rutopia.info

[imaginarylove]

[Meg]

. . . and having subjected people to my poem, I offer by way of apology, Anne Carson.

Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)

I: Death.
HT: Death made me grow up.
I: Love.
HT: Love made me endure.
I: Madness.
HT: Madness made me suffer.
I: Passion.
HT: Passion bewildered me.
I: Balance.
HT: Balance is my goddess.
I: Dreams.
HT: Dreams are everything now.
I: Gods.
HT: Gods cause me to be silent.
I: Bureaucrats.
HT: Bureaucrats make me melancholy.
I: Tears.
HT: Tears are my sisters.
I: Laughter.
HT: I wish I had a splendid laugh.
I: War.
HT: Ah war.
I: Humankind.
HT: Humankind is glass.
I: Why not take the shorter way home.
HT: There is no shorter way home.

[taciturnfriend]

Meg, I just noticed your poem a few minutes ago after Clive bumped the thread. I'm going to print and read it this evening, I will have some things to say which I hope may be useful in some way.

[NimbleMarmoset]

[Meg]

Thank you. I just posted it and wasn't necessarily expecting a response at all as this thread is so quiet, so I appreciate it!

I'm actually quite excited about the Anne Carson poem I just found. Well, I didn't just find it, I'd read it before but somehow failed to take notice. I have a poetry shindig tonight and if I can figure out a way to differentiate between interviewer and interviewee. Actually the difference might be self-evident enough anyway. We shall see.

[imaginarylove]

Oh, by the way:

[NimbleMarmoset]

heehee, I was thinking that.

[Meg]

That is interesting. I knew there was something familiar feeling about that poem, and I thought that I'd just read it before and didn't remember, but now that you point out the similarity between the poem and the Cohen song, perhaps it was that. And keeping with the theme of age and passing opportunity, yet with a somewhat more positive turn, the last third or so of Tennyson's Ulysses:

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

[youraprilfoolsman]

no one says goodbye better than you
and no one comes back easier
i never know what to do
when i'm around you
my nerves all twisted
my heart all melted down
the tossing of the frown

but there it is again
and here we are right back where we started
will this ever end
will you be more to me my friend

no one says goodbye better than you
and no one says i love you faster
you're a revolving door
in and out i go
in and out i go
where i will end up with you
is another story
i can't write

but there it is again
and here we are right back where we started
will this ever end
will you be more to me my friend

and still you take me in your arms
telling me it'll be alright
you make me whole
no one says goodbye better than you
and when you do
i'll be burying you

[taciturnfriend]

Meg, your poem. Just a few thoughts, possibly some will be helpful.

I enjoyed the sensual nature of it, this is a poem that lives on sights and sounds - and it's best when doing this concretely. The car sections are the most vivid, for that reason (I have no idea what the QEW is, but I didn't worry about not knowing).

However, there is a big problem in the situating of the poem. I think the reason for this is that you haven't decided what the poem is finally about: what do the connections the poem makes tell us about the speaker of the poem?

In the first stanza, for example, the sense of that first sentence is that "The drive [...] is present now, in someone else's church". This is a highly disconcerting abstraction, and for a poem that appears to be about drawing connections, an unhelpful beginning. I can't quite imagine the presence of a drive: you would do far better to bring into the present something concrete from it, something of the senses: you do so, effectively, with the fogged mirrors later.

And then, there is a similar semantic problem in the final stanza, which, when you strip out the modifying asides, explicitly says that "Three months ago [...] our griefs were much the same" - how does this work? I am not even certain who the "our" connects, although I assume it is the singer and the speaker of the poem. But how can the speaker know that three months before hearing the music? And in any case, the "our" could justifiably refer to the speaker and the customs agent, or the speaker and her sister. I have no idea, also, what the speaker's griefs are: while it doesn't have to be explicit, some kind of suggestion is necessary, I think, otherwise the connection with the overwhelming music, and the ghetto, becomes slightly embarrassing. Some clarity is needed here, as with the "both of us" in stanza three.

There is also confusion about the music, although it became less so once I'd googled the "Rhapsody Pathetique" and discovered that it is a "Hebraic lament". But you make something of this being "someone else's church", and have Yiddish songs in "St John the Divine", without making enough of it. As it stands this is just confusing: on my first reading, I thought the you'd introduced a third place with the Yiddish song. Either more or less needs to be done with this.

Those are the structural problems. On a smaller scale, you need to make your words work harder, I think. For example, the "sister / curled like a leaf" is beautiful, but as it stands this is just a visual image. What else is there about leaves that could be useful to you? And, "before me" in stanza three can do a bit more, too.

Stanza two... hmm. It's just about OK to personify the music (although, why?), but there's a lot of flab here. Most leaping is upwards... "shatters desolately" is unacceptable over-modification in any context, but certainly makes no sense in terms of music (it doesn't shatter, it reverberates. Over months. You tell us so). Use these lines to say more about this space, I would suggest. The emotional tugs are more real if they come later, unforced.

I hope that doesn't seem too negative. I do think there is much potential here, but it just isn't communicating yet.

One final thought, although you may think it mad: the poem is, like the sound, "contained and sorrowing", and it feels as though it wants to be held in a stronger metre. Have you thought about that? A number of the lines are close to IP: this could work very well in more structured blank verse.

[Meg]

Thank you so much for your help. Honestly I would probably just label this as a failed attempt if I wasn't required to revise it for a class. I can, as you suggest, introduce more structure, as the lines were supposed to be 9-14 syllables, so I can choose a certain length if I like. I didn't before in part because I'm being lazy, and writing in lines that are longer rather than shorter is new for me. The stanzas need to stay the length they are now, so that's the only part where I don't have a lot of flexibility.

[taciturnfriend]

[taciturnfriend]

Just because. I wanted to post something from Michael Donaghy's new, posthumous book, but I've left it at home. This is no logical substitute, but... here it is.

The Fish
Rupert Brooke

In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
Those silent waters weave for him
A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
Where wavering masses bulge and gape
Mysterious, and shape to shape
Dies momently through whorl and hollow,
And form and line and solid follow
Solid and line and form to dream
Fantastic down the eternal stream;
An obscure world, a shifting world,
Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
Or serpentine, or driving arrows,
Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
There slipping wave and shore are one,
And weed and mud. No ray of sun,
But glow to glow fades down the deep
(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
Shaken translucency illumes
The hyaline of drifting glooms;
The strange soft-handed depth subdues
Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
As death to living, decomposes—
Red darkness of the heart of roses,
Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,
And gold that lies behind the eyes,
The unknown unnameable sightless white
That is the essential flame of night,
Lustreless purple, hooded green,
The myriad hues that lie between
Darkness and darkness!...

And all's one.
Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
The world he rests in, world he knows,
Perpetual curving. Only—grows
An eddy in that ordered falling,
A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud—
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
The intricate impulse works its will;
His woven world drops back; and he,
Sans providence, sans memory,
Unconscious and directly driven,
Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.

O world of lips, O world of laughter,
Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,
Of lights in the clear night, of cries
That drift along the wave and rise
Thin to the glittering stars above,
You know the hands, the eyes of love!
The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,
The infinite distance, and the singing
Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,
The gleam, the flowers, and vast around
The horizon, and the heights above—
You know the sigh, the song of love!

But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run.
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.

[taciturnfriend]

Don't think anyone's mentioned this yet: The Poetry Archive, a fantastic new resource collecting recordings of poets reading their work. They already have a good collection of historic and contemporary recordings on there (hear Tennyson - barely audibly - reading Charge of the Light Brigade! Browning forgetting his lines! Louis MacNeice's extraordinary voice! Yeats's charming introduction to Innisfree!). Completely fascinating, and it will surely get better.

Only annoying thing is that the sound clips don't work in Firefox for me, I have to use IE. Any computer-savvy types know of a way to fix this?

[Meg]

That's very cool. Thanks for the link. They need to to get T. S. Eliot and his weird accent on there.

While less extensive in terms of poets The New York Times Audio Archive has full readings by Auden, Ginsberg and others. Nabokov reading both his poetry and prose is pretty cool.