Friday, October 24, 2008

o sappho

not one girl I think

who looks on the light of the sun

will ever

have wisdom

like this (#56)


Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me --

sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in (#130)



stand to face me beloved

& open out the grace of your eyes (#138)



their heart grew cold

they let their wings down (#42)



spangled is

the earth with her crowns (#168C)



All of the poem-fragments beneath the pictures come from Anne Carson's translations of Sappho's poetry, from a book called 'If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho'.

(All the pictures I took in the river valley about two weeks ago)



Last week I heard a talk on Sappho's poetry by a professor from History and Classics at my University. I learned a number of interesting things, including that:


-- Sappho may or may not have been a real person who actually existed; the unreality of other Greek poets, like Homer, is suggested because many of these poets composed at a time when the language was transitioning from an oral language to a more widely written one. Thus, the epic poetry of Homer was likely created by multiple composers, whether at a specific time or over successive generations. Sappho might have been a style, too, of lyric poetry that originated in the oral tradition that became mediated through writing.

-- However, we do seem to know a bit about her purported birthplace, & her supposed family. She (with her fancy headdress) appears on a lot of coins from Lesbos. The invention of playing the lyre with a pick is also attributed to her.

-- If she did exist, she did not die jumping off a cliff, inspired by her unrequited love for a man called Phaon. This scenario apparently appears in plays all the time, even centuries after her time... but in comedies, though, not tragedies. Sappho in love with a man was quite the preposterous scenario, yes. (Unfortunately, this story often gets reproduced by silly people with a heteronormative agenda).

-- New fragments of many Greek lyric poets are constantly being discovered. Apparently poems often show up on mummy-wrappings from Egypt. I guess it was like reusing scraps of newsprint...
-- As much as I like the idea of her poems being a heteroglossia, a collection of many voices singing at different times, I also like the idea that she was real, that she wandered the mountainsides picking sweet clover & plucking her lyre & expressing all this desire.


Wednesday, October 15, 2008

re-reading...

sunset-time, gilded river. this past saturday.



First of all, this statistic is shocking to me -- that only 1% of Canadians have read a book of poetry in the past year. That's about 334020 people... which maybe isn't a small number. But compared to the number of people who have likely read textbooks or non-fictiony things, it is rather small. Compared to the number of people who have definitely read at least one novel this year, it is really quite tiny. Compared to the number of people who have undoubtedly read the newspaper or the TV guide or the magazines you get at the grocery store line-up, it is postively miniscule.

And like my dear friend notes in her comments, which I have linked to above, I just cannot fathom such a poem-less life, because poetry is something I think about all the time, constantly. It is just part of being, finding poems, making poems, reading poems, hearing poems. That is what I do.

It makes me want to put poems everywhere. Tuck them randomly under car windshields. Leave them on bus seats, slip them under doors. Strategic wallpaper for the world... Not in an 'I'm taking over the world & everyone should do read poems because I know what's best for everyone' sort of way (well, maybe an iota or two of that) but because I really would just like to share things. Because some people haven't read Valzhyna Mort or Michael Longley or Adrienne Rich or Theodore Roethke. Or Anne Carson or e.e. cummings or William Wordsworth or Gregory Corso or Pablo Neruda or Oksana Zabuzhko. & to me, this is a bit sad, you know? Because there is so much richness. & this is summed up so aptly, in a poem by William Carlos Williams that Adrienne Rich quotes as the epigraph to her book, 'What is Found There':

It is difficult / to get the news from poems / but men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.

I could write an autobiography in poems, how poems have nourished me. One of the first poems I ever loved was Robert Frost's ubiquitous poem about the snowy woods. I was eight & I already loved to write haikus & couplets. With this poem, I admired the calm even-ness of the rhyme, the lilting sleigh bells. I loved thinking of how my footsteps creaked in the snow, when I went on walks in the early winter evenings with my mother. I loved stopping, letting her walk on ahead, while I stayed mesmerized in the quiet, the swirl of snow under the streetlights. I memorized it & when I have panic attacks I still say it to myself in attempts to slow my heart. but i have promises to keep & miles to go before i sleep

Then when I was 11 I met e.e. cummings with in just spring --

& he made me want to write things, poems, all the time. At one point, I tried stories too. But I came back to poems.

He wrote, in 'Forward to an Exhibit: II':

Why do you paint? / For exactly the same reason I breathe. / That’s not an answer. / There isn’t any answer. / How long hasn’t there been any answer? / As long as I can remember. / And how long have you written? / As long as I can remember. / I mean poetry. / So do I.

& later I met Wordsworth, with 'Tintern Abbey' & that force that rolls through all things, which touched me deeply. I had the requisite affair with Sylvia Plath as a 16 year old, but then I met Anne Carson who was even more enriching, so... Just this evening I was flipping through Plainwater again, & got stuck once more on her poem-prose-essay The Anthropology of Water. My copy of the book is creased & folded & caressed, pen & pencil scribbles underlining the sentences that stuck to me, shocked themselves into me. I carry so many memories in this piece; one line, highlighted in fading silvery-blue pen takes me back to the floor of a bookstore where I sat reading this at 17, trying not to cry a little in public but failing miserably because when she wrote

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes those wounds come open again

how could I not?

I have a lot of poems in my head now. There are poems I've met that made me physically weak in the knees, like that time when a friend & I first heard recordings of Adrienne Rich reading her poetry (when she said 'I am a woman sworn to lucidity', I had a wave of shivers). There are poems that I sometimes have the urge to get tattooed on my body in sinuous Cyrillic cursive; the urge to get tattooed passes, but not the wish to feel inscribed.

I love it when I know other people who know certain poems & lines from them become fantastical intertextual codes. e.g. the road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor! (noyes) or pasting Tannu-Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence (corso). I love it when people read me poems, especially ones they've written. I could listen infinitely. & I like it when they compel me to read mine, even if I'm hesitant at first.

One day a few months ago, a dear friend left a poem they had written in my mailbox. It was pretty much the loveliest thing ever, for a multitude of reasons, but just that gesture, of leaving a poem for me to find in my mailbox... I cannot quite describe it. The only thing that surpassed the goodness of poem-discovery, was writing one of my own and then sneaking down an alleyway to surreptitiously slip it into their mailbox... & then thinking about them finding it, reading it, & feeling something of what I had just felt upon discovering theirs, feeling all of what can be found there, in a poem.

Friday, October 10, 2008

fruit & thought, blosson & pit. (or, everything is related to everything else, really.)

rosehips by the n.sask river, september 2008

more river valley rosehips, september 2008













Over the last while, I've been realizing that something that I am consistently fascinated with in my writing is this idea of the space between -- the inherent separation between everyone & everything, e.g. the space between people, between people & land, between people & their personal conceptions of some divine (& unifying) force, etc. & I am fascinated by the way we try to bridge those spaces, those gaps between. I think my deep interest in language & translation is definitely rooted in my fascination with these spaces.


What I'm writing focuses partially on language (spoken, signed, written, visualized) as a major connector, & the poem itself as the vehicle of connection. Here, I'm very much inspired by Simone Weil's thoughts on the naturalness of poetry, & its role in direct, profound connection between people, a vehicle for conveying internal experience & feeling. As well, I am ever fascinated by the paradox of metaxu, what Weil describes as 'every separation being a link' -- if we were not so separate, there would be no reason for connection, for communication. We cannot bridge without that space, & so as painful as the gaps between our little beings are, it is the lacuna that makes language -- & all the transcendent things it can do -- necessary & possible.


& what I love most about this space between is that it is the very fact that there are spaces between absolutely everything. (Lately, my favourite distraction from my work is reading about the Large Hadron Collider & the philosophy of the particle physics behind it.) We are made of collections, aggregations of spaces, all these spaces between spaces at the atomic, & then subatomic level, held together mysteriously & delicately. & this, to me, is wondrous. Though there are spaces between us, & spaces within us, we are still united, as we are intrinsically connected to everything else in the universe by whatever it is (the Higgs field, say some physicists) keeps everything from flying apart.



So I'm writing a cycle of poems based upon Ukrainian holidays, the elemental feasts of the seasons. These holidays are elaborate syncretic constructions, their pagan integrity still intact under layers of Christian influence; fertility rites involving fire & water & ritual purification persist on a midsummer holiday now consecrated to John the Baptist; the Feast of the Transfiguration still involves the offering of the summer's first fruits back to the earth that provided them. Despite the Orthodox theological overlay, at their roots all of thse ritual celebrations basically serve the purpose of reuniting those who observe them with three elements -- the earth, one's ancestors, & some sort of universal presence (be it a deity, or the Higgs boson, etc) -- as well as with each other. They are simply attempts to bridge the spaces between all things, a recognition that everything is related to everything else. Through these poems, I've been trying to convey the endlessness of return & transformation, the perpetual cycles of separation & reunification, and how we try to connect with everything else (as well as ourselves) through these processes.



This is the third part of 'first fruits', the poem for the feast of Transfiguration, which is very much akin to thanksgiving, so it's also rather timely. See here for the first part & here for the second.



three)

(чорні черешнi при бiлiй хатi)
there are dark cherries hanging
above the river autumnal, echoing
round the doppler-throated swoop
of a swallow, downy feathers in the sun
splitting into vast white houses of light.

wind washes over the sky,
clouds like heavenly ribstones rippled,
a muddy bank sucks heartfuls;
we eat of the earth, ourselves, our
little birdmouths seeking sightless,
following the skirring of wings.

(ходи, дiвчино, черешнi рвати)
i have an armful of sun-darkened
cherries & i’m going to feed you
these first fruits: the poems that
gnaw sweetly away at our bones
leave us nourished & wanting

as the whole body
aches with such separation:
we are made of spaces between
spaces, the singing of shifting silt,
tiny sandgrains within
the indivisibility of wind –

(черешнi рвати, черешнi їсти)
but watch the nettle & thistle
crumble & slump back down
the fallen bank to the waiting river,
watch our hands slip cherries from
the branches onto hungry tongues

& someday, you know, there will be
no difference, nothing between
hand & mouth & fruit & thought
& blossom & pit; oh but now,
(так солодко, так швидко!) so sweet so swift –
rejoice in it.











* the Ukrainian bits are from a rather sensuous folk song about a girl picking nice dark cherries growing in abundance around a little white cottage, picking them & devouring them, as the narrator of the song implores her to share.

Also, returning to the Large Hadron Collider, this very educational little song makes me rather happy.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

yesyesyes.

mossworlds, the river valley, mid-september.

very new tree-shoot growing from a decaying birch, the river valley, last week.
"When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written.
But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?"

Robert Bringhurst, in The Tree of Meaning, p. 143.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

bringhurst on brain-birthplaces

aspen trees in the river valley, last week

black currants, the river valley, also last week


illuminated leaf veinage, the river valley last week




illuminated wild rose thorns, the river valley, last week





I was introduced to the writings of Robert Bringhurst in a very serendipitous way. I was in the library at the university looking for a book I needed to cite in my thesis, a rather technical volume on multilingualism, when suddenly, this other book sort of fell off the shelf into my hands: Everywhere Being is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking.



Robert Bringhurst is a typographer & a translator & a philosopher & an artist & a linguist, but mostly a poet, & he writes about poetry in a way that encompasses everything, & he writes about everything, because everything is connected to everything else, really. I am currently enthralled by these little pieces of thinking, as well as this book's 'spouse', as he calls it, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. There is so much goodness, here, goodness that nourishes my heart & mind so very well. I can't really adequately talk about it all at once, or really summarize exactly what it is that is just so exactly YESyesyesyesyes. Also, I am still exploring it, of course. But I want to offer little bits of it to you here, selected morsels that are particularly profound & inspiring for me.



(even though I'm finding you can pretty much open up any page of either of these books & discover some breath-catching sentence in one of these essays that he has been crafting for years)



The Tree of Meaning (p. 9) begins as follows:



there are a lot of rocks in western montana, and several creeks called rock creek. one of them, draining the north slope of the anacondas and the eastern flank of the sapphire mountains, became my father's favourite trout-fishing stream around 1949. that watershed is where my brain was born. it wasn't the first world i'd ever explored, and it's a place i never stayed for more than a week or two at a time, but that is the first landscape i began to learn to read.



I am in love with this passage for multiple reasons. Firstly, I am fascinated by the idea of the brain's birthplace, a location where the mind becomes aware & lucid, realizing its connection to a landscape, to the place, to the richness that surrounds it (that is within it, & without it). Where we understand our place within a place, where we realize we are part of that place -- place, of course, Mister Aristotle said, is the first of all beings. & so, I think that these landscapes where our brains are born can be seen as the places that we think from, a place where poetry (which Bringhurst reminds us simply comes from the Greek verb poein, to make or do) originates. I want to ask people, lately, where their brains were born. Which landscapes? Or, as a dear friend suggested to me, within which bookscapes, because many of us first found a meaning, a synchrony, or an awakening while exploring the paths & woods of words themselves...



For me, I think it first occured in the mountains, in Kananaskis, where my family has camped every summer (since the one right after I was born) -- there is something alpine in my thinking, in the breathing swaying valleys of lodgepole pine forests, in the ache & arch of the opaline ridges gone amber-red at sunset. But the other reason I love Bringhurst's passage so much is that my brain was also shaped by the boreal forest creek landscape, just north of here where the prairies roll into the rocky mossy hills.



I too grew up following my father on stream-fishing expeditions, where I didn't pay so much attention to the fishing, but a lot of attention to the rocks & the blue blur of hills in the distance, to the mushrooms in the muskeg & the swirls of water spilling over the beaverdams. To the rosehips & the labrador tea, to the secret berries, to the smell of sunlight on coppery leaves. & this landscape is especially dear to me because I know it's where my father's brain was born when he was young. It makes father, a self-professed non-poet, express to me so eloquently these thoughts that he usually keeps quiet: little things, like how smelling the scent of sunwarmed juniper & listening to the rush of water makes him feel indivisible from the trees , how he wishes he could grow arms wide enough to fall into the forest & hold it all close to him. & now, in his illness, I watch him return to these creeks -- the Windfall, the Oldman, Chickadee, Carson -- to fish, to wander, to photograph, whenever he can gather the energy, because they are healing to him. Comfort to his heart, but also a respite for his mind, from pain, from the body's slow failing. I think there he can feel a sense of indivisibility, he can read that landscape he is part of / that is part of him, & that dilutes the pain, & simply lets him be.