witness to Murder, Mogambo, Ulisee (I saw it in Italian, so that’s what I call it), de Sica’s dud, Stazione Termini, On the Waterfront, From Here to…and a couple of Italian ones I won’t go into. Not to put a fine point on it, I thought them all hell; though many featured nice-lookers caught looking their best. Tonight it’s a toss-up between Danny Kaye, dubbed, or Gerard Philipe, not dubbed. Maybe I’ll just duck over to the forum and worship a heathen idol instead.
     If you don’t tell me what poems you have in Poetry, I’ll — o I don’t know what I’ll do. Gnash my teeth, perhaps.
     Al K [resch] was here, and having so much fun. He couldn’t sit down without drawing, and he vanished one morning into the Vatican before 9, and had a fit when they told him at 2 they were closing. I can’t spend ten minutes there without thinking how far I am from the nearest comfortable café. But now he’s back in Munich. And Bill [Weaver] is in Vienna, as are the boys. (Do, if you haven’t, write Bill: it seemed as though every time we went to Amer. Exp. together, I got a letter from you. Or so it seemed to him! You know how rejectable our young folk are nowadays.)
     This is just a silly Sunday evening note, brought on by your note, which touched me so.

Love,  Jimmy

 

 

Tuesday, October 30, 1990

The sky at 6 clear and gray as blotting paper, a sky for which the loud unmodulated grind of a garbage truck is the fitting music on the right instrument.
Tomorrow morning Tim Dlugos is going to be interviewed, and to read part of his long poem just published in The Paris Review, on one of the morning talk shows—”Good Morning America,” I believe it’s called. If only this were not in a segment called “Living with AIDS”! His latest affliction is one suffered only by people with AIDS and birds, which causes his temperature to go rocketing up and up. A line of Stevens kept coming into my mind: “Dying lady, rejoice! rejoice!” How can he? Why should he? Because he’s going to Abraham’s bosom? Bur he’d prefer to stay in his Christopher’s arms.

from The Diary of James Schuyler, ed. Nathan Kernan, Black Sparrow Press, 1997

 

The Green Stamp Book; Sally’s Hair

detail from an ad for broadcast tv 1950

Advertisement for Broadcast Television, 1950 (detail)

 

The Green Stamp Book

by Susan Wheeler

 

Child in the thick of yearning. Doll carted and pushed
like child. The aisles purport opportunities —

looking up, the women’s chins, the straight rows
of peas and pretzels, Fizzies’ foils, hermetic

boxes no one knows. I’ll get it! What thing therein
— bendy straws, powder blue pack Blackjack gum —

will this child fix upon? On TV, women with grocery carts
careen down aisles to find expensive stuff. Mostly,

this means meat. This, then, is a life. This, a life
that’s woven wrong and, woven once, disbraided, sits

like Halloween before a child, disguised in its red
Santa suit, making its lap loom the poppy field

Dorothy wants to bed. Can I have and the song’s begun.
O world spotted through more frugal legs. O world.

 

 

Sally’s Hair

by John Koethe

 

It’s like living in a light bulb, with the leaves
Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass
Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy
Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass.

 

I took the train back from Poughkeepsie to New York
And in the Port Authority, there at the Suburban Transit window,
She asked, “Is this the bus to Princeton?”—which it was.
“Do you know Geoffrey Love?” I said I did. She had the blondest hair,
Which fell across her shoulders, and a dress of almost phosphorescent blue.
She liked Ayn Rand. We went down to the Village for a drink,
Where I contrived to miss the last bus to New Jersey, and at 3 a.m. we
Walked around and found a cheap hotel I hadn’t enough money for

 

And fooled around on its dilapidated couch. An early morning bus
(She’d come to see her brother), dinner plans and missed connections
And a message on his door about the Jersey shore. Next day
A summer dormitory room, my roommates gone: “Are you,” she asked,
“A hedo­nist?” I guessed so. Then she had to catch her plane.
Sally—Sally Roche. She called that night from Florida,
And then I never heard from her again. I won­der where she is now,
Who she is now. That was thirty-seven years ago.

 

And I’m too old to be surprised again. The days are open,
Life conceals no depths, no mysteries, the sky is everywhere,
The leaves are all ablaze with light, the blond light
Of a summer afternoon that made me think again of Sally’s hair.

El, 64th Street, New York, 1955

William Klein, El, 64th Street, New York, 1955

 

_________________

On October 16th, 2012 at 6pm, Susan Wheeler and John Koethe will be reading new poems at Labyrinth Books,      122 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ. The reading is free and open to the public.

 

From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine

Diebenkorn Girl in White Blouse 1962

Richard Diebenkorn, Girl in White Blouse, 1962

 

From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine

By Rosanna Warren

 

I.

 

When his dogs leapt on Actaeon, he

cried (did he cry out?)—He flung

 

his arm to command, they tore his hand

from the wrist stump, tore

 

guts from his belly through the tunic, ripped

the cry from his throat.

 

That’s how we know a god, when the facts

leap at the tenderest innards, and we know

 

the god is what we can’t change. You

stood over me as I woke, I opened my eyes, I saw

 

that I’d seen and that it was too

late: the seeing

 

of you in the doorway with weak electric light

fanning behind you in the hall, and my room and narrow pallet steeped in shadow

 

were what I couldn’t change, and distantly

I wanted you, and, as distantly,

 

I heard the dogs, baying.

 

 

II.

 

And yet the fountain spends itself, and it is

in the clear

 

light of its losing that we seem

to take delight:

 

you dipped your hand in its running braid

to sprinkle my forehead, my lips.

 

Garden deities observed us: three nymphs

with moss staining their haunches, a pug-nosed faun.

 

The wound in water closed

perfectly around your gesture, erasing it,

 

so that only the glimmer, swiftly

drying, on my face recalled

 

our interruption

of the faultless, cold, passionate, perpetual

 

idea of the stream’s descent—

which, unlike ours, would always be renewed.

 

 

III.

 

I kissed a flame, what did I expect.

 

Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold:

one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk

through that wall of molten glass.

 

And purification

could be conceived, if not

attained, only after many years,

 

in autumn, in a fire greater than yours,

though menstrual blood still tinged the threshold

and our ex-votos were sordid—scraps of blistered flesh

 

taped to kitsch prayer cards—and neither of us knew

the object of this exercise, except

having, inadvertently, each of us, burned

 

we recognized the smell

of wood smoke, the slow swirl

flakes of wood ash make in heavy air;

 

and we were ready, each in a private way, to make

the gifts the season required.

Mine was the scene

 

of my young self in your arms,

eyes in your eyes, clutched in the effort

to give each other away—when I glimpsed

 

behind your pleasure, fear; behind

fear, anger; and knew

in a bolt some gifts

 

conceal a greater gift.

I have kept it. Now I am ready to give it back

into darker flame

 

in this season of goldenrod, the ardent weed,

and Queen Anne’s lace in its mantilla of ash.

And yet, how lumpishly, how stupidly I stand.

 

How much that is human will never burn.

 

 

IV.

 

And if you should answer?

I listened, years before I knew you, to the whine

of wind through the high stony pastures above my childhood village;

 

I breathed lavender and thyme and burned my bare legs

on nettles, scraped them on thistles, and rubbed

the sore skin till it reddened all the more. When we

 

walked the uplands together, you burned your hand

and I kissed the crimsoning nettle-rash. “We are the Lords of need,”

you said Hafiz said,

 

and I believed you, and we were.

In the rugs of your country, carmine is crushed

from insects, cochineal; saffron gold

 

is boiled from crocus stamens; and indigo

of heaven and fountain pools is soaked, hours upon hours,

from indigo leaves. “Like the angel Harut,”

 

you said, “We are in the calamity of love-desire.”

The angel is chained by neck and knees, head down, in the pit of Babel

for falling in love. Your carpets

 

told a different story: scarlet and saffron

blush as in Paradise, and God reveals himself

in wine, flame, tulips, and the light in a mortal eye.

 

All night you held me, sleepless, on my childhood cot in the stone house;

all night the wind seethed through crags and twisted olive trees,

high on the scents of thyme and goat droppings. “All night,”

 

Hafiz sang, “I hope the breeze of dawn will cherish the lovers.”

But the breeze of dawn is the angel of death.

You are in your far landscape now, I am in mine:

 

the wind complains and I can’t understand the words.

And if you should answer?

You, ten years away, in a different wind.

 

“We are in the calamity,” Hafiz sang. “But tell the tale

of the minstrel and of wine, and leave time alone. Time

is a mystery no skill will solve.” We should

 

thread words like pearls, you said, and the grateful sky

would scatter the Pleiades upon us

though we couldn’t see, and that was long ago.

 

 

V.

 

The carpet is not a story. It is a place,

garden of crisscrossed pathways, labyrinth,

fountain, pool, and stream.

 

As though the fabric had ripped at the vanishing point

at the top of the street

of ashen façades and slate-sloped roofs, you stepped

 

through the gap, out of your own world.

I had already lost my world.

We met in a torn design

 

which we tore further, pulling the tall warp,

thread wrapped tightly around our fingers until it bit the flesh

and the rue de Lille unravelled.

 

I know about design: it’s my job,

arranging other people’s letters in star charts

that phosphoresce in the dark between the closed covers of books.

 

You knew about design from the holes

blown through your country.

We spoke in a language of no country on earth.

 

You moved slowly, in shadow, teaching the shadows

to echo my name. You ripped my shirt at the neck.

Was it The Beloved I held, holding you?

 

Down the middle of the carpet the river

weaves a thousand gray glimmers into the deeper green.

The river knows about mourning; that’s its job.

 

How many years has it practiced? With such fleet fingers. A man

woke me at dawn this morning, sobbing and cursing in the street,

reeling from sidewalk to gutter and back again.

 

On my long gray street, the rue de Lille, where I still live.

 

 

 

NOTES: Anne Verveine is an imaginary French poet. She was born in 1965 in the village of Magagnosc in the Alpes Maritimes, and attended the lycée in Grasse. She never studied at a university. She lived obscurely in Paris, avoiding literary society and working as a typographer and designer for a small publisher of art books. She published a few poems in provincial journals, but no book of her own work. She was last seen hitchhiking in Uzbekistan in August 2000; is presumed kidnapped or dead. Anne Verveine’s sister found these poems in notebooks in the poet’s small apartment in Paris after her disappearance.

I translate them.

 

 

“From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine” from Departure,

W. W. Norton & Co., 2003

 

______

On September 25th, 2012, at 4:30pm Rosanna Warren, Bain-Swiggett Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor of Poetry, will be reading and discussing her work in McCosh 40 as part of the Princeton Contemporary Poetry Colloquium‘s guest speaker series.

 

Interview: Paul Muldoon & Yusef Komunyakaa

65_muldon_komunyakaa.jpg
Left: Paul Muldoon. Photo by Sigrid Estrada. Courtesy Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Right: Yusef Komunyakaa. Photo by Don Getsug Studios. Courtesy of the University Press of New England.

 

PM I am interested in the musicality of language. Anyone who writes verse has some notion of the rhythm of the line. There’s always an oral or aural aspect. I’ve lived here for ten years, and I don’t speak the same language I did twenty years ago. Mind you, I was thirty-five when I left Ireland so a lot of it was ingrained, but things have changed. The poems now reflect the variety of language to which I’ve been exposed, and also to which many readers have been exposed. We’re now operating, despite our insistence on the claims of the local and parochial, in a global context, where one can try to make sense of what’s happening in contemporary Chinese poetry. That’s not to say that there aren’t complications. Yusef, do you find yourself thinking about a notional or ideal reader?

YK I don’t, but I realize that my work is immersed in Southern idiom, along with an acquired literary language. I’m trying to make both function tonally side by side to create music that doesn’t have to achieve an absolute scale of meaning, but more or less to induce a certain feeling, because that’s what literature is. How I like reading poems is to return, going to the bottom of a poem and finding myself again at the top reading down. It’s a cumulative feeling.

PM That makes me think of T.S. Eliot’s remark about poetry being able to communicate before it’s entirely understood. Each year a group of about fifty judges comes to Princeton for a weekend to talk to the faculty about their various subjects. Their questions are quite probing, as you might imagine. One of them asked me: “In what part of your body do you know that your poem is finished?” It’s a pretty good question.

YK Yes, the physicality of language. The tongue married to the heart, and emotions defined by flesh.

PM Supposedly there’s a chord called the Devil’s Chord that evokes an extraordinary visceral effect, it makes the hair stand on the back of one’s neck. That’s the answer I gave; that there’s some logic of the body, some disturbance that registers at a physical level in poetry.

YK It’s an emotional logic. The way the body operates makes me think of the blue note. That impossible note the jazz musician attempts to reach for, and it consequently becomes the engine that drives creative improvisation.

PM When you sit down to write a poem, do you have a notion of a blue note?

YK My process is to write everything down and not worry about the shape. Then I impose a structural frame. Since one is working with tools that one loves, he or she knows them well and can trust them. Rhythm extends the possibilities within the shape of language—it’s reaching for that surprise, the blue note.

PM The unexpected.

YK The unexpected becomes the challenge, to achieve that and have the possibility of duplicating it, expanding it even further.

____

Interview From BOMB Magazine Issue 65, Fall 1998. You can read the rest of this exchange on the magazine’s Digital Archive. Paul Muldoon and Yusef Komunyakaa will be reading on Governors Island, NYC on September 22, 2012, at 2PM as part of the exhi­bi­tion Mark di Suvero at Gov­er­nors Island: Pre­sented by Storm King Art Cen­ter and Poets House.