BLOODAXE BLOGS

"Flames" by Pearse Hutchinson

2012-01-24T03:26:00.000-08:00

The Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson has died, aged 84. These two tributes are well worth reading: The Irish Times and Michael McLoughlin in the Irish Independent. His Collected Poems is published by the Gallery Press. The portrait above is by Michael O'Regan.

I remember being bowled over by a reading he gave in Strokestown a few years back. This is my favourite poem of his, "Flames", which I included in the Bloodaxe anthology Being Alive: the sequel to 'Staying Alive' in 2004.

Flames

A red setter leaping
constant up and down, up-and-down,
like a big, living flame
in a dark slum room
where an old poor woman lies in bed sick,
the heat cut off the light cut off,
her only light her only heat
the red-gold setter leaping
tireless up and down like a tall
sinuous brilliant almost healing flame.

Never such buoyancy, never!

A long skinnymalink with auburn hair
loose-limbed in his mid-thirties
immaculate in a flame-coloured suit,
leaping up and down, up-and-down,
like a loose-haired ﬂame
in a bar at the head of the Zeedijk
at one in the morning as Justin
played planxties on the penny-whistle.
Such Amsterdancing! He couldn’t get enough of it.
Vertical wavering, a grace, a flame.

from Collected Poems (Gallery Press, 2002).

Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

2011-11-27T04:39:00.000-08:00

Ruth Stone: photo by her granddaughter Bianca Stone

The American poet Ruth Stone, who only received wide recognition for her work in her late 80s, has died, aged 96. She was 87 when she received the National Book Award for her collection In the Next Galaxy, and was still writing extraordinary poetry well into her 90s. Her acclaimed retrospective, What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems, followed in 2008 from Copper Canyon Press. The UK edition published by Bloodaxe Books in 2009 won her many admirers in Britain and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1915, Ruth Stone lived in rural Vermont for much of her life. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide – during a stay in London – she had to raise three daughters alone, all the time writing what she called her ‘love poems, all written to a dead man’ who forced her to ‘reside in limbo’ with her daughters.

The young Ruth, photograph by John Lane Studio

For 20 years she travelled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities. A greatly loved teacher, she was still working into her 80s. She has won many awards and honours, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house), two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed the house), the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award.

Ruth Stone pictured in 1965

Ruth Stone once said, ‘I decided very early on not to write like other people.’ What Love Comes To shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime’s work of a true American original. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce feminist and political poems, and meditations on her husband’s suicide, on love, loss, blindness and ageing. What Love Comes To opens up her own particular world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.

The book has a foreword by Sharon Olds, who ‘had the joy of meeting Ruth Stone’ as a teenager, a later encounter giving her ‘a vision of a genius at work’:

Ruth Stone’s poems are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple – their intelligence is crackling and complex… She is a poet of great humor – mockery even – and a bold eye, not obedient. There is also disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised.

Ruth’s poems are direct and lissome, her plainness is elegant and shapely, her music is basic, classical: it feels as real as the movement of matter. When we hear a Stone first line, it is as if we have been hearing this voice in our head all day, and just now the words become audible. She is a seer, easily speaking clear truths somehow unmentioned until now… She has a tragic deadpan humor: love and destruction are right next to each other…

Ruth Stone’s poems, in their originality and radiance, their intelligence and music and intense personal politics, shine in their place within her generation, among the pioneering women (Bishop, Brooks, Rukeyser)… Ruth Stone’s poems are the food the spirit craves.

Photo by Paul O. Boisvert, 2002

Ruth Stone: Poems through a life

My mother read poetry aloud when she was nursing me. She loved Tennyson deeply. She taught me all those poems by heart, so by the time I was two I knew many poems. What I absorbed from her was both a cadence of language and a music of poetry and patterns. Later on, when I was able, I wrote all these patterns of English poetry.

I started reading when I was three, and I’ve read all kinds of books all my life: a lot on science, nature and the universe. Women who love to write poetry are the hagfish of the world. We eat everything. We eat the language. We eat experience. We eat other people’s poems.

I wrote my first poem without knowing I’d done it – and found that poems came with this mysterious feeling, a kind of peculiar ecstasy. I’d feel and hear a poem coming from a long way off, like a thunderous train of air. I’d feel it physically. I’d run like hell to the house, blindly groping for pencil and paper. And then the poem would write itself. I’d write it down from the inside out. The thing knew itself already. There were other times when I’d almost miss it, feeling it pass through me just as I was grabbing the pencil, but then I’d catch it by its tail and pull it backwards into my body. Then the poem came out backwards and I’d have to turn it round.

My father was a musician and played the drums all the time, so I learned a lot of rhythms just through my ear. Rhyme is automatic with me. I use a lot of internal rhyme. It’s all in my ear, my own music. People are always talking to me about my sense of form but I think it’s just built in. It’s fun and challenging to work with form. It’s a catalyst, it zips up your adrenaline. I don’t know at what point I became more in control over what was so spontaneous, an uncontrollable process.

When I was younger there was a kind of singing in all my poetry, but after Walter died, that younger singing was subdued, not harsh enough. Of course I still have a lot of inner rhyme. But I needed to find a different way to write. Life altered me. Experience and suffering altered me. Having to endure and be strong for my daughters altered me. I couldn’t cry, but I didn’t talk for a year either. I couldn’t even stand up straight, I shuffled: ‘I shuffled and snuffled and whined for you’ [‘The Tree’]. I couldn’t live anywhere except in some sort of dreamlike state in which it seemed as though he’d never left me. And also the past kept intervening, and then it was as though there was no present, but only the past. And that kept going for a long long time.

Collaged by Neil Astley from interviews by Ruth Stone with J.F. Battaglia, Robert Bradley, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sandra M. Gilbert and Mary Ann Wehler. A shorter version of this piece was published by the Poetry Book Society in the PBS Bulletin in 2009.

Ruth Stone: photo by her granddaughter Sahara Najat Croll

Writers on Ruth Stone

Galway Kinnell: 'Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.'

Philip Levine (recalling her reading): 'She read and spoke of betrayal, rage, suicide, loneliness, despair. There are some poets who, when they read, leave at the end of each poem a little silence to be filled by the sighs of the audience as it recoils from so much wisdom in such an exquisite package. Ruth was not one of them. I think we all felt her need to unburden herself of an enormous weight of language and imagery. She’d already waited too long... Ruth lived in the only world of poetry that matters, the one without publishers, awards, prestige, competition, jealousy, money — the one we might call “poetry eternal,” the same world the great poems live in. Now she is there forever.' (Read his beautiful tribute in full in the New York Times magazine.)

Michael Longley: 'In not one of my 20 or so anthologies of American poetry is Ruth Stone’s work represented. This is a shocking state of affairs. Her poetry is profound and beautiful. It will alter the way you consider the art. What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems is, for me, the most captivating discovery of the last few decades.' (Books of the Year, Scottish Sunday Herald)

Neil Astley: Ruth Stone is a true US original. Now aged 93 and almost blind, she is still writing poetry of extraordinary variety and radiance - fierce feminist and political poems and hilarious send-ups, meditations on ageing, love and loss. I had the privilege of meeting her in September, just after reading her What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon), by far the most spirited, mysterious, wise, funny, defiant and deeply moving book of poetry that I have read in ages. (Books of the Year, Morning Star)

Frances Leviston: Guardian review of What Love Comes To.

Carol Rumens: writing on the Guardian's Poem of the Week, Ruth Stone's 'Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry', quoted with the article.

Obituaries & profiles
William Grimes, New York Times
Chard DeNiord, Guardian
Kandace Brill Lombart, Independent

Ruth Stone filmed in Vermont

Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Ruth Stone in Vermont in September 2008. Ruth was almost blind by then but still knew many of her poems by heart, and recites (or sings) several poems in this short film (prompted occasionally by editor Neil Astley) from What Loves Comes To: 'In an Iridescent Time', 'Orchard', 'The Talking Fish', 'The Excuse', 'Advice', 'I Have Three Daughters' (which she sings), 'Metamorphosis', 'Bargain, 'Mantra' and 'The Season':

In an Iridescent Time

My mother, when young, scrubbed laundry in a tub,
She and her sisters on an old brick walk
Under the apple trees, sweet rub-a-dub.
The bees came round their heads, the wrens made talk.
Four young ladies each with a rainbow board
Honed their knuckles, wrung their wrists to red,
Tossed back their braids and wiped their aprons wet.
The Jersey calf beyond the back fence roared;
And all the soft day, swarms about their pet
Buzzed at his big brown eyes and bullish head.
Four times they rinsed, they said. Some things they starched,
Then shook them from the baskets two by two,
And pinned the fluttering intimacies of life
Between the lilac bushes and the yew:
Brown gingham, pink, and skirts of Alice blue.

Orchard

The mare roamed soft about the slope,
Her rump was like a dancing girl’s.
Gentle beneath the apple trees
She pulled the grass and shook the flies.
Her forelocks hung in tawny curls;
She had a woman’s limpid eyes,
A woman’s patient stare that grieves.
And when she moved among the trees,
The dappled trees, her look was shy,
She hid her nakedness in leaves.
A delicate though weighted dance
She stepped while flocks of finches flew
From tree to tree and shot the leaves
With songs of golden twittering;
How admirable her tender stance.
And then the apple trees were new,
And she was new, and we were new,
And in the barns the stallions stamped
And shook the hills with trumpeting.

The Talking Fish

My love’s eyes are red as the sargasso
With lights behind the iris like a cephalopod’s.
The weeds move slowly, November’s diatoms
Stain the soft stagnant belly of the sea.
Mountains, atolls, coral reefs,
Do you desire me? Am I among the jellyfish of your griefs?
I comb my sorrows singing; any doomed sailor can hear
The rising and falling bell and begin to wish
For home. There is no choice among the voices
Of love. Even a carp sings.

The Excuse

Do they write poems when they have something to say,
Something to think about,
Rubbed from the world’s hard rubbing in the excess of every day?
The summer I was twenty-four in San Francisco. You and I.
The whole summer seemed like a cable-car ride over the gold bay.
But once in a bistro, angry at one another,
We quarreled about a taxi fare. I doubt
That it was the fare we quarreled about,
But one excuse is as good as another
In the excess of passion, in the need to be worn away.
Do they know it is cleanness of skin, firmness of flesh that matters?
It is so difficult to look at the deprived, or smell their decay.
But now I am among them. I, too, am a leper, a warning.
I hold out my crippled fingers; my voice flatters
Everyone who comes this way. In the weeds of mourning,
Groaning and gnashing, I display
Myself in malodorous comic wrappings and tatters,
In the excess of passion, in the need to be worn away.

Advice

My hazard wouldn’t be yours, not ever;
But every doom, like a hazelnut, comes down
To its own worm. So I am rocking here
Like any granny with her apron over her head
Saying, lordy me. It’s my trouble.
There’s nothing to be learned this way.
If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her;
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don’t confuse hunger with greed;
And don’t wait until you are dead.

I Have Three Daughters

I have three daughters
Like greengage plums.
They sat all day
Sucking their thumbs.
And more’s the pity,
They cried all day,
Why doesn’t our mother’s brown hair
Turn gray?

I have three daughters
Like three cherries.
They sat at the window
The boys to please.
And they couldn’t wait
For their mother to grow old.
Why doesn’t our mother’s brown hair
Turn to snow?

I have three daughters
In the apple tree
Singing Mama send Daddy
With three young lovers
To take them away from me.
I have three daughters
Like greengage plums,
Sitting all day
And sighing all day
And sucking their thumbs;
Singing, Mama won’t you fetch and carry,
And Daddy, won’t you let us marry,
Singing, sprinkle snow down on Mama’s hair
And lordy, give us our share.

Metamorphosis

Now I am old, all I want to do is try;
But when I was young, if it wasn’t easy I let it lie,
Learning through my pores instead,
And it did neither of us any good.
For now she is gone who slept away my life,
And I am ignorant who inherited,
Though the head has grown so lively that I laugh,
“Come look, come stomp, come listen to the drum.”
I see more now than then; but she who had my eyes
Closed them in happiness, and wrapped the dark
In her arms and stole my life away,
Singing in dreams of what was sure to come.
I see it perfectly, except the beast
Fumbles and falters, until the others wince.
Everything shimmers and glitters and shakes with unbearable longing,
The dancers who cannot sleep, and the sleepers who cannot dance.

Bargain

I was not ready for this world
Nor will I ever be.
But came an infant periled
By my mother sea,
And crying piteously.

Before my father’s sword,
His heavy voice of thunder,
His cloud hung fiery eyes,
I ran, a living blunder.

After the hawker’s cries,
Desiring to be shared
I hid among the flies.

Myself became the fruit and vendor.
I began to sing.
Mocking the caged birds
I made my offering.

“Sweet cream and curds…
Who will have me,
Who will have me?”
And close upon my words,
“I will,” said poverty.

Mantra

When I am sad
I sing, remembering
the redwing blackbird’s clack.
Then I want no thing
except to turn time back
to what I had
before love made me sad.

When I forget to weep,
I hear the peeping tree toads
creeping up the bark.
Love lies asleep
and dreams that everything
is in its golden net;
and I am caught there, too,
when I forget.

The Season

I know what calls the Devil from the pits,
With a thief’s fingers there he slouches and sits;
I’ve seen him passing on a frenzied mare,
Bitter eyed on her haunches out to stare;
He rides her cruel and he rides her easy.
Come along spring, come along sun, come along field daisy.

Smell the foxy babies, smell the hunting dog;
The shes have whelped, the cocks and hens have lost their wits;
And cry, “Why,” cry the spring peepers, “Why,” each little frog.
He rides her cruel and he rides her easy;
Come along spring, come along sun, come along field daisy.

All poems from Ruth Stone's What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2008; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2009).

Trailer from Nora Jacobson's film on Ruth Stone

Independent filmmaker Nora Jacobson has been working on a film about Ruth Stone over the past few years, assisted by Chard DeNiord. Her film production company Off the Grid Productions is based in Norwich, Vermont.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Ruth Stone's genius

An extract from Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk A different way to think about genius in which she describes meeting the poet Ruth Stone who described the way poems "came" to her. The full talk is on TED (here) and on YouTube (here). Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses – and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Peter Reading (1946-2011)

2011-11-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

We are very sad to report the death of the poet Peter Reading (pictured above by Bernard Mitchell). He died on Thursday evening (17th November) and had been ill for several months.

Peter Reading was born in Liverpool in 1946. After studying painting at Liverpool College of Art, he worked as a schoolteacher in Liverpool (1967-68) and at Liverpool College of Art, where he taught Art History (1968-70). He then worked for 22 years as a weighbridge operator at an animal feedmill in Shropshire, a job which left him free to think, until he was sacked for refusing to wear a uniform introduced by new owners of the business. His only break was a two-year residency at Sunderland Polytechnic (1981-83). After leaving Liverpool, he lived for 40 years in various parts of Shropshire, in recent years in Ludlow.

The benevolence of America’s Lannan Foundation rescued him from poverty. He was the first writer to hold the one-year Lannan writing residency in Marfa, Texas (in 1999), and is the only British poet to have won the Lannan Award for Poetry twice, in 1990 and 2004, as well as the only poet to read an entire life’s work for the Lannan Foundation’s DVD archive – his filmed readings for Lannan (made in 2001 and 2010) of 26 poetry collections make up the only archive of its kind. His other honours included the Cholmondeley Award, the Dylan Thomas Award for Diplopic (1983), and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for Stet (1986). Work in Regress was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997.

Peter Reading was one of the most original and controversial British poets of the post-war period: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he is disconcerting. He was a prodigiously skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment.

All his poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books, along with Isabel Martin’s critical study Reading Peter Reading (2000). His first collection was Water and Waste (1970), published when he was 24, and his last, 26th collection, was Vendange Tardive, published forty years later in 2010. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems, published in three volumes: 1: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), 2: Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and 3: Poems 1997-2003 (2003). His later collections from Bloodaxe are -273-15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010).

Peter Reading reading his work

Peter Reading reads extracts from two book-length sequences, Going On and Evagatory, from his Collected Poems: 2 [1985-1996] (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley.

Obituaries
Tim Dee, Guardian
Tim Dee, Caught by the River (longer more personal tribute)
Daily Telegraph
Alan Jenkins, TLS
Robert Potts, The Times, 25 November 2011 (not available online)
Anthony Thwaite, Independent

Critics on Peter Reading

'Peter Reading’s most characteristic work, always economical, is now concise to the point of terseness… leaving sparser textures and a sometimes painfully direct expression of personal sadness, anger and despair. Can we find a parallel here with other modern artists – Rothko, Shostakovich, Beckett – who found themselves, in extremis and in their later works, continuing to create less and less, moving inexorably towards the point where they would be left with nothing, the point (presumably) of artistic extinction?’ – Alan Jenkins.

'Reading has spent 25 years creating a body of work which vindicates Tom Paulin’s description of him as “the unofficial laureate of a decaying England”…Now that his entire corpus, astonishing in its range and integrity, is available, it is hard to see how Reading’s role has for so long been under-recognised…Reading has completed a quarter-century masterpiece which has successfully blended the personal, the national and the global. The result is an epic lament for a species given to cruelty and self-destruction, employing a vast array of traditional forms and genres' – Robert Potts, Guardian.

'Deliberately squalid, violent and apocalyptic contemporary contents are yoked to forms that for the best part of three millennia have been used for the beautiful and the heroic' – Michael Hofmann, The Times.

'Reading’s ambition, his commitment to confronting the darkest contemporary realities, his erudition, wit and dry magniloquence, mean that his work presents unique challenges and offers unique rewards. If these same qualities make him indigestible to many readers of contemporary poetry, the loss is theirs' – Paul Batchelor, TLS, on Peter Reading's last collection, Vendange Tardive (2010). Click here to read the whole review.

'Peter Reading, one of Britain's greatest living poets, is also one of its most passionate on the page, where a tenderness for the natural world goes hand in hand with an angry frustration with the human realm... Reading's ability to evoke a layered, nuanced portrait of his times is both rare and necessary. That he can do so with such concision, magisterial command of metre and structure, and a great range of emotion, makes his work as pleasurable in its poetry as it is agonising in its message. Vendange Tardive may indeed be a late harvest, but let us hope that it will be far from the last' – Carrie Etter, Guardian, on Peter Reading's last collection, Vendange Tardive (2010). Click here to read the whole review.

Peter Reading: Bibliography

Collected Poems 1: Poems 1970-1984 (1995):
Water and Waste (1970), For the Municipality’s Elderly (1974), The Prison Cell & Barrel Mystery (1976), Nothing For Anyone (1977), Fiction (1979), Tom o' Bedlam’s Beauties (1981), Diplopic (1983), 5x5x5x5x5 (1983) and C (1984).
Collected Poems 2: Poems 1985-1996 (1996)
Ukulele Music (1985), Going On (1985), Stet (1986), Final Demands (1988), Perduta Gente (1989), Shitheads (1989), Evagatory (1992) and Last Poems (1994).
Collected Poems 3: Poems 1997-2003 (2003)
Work in Regress (1997), Ob. (1999), Marfan (2000), [untitled] (2001), Faunal (2002), Civil (2002) and d (2003).
-273-15 (2005)
Vendange Tardive (2010).

Arundhathi Subramaniam

2011-11-18T15:15:00.000-08:00

Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems explore various ambivalences – around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. Neil Astley filmed her reading a selection of her work in Bombay in November 2011. Here she reads eight poems: 'Winter, Delhi, 1997', 'To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian', 'Prayer', 'Home', 'Madras', 'I Live on a Road', 'Recycled' and 'Confession', all from Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009).

POEMS READ ON THE VIDEO:

Winter, Delhi, 1997

My grandparents in January
on a garden swing
discuss old friends from Rangoon,
the parliamentary session, chrysanthemums,
an electricity bill.

In the shadows, I eavesdrop,
eighth grandchild, peripheral, half-forgotten,
enveloped carelessly
by the great winter shawl of their affection.

Our dissensions are ceremonial.
I growl obligingly
when he speaks of a Hindu nation,
he waves a dismissive hand
when I threaten romance with a Pakistani cricketer.

But there is more that connects us
than speech ﬂavoured with the tartness of old curd
that links me ﬂeetingly to her,
and a blurry outline of nose
that links me to him,
and there is more that connects us
than their daughter who birthed me.

I ask for no more.
Irreplaceable, I belong here
like I never will again,
my credentials never in question,
my tertiary nook in a gnarled family tree
non-negotiable.

And we both know
they will never need me
as much as I, them.
The inequality is comforting.

To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian

You believe you know me,
wide-eyed Eng Lit type
from a sun-scalded colony,
reading my Keats – or is it yours –
while my country detonates
on your television screen.

You imagine you’ve cracked
my deepest fantasy –
oh, to be in an Edwardian vicarage,
living out my dharma
with every sip of dandelion tea
and dreams of the weekend jumble sale…

You may have a point.
I know nothing about silly mid-offs,
I stammer through my Tamil,
and I long for a nirvana
that is hermetic,
odour-free,
bottled in Switzerland,
money-back-guaranteed.

This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
how much from the mind,
how much from the gut,
how much is too little,
how much too much,
how much from the salon,
how much from the slum,
how I say verisimilitude,
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham –
it’s all yours to measure,
the pathology of my breath,
the halitosis of gender,
my homogenised plosives
about as rustic
as a mouth-freshened global village.

Arbiter of identity,
remake me as you will.
Write me a new alphabet of danger,
a new patois to match
the Chola bronze of my skin.
Teach me how to come of age
in a literature you’ve bark-scratched
into scripture.
Smear my consonants
with cow-dung and turmeric and godhuli.
Pity me, sweating,
rancid, on the other side of the counter.
Stamp my papers,
lease me a new anxiety,
grant me a visa
to the country of my birth.
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do,
on every page of world history.

Prayer

May things stay the way they are
in the simplest place you know.

May the shuttered windows
keep the air as cool as bottled jasmine.
May you never forget to listen
to the crumpled whisper of sheets
that mould themselves to your sleeping form.
May the pillows always be silvered
with cat-down and the muted percussion
of a lover’s breath.
May the murmur of the wall clock
continue to decree that your providence
run ten minutes slow.

May nothing be disturbed
in the simplest place you know
for it is here in the foetal hush
that blueprints dissolve
and poems begin,
and faith spreads like the hum of crickets,
faith in a time
when maps shall fade,
nostalgia cease
and the vigil end.

Home

Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.

A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to ﬁll in the crevices.

A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting.

Madras

I was neither born nor bred here.

But I know this city

                of casuarina and tart mango slices,
                gritty with salt and chilli
                and the truant sands of the Marina,

the powdered grey jowls of ﬁlm heroes,

                my mother’s sari, hectic with moonlight,
                still crackling with the voltage
                of an M.D. Ramanathan concert,

the ﬂickering spice route of tamarind and onion
from Mylapore homes on summer evenings,

the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal,
ﬂambéed with sun,

and a language as intimate as the taste
of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost,
the sour cadences as comforting
as home.

It’s no use.
Cities ratify
their connections with you
when you’re looking the other way,

annexing you
through summer holidays,
through osmotic memories
of your father’s glib
lie to a kindergarten teacher
(‘My mother is the fair one’),
and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription –
Peabury, Plantation A
and ﬁfty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.

City that creeps up on me
just when I’m about to afﬁrm
world citizenship.

I Live on a Road

I live on a road,
a long magic road,
full of beautiful people.

The women cultivate long mocha legs
and the men sculpt their torsos
right down to the designer curlicue
of hair under each arm.
The lure is the same:
to confront self with self
in this ancient city of mirrors
that can bloat you
into a centrespread,
dismantle you
into eyes, hair, teeth, butt,
shrink you
into a commercial break,
explode you
into 70 mm immortality.

But life on this road is about waiting –
about austerities at the gym
and the beauty parlour,
about prayer outside the shrines
of red-eyed producers,
about PG digs waiting to balloon
into penthouses,
auto rickshaws into Ferraris,
mice into chauffeurs.

Blessed by an epidemic
of desperate hope,
at any moment,
my road
might beanstalk
to heaven.

Recycled

Driving through the Trossachs I see
the picture I drew as a ﬁve-year-old
in Bombay – a rectangle
with two square windows,
isosceles roof, smoking chimney,
and girl with yellow hair
standing in the driveway,
ﬂanked by two ﬂower pots.

And there is comfort in knowing
what we are so often told,
that fancy has wings
and dreams come true,
even if it takes years
for them to take root
in some corner
of a foreign land
that is forever India.

Confession

To take a homeopathic approach to the soul is to deal with
the darkness in ways that are in tune with the dark.
Thomas Moore

It’s taken time
to realise
no one survives.
Not even the ordinary.

Time to own up then
to blue throat
and gall bladder extraordinaire,

to rages pristine,
guilt unsmeared
by mediocrity,

separation traumas
subcontinental
and griefs that dare
to be primordial.

Time to iron out
a face corrugated
by perennial hope,

time to shrug off
the harlotry
and admit
there’s nothing hygienic
about this darkness –
no potted palms,
no elevator music.

I erupt from pillars,
half-lion half-woman.

The ﬂoor space index I demand
is nothing short
of epic.

I still wait sometimes
for a ﬂicker of revelation
but for the most part
I’m unbribable.

When I open the coffee percolator
the roof ﬂies off.

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems

Where I Live combines Arundhathi Subramaniam's first two Indian collections of poetry, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with a selection of new work. Her poems explore various ambivalences – around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. They probe contradictory impulses: the desire for adventure and anchorage; expansion and containment; vulnerability and strength; freedom and belonging; withdrawal and engagement; an approach to language as exciting resource and desperate refuge.

Her new poems are a meditation on desire – in which the sensual and sacred mingle inextricably. There is a fascination with the skins that separate self from other, self from self, thing from no-thing. These are poems of dark need, of urgency, of desire as derailment, and derailment as possibility.

‘This is writing that creeps up on the reader quietly, sometimes with just the whisper of a sari, or the taste of a lullaby, and yet spins suddenly on the edge of stark recognition. Arundhathi Subramaniam’s is a strong new voice’ – Imtiaz Dharker.

‘A marvellous collection, wonderfully varied and rich’ – John Burnside.

‘Subramaniam’s poetry is one of illumination. She flashes a pencil-torchlight on a subject, and suddenly you feel you are the richer for it… Even more than precision, what defines her verse is its subtlety and the angle of vision from which she sees life’ – Keki Daruwalla.

Where I Live is available now from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on this link.

ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM lives in Bombay (a city she is perennially on the verge of leaving) where she works as writer, editor and curator. She has published two books of poetry in India with Allied Publishers, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, and in Britain, Where I Live (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), which combines selections of work from her two Indian collections with new poems. She has also written The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English, and edited Pilgrim's India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011). In 2006 she appeared at London’s Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society.

Nicholas Birns: Eulogy for Samuel Menashe

2011-11-17T15:22:00.000-08:00

Photo: Samuel Menashe (1970) by Richard M. Gummere

Delivered by Nicholas Birns, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, October 26, 2011.

I first heard of Samuel Menashe in the mid-1980s through reading British poetry periodicals such as PN Review and Agenda. I was struck by the way articles in these periodicals referred to a living American poet I had not heard of as if he were already part of the firmament, already integrated into the fabric of universally assumed references. When the University of Maine Press released his Collected Poems in 1986, I bought them and became familiar with his work. As a consequence of this, in 1991, when I was asked to write for an anthology on poems more or less of my own choosing, I chose Samuel's poem "Curriculum Vitae"

Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time.

Time and again.
And now, once more
I climb these stairs
Unlock this door—
No name where I live
alone in my lair
With one bone to pick
And no time to spare.

I knew that this poem referred to Menashe's fifth-floor walkup, where, the British poet and critic Donald Davie had put it, he lived "alone and frugally." Little did I know that, in the course of cleaning out Menashe's papers, I myself would mount those five flights of stairs hundreds and hundreds of times.

I later published two more essays on Samuel's work (four in total, but two more before I met him). Yet, as Samuel constantly reminded me, I made no attempt to contact him. Just as Samuel, when young in Paris after the Second World War, never even thought he would meet a poet, yet alone become one, at that point I did not see that any poet I wrote on would want to be contacted by me. We were finally introduced in 2002 through the agency of a senior American author (you can work out who she is from the context, since I have provided the gender) who suggested to Irving Malin, a retired literary critic who had taught at CUNY, that a new article be written on Menashe's work, that he was still underrated even though his recent omnibus volume The Niche Narrows had received very positive notice. I met Samuel in December 2002 and wrote a long piece about him for The Hollins Critic.

I never thought Samuel and I would become friends, he was forty years older than I was. Yet Samuel and I developed such a rapport that we would talk several times a week and would meet usually once a week or every two weeks to see a literary event. (Samuel set the record both for going to literary events in New York and for getting autographed books signed. He is the Cal Ripken Jr. or the Joe DiMaggio of these records; they will not be broken). I also became, along with his friends of far longer standing, a principal interlocutor of his new poetry, including some of the most exciting of his 'ultimate poems,' which I got to see in their meticulous working-out. Here is 'Rue':

For what I did
And did not do
And do without
In my old age
Rue, not rage
Against that night
We go into,
Sets me straight
On what to do
Before I die—
Sit in the shade,
Look at the sky.

On the internet, there is a recording of Samuel reading this poem. It feels eerie to hear his voice, so strong and confident. This would have been in 2006 or so, before he became ill and frail. I am still used to the ill, frail Samuel, but tend to forget that until 2009 or so he was still at the height of his vigor, not, as goes the Dylan Thomas line alluded to in that poem, going gently at all into that good night.

But my friendship with Samuel was not one-sided or confined to his own poetry. We talked about poetry, the Bible, literature in general, politics. He was often a crucial backchannel reasder or editor of my own work, at first the subsequent essays I wrote on his poetry, then, as I became increasingly aware of his intellectual breadth—Samuel loved the word 'breadth'—and learning, on virtually every aspect of my work. As I will come back to later, the man was not just a great poet but also an intellectual.

I was very privileged to know Samuel in the years he finally got his due recognition; the Neglected Master award from the Poetry Foundation in 2004; regular publication in the premier literary magazines of our day; increasing awe and respect from younger writers such as the award-winning novelist Colum McCann, who inscribed a short story of his to Samuel with these words: "We have taken our voice from yours." As much as Samuel was wont to rue his earlier lack of recognition, he understood what a gift and a miracle his being loved and respected in his own lifetime was; after all, none of his great idols among the poets of the past two centuries—William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins—had received anything like this.

I think that God, or whatever agency you prefer to impute these things to, placed me in Samuel’s life when he needed me; both when his career was finally becoming as spectacular as it should always have been, and when he needed logistical help of the sort I, being relatively young and geographically proximate was able to provide. It was wonderful for me to be able to give help and care in a way that I think mattered.

Samuel was a world of paradox. Concentrated intensely on his own career and inner life in the way any truly creative person needs to be, he was nonetheless incredibly concerned about the lives of others, always asking after the health of my parents, scrupulously sympathetic to what was going on with the people he knew. He also brought people in touch with each other: to know Samuel was also to know John Thornton, his fellow soldier and lifelong, cherished friend, and also Frank Ceglia, Margaret Mills, Neil McDonnell, and the many others who are here as well as those who wished they could be here. Among the latter, Herb Weisberg, whose selfless management of Samuel’s last years was truly heroic, must stand paramount. Though he never married or had children, was a lifelong, solitary bachelor, Samuel was really a family man, and made all his friends and relatives feel they were part of an invisible, extended family.

Notwithstanding the brilliance and intensity of his imagination, Samuel was accessible, approachable, in the way that few writers are. He loved young people, and the people I had to most truly comfort in the aftermath of his passing were students of mine who had heard readings he gave to my classes. He was always young at heart. Samuel loved to see movies, and was always pressing me to go to the movies with him. I did so only once, along with Ilya Bernstein, in January 2009, when we saw Defiance, whose themes of Jewish resistance to genocidal oppression inspired Samuel. But mostly he would go on his own and report back to me. One time he said, “I saw this terrible movie!” “What was it?” I asked. “Pirates of the Caribbean 2!” he thundered. “Oh, that’s just for young kids,” I said. “It was totally not as good as the first one,” said Samuel, in an impeccable Valley Girl accent. Life had given him more than its share of blows, yet he was still at home in the world, still affirming the essential gifts of each day, still immersed in the possibilities of a life which many of those with whom he had fought in the war had been denied. He hated the downbeat and the depressing. He always looked for, to use the title of one of his late poems, “More to Come.”

Samuel seemed to many the quintessential New Yorker, and indeed he had a relation to almost every nook and cranny of Manhattan, knowing the history and the physical and social layout of institutions, able with his knowledge of the bus and subway system to swing huge distances at short notice, even when his legendary spryness had finally faded in his early eighties. He was a neighborhood fixture in Soho and Greenwich Village, at his various 'clubs.” Including the legendary “Homer’s,” subject of his poem, “Diner”:

Where can we eat
With a garden view
And a bell tower
Across the street
No place like Homer's

—and later the Washington Square Diner, where Drucilla Cornell and I shared many a meal with him. Samuel was irrepressible. During one diner meal, he noticed that the man at the next booth was listening to us talk about poetry. He tapped the man on the shoulder and gave him a flyer for the new Library of America book. “Do you always promote your work to total strangers in Greek diners?” asked the man. “YES,” roared Samuel.

Yet Samuel was not a local color figure. Indeed, he had the same sort of easy relationship to many cities where had spent significant time. These included Paris, where he studied after the war, where he made some of his closest friendships, and where he cultivated a true love of the French language, especially the poetry of Baudelaire. In his last months at the Esplanade, he acquired a copy of Andrei Makine’s Le testament français, and read it slowly and deeply. “This will be the French book for the rest of my life” he said. At the Sorbonne, he had studied under the theorists Jean Wahl and Étienne Souriau, and wrote his doctoral thesis, several copies of which are possessed by the Berg. The thesis, which Samuel termed an ´étude introspective,’ sheds crucial light on issues ranging from the role of the Jews in the history of Europe to the sources of his own poetic awareness. A French obituary for Samuel put it perfectly: Il était connu pour ses poèmes brefs et puissants.

Samuel also loved London, where he went in 1960 to finally secure publication of his first book of poetry. This was the turning point in Samuel’s life, the time when his dreams became possible, due both to the generous backing of Kathleen Raine and his own indomitable persistence. “I had to wrestle for that blessing,” he said. Britain gave Samuel his reputation, enabled his work to be heard, and also offered another arena for Samuel’s incredibly wide social coverage, including aristocrats, poets, newspaper editors, and statesmen. I wish I had been able to see Samuel in London: capering around, enthralling audiences large and small, above all intoning his poetry, as he did most recently at the Ledbury Festival in 2008. He was proud that, to many British readers, it was not necessarily evident in his work that he was an American.

But perhaps the most special place for Samuel was Ireland. He became very nearly an honorary Irish poet, applauded by generations of writers from Austin Clarke to Brian Lynch, from Derek Mahon to Joseph Woods. One of his last foreign trips was to Dublin in 2007, invited by a prominent businessman, Oliver Caffrey. Samuel went to town, being feted by dignitaries (including several ambassadors.) Years earlier, at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan, Samuel wrote one of his greatest poems, ‘A Bronze Head’:

We are not statues yet
Nor about to become
Immortals,
thoroughbreds
At the starting post
Programmed to run
A race against ghosts

One of Samuel’s last readings was, appropriately enough, on St Patrick’s Day.

As his cousin Herb recently told me, Samuel also lived in Los Angeles for three years, trying to make it in the movie business, where even his good looks, talent, and charisma could not avail him. Another place important to him was Ibiza, where he honed his incredibly good Spanish—which he employed to translate Antonio Machado and to heckle Latino waiters in the aforementioned Greek diners—and, in 1955, wrote his sole and incredibly intense short story on his wartime battle experience. He also went to Morocco. Samuel wrote a poem set in Tangier, beginning, “As the tall, turbaned black incense man…” He cared about many other places: Congleton, in Cheshire, England, where he had been stationed after crossing the Atlantic, Dieblich on the Rhine, where Samuel, as young American soldier, was welcomed by a gemütlich German woman, who upon learning Samuel was Jewish, said “I knew God would curse us for how we treated the Jews.” These scenes from over sixty years before were recalled effortlessly, expansively, in a tone of someone who knew he was a witness to history.

In other words, Samuel was a kind of patchwork cosmopolitan. Despite his fifty-six years on Thompson Street, he cannot be confined to one context or circumstance. Nor was he a naïf. Those who peruse the Berg’s collection of his work will see how many books and authors he truly valued: not just the obvious ones—the Bible, Blake, Dickinson, Hopkins, Shakespeare—-but Gide, Yeats, Trollope, Verlaine, Eça de Queiros. He was not just a poet but what the French would call an homme de lettres. He was a searcher after truth, with too much integrity to ever think he found it, but always, as he said in “Enlightenment,” questing “to see, to know.”

Until his miraculous late years, Samuel was underappreciated in the literary world. Being a forthright man, he made his resentments known. One time at the New School, Paul Muldoon was reading as part of the Best American Poetry annual event; Muldoon had chosen the poems for that year. Samuel went up to Muldoon at the end, saying “You edited the Best American Poetry this year! I had four poems in Poetry magazine, and you did not choose any of them!” Muldoon, staggered, could only mumble, in his decent, honorable way, “oh dear.” Samuel’s record of encounters, encouragements, rejections went back decades; he was taunted by T.S. Eliot’s friend, John Hayward, warmly cheered by an elderly Marianne Moore, whose groceries he helped carry across Sixth Avenue. I had a private joke that Samuel had thought himself a contestant for the Roman Forum prize in 110 AD, only to lose to Juvenal. In that case, he would have been justified to claim anti-Semitism as the reason.

Yet, I came to understand, much of this complaining was for show, and, more complexly, much of the way Samuel lived, eschewing every conventionality, exulting, complaining, celebrating, raging, was itself part of a long poem, as boundless as his actual poems were concise: a poem of his life, a strand, a thread, uniquely his. As great as his enmities in the literary world were—he boasted to a prestigious Washington, DC audience assembled by his friend, and crucial backer, Dana Gioia, that he had a “hit list”—he seized upon reconciliation when it occurred. One of the last readings he attended was an evening of jazz and poetry led by Robert Pinsky, against whom Samuel formerly had some sort of grudge. Samuel went up to Pinsky after the reading to congratulate him and Pinsky, truly moved, embraced Samuel. During his final months of hospitalization and stays at the Hebrew Home and the Esplanade, Samuel returned to that moment of reconciliation, almost Biblical in its color and amplitude, again and again. In the future, accounts of Samuel’s era will reconcile his work and its worth to the history of poetry.

When one took the step from knowing Samuel as a poet to Samuel as a person, he made sure you knew about two aspects of him: his Jewish identity and his service as a foot soldier in the Second World War. The mythology we have of “the greatest generation” is of heroes who gave their all for their country, then returned home to wives and children, suburban split-levels, success, achievement. This is even true among the poets who served in the war, for whom it was subject matter or background, but often only an early phase of lives that took other trajectories, most often the university teaching jobs that Samuel considered and rejected. For Samuel, the war never fully ended. I often saw the very provisionality in which he lived as that of an infantryman, hastily burrowing down in the nearest trench, waiting for his chance to go over the top and give fire. I came to see Samuel’s various contretemps and kerfuffles at literary events as firefights, skirmishes, engagements at the service of his life’s great operative truth, as he put it in “At A Standstill,“ “I did not advance/I cannot retreat.”

Samuel wrote of his wartime experiences in poems such as “Winter” and “Warrior Wisdom”, and in this memorable lyric, which we just heard in the wonderful presentation:

All my friends are homeless
They do not even have tents 
Were I to seek a safe place
I would run nights lost
Ice pelting my face
 Sent the wrong way
Whenever I ask — 
Afraid to run back, 
Each escape the last

And also in his lone short story, “Today is December 11th and We Are All Going to Die,” recounting his experiences in the Battle of the Bulge. This is a very intense story, which Samuel showed to few people, although he let it be republished in Irish Pages and read it aloud in one of his last public appearances. I indeed have heard the story twice, once when Samuel read it on that occasion, once when I read it to Samuel, the last time I saw him, three days before his death. It was so intense, so unremitting, laying the heart so bare, that the only text I could think of to equal these qualities was the last act of King Lear, Which I proceeded to read aloud to Samuel. As a very young man, Samuel had been in as intense conditions as it is possible for a human being to dwell in and still live.

Samuel once said, “If you take away the thread ‘Jew’ from me, the whole fabric collapses.” Although abhorring stereotypes of the American Jewish experience, Samuel wrote frequently about Jewish themes in the poems. He was steeped in the Bible, and he loved it when, at the Esplanade, I would read aloud from the Bible to him while he lay in his bed and rested his eyes, or while he sat on a bench in the beloved Riverside Park of his last months. I read Ruth, Esther, the first part of Exodus, and 1 Samuel. We had just gotten to the death of Saul two visits before his death. Many poems touch on the Bible, as in “Adam Means Earth”

I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what’s in a name
To shame one who knows
Mud does not stain
Clay he’s made of
Dust Adam became—
The dust he was—
Was he his name

The poem reaffirms the identity of matter and spirit that Samuel saw as one of the core values of Judaism. But Samuel's Jewish identity was also expressed in yearning, as in “Premised Land”.

At the edge/
Of a world/
Beyond my eyes
/ Beautiful/
I know
Exile Is always
Green with hoe
The river
We cannot cross
Flows forever

Deferral is part of the sacred; in turn, promise can show itself unwittingly, as “every derelict stem/engenders Jerusalem.” His longest poem, “The Shrine Whose Shape I Am,” is an epic in fifteen lines, bringing to mind Samuel’s colloquy with his mother:

“I am revising my poem”

“Oh, how much shorter have you made it?”

In “The Shrine Whose Shape I Am” Samuel showed both ecstasy, “I believe the Prophets and Blake. and like David I bless myself with all my might” as well as an awareness of bodily mortality and the suffering of his century: “Zion ground down must become marrow.” In his lucid yet gnomic utterance, Samuel is as close to the great poet of the Holocaust, Paul Celan (whom he met once in Paris), as any other poet. But Samuel could also have fun with his Jewishness. He submitted this poem to Midstream, a well-known Jewish-American magazine:

Night Music
(pizzicato)

Why am I so fond
Of the double bass
Of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding—
In perfect accord—
To one another
Across this pond
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew’s harp
I hear in the dark?)

The late editor of Midstream, Joel Carmichael, said, “Putting in a jew's harp at the end does not make it a Jewish poem.” Never one not to have the last word in a conversation, Samuel said “Oh yes it does.” And he got his way: the poem was published.

Returning to Samuel’s mother, Brantzia Barak, she was a great inspiration to Samuel, and the subject of some of his most fervent poetry of love and loss.

Old as I am
This candle I light
For you today
May be the last one
Of your afterlife
With me, your son—
With me you die twice.

Samuel’s father, Berish Weisberg, is also celebrated in the poems, as seen in “The Friends of My Father”

The friends of my father
Stand like gnarled trees
Yet in their eyes I see
Spring's crinkled leaf

And thus, although one dies
 With nothing to bequeath
We are left enough
Love to make us grieve

and “Captain, Captive,” which begins

Trim your sails
My father said….

Samuel’s father had advised him that, due to a financial reversal, Samuel could not count on the full scope of the inheritance he expected; he would have to ‘trim his sails.” Samuel said loftily, “My estate is not one of money, I am a poet, art is my realm.” Samuel’s father, simply and straightforwardly said, “I am glad of that.” Though he very much charted his own course, Samuel in life and art was, in reality, never one to trim his sails. We are privileged that, in such a long and valorous life, he sailed so abundantly among us.

Nicholas Birns is Associate Teaching Professor at Eugene Lang College, the New School, New York. He is the author of Understanding Anthony Powell (University of South Carolina Press, 2004) and Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century (Broadview 2010) and the co-editor of A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (Camden House, 2007), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book of the year for 2008 and of Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics (Palgrave. 2010).

More on Samuel Menashe on Bloodaxe Blogs:
Samuel Menashe (1925-2011)
Tributes to Samuel Menashe
Samuel Menashe: Giving the Day Its Due

Samuel Menashe's New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, was published by the Library of America in 2005. An expanded edition, published with Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film on DVD by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2009.

Ahren Warner's Confer

2011-10-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

Photo: Eleanor Irving

Ahren Warner on his Bloodaxe debut collection Confer:

'Confer' is derived from the Latin 'conferre' which harbours three meanings: to compile, to bestow and to compare. Inevitably, as a first collection, 'to compile' is particularly resonant, encompassing as it does the peculiar practice of gathering together and ordering one's poems.

However, the meaning of the book's title as 'compare' is the most important to me. Lucian Freud once said that he wants "paint to work as flesh…to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them". Split between two cities — London and Paris — there is a sense in which many of these poems attempt embodiments of place that are best understood against the inevitable flux of the places themselves; a kind of parallax, for example, between Paris as one might actually experience it and Paris as it is (not as it has been experienced) in the poem.

There are also a fair amount of poems that allude to other literary and extra-literary sources. Eliot wrote that there are two types of allusion – extensive and intensive – and to the extent that I hope such allusions are extensive, the process of comparison (between the allusion and the alluded to) seems to me as much part of the poems as the words they contain.

Finally, 'confer' as a synonym for 'bestow' seems to most emphatically concern those poems in the book that shun normal punctuation and find their grammar in a kind of spacing dependent on uniform line lengths to bestow a common musical measure. This is a form I've worked in for a while (though one which I’m moving away from) and which attempts to offer a greater range of intonational and affective pauses in order to perform a forceful but complex music: the ideal of a fugue con fuoco, perhaps.

*

Two Recommendations: Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast (Faber) and C.K. Williams' Collected Poems (Bloodaxe).

*

Ahren Warner's comment is reprinted from the PBS Bulletin (Autumn 2011) with the kind permission of the Poetry Book Society and the author. Each quarter the Poetry Book Society's judges select one Choice and four Recommendations (along with one or more Special Recommendations and a Recommended Translation). The five chosen or recommended poets are invited to write a comment on their collections for the PBS Bulletin – something of great interest to poetry readers since most published commentary on new poetry books is by reviewers not by the poets themselves. Ahren Warner's Confer, published by Bloodaxe Books in September, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for the autumn quarter.

THREE POEMS FROM CONFER

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters…

Though, when it comes to breasts, it’s a different story.
Cranach, for example, never seems to have progressed
beyond his pubescent attempts at apprenticeship:

tennis balls sewn to a pillow of hay, ﬁngers coming
to terms with the concept of foreplay. So too
with Titian, whose Venus bares handleless plungers

or the fruits of a template mocked up at Bellini’s.
For breasts, you want Rochegrosse, his Chevalier
surrounded by breasts real enough to have men

gripping their gallery plans discreetly; or Picabia
at his most garish: his naked, peroxidised blonde
stretching to coddle her slavering mutt. Her breasts

impress their tender weight upon us, and though
not as lofty as Pieter would have liked, she too
knows something of our weakness; that we fall

and are ﬂoored as much by the salt lure of skin.

*

Confer

The varieties of household paint proliferate;
Crown’s glosses, matts and silks spill over,
ﬁll the book I ﬁnd between Catullus

and Celan. Donaghy and Donne
ﬂank a Dulux brochure. And yes
I’m trying to show how well-read I am,

or trying a line between compulsion
and abandon – the just-off alphabetical
I’ve whittled to a totem – a prop

with which to strut the bounds
of personality. Contradiction in coherence
expresses the force of desire, apparently.

*

Opus

That note, in Buckley’s rendition
of Cohen, should exist

as the only deﬁnition for ‘fucked’
– as in ‘I’m fucked’.

There is a point, somewhere,
around twenty seconds in

to a Seattle-birthed song
that embodies the word ‘abandon’.

So too with the dab of his foot
to the Whirlwind Selector turning

acoustic to distortion;
the sublating of silence that occurs

in that bar of the Allegro
of that Bruch Konzertstück.

There was a girl at school who’d say
I’d end up a rock star or in prison.

I’m neither, have nothing,
but an art I’ve been learning

too long; a subject
I’ve studied beyond ﬂogged.

CONFER

Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Confer is a book between two cities – London and Paris – with detours via rural and small-town England, drunkenness and death camps in Bavaria, the American absurd and the lost libraries of the Roman Empire. It contains love and lust poems, variations on Baudelaire and conversations with Nietzsche and Auden.

This impressive debut collection by a young poet already well-known for his innovative, highly musical poetry draws its energy from an interplay between melody and intellect. Ahren Warner’s poems seek to amplify the effect of our common experiences and to attenuate the everyday within a matrix of philosophy and art, language and its intervals.

‘In these poems, Mozart rubs shoulders with Hesiod, Cranach with Picabia, Nietzsche with Fitzgerald, Rodin with Rochegrosse. But what animates this first full collection is the constant and beguiling presence of the central character - arch-flâneur, would-be mauvais garçon, Lincolnshire small-town escapee, irreverent scholar - picking his way through these crowded streets, savouring his impressions of all that he encounters and inviting the reader to join him. Ahren Warner has almost invented a new kind of Fin de siècle’ – Annie Freud

‘Even before this first collection, Ahren Warner has become an influential poet, with his trademark tabulations and his unlikely mix of youthful humour and academic nous. Confer confers upon him the status of a central figure in a new generation of British poets’ – Roddy Lumsden

Ahren Warner was born in 1986, and grew up in Lincolnshire before moving to London. He has published his work widely in magazines and anthologies, including Identity Parade and Voice Recognition from Bloodaxe, and in Re:, a pamphlet from Donut Press. His first book-length collection, Confer (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2010 and is completing a PhD in philosophy and literature at the University of London. He divides his time between Paris and London.

Tomas Tranströmer wins the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

2011-10-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

Nobel Prize edition, with cover photograph by Paula Tranströmer

Sweden's greatest living poet, Tomas Tranströmer, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement was made today (6 October) by the Swedish Academy. He is Scandinavia’s best-known and most influential contemporary poet. His books sell thousands of copies in Sweden, and his work has been translated into 50 languages, with substantial or complete editions of his work published in 19 languages.

Bloodaxe Books has been publishing Tranströmer’s work for the past 25 years, starting with his Collected Poems in 1987, translated by Robin Fulton. Fulton's prize-winning translation is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere in English. He has worked with Tranströmer on each of his collections as they have been published over many years, which has involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems.

A revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems was published in April 2011 on the occasion of Tranströmer's 80th birthday. This is a complete translation of all the collections Tranströmer has published in Swedish, from 17 Poems (1954) to The Great Enigma (2004). Following today's announcement, all the remaining copies sold within hours and an immediate reprint was ordered. An e-book will be available as a Kindle edition very shortly. A US edition of New Collected Poems was sublicensed to New Directions in 2006 who publish the book in America under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems.

Tranströmer's New Collected Poems received a highly appreciative review from Paul Batchelor in The Guardian in June: 'Fulton is to be applauded for bringing into English a unique sensibility, a haunting voice, and images of such incisive clarity that they can permanently alter your perceptions.' To read the whole review, click on this link.

Guardian article: 'Nobel prize for literature goes to Tomas Tranströmer' (click this link to read this report)

Photo: Paula Tranströmer

Tomas Transtromer's 80th birthday

Tomas Tranströmer celebrated his 80th birthday in April of this year. To mark the occasion, Bloodaxe Books published its new expanded edition of his New Collected Poems, the award-winning definitive translation of all his poetry by Robin Fulton.

In Sweden, Daphne Records released Dagsmeja: Emma Tranströmer sjunger Tomas Tranströmer (Noon Thaw: Emma Tranströmer sings Tomas Tranströmer). This is a recording of settings of eighteen poems by Tranströmer performed by his daughter Emma Tranströmer, pianist Andreas Kreuger, guitarist David Härenstam and violinist Bernt Lysell. The main musical emphasis is on Fredrik Jakobsson, an outstandingly talented Swedish composer largely unknown to the general public. Emma also includes a couple of songs by the more established Maurice Karkoff, who recently completed two new Tranströmer settings, plus a few songs by Håkan Parkman, who died in a tragic drowning accident in August 1988, aged only 33.

The project began, Emma says, with the Dagsmeja concert performance at the Gävle Concert Hall in 2007. 'Dagsmeja is a tribute to my father, above all perhaps as a guide in the art of humane living, but also as reflected through his own poetry. Pianist Andreas Kreuger and I had a labour of love in finding the very music which felt perfectly fitting for the occasion.'

Three of the poems they chose for the concert and CD are printed below, with the translations by Robin Fulton from Tranströmer's New Collected Poems which accompany them in the CD booklet – this includes all the poems in the Swedish original with Fulton's translations, along with accounts of the project by Emma Tranströmer and by scholar Niklas Schiöler (who contributes a fascinating piece called 'Reading is listening' on Tranströmer and music). The CD cover shows J.M.W. Turner's painting Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), which hangs in the National Gallery in London. Tranströmer's poem 'A Sketch from 1844' pictures Turner making a sketch possibly featuring the same train.

A Sketch from 1844

William Turner’s face is weather-brown
he has set up his easel far out among the breakers.
We follow the silver-green cable down in the depths.

He wades out in the shelving kingdom of death.
A train rolls in. Come closer.
Rain, rain travels over us.

En skiss från 1844

William Turners ansikte är brunt av väder
han har sitt staffli längst ute bland bränningarna.
Vi följer den silvergröna kabeln ner i djupen.

Han vadar ut i det långgrunda dödsriket.
Ett tåg rullar in. Kom närmare.
Regn, regn färdas över oss.

[from The Wild-Market Square, 1983]

*

Från mars -79

Trött på alla som kommer med ord, ord men inget språk
for jag till den snötäckta ön.
Det vilda har inga ord
De oskrivna sidorna breder ut sig åt alla håll!
Jag stöter på spåren av rådjursklövar i snön.
Språk men inga ord.

From March 1979

Weary of all who come with words, words but no language
I make my way to the snow-covered island.
The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!
I come upon the tracks of deer’s hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.

[from The Wild-Market Square, 1983]

*

April och tystnad

Våren ligger öde.
Det sammetsmörka diket
krälar vid min sida
utan spegelbilder

Det enda som lyser
är gula blommor.

Jag bärs i min skugga
som en fiol
i sin svarta låda.

Det enda jag vill säga
glimmar utom räckhåll
som silvret
hos pantlånaren.

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reﬂections.

The only thing that shines
is yellow ﬂowers.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.

[from The Sad Gondola, 1996]

About Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer has been called a ‘buzzard poet’ (by Lasse Söderberg) because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states.

He is Scandinavia’s best-known and most influential contemporary poet. His books sell thousands of copies in Sweden, and his work has been translated into 50 languages, with substantial or complete editions of his work published in 19 languages.

Tranströmer was born in 1931 in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reﬂecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences.

Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conﬂicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. His translator Robin Fulton has noted how such images ‘leap out from the page, so that the ﬁrst-time reader or listener has the feeling of being given something very tangible, at once’, which has made Tranströmer’s poetry amenable to translation into other languages. But while acknowledging Tranströmer’s view that ‘a poem can exist beneath or prior to a particular language and can therefore emerge in any number of tongues’, Fulton maintains that ‘the best versions of his poems are those he made himself in his own language’. Yet such is the power of Tranströmer’s ‘deep image’ poetry that several American poets have been inﬂuenced by his work, via translations.

Tranströmer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Södra Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in Alf Sjöberg’s Frenzy, which was ﬁlmed there, the young Tomas amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects, especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where he worked his way through most of the non-ﬁction shelves. However, this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents’ divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a winter of psychological crisis (described in ‘Exorcism’, printed below). He published his ﬁrst collection, 17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23.

After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Västerås, where he spent the rest of his working life. He now lives in Stockholm.

Like the scientist-poet Miroslav Holub, Tranströmer sees no division between his own two ﬁelds, poetry and psychology. In an interview in 1973 he responded to Gunnar Harding’s question about how his writing related to his work as a psychologist:

'I believe there is a very close connection, though it can’t be seen. Everything one writes is an expression of a gathered experience. And the problems one meets in the world at large are present to a very great extent in what I write, though it doesn’t always show directly. But it’s close to hand, all the time.'

In 1990, a year after the publication of his tenth book of poems, Tranströmer suffered a stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play.

Since his stroke, he has published a short book of ‘autobiographical chapters’, Memories Look at Me (1993), and a new collection, The Sad Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton’s translation of his New Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), expanded from his 1987 Collected Poems from Bloodaxe. In 2004 he published The Great Enigma, a slim volume containing ﬁve short poems and a group of 45 even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to the New Collected Poems to form Tranströmer’s ﬁrst collected edition to appear in the States, licensed by Bloodaxe Books to New Directions in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. That edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK as the latest revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems in 2011.

Tranströmer has also translated other poets into Swedish, including Robert Bly and Hungary’s János Pilinszky. Before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, he had won many other international awards for his poetry, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in the US, the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize. In 2007, he received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize.

Tranströmer has been tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature on a number of occasions, most recently in 2010, as the Guardian reported, only for Mario Vargas Llosa to pip him at the post.

Robin Fulton has worked with Tranströmer on each of his collections as they have been published over many years, and his award-winning translation New Collected Poems is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere. It received a highly appreciative review from Paul Batchelor in The Guardian in June: 'Fulton is to be applauded for bringing into English a unique sensibility, a haunting voice, and images of such incisive clarity that they can permanently alter your perceptions.' To read the whole review, click on this link.

As well as complete translations of all his poetry collections, Tomas Tranströmer's New Collected Poems includes his 1993 prose memoir, Memories Look at Me, from which this autobiographical sketch is taken:

Exorcism

During the winter when I was 15 I was afﬂicted by a severe form of anxiety. I was trapped by a searchlight which radiated not light but darkness. I was caught each afternoon as twilight fell and not released from that terrible grip until next day dawned. I slept very little, I sat up in bed, usually with a thick book before me. I read several thick books in that period but I can’t say I really read them for they left no trace in my memory. The books were a pretext for leaving the light on.

It began in late autumn. One evening I’d gone to the cinema and seen Squandered Days, a ﬁlm about an alcoholic. He ﬁnishes in a state of delirium – a harrowing sequence which today I would perhaps ﬁnd rather childish. But not then.

As I lay down to sleep I reran the ﬁlm in my mind’s eye, as one does after being at the cinema.

Suddenly the atmosphere in the room was tense with dread. Something took total possession of me. Suddenly my body started shaking, especially my legs. I was a clockwork toy which had been wound up and now rattled and jumped helplessly. The cramps were quite beyond the control of my will, I had never experienced anything like this. I screamed for help and Mother came through. Gradually the cramps ebbed out. And did not return. But my dread intensiﬁed and from dusk to dawn would not leave me alone. The feeling that dominated my nights was the terror which Fritz Lang came near to catching in certain scenes of Dr Mabuse’s Testament, especially the opening scene – a print works where someone hides while the machines and everything else vibrate. I recognised myself in this immediately, although my nights were quieter.

The most important element in my existence was Illness. The world was a vast hospital. I saw before me human beings deformed in body and in soul. The light burned and tried to hold off the terrible faces but sometimes I would doze off, my eyelids would close, and the terrible faces would suddenly be closing in on me.

It all happened in silence, yet within the silence voices were endlessly busy. The wallpaper pattern made faces. Now and then the silence would be broken by a ticking in the walls. Produced by what? By whom? By me? The walls crackled because my sick thoughts wanted them to. So much the worse… Was I insane? Almost.

I was afraid of drifting into madness but in general I did not feel threatened by any kind of illness – it was scarcely a case of hypochondria – but it was rather the total power of illness that aroused terror. As in a ﬁlm where an innocuous apartment interior changes its character entirely when ominous music is heard, I now experienced the outer world quite differently because it included my awareness of that domination wielded by sickness. A few years previously I had wanted to be an explorer. Now I had pushed my way into an unknown country where I had never wanted to be. I had discovered an evil power. Or rather, the evil power had discovered me.

I read recently about some teenagers who lost all their joy in living because they became obsessed with the idea that AIDS had taken over the world. They would have understood me.

Mother had witnessed the cramps I suffered that evening in late autumn as my crisis began. But after that she had to be held outside it all. Everyone had to be excluded, what was going on was just too terrible to be talked about. I was surrounded by ghosts. I myself was a ghost. A ghost that walked to school every morning and sat through the lessons without revealing its secret. School had become a breathing space, my dread wasn’t the same there. It was my private life that was haunted. Everything was upside down.

At that time I was sceptical towards all forms of religion and I certainly said no prayers. If the crisis had arisen a few years later I would have been able to experience it as a revelation, something that would rouse me, like Siddhartha’s four encounters (with an old person, with a sick person, with a corpse, and with a begging monk). I would have managed to feel a little more sympathy for and a little less dread of the deformed and the sick who invaded my nocturnal consciousness. But then, caught in my dread, religiously coloured explanations were not available to me. No prayers, but attempts at exorcism by way of music. It was during that period I began to hammer at the piano in earnest.

And all the time I was growing. At the beginning of that autumn term I was one of the smallest in the class, but by its end I was one of the tallest. As if the dread I lived in were a kind of fertiliser helping the plant to shoot up.

Winter moved towards its end and the days lengthened. Now, miraculously, the darkness in my own life withdrew. It happened gradually and I was slow in realising fully what was happening. One spring evening I discovered that all my terrors were now marginal. I sat with some friends philosophising and smoking cigars. It was time to walk home through the pale spring night and I had no feeling at all of terrors waiting for me at home.

Still, it is something I have taken part in. Possibly my most important experience. But it came to an end. I thought it was Inferno but it was Purgatory.

*

All the English translations of poetry and prose by Tomas Tranströmer in this blog posting are by Robin Fulton from New Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011).

Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011)

2011-10-03T03:17:00.000-07:00

Photo: Nina Subin

We are very sad to report the death of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. He died in Nazareth on Sunday (2nd October). His translator Peter Cole writes: 'As all who encountered the man and his work know, Taha’s imagination was expansive, and several years back he had, as it happens, already conjured his final hours as he’d liked them to have been…'

This is one of his later poems, from So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin (published by Copper Canyon in the US in 2006 and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2007):

Tea and Sleep

If, over this world, there’s a ruler
who holds in his hand bestowal and seizure,
at whose command seeds are sewn,
as with his will the harvest ripens,
I turn in prayer, asking him
to decree for the hour of my demise,
when my days draw to an end,
that I’ll be sitting and taking a sip
of weak tea with a little sugar
from my favorite glass
in the gentlest shade of the late afternoon
during the summer.
And if not tea and afternoon,
then let it be the hour
of my sweet sleep just after dawn.

*

And may my compensation be —
if in fact I see compensation —
I who during my time in this world
didn’t split open an ant’s belly,
and never deprived an orphan of money,
didn’t cheat on measures of oil
or violate a swallow’s veil;
who always lit a lamp
at the shrine of our lord, Shihab a-Din,
on Friday evenings,
and never sought to beat my friends
or neighbors at games,
or even those I simply knew;
I who stole neither wheat nor grain
and did not pilfer tools
would ask —
that now, for me, it be ordained
that once a month,
or every other,
I be allowed to see
the one my vision has been denied —
since that day I parted
from her when we were young.

*

But as for the pleasures of the world to come,
all I’ll ask
of them will be —
the bliss of sleep, and tea.

27.ix.2004

In this video Taha Muhammad Ali reads his poem 'Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower' in Arabic and then Peter Cole reads his English translation, from So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Taha with Peter Cole when he visited Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2007. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which includes four poems from So What read by Taha Muhammad Ali with Peter Cole.

Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower

In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”

*

Nevertheless —
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.

And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.

vii.1973

Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011) was a much celebrated Palestinian poet whose work is driven by a storyteller’s vivid imagination, disarming humour and unflinching honesty. Born in rural Galilee, Muhammad Ali was left without a home when his village was destroyed during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Out of this history of shared loss and survival, he created art of the first order. His poems portray experiences ranging from catastrophe to splendour, all the while preserving an essential human dignity.

He was born in 1931 in the village of Saffuriyya, Galilee. At 17 he ﬂed to Lebanon with his family after the village came under heavy bombardment during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later they slipped back across the border and settled in Nazareth, where he lived until his death in 2011. An autodidact, he owned a souvenir shop now run by his sons near Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation. He published several collections of poetry and one volume of short stories. So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2006; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2007).

In his introduction to So What, Gabriel Levin writes: ‘Muhammad Ali writes a literary Arabic that occasionally incorporates or, as he puts it, “grafts” onto the classical forms certain elements of a quasi-colloquial and often idiosyncratic Arabic, along with – in some instances – full-ﬂedged dialect when his characters speak. In contrast to the stylised, heightened diction of most of his contemporaries, Muhammad Ali’s lower register anchors the poetry to a sense of place without ever sounding merely like dialect. […] Arabic poets and critics have pointed out that Muhammad Ali’s originality (and even his relevance to the Palestinian cause) lies precisely in his blending of registers and employment of natural, homespun imagery – both of which contribute to the poetry’s apparent simplicity while belying all along its complex sensibility. Saffuriyya may have been razed to the ground, but its mores, language, and landscape remain paradigms of durable hope in the poet’s imagination. In effect the rhetoric and technique of Muhammad Ali’s poetry constitute yet another means of clinging to his home and land, and of being a samid – a term coined by Palestinians in the late 70s and meaning one who holds on tenaciously to his land and its culture and perseveres in adverse times.’

The Bloodaxe UK edition of So What was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and was launched in November 2007 at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Adina Hoffman's acclaimed biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press, 2009), won the 2010 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.

In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences were powerfully moved by Taha Muhammad Ali’s poems of political complexity and humanity. Aldeburgh Poetry Festival director Naomi Jaffa last saw him when he gave his only UK reading in 2007: 'I knew he was extremely frail, now, and obviously a considerable age - but I'm extremely sad to know that Taha is gone. He - together with Peter Cole - was an absolute sensation at Aldeburgh - the only standing ovation, with people weeping, I've ever experienced at the Festival. And they were the same at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2002 - where I encountered Taha and his poems. What a man. What a loss.'

Review comments on So What

‘Taha Muhammad Ali speaks with an emotional forthrightness and unflinching honesty that at times reminds me of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, at times of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. He writes in a literary Arabic grounded in the vernacular and rooted in local custom… He has developed a style that seems both ancient and new, deceptively simply and movingly direct’– Edward Hirsch, Washington Post

'Bittersweet, powerful verse’ – New York Sun

‘In Muhammad Ali’s world, what appears to be placid can suddenly become disconcerting… He is a beguiling storyteller who maintains a tone of credibility and lucidity without diluting the mysterious or distressing aspects of his tale. By avoiding commonplace response to everyday experience [he] has written poems that are fragile and graceful and fresh’ – John Palatella, The Nation

‘Taha Muhammad Ali’s patient, insistent and often beautiful iterations of who he is and what is what are as compelling and evocative as the faces and places that any reader has himself or herself loved…the poet’s vision of experience is equally applicable to Arabs and Jews, kings and paupers, the quarter of the world’s population that is Chinese, and the other threequarters as well’ – Ha’aretz (Israel)

‘The translation from the Arabic is excellent, and the introduction is masterly’ – Issa Boullata, World Literature Today

‘An exceptional translation’ – Rain Taxi

Luljeta Lleshanaku: a completely original voice in Albanian poetry

2011-09-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

Luljeta Lleshanaku reads four poems: 'Marked' (in both English and Albanian), 'The Mystery of Prayers', 'Monday in Seven Days' (parts 5 and 9) and 'Memory', all from Haywire: New & Selected Poems. Neil Astley filmed Luljeta Lleshanaku at Rathfarnham, Dublin, in March 2010, when she visited Ireland to read at DLR Poetry Now in Dún Laoghaire.

POEMS READ ON THE VIDEO:

Marked

My deskmate in elementary school
had blue nails, blue lips, and a big irreparable hole in his heart.
He was marked by death. He was invisible.
He used to sit on a stone
guarding our coats
as we played in the playground, that alchemy of sweat and dust.

The one marked to be king
is cold, ready for a free fall
born prematurely from a sad womb.

And the redheaded woman waiting for her drunk husband to return
will go on waiting for one hundred years.
It isn’t the alcohol; she is marked by ‘waiting.’
And he only as guilty as an onlooker
pushed indoors by rain.

What’s more, it isn’t the war
that took the life of the young boy
with melancholy eyes. He was marked as well, born to be on the
recruiter's list.
Melancholy is the standard arsenal of war.

And then there is one marked for survival
who will continue to eat his offspring like a polar bear
that never notices the warming climate.

All of them are as closed as theorems, their sky
a rental home
where hammering even a single nail of change is forbidden.

They are waiting for their next command, which they will ignore
anyway
like the Argonauts who ﬁlled their ears with wax
and rowed on through the sirens’ path.

translated by Henry Israeli & Shpresa Qatipi

The Mystery of Prayers

In my family
prayers were said secretly,
softly, murmured through sore noses
beneath blankets,
a sigh before and a sigh after
thin and sterile as a bandage.

Outside the house
there was only a ladder to climb
a wooden one, leaning against a wall all year long,
ready to use to repair the tiles in August before the rains.
No angels climbed up
and no angels climbed down –
only men suffering from sciatica.

They prayed to catch a glimpse of Him
hoping to renegotiate their contracts
or to postpone their deadlines.

‘Lord, give me strength,’ they said
for they were descendants of Esau
and had to make do with the only blessing
left over from Jacob,
the blessing of the sword.

In my house praying was considered a weakness
like making love.
And like making love
it was followed by the long
cold night of the body.

translated by Henry Israeli & Shpresa Qatipi

from Monday in Seven Days

5
Broken toys were my playthings:
zebras, wind-up Chinese dolls, ice-cream carts
given to me as New Year’s presents by my father.
But none was worth keeping whole.
They looked like cakes whose icing had been
                licked off by a naughty child

until I broke them, cracked and probed their insides, the tiny
                 gears, the batteries,
not aware then that I was rehearsing
                 my understanding of freedom.
____

When I ﬁrst looked at a real painting
I took a few steps backward instinctively
                 on my heels
ﬁnding the precise place
where I could explore its depth.
It was different with people:
I built them up,
loved them, but stopped short of loving them fully.
None were as tall as the blue ceiling.
As in an unﬁnished house, there seemed to be a plastic sheet
                above them instead of a roof
at the beginning of the rainy autumn of my understanding.

9
Medio tutissmus ibis, the middle is the safest ground.
The embroidered tablecloth in the middle of the table.
The table in the middle of the carpet.
The carpet in the middle of the room.
The room in the middle of the house.
The house in the middle of the block.
The block in the middle of the town.
The town in the middle of the map.
The map in the middle of the blackboard.
The blackboard in the middle of nowhere.

Lola is an angel. Her forehead hasn’t grown since she was eight,
her centre of gravity unchanged. And she likes edges, corners,
although she always ﬁnds herself
in the middle of the bus
where people rush toward the doors at either end.

My neighbours never went to school
nor have they heard of aesthetics
and hardly ever have they read anything
about the Earth’s axes, symmetry, or absolute truth.
But instinctively they let themselves drift toward the middle
like a man laying his head on a woman’s lap,
a woman who, with a pair of scissors
will make him more vulnerable than ever
before the day is done.

translated by Henry Israeli & Shpresa Qatipi

Memory

There is no prophecy, only memory.
What happens tomorrow
has happened a thousand years ago
the same way, to the same end –
and does my ancient memory
say that your false memory
is the history of the featherhearted bird
transformed into a crow atop a marble mountain?
The same woman will be there
on the path to reincarnation
her cage of black hair
her generous and bitter heart
like an amphora full of serpents.

There is no prophecy, things happen
as they have before –
death ﬁnds you in the same bed
lonely and without sorrow, shadowless
as trees wet with night.

There is no destiny, only laws of biology;
ﬁsh splash in water
pine trees breathe on mountains.

translated by Henry Israeli & Albana Lleshanaku

Haywire: New & Selected Poems
Luljeta Lleshanaku's Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) is her first British publication, and draws on two editions published in the US by New Directions, Fresco: Selected Poems (2002) and Child of Nature (2010), as well as a selection of newer work. Published in September 2011, it is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Available now from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on this link.

Readings
Luljeta Lleshanaku is reading at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Sunday 6th November (with Robert Hass and Maurice Riordan) and at London's South Bank Centre on Tuesday 8th November (with Amjad Nasser and Soleïman Adel Guémar).

Review
Review by Sean O'Brien in The Guardian, 24 September 2011: 'The tyrant's insistence that there is no private realm has the unintended effect of making it necessary to write powerful and durable poems which suffer all the constraints imposed by confinement and yet have something ungovernable in reserve, namely their accuracy.' To read the full review, click on the Guardian link.

Interview
Luljeta Lleshanaku is interviewed S.J. Fowler: click on this page of Bloodaxe Blogs.

LULJETA LLESHANAKU belongs to the first “post-totalitarian” generation of Albanian poets. In Haywire she turns to the fallout of her country’s past and its relation to herself and her family. Through intense, powerful lyrics, she explores how these histories intertwine and influence her childhood memories and the retelling of her family’s stories. Sorrow, death, imprisonment, and desire are some of the themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku’s hauntingly beautiful poems.

She was born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She later studied Albanian philology at the University of Tirana, and has worked as a schoolteacher, literary magazine editor and journalist. She won the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, and has had a teaching post at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has given readings in America, Europe and in Ireland at the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire in 2010, and launches Haywire, her first British publication, at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and and at London's South Bank Centre in November (full details above or via these links).

‘Luljeta Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry. She speaks with a completely original voice, her imagery and language always unexpected and innovative. Her poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the world. And, interestingly enough, it is not connected to anything in Albanian poetry either. We have in Lleshanaku a completely original poet’ – Peter Constantine.

‘Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poems take place in a melancholy landscape of mountain villages, chestnut trees, and collapsing futures where “spring kills solitude with its solitude” and the only emotional expression not considered a sign of weakness is impatience. The place of her poems is like a zero point that can only look out from itself in all directions at once. But the poet looks inward beyond paradox, and, instead of judgment, she finds recognition. In Lleshanaku’s work, geography and soul are charted on the same map. The rhythms of her new poems are expertly managed to enact vulnerability and withdrawal. Her lines stretch out and suddenly retract into fragments with the sensitivity of snail horns.’ – Forrest Gander, citation for the 2009 International Kristal Vilenica Prize.

‘These impressive poems carry a poignance much like the first buds of spring, a mark of survival and insistent life. In this bewildering human world such articulate determination proves again our common faith. Luljeta Lleshanaku speaks to us one and all’ – Robert Creeley.

‘When you close her book, the images don’t leave you. They cleave you open like a leopard’s paw, and enter into you. Once inside they create their own life, a second life, vastly different from the original. What more can we expect from real poetry, from true art?’ – Ridvan Dibra.

Arun Kolatkar: genius of modern Indian poetry

2011-09-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

Arun Kolatkar pictured at the Wayside Inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay, 1995 (photo: Madhu Kapparath).

Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004) was one of India’s greatest modern poets. He wrote proliﬁcally, in both Marathi and English, publishing in magazines and anthologies from 1955, but did not bring out a book of poems until he was 44. His ﬁrst book of poetry, Jejuri (1976), won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His third Marathi publication, Bhijki Vahi, won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004. Both an epic poem, or sequence, celebrating life in the Indian city (and site of pilgrimage) of that name in the state of Maharashtra, Jejuri was later published in the US in the NYRB Classics series, with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri, an edited version of which was published by The Guardian in 2006: see this link for Chaudhuri's account of 'the poet who deserves to be as well-known as Salman Rushdie'.

Always hesitant about publishing his work, Kolatkar waited until 2004, when he knew he was dying from cancer, before bringing out two further books, Kala Ghoda Poems (a portrait of all life happening in Kala Ghoda, his favourite street) and Sarpa Satra. A posthumous selection, The Boatride and Other Poems (2008), edited by his friend, the poet and critic Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, contained his previous uncollected English poems as well as translations of his Marathi poems; among the book’s surprises were his translations of bhakti poetry, song lyrics, and a long love poem, the only one he wrote, cleverly disguised as light verse. Arun Kolatkar's Collected Poems in English, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010, also edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, brought together work from the four volumes published in India by Ashok Shahane at Pras Prakashan.

Jejuri offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of devotion, discovering the divine trace in a degenerate world. Salman Rushdie called it ‘sprightly, clear-sighted, deeply felt…a modern classic’. For Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, it was ‘among the finest single poems written in India in the last forty years…it surprises by revealing the familiar, the hidden that is always before us’. Jeet Thayil attributed its popularity in India to ‘the Kolatkarean voice: unhurried, lit with whimsy, unpretentious even when making learned literary or mythological allusions. And whatever the poet’s eye alights on – particularly the odd, the misshapen, and the famished – receives the gift of close attention.’

Although the four volumes which comprise the Collected Poems in English have been published in India, the book itself has not yet been published there, and for the moment Indian readers have had to buy copies of the Bloodaxe edition from the Strand Bookstore in Mumbai.

The Independent's literary editor Boyd Tonkin made it one of his books of the year in 2010: 'My discovery of the year arrived from India, in Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar. Sublime and satirical, comic and visionary by turns, close to the gutter but looking at the stars, Kolatkar over many years became a Bombay bard to march, or outperform, the city's novelists. Any reader of Midnight's Children, and of its tribe of fictional children, should get to know Kolatkar too.' And writing in The Tablet, Michael Glover said: 'The best new discovery of the season is… Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar, one of the great poets of post-war India… The poetry is utterly fearless. No topic is out of bounds… What is so delightfully unexpected, always, is his angle of attack. You can never quite prejudge how he will view the odd, improverished particularities of the topsy-turvy world that he studies with such care and irreverent fondness.' Stephen Knight, reviewing the book for Poetry Review, declared that 'Collected Poems in English must already be regarded as a classic of English language poetry from India. In time, if there is any justice, its reputation will cross the globe.'

Regrettably, this work by a literary genius of world stature – a landmark in modern Indian literature – has not received very much attention in Britain, apart from those three notices and a few reviews, published or imminent, in the poetry magazines and journals. Even in India, Arun Kolatkar's profile was never as high as that of the much more widely published Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, but the Collected Poems in English should establish his reputation as – to quote Michael Glover – 'one of the great poets of post-war India', in English as well as in Marathi.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra introduces the Collected Poems in English with a marvellous essay, 'Death of a Poet', prefaced by his 'Editor's Note'. These two pieces form the best possible introduction to Kolatkar's life and work.

Arvind Krishna Mehrota, Colaba, Bombay, 1997
(photo: Madhu Kapparath).

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA: EDITOR'S NOTE

Sometime in early 1967, in a Colaba Causeway bookshop in Bombay, I first set eyes on Arun Kolatkar. I had arrived in the city the previous year from Allahabad to do my MA at the university. Before coming to Bombay I had, as an undergraduate, written some poems and with two friends started a ‘little magazine’, a cyclostyled affair of which a couple of issues had appeared. It was called damn you/a magazine of the arts. I was twenty years old.

I did not know Kolatkar but had heard about him from other poets and was keen to make his acquaintance. The man in the Causeway bookshop, with his long hair, drooping moustache, large slightly hooded raptorial eyes, and distinctive clothes – ﬁve-pocket jeans, round neck t-shirt, white khadi bundi, ﬁtted the mental image I had of Kolatkar, but before I could gather the courage to walk up to him and introduce myself he was gone. I must have met him soon afterwards, and either on that occasion or later I asked him for a contribution for damn you. He said I should come home with him, and we took a taxi from wherever we were in Flora Fountain to his ﬂat behind the Colaba Post Ofﬁce, where he lived with his ﬁrst wife Darshan. It was here, without any fuss, that he gave me the manuscript of the boatride, each section on a separate sheet and typed in capital letters, which is how it appeared in damn you # 6 in 1968. It was to be the last issue of the magazine. Little could I have then imagined that thirty-seven years after he gave me the poem I would be sitting by his deathbed in Pune and he would ask me to edit his posthumous book of uncollected work, The Boatride and Other Poems. That story is told in the Introduction; my association with him, the only ‘complete man of genius’ (Baudelaire’s phrase for Delacroix) I’ve known, had come full circle. (Incidentally, the many similarities between Kolatkar’s and Delacroix’s ‘Life and Art’, as described by Baudelaire in his magnificent essay on the painter, are uncanny.)

All his life Kolatkar had an inexplicable dread of publishers’ contracts, refusing to sign them. This made his work difﬁcult to come by, even in India. Jejuri was ﬁrst published by a small co-operative, Clearing House, of which he was a part, and thereafter it was kept in print by his old friend, Ashok Shahane, who set up Pras Prakashan with the sole purpose of publishing Kolatkar’s ﬁrst Marathi collection Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita. In the event, Shahane ended up as publisher of both Kolatkar’s English and Marathi books, which together come to ten titles to date, with more forthcoming, including a newly-discovered Marathi version of Jejuri, a book of interviews, and a novel in English.

The small press, despite the obvious limitations, suited Kolatkar. He was, for one, in complete control of the way the book looked, from its format (he did not want his long lines to be broken), cover design, endpapers, and blurb to what went on the spine, which in the case of Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra was precisely nothing, no title, no author’s name, no publisher’s logo. Moreover, with Clearing House and Pras there were no contracts to sign. From time to time, trade publishers would send Kolatkar feelers to see if he was willing to part with Jejuri, but making him change his mind wasn’t easy. One such occasion, when he was trying to get Kolatkar to sign an earlier contract, is described by Amit Chaudhuri in his Introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Jejuri, which Kolatkar gave permission for months before he died.

At one point, I was interviewed at the inn [Wayside Inn] by a group of friends, including Shahane – a sort of grilling by the ‘ﬁrm’ – while Kolatkar occasionally played, in a deadpan way, my advocate. His questions and prevarications regarding the contract betrayed a ﬁendish ingeniousness: ‘It says the book won’t be published in Australia. But I said nothing about Australia.’ Only my reassurance, ‘I’ve looked at the contract and I’d sign it without any doubts in your place,’ made him tranquil.

The four books that comprise the Collected Poems in English appear in the order in which they were published. Though The Boatride and Other Poems contains some of his earliest poems, it seemed proper to open a collected volume with Jejuri, which was Kolatkar’s ﬁrst book and the work he is most associated with. There comes a time in the life – or afterlife – of every cult ﬁgure when, escaping from the small group of readers that had kept the ﬂame burning, mainly through word of mouth, he begins to belong to a larger world. With the publication of Collected Poems in English, Kolatkar’s moment has perhaps come.

Arun Kolatkar (photo: Gowri Ramnarayan).

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA: DEATH OF A POET

Arun Kolatkar, who is widely regarded as one of the great Indian poets of the last century, was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra in 1931. His father was an educationist, and after a stint as the principal of a local school he taught at a teacher’s training college in the same city. ‘He liked nothing better in life than to meet a truly unteachable object,’ Kolatkar once said about him. In an unpublished autobiographical essay which he read at the Festival of India in Stockholm in 1987, Kolatkar describes the house in Kolhapur where he spent his ﬁrst eighteen years:

I grew up in a house with nine rooms that were arranged, well almost, like a house of cards. Five in a row on the ground, topped by three on the ﬁrst, and one on the second ﬂoor.
The place wasn’t quite as cheerful as playing cards, though. Or as colourful. All the rooms had mudﬂoors which had to be plastered with cowdung every week to keep them in good repair. All the walls were painted, or rather distempered, in some indeterminate colour which I can only describe as a lighter shade of sulphurous yellow.

It was in one of these rooms – his father’s study on the ﬁrst ﬂoor – that Kolatkar found ‘a hidden treasure’. It consisted of

three or four packets of glossy black and white picture postcards showing the monuments and architectural marvels of Greece, as well as sculptures from the various museums of Italy and France.
       As I sat in my father’s chair, examining the contents of his drawers, it was inevitable that I should’ve been introduced to the ﬁnest achievements of Baroque and Renaissance art, the works of people like Bernini and Michaelangelo, and I spent long hours spellbound by their art.
       But at the same time I must make a confession. The European girls disappointed me. They have beautiful faces, great ﬁgures, and they showed it all. But there was nothing to see. I looked blankly at their smooth, creaseless, and apparently scratch-resistant crotches, sighed, and moved on to the next picture.
       The boys, too. They let it al hang out, but were hardly what you might call well-hung. David, for example. Was it David? Great muscles, great body, but his penis was like a tiny little mouse. Move on. Next picture.

After matriculating in 1947, Kolatkar attended art school in Kolhapur, and, in 1949, joined the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay. He abandoned it two years later, midway through the course, but went back in 1957, when he completed the assignments and, ﬁnally, took the diploma in painting. The same year he joined Ajanta Advertising as visualiser, and quickly established himself in the profession which, in 1989, inducted him into the hall of fame for lifetime achievement.

Kolatkar also led another life, and took great care to keep the two lives separate. His poet friends were scarcely aware of the advertising legend in their midst, for he never spoke to them about his prize-winning ad campaigns or the agencies he did them for. His ﬁrst poems started appearing in English and Marathi magazines in the early 1950s and he continued to write in both languages for the next ﬁfty years, creating two independent and equally signiﬁcant bodies of work. Occasionally he made jottings, in which he wondered about the strange bilingual creature he was:

I have a pen in my possession
which writes in 2 languages
and draws in one
__

My pencil is sharpened at both ends
I use one end to write in Marathi
the other in English
__

what I write with one end
comes out as English
what I write with the other
comes out as Marathi

Pilgrims at the Khandoba temple in Jejuri.

His ﬁrst book in English, Jejuri, a sequence of thirty-one poems based on a visit to a temple town of the same name near Pune, appeared in 1976 to instant acclaim, winning the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and establishing his international reputation. The main attraction of Jejuri is the Khandoba temple, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral communities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Only incidentally, though, is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of faith. At its heart, and at the heart of all of Kolatkar’s work, lies a moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, rapturously observed. So, a common doorstep is revealed to be a pillar on its side, ‘Yes. / That’s what it is’; the eight-arm-goddess, once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the rundown Maruti temple, where nobody comes to worship but is home to a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for that reason, ‘nothing less than the house of god.’ The matter of fact tone, bemused, seemingly offhand, is easy to get wrong, and Kolatkar’s Marathi critics got it badly wrong, ﬁnding it to be cold, ﬂippant, at best sceptical. They were forgetting, of course, that the clarity of Kolatkar’s observations would not be possible without abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting, too, that without abundant sympathy for what was being observed, the poems would not be the acts of attention they are.

Far from mocking what he sees, Kolatkar is divinely struck by everything before him, as much by the faith of the pilgrims who come to worship at Jejuri’s shrines as by the shrines themselves, one of which happens to be not shrine at all:

The door was open.
Manohar thought
It was one more temple.

He looked inside.
Wondering
which god he was going to ﬁnd.

He quickly turned away
when a wide eyed calf
looked back at him.

It isn’t another temple,
he said,
it’s just a cowshed.

(‘Manohar’)

The award of the prize inevitably led to interviews, which, except for the interview Eunice de Souza did later, are the only ones Kolatkar ever gave. In one interview, to a Marathi little magazine that brought out a special issue on him, Kolatkar was asked about his favourite poets and writers. ‘You want me to give you their names?’ he replied, and then proceeded to enumerate them:

Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, Ram Joshi, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller, Günter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdev Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Bhalchandra Nemade, Dürrenmatt, Arp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andrzej Wajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy.

‘The astonishing admixture (off the top of his head),’ the American scholar of Marathi Philip Engblom has said of the list, ‘not only of nationalities but of artistic genres (symboliste poetry to art ﬁlm to Mississippi and Chicago Blues to Marathi sants) speaks volumes about the environment in which Kolatkar produced his own poetry’.

And not just Kolatkar. In the introduction to his Anthology of Marathi Poetry: 1945-1965 (1967), in which some of Kolatkar’s best-known early poems like ‘Woman’ and ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’ ﬁrst appeared, Dilip Chitre writes about ‘the paperback revolution’ which

unleashed a tremendous variety of…inﬂuences [that] ranged from classical Greek and Chinese to contemporary French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian. The intellectual proletariat that was the product of the rise in literacy was exposed to these diverse inﬂuences. A pan-literary context was created.
[…]
Cross-pollination bears strange fruits. [Bal Sitaram] Mardhekar wrote books on literary criticism and aesthetic theory which make references to contacts with various European works of art and literature… During his formative years as a writer, he was deeply inﬂuenced by Joyce and Eliot, and these continued to be critical inﬂuences in his critical writing throughout his career, until his untimely death in 1956.

After the success of Jejuri, except for the odd poem in a magazine, Kolatkar did not publish anything. To friends who visited him, he would sometimes read from whatever he was working on at the time, but there were to be no further volumes. Then in July 2004 he brought out Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra. At a function held at the National Centre for the Performing Arts’ Little Theatre in Bombay, ﬁve poets read from the two books. Kolatkar, wearing a black t-shirt and brown corduroy trousers, sat in the audience. He was by then terminally ill with stomach cancer and did not have long to live.

To his readers it must have seemed at the time, as it did to me, that the publication of these long awaited new books by Kolatkar, twenty-eight years after he published Jejuri, completed his English oeuvre. There were some scattered uncollected poems of course, most notably the long poem ‘the boatride’, but they had appeared in magazines and anthologies before and in any case were not enough to make another full-length collection. Which is why when Ashok Shahane, Kolatkar’s publisher, ﬁrst brought up the idea of The Boatride and Other Poems and asked me to draw up a list of things to include in it I was sceptical. In the event, the list, based on what was available on my shelves, did not look as meagre as I had feared. It had thirty-two poems divided into three sections: ‘Poems in English’, which had poems written originally in English; ‘Poems in Marathi’, which had poems written originally in Marathi but which he translated into English; and ‘Translations’, which had translations of Marathi bhakti poets, mostly of Tukaram. The ﬁrst poem in the ﬁrst section was ‘The Renunciation of the Dog’, written in 1953. A poem titled ‘A Prostitute on a Pilgrimage to Pandharpur Visits the Photographer’s Tent During the Annual Ashadhi Fair’, from his Marathi book Chirimiri, was from the 1980s.

The Boatride and Other Poems, I remember thinking to myself, though small in terms of the number of pages, would be the only book to represent all the decades of Kolatkar’s writing life barring the last and the only one to have, between the same covers, his English and Marathi poems. Kolatkar approved of the selection when we discussed it over the phone and made one suggestion, which was to put ‘the boatride’ not with the ‘Poems in English’, as I had done, but at the end of the book, in a section of its own. The reason for this, though he did not say it in so many words, was that in its overall structure, which is that of a trip or journey described from the moment of setting out to the moment of return, and in its observer’s tone, ‘the boatride’, though written ten years earlier, preﬁgures Jejuri, which was his next sequence.

A week or two after this conversation when next I spoke with Kolatkar he surprised me by saying that I should edit The Boatride. Since the book’s contents had already been decided and there were no further poems to add, or at least none that I was aware of, my role at the time, as editor, seemed limited to ensuring that we had a good copy-text. But even this, I realised, would not be easy.

There was one poem, ‘The Turnaround’, about which Kolatkar had in the past expressed reservation, and I wondered if I should use it as it stood. In 1989, when Daniel Weissbort and I were editing Periplus: Poetry in Translation (1993), I had asked Kolatkar for unpublished translations of his Marathi poems. He had shown me ‘The Turnaround’ on that occasion, but, unhappy about one word in it, ‘daisies’, had asked me not to include it in Periplus. The Marathi had vishnukranta, a common wild ﬂower widely distributed throughout India, for which he felt ‘daisies’ was not the right equivalent. Here is the poem:

Bombay made me a beggar.
Kalyan gave me a lump of jaggery to suck.
In a small village that had a waterfall
but no name
my blanket found a buyer
and I feasted on just plain ordinary water.

I arrived in Nasik with
peepul leaves between my teeth.
There I sold my Tukaram
to buy myself some bread and mince.
When I turned off Agra Road,
one of my sandals gave up the ghost.

I gave myself a good bath
in a little stream.
I knocked on the ﬁrst door I came upon,
asked for a handout, and left the village.
I sat down under a tree,
hungry no more but thirsty like never before.

I gave my name et cetera
to a man in a bullock cart
who hated beggars and quoted Tukaram,
but who, when we got to his farm later,
was kind enough to give me
a cool drink of water.

Then came Rotegaon
where I went on trial
and had to drag the carcass away
when howling all night
a dog died in the temple
where I was trying to get some sleep.

There I got bread to eat alright
but a woman was pissing.
I didn’t see her in the dark
and she just blew up.
Bread you want you motherfucker you blind cunt, she said,
I’ll give you bread.

I could smell molasses boiling in a ﬁeld.
I asked for some sugarcane to eat.
I shat on daisies
and wiped my arse with neem leaves.
I found a beedi lying on the road
and put it in my pocket.

It was walk walk walk and walk all the way.
It was a year of famine.
I saw a dead bullock.
I crossed a hill.
I picked up a small coin
from a temple on top of that hill.

Kopargaon is a big town.
That’s where I read that Stalin was dead.
Kopargaon is a big town
where it seemed shameful to beg.
And I had to knock on ﬁve doors
to get half a handful of rice.

Dust in my beard, dust in my hair.
The sun like a hammer on the head.
An itching arse.
A night spent on ﬂagstones.
My tinshod hegira
was hotting up.

The station two miles ahead of me,
the town three miles behind,
I stopped to straighten my dhoti
that had bunched up in my crotch
when sweat stung my eyes
and I could see.

A low fence by the roadside.
A clean swept yard.
A hut. An old man.
A young woman in a doorway.
I asked for some water
and cupped my hands to receive it.

Water dripping down my elbows
I looked at the old man.
The goodly beard.
The contentment that showed in his eyes.
The cut up can of kerosene
that lay prostrate before him.

Bread arrived, unbidden,
with an onion for a companion.
I ate it up.
I picked up the haversack I was sitting on.
I thought about it for a mile or two.
But I knew already

that it was time to turn around.

Apart from the problem of the copy-text, there were, in ‘The Turnaround’, passages I found mystifying. The poem is about a walking trip through western Maharashtra and Kolatkar gives the names of the towns he passes through: Kalyan, Nasik, Rotegaon, Kopargaon. Far from being a pleasant excursion – though it has its light moments – the trip turns out to be an ordeal. At Rotegaon, he says, he ‘went on trial’, but there is no mention in the poem of any crime or whether the ‘dog [that] died in the temple / where [he] was trying to get some sleep’ and the crime are connected. By the time he reached Kopargaon, it had become physically unendurable for him to continue walking: ‘My tinshod hegira / was hotting up’. But what did ‘tinshod hegira’ mean? In fact, now that I was reading it with an editorial eye, I felt there was an air of mystery hanging over not just certain passages but the whole poem. ‘[I]n realism you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp,’ Joyce told Arthur Power. As a poet of ‘that sudden reality’, as someone who revelled in the particular and was passionate about nouns, especially proper nouns, Kolatkar gives us all the facts about the trip including the year (‘Kopargoan is a big town. / That’s where I read that Stalin was dead.’), but this only deepened the puzzle. The poem’s dramatic opening line, ‘Bombay made me a beggar’, leaves several questions unanswered. What had made him leave the city and seek the open road? Did he have a destination in mind, or even an itinerary? Was he, as his route suggests, going to the pilgrimage town of Shirdi, which is just fourteen kilometres from Kopargaon? In 1953, the year Stalin died, Kolatkar was twenty-two years old.

My last phone conversation with Kolatkar was early in the third week of September. By then he had stopped going to Café Military, an Irani restaurant in Meadows Street, where over cups of tea he routinely met with a close circle of friends on Thursday afternoons, as he had earlier met them, for more than three decades, at Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda before the place shut down in 2002. When his condition deteriorated, his family shifted him to Pune, to the house of his younger brother, who was a doctor. He had already been in Pune ten days when I made the phone call and found that he was too weak to speak. When I persisted, a little excitedly I’m afraid, in asking him about ‘The Turnaround’, he said it was ‘an inner journey’ and mumbled something about a ‘personal crisis’. He said he’d explain everything if I came to Pune. I took the next train.

I reached Pune late in the evening of the 21st and made my way to his brother’s house in Bibwewadi. The house was in a side street, a duplex in a row of identical houses, each having a modest front yard with a motor scooter or car, often both, parked in it. Kolatkar was in an upstairs room and seemed to be asleep. The brother who was a doctor was still at his clinic, but his two other brothers, Sudhir and Makarand, were there, as was his wife Soonoo. ‘His mouth is constantly parched,’ Sudhir said, ‘and that’s affected his speech. He also cannot take in any food. But he feels a little better in the mornings. Maybe you should come back tomorrow and put your questions to him.’ Looking at Kolatkar, there wasn’t much hope of getting answers.

When I returned in the morning, I found Kolatkar was awake and, judging by the faces of those around him, ready to receive visitors. I pulled up a chair close to his bed and we resumed the phone conversation started three days ago. Speaking haltingly and with difﬁculty, sometimes leaving his sentences unﬁnished, he said that ‘The Renunciation of the Dog’ and ‘The Turnaround’ had come out of the same experience. Though it seems from ‘The Turnaround’ that he went on the walking trip alone, Kolatkar said that a friend, the poet and painter Bandu Waze, had accompanied him. There is a reference to Waze, though not by name, in ‘The Renunciation of the Dog’:

Tell me why the night before we started
                   Dogs were vainly
                                      Barking at the waves;
And tell my why in an unknown temple
                   Days and waves away
                                      A black dog dumbly
From out of nowhere of ourselves yawned and leapt;
                   And leaving us naked
                                        And shamefaced,
Tell me why the black dog died
                   Intriguingly between
                                        God and our heads.

Kolatkar said that they spent the night before they started on the trip at the Gateway of India, which is where he heard the dogs ‘vainly / Barking at the waves’. They had probably slept rough on the footpath. It would be, for them, the ﬁrst of many such nights.

We know little about Waze. He and Kolatkar ﬁrst met in 1952, when Kolatkar was a student at the Sir J.J. School of Art. Dilip Chitre, who was a close friend of both, describes Waze as ‘a maverick, self-taught artist…with immense energy, talent, and conviction that many of his academically cultivated colleagues lacked.’ The ‘academically cultivated colleagues’ presumably referred to painters like Ambadas, Baburao Sadwelkar and Tyeb Mehta, who were students at the art school roughly at the same time as Kolatkar. In 1954, during the early difﬁcult months of their marriage, when Kolatkar and his ﬁrst wife Darshan Chhabda were living in Malad, Bombay, in a place that was little better than a shack, Waze moved in with them. His presence, at a time when Kolatkar had no job and practically no money of his own, couldn’t have made matters easier.

Makarand, whom I asked later about the walking trip, said he was then still at school but remembered Kolatkar and Waze arriving at their father’s house in Pune, unshaven and tired, looking like two sadhus. When they sat down to a meal, he said, it was as though they had not eaten in days. Indeed, accounts of eating, or more often not eating, recur throughout ‘The Turnaround’:

I arrived in Nasik with
peepul leaves between my teeth.

‘The Renunciation of the Dog’ does not mention the ‘trial’ in Rotegaon nor ‘The Turnaround’ the dogs at the Gateway of India, but both poems refer to the incident at the temple. In ‘The Renunciation of the Dog’ the incident is central to the poem (‘And tell me why in an unknown temple /…A black dog dumbly,’ etc), whereas in ‘The Turnaround’, as everything else in it, the incident, stripped down to essentials, like the language itself, is mentioned in passing.

As Kolatkar now narrated it to me, there had been a series of petty thefts in Rotegaon and the suspicion of the townsfolk fell on the two tramps. Hauled up before a group of elders (this is the ‘trial’ referred to in ‘The Turnaround’), they had a hard time proving their innocence. When they were ﬁnally allowed to leave, it was on the condition that they ﬁrst clean up the temple (‘drag the carcass away’) where, on the one night they had spent in it, a ‘black dog’ had died ‘Intriguingly between / God and our heads.’ Kolatkar said the dog had died at the midpoint between where they had lain down to sleep (‘our heads’) and the temple idol (‘God’).

I asked Kolatkar about ‘tinshod hegira’. He said ‘tinshod’ referred to Nana Patil’s patri sarkar or ‘horseshoe government’. Patil was a well-known revolutionary leader during colonial times and ran a parallel government in the villages around Satara in the 1940s. Those found defying its orders and collaborating with the British had, horseshoe-fashion, tin nailed to the soles of their feet. Kolatkar, in the poem, is comparing his suffering after his hegira – or ﬂight – from Bombay (‘It was walk walk walk and walk all the way’) with the suffering of those punished by Patil’s patri sarkar. His feet felt as though ‘tinshod’, ‘The sun like a hammer on the head’. He was by then at the end of his tether. The poem ends on a note that, in more sense than one, is visionary:

I stopped to straighten my dhoti
that had bunched up in my crotch
when sweat stung my eyes
and I could see.

A clean swept yard.
A hut. An old man.
A young woman in a doorway.

Lying ‘prostrate’ before the old man was a ‘cut up can of kerosene’. Kolatkar now remembered that can. It was cut in half, he said, and looked as though the old man had ‘beaten the life out of it’. As he spoke, he seemed to be reliving the satoric experience of ﬁfty years ago:

I thought about it for a mile or two.
But I knew already

that it was time to turn around.

About the ‘personal crisis’, though, which had led him to renounce the city he was returning to, he did not say anything.

There remained the matter of ‘daisies’. When I asked him about it, he said I should change it to vishnukranta. He had looked it up in a book on ﬂowers, he said, but to no avail. The book didn’t give the English name.

‘The Renunciation of the Dog’ is one of fourteen English poems, collectively called ‘journey poems’, written during 1953-54. Though they all came out of the same experience, the walking trip through western Maharashtra, there is nothing in the poems that identiﬁes them with a particular landscape. It is as though, in 1953, Kolatkar had staked off his subject but not located the poetic resources to express it in. Never a man in a hurry, he was prepared to wait. The wait ended in 1967 when he wrote, in Marathi, ‘Mumbaina bhikes lavla’. Its English translation, ‘The Turnaround’, he did in 1987, to read at the Stockholm festival.

Kolatkar showed the ‘journey poems’ to his friends, one of whom, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, who later became a well-known art critic and writer on Marathi theatre, passed them on to Nissim Ezekiel. As editor of Quest, a new magazine funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Ezekiel was open to submissions. He also had an eye for talent and this time, in Kolatkar, he spotted a big one. He decided to carry ‘The Renunciation of the Dog’ in the magazine’s inaugural issue, which appeared in August 1955. It was Kolatkar’s ﬁrst published poem in English. Around then, he and Ezekiel also met for the ﬁrst time. For someone who was to spend his next ﬁfty years in advertising, Kolatkar’s meeting with Ezekiel, ﬁttingly enough, took place in the ofﬁces of Shilpi, where Ezekiel had a job as copywriter.

A line below ‘The Hag’ and ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’ in Chitre’s Anthology of Marathi Poetry says ‘English version by the poet’, suggesting that the two poems are translations. I knew from previous conversations with Kolatkar that he wrote them both in English and Marathi and considered them to be as much English poems as Marathi ones. Now, in Pune, as Soonoo dabbed his lips with wet cotton wool to keep them moist, he spoke about them again. The Marathi and English versions, he said, were ‘very closely related’; ‘they can bear close comparison’. He also said he wrote them ‘side by side’. Of ‘The Hag’ and ‘Therdi’ (its Marathi title) he said he would write one line in Marathi and a corresponding line in English, or the other way round. ‘They run each other pretty close.’ He also commented on the rhyme scheme: ‘There is no discrepancy.’

Chitre, whom I’d rung up on reaching Pune, came with his wife Viju to see Kolatkar. He had with him an ofﬁce ﬁle and a spiral bound book consisting of photocopies made on card paper. He asked me to look at them. He had recently ﬁnished a short ﬁlm on Kolatkar for the Sahitya Akademi, and the ofﬁce ﬁle and the spiral bound book, both of which Darshan had given him, were part of the archival material he’d collected. The poems in the ﬁle consisted mostly of juvenilia, and some, with their references to ‘a begging bowl’ and ‘the changing landscape’, looked like they belonged with the ‘journey poems’, which, as I found out later, they indeed did:

Destined to become a begging bowl
We let rise our clay
And holding it in our hand
Wordlessly and worldlessly
To be ﬁlled and fulﬁlled
We wandered
In the wilderness of our heart

and

We retreated from ourselves
To become the changing landscape
And the mutable topography
That accompanied us
And whispered in our ears

I quickly went through the poems and read them out to Kolatkar. If I liked something I asked him if I could put it in The Boatride, and if he said yes I’d put a tick against it. The ones I ticked were ‘Of an origin moot as cancer’s’, ‘Dual’, ‘In a godforsaken hotel’, and ‘my son is dead’. The poems were typewritten and some had obvious typos. A line in ‘Dual’ read ‘the two might declare harch thorns and live’.

‘Harch’? I asked Kolatkar.

‘Harsh.’

In the list I had sent him, the one he had approved of, the ‘Poems in English’ section had eight poems. Now it had twelve. Clearly, The Boatride was going to be a bigger book than I had anticipated; I also began to see why Kolatkar wanted it to have an editor.

In 1966, Kolatkar joined an advertising studio, Design Unit, in which he was one of the partners. It did several successful campaigns, including one for Liberty shirts, which won the Communication Artists Guild award for the best campaign of the year. The Liberty factory had recently been gutted in a ﬁre and the copy said ‘Burnt but not extinguished’; Kolatkar did the visuals, one of which showed a shirt, with ﬂames leaping from it. The studio was in existence for three years and everything in the spiral bound book was from this period of Kolatkar’s life. In fact, it was his Design Unit engagement diary, whose pages Darshan had rearranged and interspersed with poems, drawings and jottings. Flipping through it was like peeking into an artist’s lumber-room, crammed with bric-à-brac. It revealed more about Kolatkar’s public life as successful advertising professional and private life as poet than a chapter in a biography would have.

The ﬁrst page had a drawing of a gladiolus, the curved handle of an umbrella sticking through the leaves. Other drawings showed an umbrella hanging from a sickle moon; from an antelope’s horns; from a man’s wrist; stuck in a vase; safely tucked behind a man’s ear like the stub of a pencil; placed with a cup and saucer, like a spoon, to stir the tea with. The text accompanying the drawings was always the same, ‘Keep it’. Between the drawings were jottings, scribbles, messages (‘Darshan Kolatkar 40 Daulat Send me my green shirt’), expenditure ﬁgures (‘Liquor 37.75’), memos to himself (‘plan & save cost; meetings fortnightly; how to inspire/educate artists’), names and telephone numbers of clients, appointments to keep or cancel, seemingly useless scraps of paper preserved only because those who were close to him were farsighted and valued every scrap he put pen to. One page had written in it ‘Ring Farooki’; ‘Ring Pﬁzer’; ‘Ring Mrs Chat. cancel 3.30 Tues. appt.’; ‘?Bandbox?’; ‘7.30 Kanti Shah’; and somewhere in the middle was also the drawing of a man with a V-shaped face and arrows for arms and legs, the right arrow-leg pointing to ‘12.00 Jamshed’. Against a drawing of a cut-out-like ﬁgure he had written, ‘Imagine he is the client you hate most and stick a pin anywhere.’ And above it, ‘Just had a frustrated meeting with a frustrated client. This fellow goes on and on. I do not like long telephonic conversations. The client is a Marwari, you know.’ In an invoice to one Mrs Mukati dated ‘9/9/67’, he had jokily scribbled ‘10,000’ under ‘Quantity’ and ‘Good mornings’ under ‘Please receive the following in good order and condition’.

The scribble on the invoice, the drawings and the poems, whether early or late, are part of the same vision. Enchanted by the ordinary, Kolatkar made the ordinary enchanting. Which is why, however familiar one may be with his work, it’s always as though one is encountering it for the ﬁrst time. ‘[T]he dirtier the better’ he says of the ‘unwashed child’ in a poem in Kala Ghoda, ‘The Ogress’, and the same might be said about the subjects he was drawn to: the humbler the better. When the ogress, as Kolatkar calls her, gives the ‘tough customer on her hands’, ‘a furious, foaming boy’, a good scrub, she has a ‘wispy half-smile’ on her face and ‘a wicked gleam’ in her eye. One imagines Kolatkar’s face bore a similar expression when he mischievously transformed the humble invoice into a cheery greeting.

What can be more uninspiring, more ordinary, or, sometimes, more enchanting, than the tall stories men tell each other when they meet in a restaurant over a cup of tea? In ‘Three Cups of Tea’ Kolatkar reproduces verbatim, in ‘street Hindi’ (and translates into American English), three such stories. He wrote the poem in 1960, at the beginning of the revolutionary decade that we associate more with Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Box exhibition and the music of John Cage than with Kolatkar’s poem; more with New York than Bombay. Yet the impulse behind their works is the same, to erase the boundaries between art and ordinary speech, or art and cardboard boxes, or art and fart, whose sound Cage incorporated into his music. The impulse has its origin in Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘ready-mades’, the snow shovels, bicycle wheels, bottle racks and urinals he picked off the peg. It was art by invoice.

By reproducing conversations heard in a restaurant in ‘Three Cups of Tea’, Kolatkar introduced the Bombay urban vernacular, the language of the bazaar, to Indian poetry; in ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’, he introduces seedy restaurant interiors and the bazaar art on their walls.

the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake
decompose carefully in a cracked showcase;
distracted only by a ﬂy on the make
as it ﬁnds in a loafer’s wrist an operational base.

dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat
breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon
if it disturb the pond; the road, neat
as a needle, points at a lovely cottage with a garden.

the thirsty loafer sees the stylised perfection
of the landscape, in a glass of water, wobble.
a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention
singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table.

In 1962, when he wrote ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’, Kolatkar wouldn’t have read Walter Benjamin’s essays, which were not then available to the Anglophone world, nor would he have heard of the arcade-haunting Parisian ﬂâneur. But as a Bombay loafer him-self, someone who daily trudged the city’s footpaths, particularly the area of Kala Ghoda, he would have recognised the ﬁgure.

‘Salo loafer!’ says a character in Cyrus Mistry’s play Doongaji House. Over the centuries, ‘Loafer’ has almost become an Indian word of abuse, suggesting a good-for-nothing who drifts through the city in self-absorbed fashion when, in fact, he is streetwise and his keen eye doesn’t miss a thing. (Kolatkar himself seldom walked past a pavement bookstall without picking up a treasure.) This is true of the loafer even when he appears most relaxed, having tea, say, in an Irani restaurant, a portrait of ‘the cockeyed shah of iran’ displayed above the till and the whole place buzzing with ﬂies. On these occasions, he is like a papyrologist in a library poring over a classical document, though the objects he could be studying are the tables, chairs, mirrors and bazaar prints in whose midst he sits.

The bazaar print here described – the ‘stylised perfection’ of the landscape – brings to mind some of Bhupen Khakhar’s yet unpainted early works like Residency Bungalow (1969). In Khakhar’s painting, the bungalow is a two-storey colonial house, complete with verandah, Doric columns and pediment; ‘a lovely cottage’. Leading to it is a path, ‘neat as a needle’, with ‘elaborate trees’ on either side. In the background are more trees, painted in the same ‘elaborate’ fashion. In the foreground, where the ‘crooked swan’ might have been, is the painter’s friend, Gulammohammed Sheikh, sitting very stifﬂy in a chair, leaning a little to his right, his arm resting on a round table. Behind him, sitting on a platform attached to the house, are smaller ﬁgures. Pop art was an inﬂuence on Khakhar, and it is not surprising that both he and Kolatkar responded to bazaar prints. They were, in their different mediums, responding to the spirit of the age.

Residency Bungalow was the house in Baroda that Khakhar and Sheikh shared, along with other painter friends of theirs. And it was from this house, which belonged to Baroda University where Sheikh taught at the art school, that Sheikh and Khakhar brought out their A4-sized little magazine Vrischik (1969-1973), which means scorpion in Gujarati. Among those whose work appeared in its pages was Kolatkar, who contributed translations of Namdeo, Janabai and Muktabai to a special issue of Vrischik (Sept-Oct 1970) on bhakti poetry. As Ezra Pound (from St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington DC) wrote to Chak (‘Dear Chak’), that is Amiya Chakravarty, ‘“All ﬂows” and the pattern is intricate.’

Wayside Inn where Kolatkar held court on Thursday afternoons for many years (it closed down in 2002).

The view from a restaurant rather than a restaurant interior is the subject of Kala Ghoda Poems. On most days, around breakfast time and again in the late afternoon, after the lunch crowd had left, Kolatkar could be found at Wayside Inn in Rampart Row. He would usually be alone, except on Thursday afternoons, when all those who wished to see him joined his table and there could be as many as ﬁfteen people around it. Sometime in the early 1980s, the idea of writing a sequence of poems on the street life of Kala Ghoda, encompassing its varied population (the lavatory attendant, the municipal sweeper, the kerosene vendor, the beggar-cum-tambourine player, the drug pusher, the shoeshine, the ‘ogress’ who bathes the baby boy, the idli lady, the rat-poison man, the cellist, the lawyer), its animals (pi-dog, crow), its statuary (David Sassoon), its commercial establishments (Lund & Blockley) and its buildings (St Andrew’s church, Max Mueller Bhavan, Prince of Wales Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery ), began to take shape in his head. Asked in 1997 by Eunice de Souza, how he managed to write a poem like ‘The Ogress’, in which both the woman and the boy she’s bathing ‘emerge as complete human beings’, Kolatkar replied, ‘It’s a secret.’* The secret, I think, lay in the gift he had of making completely impersonal the scene he was imaginatively engaging with while at the same time, eschewing all isms and ideologies, identifying closely with each part. By the time he ﬁnished the sequence in 2004, to quote Joyce’s famous remark to Frank Budgen about Ulysses, it gave a picture of Kala Ghoda ‘so complete that if it one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of [his] book’.

Kala Ghoda Square.

The name Kala Ghoda (काळा घोडा in Marathi), meaning black horse, came from the black stone statue of King Edward VII mounted on a horse which used to stand in Kala Ghoda Square.

The ﬁrst time I heard Kolatkar read was at Jehangir Art Gallery in 1967. Two years earlier, at Gallery Chemould in the same premises, Khakhar had exhibited his ﬁrst collages, their inspiration the vividly coloured oleographs that had fascinated him since boyhood. I cannot now recall what the occasion was nor, apart from the painter Jatin Das, who else read that evening, but Kolatkar read a poem that he seemed to have improvised on the spot. It began ‘My name is Arun Kolatkar’ and was over in less than a minute. He left immediately afterwards, making his way to one of the Colaba bars, for he was, in the late 1960s, for about two and a half years, a heavy drinker, stories of which are still told by those who knew him at the time.

To my surprise, the poem was in the Design Unit diary, written out in his neat hand. He said I could include it in The Boatride, then added, referring to the poem, ‘It’s a disappearing trick.’ There were also other poems in the diary which I thought were worthy of inclusion: ‘Directions’, a “found” poem similar to ‘Three Cups of Tea’ but in a quite different linguistic register, was one and ‘today i feel i do not belong’, which makes the only reference to advertising in his poetry (‘i’m god’s gift to advertising / is the refrain of my song’), another. For the most part, though, the diary consisted of ideas for future poems (‘Write a bloody poem called beer. Make it bloody.’), notes and fragments in English and Marathi, and quick verbal sketches that captured a domestic moment or something he’d seen while walking idly down a road. For Kolatkar, writing was a zero waste game; no thought that passed through his mind went unnoted.

Once we got the rat behind the trunk, all we had to do was ram it against the wall.

                          *

It was dark
Arun woke up
D was asleep
the sound of the ceiling fan
gets mixed up
with the sound of the elevator

                          *

your sulky lips are prawns
fork them with a shining smile

                          *

on the same tile of the footpath
where that schoolgirl is standing
a mad woman sat yesterday scratching with her nail
a rotten cunt
and a big festering wound
on her shaven head

                          *

Leap clear, my lion, through
the ring of ﬁre. Mind the mane,
the hind legs and the tail.
Do it again.

I wanted to ask Kolatkar about these poems and fragments but his voice had grown faint and he closed his eyes. It was time to leave. As we slipped out of the room, a message came from the kitchen downstairs that lunch was ready.

The following day, on my way to see him, I wondered if we had not already had our last conversation. Still, in the hope that he might be able to talk, I was carrying with me the original list of thirty-two poems for The Boatride, since added to, as well as the diary. But Kolatkar had other things on his mind.

He spoke about American popular music and its inﬂuence on him. He said that gangster ﬁlms, cartoon strips and blues had shaped his sense of the English language and he felt closer to the American idiom, particularly Black American speech, than to British English. He mentioned Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters – ‘Their names are like poems,’ he said – and quoted the harmonica player Blind Sonny Terry’s remark, ‘A harmonica player must know how to do a good fox chase.’ One reason why he liked blues, he said, was that the musicians were often untrained and improvised as they went along. He dwelt on the music’s social history: how during the Depression blues performers moved from place to place, playing in honky-tonks, sometimes under the protection of mobsters. He remembered the Elton John song ‘Don’t shoot me I’m only the piano player’.

Blues (though it can have a spiritual side) and bhakti poetry are, in intent, markedly different from each other. One belongs to the secular world; the other addresses itself to god. There are, however, parallels between them. Each draws its images from a common pool, each limits itself to a small number of themes that it keeps returning to, and each speaks in the idiom of the street. They can sound remarkably alike.

It’s a long old road, but I’m gonna ﬁnd the end.
It’s a long old road, but I’m gonna ﬁnd the end.
And when I get there I’m gonna shake hands with a friend.

could be Tukaram but is Bessie Smith, just as ‘Get lost, brother, if you don’t / Fancy our kind of living’ could be blues but are the lines of a Tukaram song, in Kolatkar’s ‘blues’ translation. In his use of diction, Kolatkar saw himself very much in the blues-bhakti tradition. He once said to me that he wrote a Marathi that any Marathi-speaker could follow. He also said that he was not ﬁnished with a translation until he had made it look like a poem by Arun Kolatkar.

The parallels between Kolatkar’s work and blues do not end there. Here is the blues singer Tommy McClennan, standing beside a road in the Mississippi delta, waiting for a bus in the hot sun:

Here comes that Greyhound with his tongue hanging out on
the side.
Here comes that Greyhound with his tongue hanging out on
the side.
You have to buy a ticket if you want to ride.

And here is Kolatkar in Jejuri:

The bus goes round in a circle.
Stops inside the bus station and stands
purring softly in front of the priest.

A catgrin on his face
and a live, ready to eat pilgrim
held between its teeth.
(‘The Priest’)

Observe, too, the stanza unit. It was with the development of the three-line verse, which Kolatkar uses here and throughout much of Kala Ghoda Poems, that the blues became a distinctive poetic form.

After Elton John’s ‘Don’t Shoot Me’, Kolatkar recalled some more songs: Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Money Honey’. His voice, which so far had been a whisper, suddenly grew loud as he almost sang out the words:

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog cryin’ all the time.
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog cryin’ all the time.
Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend
of mine.

and

Well, you can knock me down,
Step in my face…

Do anything that you want to do, but uh-uh,
Honey, lay off of my shoes
Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes.

and

You know, the landlord rang my front door bell.
I let it ring for a long, long spell.
I went to the window,
I peeped through the blind,
And asked him to tell me what’s on his mind.
He said,

Money, honey.
Money, honey.
Money, honey, if you want to get along with me.

He said he had a record collection of about 75 LPs, which he gifted to the National Centre for the Performing Arts.

He would have gifted them, in all likelihood, in 1981, when he moved house from Bakhtavar in Colaba, where he had lived since 1970, to a much smaller one-room apartment in Prabhadevi, Dadar. Around then, he also sold off his substantial collection of music and science ﬁction books. The ﬁrst time I visited him in Prabhadevi, I was surprised that there were hardly any books in the room. I especially missed the volumes of American and European poets, which he kept in a glass-front bookcase in Bakhtavar and which I would eye enviously each time I passed them. Those, he said, he had not sold off but because of the shortage of space had put them in storage with a friend. I remember asking if he regretted not having his books with him and he said that having them in his head was more important than their physical presence. This particular conversation with him came back to me recently while reading Susan Sontag’s essay on Canetti, ‘Mind as Passion’. To interpolate from it, Kolatkar’s passion for books was not, as it was for Walter Benjamin, ‘a passion for books as material objects (rare books, ﬁrst editions).’ Rather, the ‘ideal’ was ‘to put the books inside one’s head; the real library is only a mnemonic system.’ To this library in the head, because of his prodigious memory, Kolatkar, at all times, had complete access. I never saw him reach out for a book, but whenever he spoke about one, whether it was a Latin American novel, The Tale of the Genji, or a Sanskrit bhand, it was as though he had it open in front of him, and if he remembered a funny passage would, while narrating it, almost roll on the ﬂoor, gently slapping his thighs.

Kolatkar may not have had space for books, but he continued to buy them as before, on a scale that would match the acquisitions of a small city library. (He purchased newspapers on the same scale too; ﬁve morning and three evening papers every day.) He bought books, read them, and passed them on to his friends. This is how I acquired my copy of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which he had bought in hardback soon as it became available at Strand Book Stall.

It was only a matter of time before books reappeared in his apartment, covering a wall from end to end. Scanning the titles, I found no poetry or ﬁction; instead, history. When, in her interview with him, Eunice de Souza remarked on the books on Bosnia on his shelves, Kolatkar dwelt at length on his reading habits:

I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition. I am particularly interested in history of all kinds, the beginning of man, archaeology, histories of everything from religion to objects, bread-making, paper, clothes, people, the evolution of man’s knowledge of things, ideas about the world or his own body. The history of man’s trying to make sense of the universe and his place in it may take me to Sumerian writing. It’s a browser’s approach, not a scholarly one; it’s one big supermarket situation. I read across disciplines and don’t necessarily read a book from beginning to end. I jump back and forth from one subject to another. I ﬁnd reading documents as interesting as reading poetry. I am interested in the nature of history, which I ﬁnd ambiguous. What is history? While reading it one doesn’t know. It’s a ﬂoating situation, a nagging quest. It’s difﬁcult to arrive at any certainties. What you get are versions of history, with nothing ﬁnal about them. Some parts are better lit than others, or the light may change, or one may see the object differently. I also like looking at legal, medical, and non-sacred texts – schoolboys’ texts from Egypt, a list of household objects in Oxyrhincus, a list of books in the collection of a Peshwa wife, correspondence about obtaining a pair of spectacles, deeds of sale, marriage and divorce contracts. One dimension of my interest in all this is literary, for example, in the Bible as literature. The Song of Solomon goes back to Egypt and Assyria. I like following these trails.

Like all autodidacts, Kolatkar’s dream was to know (‘to reclaim’) everything, to hold all knowledge, like a shining sphere, in the palm of the hand. Nor did he give up reading ﬁction altogether. One winter I was in Bombay he was reading W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

He read widely, and if a question interested him, he would track down everything there was on it. When he was contemplating a poem on Héloïse for Bhijki Vahi (2003), each of whose twenty-ﬁve poems is centred around a sorrowing woman – from Isis, Cassandra and the Virgin Mary to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Susan Sontag, and his own sister, Rajani, who lost her only son, a cadet pilot in the Indian Air Force, in an air crash – he collected a shelfful of books on the subject. Eventually he abandoned the idea of writing on Héloïse, saying to me that he had not been able to ﬁnd a way into the story, by which he meant a new perspective on it that would make it different from a retelling. He faced a similar problem with Hypatia of Alexandria, which he solved by making St Cyril, who is thought to have had a hand in her murder, the poem’s speaker.

At 393 pages, Bhijki Vahi (which translates as Tear-stained Notebook) is among all of Kolatkar’s works the longest. It is also the most complex. Just to enumerate the books and authors he read for it is to outline a course in world literature. For ‘Trimary’ (Three Maries), the New Testament; for ‘Laila’, Fuzuli’s Leyla and Mejnun in Soﬁ Huri’s translation (Kolatkar said he found the introductory essay by Alessio Bombaci on the history of the poem particularly useful); for ‘Apala’, the Rg Veda, Rg Vedic Darshan and Chitrao Shastri’s Prachin Charitra Kosh; for ‘Isis’, E.A. Wallis Budge; for ‘Cassandra’, Homer, Virgil, Robert Graves and Robert Payne (The Gold of Troy); for ‘Muktayakka’, the Sunyasampadane; for ‘Rabi’a’, Farid-ud-Din Attar and Margaret Smith; for ‘Hypatia’, Edmund Gibbon, Charles Kingsley, E.M. Forster and Maria Dzielska; for ‘Po Chu-i’, Arthur Waley; for ‘Helenche guntaval’ (Helen’s Hair), Robert Payne and Peter Green (Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age); for ‘Kannagi’, Alain Danielou’s translation of Shilappadikaram and Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; for ‘Nadezhda’, her two volumes of autobiography and Mandelstam’s prose; and for ‘Susan’, Susan Sontag’s On Photography. ‘Hadamma’ was based on an Inuit folktale and ‘Maimun’, the Qureshi girl from Haryana who was the victim of an honour killing in 1997, on a clutch of newspaper reports. The story was still being reported in the Indian press when Kolatkar wrote the poem. In ‘Ashru’ (Tears), the ﬁrst poem in the book, he uses the word ‘lysozyme’, an enzyme found in human tears and egg white, which he came across in a newspaper article on the work of the molecular biologist Francis Crick, and ‘Kim’ is a reference to Nick Ut’s famous 1972 photograph showing nine-year-old Kim Phuc ﬂeeing her village outside Saigon after a napalm attack. He does not provide the poems with notes, but had he done so, the eclecticism of his sources would be reminiscent of Marianne Moore.

Bhijki Vahi won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Marathi but otherwise the critics, daunted by its range of references, greeted it with silence. Kolatkar, unfortunately, never got round to translating its poems into English. ‘Sarpa Satra’, the penultimate poem in the book, appears to be an exception but it is not. I asked him about it now and he said that he started writing it in Marathi ﬁrst but, compelled by the subject, also decided to write it in English. Like ‘The Hag’ and ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’, it exists independently in both languages.

Based in the frame story of the Mahabharata, Sarpa Satra is also a contemporary tale of revenge and retribution, mass murder and genocide, and one person’s attempt to break the cycle. In the story, the divine hero Arjuna decides, ‘Just for kicks, maybe’, to burn down the Khandava forest. In a passage of great lyrical beauty, Kolatkar describes the conﬂagration in which everything gets destroyed, ‘elephants, gazelles, antelopes’ and

people as well.
Simple folk,

children of the forest
who had lived there happily for generations,
since time began.

They’ve gone without a trace.
With their language
that sounded like the burbling of a brook,

their songs that sounded like the twitterings of birds,
and the secrets of their shamans
who could cure any sickness

by casting spells with their special ﬂutes
made from the hollow
wingbones of red-crested cranes.

Among those who die in the ‘holocaust’ is a snake-woman, to avenge whose loss her husband, Takshaka, kills Arjuna’s grandson, Parikshit. Parikshit’s son, Janamejaya, then holds the snake sacriﬁce, the Sarpa Satra, to rid the world of snakes: ‘My vengeance will be swift and terrible. / I will not rest / until I’ve exterminated them all.’ Though the mass killing of snakes symbolically represents the many genocides of the last century, Kolatkar, by taking a story from an ancient epic, brings the whole of human history under the scrutiny of his moral vision. In the Mahabharata, Aasitka, whose mother is herself a snake-woman and Takshaka’s sister, is able to stop the sacriﬁce midway, but Kolatkar’s poem offers no such consolation:

When these things come to an end,
people ﬁnd
other subjects to talk about

than just
the latest episode of the Mahabharata
and the daily statistics of death;

rediscover simpler pleasures –
ﬂy kites,
collect wild ﬂowers, make love.

Life seems
to return to normal.
But do not be deceived.

Though, sooner or later,
these celebrations of hatred too
come to an end

like everything else,
the ﬁre – the ﬁre lit for the purpose –
can never be put out.

In July 2004, as we were on our way by taxi from Prabhadevi to Café Military, Kolatkar, looking out of the taxi window and then at me, remarked on his English and Marathi oeuvres. With the exception of Sarpa Satra, he said, his stance in ‘the boatride’, Jejuri and Kala Ghoda Poems had been that of an observer; he was on the outside looking in. He wondered whether he’d have gone on writing the same way if he’d lived for another ten years. The Marathi books, on the other hand, were all quite different, he said, and there was no obvious thread connecting Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, Chirimiri and Bhijki Vahi.

But there’s something else, too, that links ‘the boatride’, Jejuri and Kala Ghoda Poems. Each of them is arranged in the cyclic shape of the Ouroboros, their last lines suggestingly leading to their opening ones. Jejuri begins with ‘daybreak’ and ends with the ‘setting sun / large as a wheel’. Similarly, Kala Ghoda Poems begins with a ‘trafﬁc island’ ‘deserted early in the morning’ and ends with the ‘silence of the night’, the ‘trafﬁc lights’ ‘like ill-starred lovers / fated never to meet’. In ‘the boatride’, the boat jockeys ‘away / from the landing’ and returns to the same spot when the ride is over. It will ﬁll up with tourists and set off again, just as the state transport bus in Jejuri, at the end of the ‘bumpy ride’, will deliver a fresh batch of ‘live, ready to eat’ pilgrims to the temple priest.

His Bombay friends had meanwhile been arriving through the morning to see Kolatkar. It was a Thursday, and the crowd around his bed – Adil Jussawalla, Ashok Shahane, Raghoo Dandavate, Kiran Nagarkar, Ratnakar Sohoni – was a little like the Thursday afternoon crowd around his table at Wayside Inn. Also in the room were Dilip and Viju Chitre. Sohoni was Kolatkar’s Prabhadevi neighbour and had known him since his Design Unit days. He was carrying an accordion ﬁle, bulging with papers, which he handed over to me. Separately, he also gave me a letter. It was from Edwin Frank, the editor of the NYRB Classics Series. Frank had been in touch with Kolatkar over Jejuri, which he acquired for the series in May 2004. When Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra appeared, Kolatkar had sent him the books and Frank’s letter was an acknowledgement. I read it out.

                         September 3, 2004
Dear Mr Kolatkar,

Many thanks for sending me Sarpa Satra and the long awaited Kala Ghoda poems. I have read both books with enormous pleasure and look forward to doing so again many times. The acuteness of description, the attentive humanity, and the humour are all extraordinary; above all, I am struck by how the poems, as true poems will, succeed in making time – a time in which the world becomes real and welcome and which they offer to the reader as a gift. Here’s to idlis!
           I also want to say how beautifully put together the two books are. And many thanks for the signed copy of Jejuri which Amit Chaudhuri has forwarded to me.
           I cannot read Marathi, I am sad to say, but are there any English translations of any of the poems you have written in that language? Pras Prakashan’s brief description makes me eager to ﬁnd out what I can.
           Where, ﬁnally, should I turn to purchase additional copies of the two new books?

           With deepest appreciation and admiration,

                       Yours,
                                     Edwin Frank

‘Nice letter,’ Kolatkar said after I ﬁnished reading it. And after a pause, ‘What did you say about September?’

‘September 3. It’s the date on the letter,’ I said.

The NYRB edition of Jejuri.

During my visit to Bombay in July, I had told Kolatkar that I would try and visit him again in August. I couldn’t go, but in anticipation of my coming he had set aside the poems which he wanted me to see, putting them in the accordion ﬁle. The ﬁrst folder I pulled out from it was marked ‘Drunk & other songs. Late sixties, early seventies’. This was the period when Kolatkar’s interest in blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll took a new turn. He learnt musical notation and took lessons in the guitar and, from Arjun Shejwal, the pakhawaj, and started to write songs, recording, in 1973, a demo consisting of ‘Poor Man’, ‘Nobody’, ‘Joe and Bongo Bongo’ and ‘Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town’. Three of these are “found” songs, further examples of Kolatkar’s transformations of the commonplace. ‘Joe and Bongo Bongo’ and ‘Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town’ were based on newspaper reports and ‘Poor Man’ took its inspiration from the piece of paper that beggars thrust before passengers waiting in bus queues and at railway stations. It gives the beggar’s life story and ends with an appeal for money. ‘Poor Man’ has an ananda-lahari in the background, an instrument that is popular with both beggars and mendicants, particularly the Baul singers of Bengal. While its plangent music is truthful to the origin of the song, the beggar’s appeal, it also provides a nice contrast to the outrageous lyrics in which the ‘poor man from a poor land’ is an aspiring rock star, who is singing not for his next meal but because he wants ‘a villa in the south of france’ and ‘a gold disk on [his] wall’.

In October 1973, one of Kolatkar’s friends, Avinash Gupte, who was travelling to London and New York, tried to interest agents and music companies there in the demo but nothing came of the effort. Kolatkar’s shot at the ‘gold disk’ had ended in disappointment and he abandoned all future musical plans. He ﬁled away the ‘Drunk & other songs’, never to return to them again. Instead, in November-December of that year, he sat down and wrote Jejuri, completing it in a few weeks.

One by one, I read out the ‘Drunk & other songs’, many of which I was seeing for the ﬁrst time. I wanted to know which ones to include in The Boatride and, in case there was more than one version, which version to use. I read them in the order I found them.

tape me drunk
my sister
my chipmunk

spittle spittle spittle
gather my spittle
but never in a hospital

don’t tie me down
promise me pet
don’t tie me down
to a hospital bed
my salvation i believe
is in a basket of broken eggs
yolk on my sleeve
and vomit on my legs

o world
what is my worth
o streets
where is my shirt

begone my psychiatrist
boo
but before you do
lend me your trousers
because in mine i’ve pissed

‘That sounds honourable enough,’ Kolatkar joked after I’d ﬁnished reading it. I read out the next one:

hi constable      tell me what’s your collar size
same as mine      i bet this shirt will ﬁt you right

the shirt is yours      feel it      don’t you like the fall
all you got to do to get it is make one phone call…

‘Drunk,’ he said, by way of categorising the song. During his drinking days, Kolatkar had had his run-ins with the police, being picked up for disorderly behaviour on at least one occasion. Years later, he recalled the jail experience in Kala Ghoda Poems:

Nearer home, in Bombay itself,
the miserable bunch
of drunks, delinquents, smalltime crooks

and the usual suspects
have already been served their morning kanji
in Byculla jail.

They’ve been herded together now
and subjected
to an hour of force-fed education.

(‘Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda’)

But the poems I was reading to him from the folder were nearer in time to the experience they described:

nothing’s wrong with me man i’m ok
it’s just that i haven’t had a drink all day

let me ﬁnish my ﬁrst glass of beer
and this shakiness will disappear

you’ll have to light my cigarette i can’t strike a match
but see the difference once the ﬁrst drink’s down the hatch

‘Straight drunk,’ came his response, quickly. To other songs, after hearing the ﬁrst line, he said I could decide later whether to include them or not and to those towards the end he said ‘Skip’. Barring two, I have included all the songs in the folder. They appear in a separate section, ‘Words for Music’.

A second folder contained his translations from Marathi, six of which I had not seen before, ‘Malkhamb’, ‘Buildings’ and the four ‘Hospital Poems’. In a note given on the same sheet as the poem, Kolatkar says that ‘malkhamb’ ‘means, literally, “a wrestler’s pole”. It’s a smooth, wooden, vertical pole buried in the ground. A common feature found in all Indian gyms. Used by wrestlers in training and by gymnasts to display their skill.’ Remembering his boyhood in Kolhapur, Kolatkar said that he used to be quite good at the malkhamb.

The ‘Hospital Poems’ were not a typescript but a photocopy from a magazine and I asked him where they’d been published. He said ‘Santan’. I wondered what he meant and Adil helped me out. He said that the poems had appeared in Santan Rodriguez’s magazine Kavi, which had brought out a special Kolatkar number in 1978.

Referring to ‘The Turnaround’, Kolatkar said that the book in which he’d looked for the English equivalent of vishnukranta was in the accordion ﬁle. ‘It has a description of the ﬂower,’ he said. I hadn’t had a chance to explore the ﬁle but did so now and found Flowers of the Sahayadri (2001) by Shrikant Ingalhalikar in one of the pockets.

‘Your work is in good hands,’ Adil said to Kolatkar, and repeated the sentence. He believes he saw Kolatkar smile.

Sohoni, at Kolatkar’s behest, had done some photography for the cover of The Boatride and he showed him the pictures. They were shots of boats at the Gateway of India:

where the sea jostles
against the wall
vacuous sailboats snuggle
tall and gawky
their masts at variance
      islam
            mary
                  dolphin

their names appearing
                        music

            (‘the boatride’)

Kolatkar looked at them without saying anything. Then Ashok Shahane asked him something to which he replied that they could discuss it once he returned to Bombay. It was the last thing he said this side of silence. He died two days later, around midnight.

*

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947, the year India became independent and Lahore became a part of the newly formed nation of Pakistan. His family – caught up in the enormous human dislocation that followed after Independence – abandoned Lahore for the city of Allahabad, where his father set up a dental practice. Author of four collections of poetry in English and one of translations from the Prakrit, Mehrotra has edited several books including the influential Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1991) and An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Columbia University Press, 2003). He is head of the Department of English at the University of Allahabad, and was nominated for the chair of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2009, coming second behind Ruth Padel who resigned a week later.

Arun Kolatkar's Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, is published by Bloodaxe Books, and can be ordered immediately from Amazon.co.uk via this link.

ARUN KOLATKAR: TWO POEMS

An Old Woman

An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a ﬁfty paise coin.
She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.

She won’t let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and face her
with an air of ﬁnality.
You want to end the farce.

When you hear her say,
‘What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?’

You look right at the sky.
Clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

And as you look on
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

with a plateglass clatter
around the shatter proof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced
to so much small change
in her hand.

Pi-dog

1
This is the time of day I like best,
and this the hour
when I can call this city my own;

when I like nothing better
than to lie down here, at the exact centre
of this trafﬁc island

(or trisland as I call it for short,
and also to suggest
a triangular island with rounded corners)

that doubles as a parking lot
on working days,
a corral for more than ﬁfty cars,

when it’s deserted early in the morning,
and I’m the only sign
of intelligent life on the planet;

the concrete surface hard, ﬂat and cool
against my belly,
my lower jaw at rest on crossed forepaws;

just about where the equestrian statue
of what’s-his-name
must’ve stood once, or so I imagine.

2
I look a bit like
a seventeenth-century map of Bombay
with its seven islands

not joined yet,
shown in solid black
on a body the colour of old parchment;

with Old Woman’s Island
on my forehead,
Mahim on my croup,

and the others distributed
casually among
brisket, withers, saddle and loin

– with a pirate’s
rather than a cartographer’s regard
for accuracy.

3
I like to trace my descent
– no proof of course,
just a strong family tradition –

matrilineally,
to the only bitch that proved
tough enough to have survived,

ﬁrst, the long voyage,
and then the wretched weather here
– a combination

that killed the rest of the pack
of thirty foxhounds,
imported all the way from England

by Sir Bartle Frere
in eighteen hundred and sixty-four,
with the crazy idea

of introducing fox-hunting to Bombay.
Just the sort of thing
he felt the city badly needed.

4
On my father’s side
the line goes back to the dog that followed
Yudhishthira

on his last journey,
and stayed with him till the very end;
long after all the others

– Draupadi ﬁrst, then Sahadeva,
then Nakul, followed by Arjuna and,
last of all, Bhima –

had fallen by the wayside.
Dog in tow, Yudhishthira alone plodded on.
Until he too,

frostbitten and blinded with snow,
dizzy with hunger and gasping for air,
was about to collapse

in the icy wastes of the Himalayas;
when help came
in the shape of a ﬂying chariot

to airlift him to heaven.
Yudhishthira, that noble prince, refused
to get on board unless dogs were allowed.

And my ancestor became the only dog
to have made it to heaven
in recorded history.

5
To ﬁnd a more moving instance
of man’s devotion to dog,
we have to leave the realm of history,

skip a few thousand years
and pick up a work of science fantasy
– Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and his Dog,

a cultbook among pi-dogs everywhere –
in which the ‘Boy’ of the title
sacriﬁces his love,

and serves up his girlfriend
as dogfood to save the life of his
starving canine master.

6
I answer to the name of Ugh.
No,
not the exclamation of disgust;

but the U pronounced as in Upanishad,
and gh not silent,
but as in ghost, ghoul or gherkin.

It’s short for Ughekalikadu,
Siddharamayya’s
famous dog that I was named after,

the guru of Kallidevayya’s dog
who could recite
the four Vedas backwards.

My own knowledge of the scriptures
begins
and ends, I’m afraid,

with just one mantra, or verse;
the tenth,
from the sixty-second hymn

in the third mandala of the Rig
(and to think
that the Rig alone contains ten thousand

ﬁve hundred and ﬁfty-two verses).
It’s composed in the Gayatri metre,
and it goes:

Om tat savitur varenyam
bhargo devasya dhimahi
dhiyo yonah prachodayat.

Twenty-four syllables, exactly,
if you count the initial Om.
Please don’t ask me what it means, though.

All I know
is that it’s addressed to the sun-god
– hence it’s called Savitri –

and it seems appropriate enough
to recite it
as I sit here waiting for the sun

to rise.
May the sun-god amplify
the powers of my mind.

7
What I like about this time and place
– as I lie here hugging the ground,
my jaw at rest on crossed forepaws,

my eyes level with the welltempered
but gaptoothed keyboard
of the black-and-white concrete blocks

that form the border of this trisland
and give me my primary horizon –
is that I am left completely undisturbed

to work in peace on my magnum opus:
a triple sonata for a circumpiano
based on three distinct themes –

one suggested by a magpie robin,
another by the wail of an ambulance,
and the third by a rockdrill;

a piebald pianist, caressing and tickling
the concrete keys with his eyes,
undeterred by digital deprivation.

8
As I play,
the city slowly reconstructs itself,
stone by numbered stone.

Every stone
seeks out his brothers
and is joined by his neighbours.

Every single crack
returns to its ﬂagstone
and all is forgiven.

Trees arrive at themselves,
each one ready
to give an account of its leaves.

The mahogany drops
a casket bursting with winged seeds
by the wayside,

like an inexperienced thief
drops stolen jewels
at the sight of a cop.

St Andrew’s church tiptoes back to its place,
shoes in hand,
like a husband after late-night revels.

The university,
you’ll be glad to know,
can never get lost

because, although forgetful,
it always carries
its address in its pocket.

9
My nose quivers.
A many-coloured smell
of innocence and lavender,

mildly acidic perspiration
and nail polish,
rosewood and rosin

travels like a lighted fuse
up my nose
and explodes in my brain.

It’s not the leggy young girl
taking a short cut
through this island as usual,

violin case in hand,
and late again for her music class
at the Max Mueller Bhavan,

so much as a warning to me
that my idyll
will soon be over,

that the time has come for me
to surrender the city
to its so-called masters.

Rita Ann Higgins: Ireland Is Changing Mother

2011-09-04T03:14:00.000-07:00

IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER is the latest collection from Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the lives of the Irish dispossessed, before as well as since the demise of the Celtic tiger. (Author photo by Stan Shields)

LAUNCH EVENTS
Galway
Galway Arts Centre, Dominick Street
Friday 16th September, 6pm
Introduced by comedian Tommy Tiernan
Dublin
Irish Writers' Centre, Parnell Square
Tuesday 20th September, 7.30pm
Introduced by critic and journalist Fintan O'Toole

Ireland Is Changing Mother is available from good bookshops in Britain and Ireland or online from Amazon via this link.

REVIEW OF IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER
'It shouldn't be unusual to hear a smart, sassy, unabashed, female working-class voice in Irish writing. But it is. Higgins's achievement doesn t depend on that rarity value, but it is certainly amplified by it. Higgins is, quite consciously, an artistic outsider... a unique fusion of wry, deadpan humour on the one side and absolute sincerity on the other. She doesn't congratulate herself for her sympathy with those who are (in this case literally) outside the world of art. She simply sees and writes. Her humour and playfulness keep sentimentality and self-righteousness resolutely at bay... She has made what is still the most direct and powerful statement of the class divide in Irish society... The boom years had no great effect on Higgins's voice, on her point of view or on her style. She had a manic linguistic energy long before the hysteria of the Tiger era quickened the pulse of the culture as a whole: Higgins could be regarded, in one of her guises, as Ireland's first rapper.... Her political satire hasn't lost its edge, but it no longer reads as a cry in the wilderness... Now the bubble's burst, we re left with our real treasures, and Rita Ann Higgins is one of them.' – Fintan O'Toole, writing in The Irish Times on Ireland Is Changing Mother
Click here to read the full review (this is only a small part of a full-length, in-depth review)

INTERVIEW WITH RITA ANN HIGGINS ON ARENA
Rita Ann Higgins talks to Sean Rocks on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1 on 23 September 2011, and reads poems from the book.
Click here to listen to the interview online.

REVIEW COMMENTS ON HER PREVIOUS BOOKS
         ‘Rita Ann Higgins writes a poetry in which anger is transformed into irony, social comment into wordplay. Hers is an unstoppable intelligence, which comes off the page in a swirl of humour, deprecation and observation’ – Fiona Sampson, Irish Times.
         ‘A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues. Her poems are a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective, with wonderful rhythms that effortlessly incorporate direct speech’ – Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday.
         ‘A quite untameable poet. Higgins roams the provincial towns and countryside of Ireland fomenting rebellion and writing with unstaunchable energy of everything warm and unrespectable in Irish life. Her voice is like nobody else’s, simple but not naive, raucous but sympathetic’ – Peter Porter, PBS Bulletin.
         ‘Higgins’s voices are so distinctive and real that a whole world of semi-rural Irish poverty rises around the reader with the jolting acuity of an excellent documentary…an hilarious, absorbing and thoroughly disturbing experience’ – Kate Clanchy, Independent.
         ‘Rita Ann Higgins means a unique line in human warmth; and a unique colour of humour and a unique clarity’ – Paul Durcan.

TWO POEMS FROM IRELAND IS CHANGING MOTHER

The Builder’s Mess

Toxic and tired is the builder’s mess
in post-Celtic-tiger-Ireland.
Now that the bubble’s burst mother
the ghost-estates are everywhere.

A bank-owned-builders’-mess mother.

All those estates
six hundred and twenty, maybe more,
few ﬁnished, loads unﬁnished.
Unsightly and neglected
dirty-faced and dour mother
toxic and tired mother.

The Olympic rats run in and out
of unﬁnished drainpipes,
up bare-stairs,
devouring lagging jackets
in hot presses that never had heat.

Someone high up in a department,
reeking with negative equity
calls all the ghost estates,
a phenomenon mother.

The homeless guy who is barred
from the homeless shelter
for urinating in a doorway.
He calls them a shame mother
a crying shame mother.

Some were completed and vacant,
some were found to be occupied
some were found to be empty and occupied,
all at the same time mother.
Others were bought but never built mother.

And what do the sons and daughters
of the Celtic tiger call them mother?

The ones who camped out in the ﬂoods
to get the semi with the decking,
and the snooker table lawn mother.
The ones who queued
with their deposits in their pockets,
their unborn children up their sleeves
their shaved backsides hanging out.
What do they call them mother?
They call them a travesty mother.

Ireland Is Changing Mother

Don’t throw out the loaves
with the dishes mother.
It’s not the double-takes so much
it’s that they take you by the double.
And where have all the Nellys gone
and all the Missus Kellys gone?
You might have had
the cleanest step on your street
but so what mother,
Nowadays it’s not the step
but the mile that matters.

Meanwhile the Bally Bane Taliban
are battling it out over that football.
They will bring the local yokels
to a deeper meaning of over the barring it.
And then some scarring will occur –
as in cracked skull for your troubles.
They don’t just integrate, they limp-pa-grate,
your sons are shrinking mother.

Before this mother,
your sons were Gods of that powerful thing.
Gods of the apron string.
They could eat a horse and they often did,
with your help mother.
Even Tim who has a black belt in sleepwalking
and border lining couldn’t torch a cigarette,
much less the wet haystack of desire,
even he can see, Ireland is changing mother.
Listen to black belt Tim mother.

When they breeze onto the pitch
like some Namibian Gods
the local girls wet themselves.
They say in a hurry, O-Ma-God, O-Ma-God!

Not good for your sons mother,
who claim to have invented everything
from the earwig to the slíothar.
They were used to seizing Cynthia’s hips
looking into her eyes and saying
I’m Johnny come lately, love me.

Now the Namibian Gods and the Bally Bane Taliban
are bringing the local yokels
to their menacing senses,
and scoring more goals than Cú Chulainn.
Ireland is changing mother
tell yourself, tell your sons.

slíothar: hurling ball

HERSELF

Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives. She left school at 14, and was in her late 20s when she started writing poetry. She has since published nine books of poetry, including Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation) (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005) and Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) from Bloodaxe Books, and Hurting God: Part Essay, Part Rhyme (2010) from Salmon. Throw in the Vowels was reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of her reading her poems. Her plays include Face Licker Come Home (1991), God of the Hatch Man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993), Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Plastic Bag (2007) and The Empty Frame (2008). Her many awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989 and several Arts Council bursaries. She is a member of Aosdána.

High Talk and Reeling Thoughts: Gjertrud Schnackenberg on 'High Talk' by W.B. Yeats

2011-09-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg won the Griffin International Poetry Prize earlier this year for her latest book of poetry, Heavenly Questions, which is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in September. Writing in The American Prospect, Eliza Griswold said: 'Schnackenberg is best known for her stunning command of prosody. She is the most accomplished master of blank verse on the planet.' Jonathan Galassi interviews Gjertrud Schnackenberg about Heavenly Questions elsewhere on Bloodaxe Blogs. Here she discusses an inexplicably neglected late poem by W.B. Yeats, 'High Talk', first published towards the end of his life in 1938.

'High Talk' by W.B. Yeats

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks
loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

*

GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG:
HIGH TALK AND REELING THOUGHTS

That we cannot say what poetry is, and that we don't know what it is, and that we likely can't know and never will know what it is, is a paradox that for me becomes only curiouser and curiouser as I grow older. Poetry's truths don't merely invite us to see that there are some truths which in principle we must leave alone: they enjoin it. But apparently helpless to stop ourselves, we paraphrase these truths and watch as they immediately escape, irreducible, almost extra-verbal, whole and shining in their projected imaginative worlds, as indivisible as prime numbers and as untouchable as soap bubbles. We see this happen, and nonetheless we try again to reparaphrase these truths, and then watch as they escape again—and we can see, in the same moment of their escape, how they instantaneously and magically re-form themselves.

Even William Butler Yeats, the arch poet, couldn't say what poetry is. His biographer R.F. Foster, in The Arch-Poet, quotes a sentence which Yeats was dwelling on at the very end of his life: "Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it." His monumental last sonnet, "High Talk," is one of several poems about poetry from his last poems, a circus poem written at the same time that he was writing "The Circus Animals' Desertion." "High Talk" is many things, a thing of thingness: it is a piece of unholy, perpetrated music, and a valediction, and a self-portrait of the artist as a maniac, and it is a stupendous piece of poetic terribilita that embodies, without a trace of beauty, what it cannot know—or what it cannot know in any other words or ways.

Professor Ben Reid pointed this poem out to me in 1975, and since that time, I have asked nearly every literary scholar and critic I have encountered what they think of the poem: almost invariably they have forgotten its existence or are unfamiliar with it, and invariably when they reread or read it, they are startled by the spectacle and mania of it, and by its bizarre, meaning-drenched metrical footwork. With consideration and grace, almost all of my interlocutors over these many years have held back from writing about what we discussed, sometimes at my request, sometimes out of instinctive courtesy, and I gratefully acknowledge their forbearance, which has allowed me to gradually collect and write down my own reeling thoughts about this poem.

Mr. Yeats

Yeats wrote "High Talk" six months to the day before his death, and it was published in the London Mercury in December 1938, about six weeks before he died on January 28, 1939, in a boardinghouse on the French Riviera, in Roquebrune.

In the New York Times obituary published on January 30, 1939, we see Yeats in a last, brief glimpse, as a tattered coat upon a stick: "Mr. Yeats was able only to take short walks in the gardens of the house where he stayed. He was confined to his bed since Tuesday."

Short walks? In the garden? Mr. Yeats? The body is sinking, but the spirit's riposte is already published in the Mercury, well named for the messenger of the gods: "night splits, and the dawn breaks loose; / I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on."

Poetic Feet

"High Talk" is not a comic poem (and not a tragic poem), but it abounds with jokes, jests, and puns, above all about "poetic feet," as well as with witticisms about the history of sonnet forms, and heroic and mock-heroic couplets, and the meaning of triple rather than duple meters, and of the stilt-like thunking of spondees, and of extra-long, lumbering line-lengths of hexameters, and of the rhythmic pause exposed, as an abyss is exposed by the height of stilts—and there are many other stunts, japes, mockeries, tricks, and plays, beginning with the pun of its title. Yeats is caught up by his "poetic feet," and by the meaning of "poetic feet," and by the divine lengths to which the "poetic feet" of these hexameters transport him.

Footedness, poetic, anatomical, inhuman, human, supernal—and inanimate, in the empty shoes being repaired and in the "timber toes" of the stilt man: the sonnet is choreographed with an impeded, uncanny, lumbering footwork by the poet we know to be "the dancer and the dance." "High Talk" is a bestiary of variable footedness: the four-footed circus animals (pony, bear, lion) from "The Circus Animals' Desertion," here being led from collar to collar, presumably chained; and the eight-footed daddy longlegs, and the web-footed barnacle goose (in stratospherically high flight); and the women whose task is "patching old heels" on worn-out shoes for other, absent human bipeds; and, in the poem's menacing last line, the footlessness of the spooky sea horses; and, overtowering all of these, the stiltwalker, whose human feet do not touch the ground as he lumbers along at a grotesque, self-inflicted pace through the triple-foot accents—or is the stiltwalker four-footed, if we count both his stilt stumps and his two feet in the footrests?—wading through the tripartite, wooden dactyls and anapests and thunking down in spondees, transporting himself with and across the hexameter lengths of his lines, like an embodied answer to all three parts of the Sphinx's riddle (an ironic embodiment, since the answer to the Sphinx is "man" and this stiltwalker is less human than humanoid, a hybrid of human and stilts) as the Sphinx is a hybrid of "Lion and woman and the Lord knows what." Apollodorus's version of the Sphinx's riddle is a riddle about a hybrid: What has one voice but is four-footed, two-footed, three-footed? "High Talk" is a bestiary compendium of the subhuman, the humanoid, the superhuman, the extra-human, the nonhuman, and the merely human, and it is filled with hybrids, zoological, anthropological, divine, spiritual, auditory, poetic, religious, cultural; its stiltwalker, oddly, freakishly belongs to all of these kingdoms, phylums, classes, orders, families, genera, species, and he is, as well, unclassifiable and a thing apart. "High Talk" teems with hybrids, and is about a hybrid, and it is itself a hybrid.

A Twice-Appearing Foot, in the Singular, with a Third Meaning

Linguistic hybrids abound as well in "High Talk"—puns, multiple plays on words, giant metaphors, staggering homonyms. One homonym, for example, is the word "stilts," used to mean over-sized circus crutches and to mean also the stiltedness, the exaggerated affectation, of Yeats’s hexameters. And, equally importantly to the poem, the word "foot" is a homonym.

"Foot" appears only twice (bipedally, one could say), in the second and third lines, and, using it twice, Yeats invokes a third definition of the word: to the two implicit but pervasive definitions of "foot" which propel the stilt walker through the lines of "High Talk"—"foot" as the anatomical appendage and "foot" as the unit of prosody—Yeats here explicitly adds a third definition of "foot" as linear measurement (for the measuring both of the height of his stilts and the height of his poetic stature): he says that his great grand-dad's stilts were "twenty foot high" and that his stilts are "but fifteen foot." Yet even in using the word "foot" only as a linear measurement—and the word "foot" appears only as a linear measurement in the poem–Yeats further compounds the doubly defined (although otherwise merely implied) "poetic feet" of his stilts, and also thereby adds to the population of hybrids of which the poem is composed: as a homonym, even this single word is itself yet another kind of hybrid, and another way for one to become two and two to become three (and, given the hybrid Sphinx's riddling focus on feet in Apollodorus, it is appropriate that the word "foot" should be the locus, and the weight-bearer, of this further compounding). Yet, in using “linear measurement” as the definition of the word "foot," Yeats retains and intensifies his focus on poetic meter -- and this seems to me nearly miraculous—because, as we know, the word “meter” comes from the Greek word metron, meaning "measure."

And yet this hybrid word—the homonymous, punning, compounded, twice-appearing, triply-defined "foot"–is only one of the dazzling, multivalent witticisms in this entirely singular poem, and only one instance of its fused multiplicities. Some of the hybrids in "High Talk" are classical, the most prominent of these being the alluded-to Sphinx (which was a male in Egypt and a female in Greece, and which, in "The Second Coming," begins moving toward the town of Bethlehem) but "High Talk," for all its classical references and rough-shod hexameters, is not a classical poem.

The God of the Dragging Footsteps

Not a classical poem: in fact, "High Talk" is barbaric—although barbarity is, of course, a classical idea, a mental projection across an imposed cultural boundary—yet I do not doubt that Yeats is aggressively, brazenly taking on the landscape of classical Greek poetry in the extra-long reaches of these unstable, striding hexameters. Barbaric, but the poem's approximations of dactylic hexameters—though the dactyls wobble into anapests, unsteadily, like stilts—inevitably echo the oracular speech of Apollo at Delphi and the meter of the divine archive of Homer's poetry. And as Yeats fabricates his own stilts, it is impossible to not think of the golden leg braces or crutches that Hephaestus created for his own injured legs and feet, and it is impossible too not to recall how the artisan-god's hobbled gait provokes the unfeeling, inextinguishable laughter of the gods on Olympus—their laughter echoed in the laughter of the great sea horses at the end of "High Talk." And the height of the stiltwalker suggests the sheer size and out-of-scale, overtowering stature of the classical gods. In the Iliad, Ares and Pallas Athene are "huge in their armour, / being divinities, and conspicuous from afar, / but the people around them were smaller" (Lattimore translation, Book 18, lines 516–519).

Not classical but barbaric: Yeats's crude carpentry is a grimy mockery of the fabulous, wonder-working artisanship of Hephaestus, who even created thinking and feeling automatons, and who keeps "all the tools with which he worked in a silver strongbox"; and Yeats's lumbering pace is a mortal, labored shadow of the effortless gliding of the golden wheels of Hephaestus's leg braces; and his barbaric rudeness and contempt for the shoe-repairing women is a travesty of Hephaestus's loving, immortal hospitality to the silver-footed Thetis visiting his workshop—yet Yeats too manages, arduously, to fabricate an overtowering identity for himself, with brute materials and the crude workmanship of a mortal, an identity which culminates in "High Talk" as—to use a Homeric phrase for the marvels that Hephaestus creates in the remote god-world—"a wonder to look upon."

The Octave

Sifting through all the classical allusions of "High Talk," I must reiterate that this poem is barbaric: above all, all out of proportion, and out of all proportion, its attitude wanton, insolent, transgressive, brandishing its bad manners. Yeats insults himself in the octave with a debased description of the poet as a tawdry, cynical impresario of cheap thrills, performing for an audience he holds in contempt; he insults poetry as a base and gross entertainment, calculated, wooden, staged, and worse, he insists, verging into a crime, that poetry is an exhibitionistic performance for voyeurs, even making the repulsive accusation that he is an exhibitionist because the women "want it"—although it is his face that appears at the upper-story pane (in his aggressive accusation toward these women, there is a jape too about the Petrarchan sonnet form, invented once upon a time as golden nets of rhyme to capture Petrarch's lifelong worship of Laura). Barbaric: "High Talk" brags, boasts, swaggers. We feel indignant, incensed, in the presence of its octave, even faintly vandalized or stolen from—even as Yeats claims that he himself is the victim of vandalizing (a thought brought on at the moment that he calls himself a modern). This twentieth-century rogue showman claims that his stilts have been stolen and vandalized, his hexameters chopped up by another rogue, presumably an agent of modernism's inalienable, righteous, destructive force (I think the great-granddad is Shakespeare): "What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, / And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, / Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire."

A rogue victim of a rogue: but in the octave he perpetrates his own social crimes; alienated, he violates human bonds and ties with insult, accusation, bragging, and self-debasement—and with boasting self-elevation—and, presumably, he violates his mortal connection to more-than-mortals with his sacrilege and hubris.

Hubris, Hybris, Hybrid

"Hubris" is from the Greek word hybris (in the dictionary, hubris is "overbearing pride and presumption toward the gods"; hybris is a wanton, swaggering insolence, verging on violence): these are words for aggressively taking on the gods. I have tried to count the forms that hybridism takes in this poem, and I know I haven't found all of them, but a partial list would include the hybrid stiltman, the hybrid sonnet forms, the hybrid meters, the hybrid slowness-swiftness of stiltwalking, the hybrid barbarian-classical craftsmanship, even the presiding ghost of the hybrid Sphinx, and the ghastly sea horses which, although not hybrids (unless they have been secretly compounded with the gods), look and feel to us like hybrids, like freaks of nature. And of course, this is a poem about poetry: and metaphor too is hybridizing, in and of itself a compounding.

But for me the poem's most astonishing insight is about a hybrid of poetry, and is more an oracle than an insight, a pinnacle-peak, oracular truth about poetry, of poetry, in poetry: that meter and metaphor are one, fused in revelation. "All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all": the stilts are both the oracular hexameters and the metaphysical heights they bestow upon him, at one and the same time; the hexameters are the way that he is raised high enough to see what he sees; his rugged craft is inseparable from his visionary sight and insight.

The Feet of the Gods

"Poetic feet," footedness, footwork: in the classical world, in Greek poetry, a god's disguised feet, if visible to a mortal, can be a giveaway that discloses the god's divine identity. Mortals on earth are allowed only fleeting glimpses of the divine heels, calves, footprints of the often barefooted gods. Though mortal, Homer is allowed to see, in his Muse-endowed poetry vision, the silver-footed Thetis as she visits the Olympian workshop of Hephaestus, who is the "god of the dragging footsteps" (Lattimore translation, Book 18, line 371). In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, a fascinating passage is devoted to Apollo's inspection of the bewildering footprints left behind by the branch-woven shoes—or stilts—of the messenger god: "monstrous footprints… such as are a noble god's wondrous works." Divine feet, when they touch the earth, may seem lame or inadequate, perhaps because they are inexperienced, although, in Greek poetry, this is only hinted, not stated or elaborated, only lightly touched upon. In her remarkable and disquieting book The War That Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander alludes to the trouble the goddesses Hera and Athene have in the Iliad when their feet touch the earth: she describes the dove-like gait of these terrifying goddesses who, having arrived on earth to intensify the warfare, can't disguise very well that they are not experienced in walking. These goddesses customarily fly at the speed of lightning bolts, hurling themselves from Olympus like comets; but when they touch down among mortals onto the earth, they are hobbled, they walk overly quickly, oddly bobbing, as if on birds' feet: "the two [Hera and Athene] set forth ‘in little steps like shivering / doves, in their eagerness to stand by the men of Argos'—this image of the bloodthirsty divinities shivering in excitement as they mince toward their prey is inexpressibly sinister."

When I was writing The Throne of Labdacus, I was haunted by the fugitive, only barely hinted-at suggestion that Oedipus's injured feet—for which he is named—may indicate a perhaps partially hidden, perhaps partially manifest alliance with the antagonist divinities who torment him, a connection which I wanted and tried, but failed, to uncover. But this much is known, recorded in the Sophocles tragedy: that Oedipus's feet are injured, and that it is the injury to his feet by which Oedipus is not only named ("Swollen-Foot"), called, and known to others, but through which he finally discovers and knows himself, in his catastrophic, Delphi-driven self-revelation. The ancient injury to his feet is the secret, and the answer to the secret, of who and what he is.

Gods are not the only beings identified by their feet; humans are identified by their feet as well, as much in ancient poetry as in the modern anthropological definition of bipedal feet as a signal trait of human evolution. Homer's poetry is the first written account to distinguish humans (from gods) by the fact that the feet of mortals walk on the earth; and Aristotle defines humans as footed: "animal, mortal, footed, biped, wingless." When Eurycleia bathes the feet of the disguised Odysseus, she feels his scar, and knows him.

The Stiltwalker's Feet

In "High Talk," Yeats's feet do not touch the ground as he walks, and his gait is, of course, disabled, off-balance, wrong-rhythmed, immensely laborious (and self-inflicted). The disabled gait and superhuman height of his stilts suggest ancient divinity and give the poem's insight about poetry the aura of a more than human authority.

The sight and sound of stiltwalking is perturbing, even menacing, in its inhuman pace, its inhuman height, its flouting of human proportion, rhythm, balance, and the pace of the stride: the stiltwalking performer, having vaulted up and away, looms, isolated by unnatural height, thing-like and suspended apart from and above human concerns and engagements and conversation; the performer's face is no longer face-to-face with others but is obscured by the height ("love fled…/ And hid his face amid a crowd of stars").

Eerily slow, yet space-grabbing and therefore paradoxically fast: built into the stiltwalker's pace-rhythm is a mid-stride stall, a beat's hesitation between steps, before the expected next step thunks down; the hesitation is ominous and can give a bystander a frisson of cold goose bumps. Yeats depicts this disturbed walking rhythm with the tripartite dactyls and anapests—uncomfortable in English but well suited to introducing this extra beat of hesitation.

And then there is the caesura: Yeats spotlights and exaggerates the suspended hesitation, or pause, that crops up naturally midway between the phrases of a hexameter line (or, on stilts, between strides) with a brilliant, heavily choreographed move. He metrically depicts what happens when a stiltwalker comes to a full stop and stands still for a long moment, swaying overhead, regaining, reassessing, and reasserting his balance, and he accomplishes this full stop with two heavy stresses in a row (spondees: THUNK THUNK) right before the caesura, so that the pause opens up—like the precipice before a stiltwalker, a sudden height-created abyss. Arrested mid-line, precarious, the stilt man teeters above the caesura, before he heavily swings out again with the long, slow swing of the next stride (I hear three thunks before the caesura and only two thunks after, the fifth stress audible but not part of the stride; I don't know why my ear registers it this way, except that scansion is a subjective art, not a science, and each of us reads and hears in our own way):

ProCESSions that lack HIGH STILTS / / have NOTHing that CATches the EYE.

WHAT if my great-GRANDDAD / / had a PAIR that were TWEN-ty foot HIGH,

And MINE were but fifTEEN FOOT, / / NO modern STALKS upon HIGHER,

Some ROGUE of the world STOLE THEM / / to PATCH up a FENCE or a FIRE.

I Hew, I Fell, I Carve

These exaggerated caesuras feel, to me at least, sawn through. In the dictionary I found something that I had known and forgotten long ago, that the original root of "caesura" comes from a Late Latin verb which means "to hew, to fell, to carve," an etymology miraculously appropriate to these woodworked, hand-sawn, planed, and chiseled hexameters, of which Yeats is the mad carpenter: "I take to chisel and plane."

Sonnet Hybrids

Two sonnet forms, the Petrarchan, named for its Italian inventor, and the Shakespearean, named for its English master, often are conjoined by sonnet writers in English—with the more profound and beautifully proportioned weight-bearing structure of the Petrarchan model (eight and six, octave and sestet) supporting the less well-paced and well-timed English model, whose rhyme scheme was recast as a solution for the comparative difficulty of rhyming in English (four, four, four, and two, three quatrains and the bedeviling couplet with its too-quick, too-shallow closure). Most sonnet writers in English conjoin the Shakespearean sonnet structure to the shadow of the Petrarchan, seeking the time and space the sestet offers, its sweep and sway, its greater depth; and the memory of the all-important ninth line of the older Italian form has proven indelible in the newer English form. But Yeats achieves a more fused, conjoined, intrinsically meaningful sonnet structure: his compounding of these two kinds of sonnets is a part of the meaning of his choreography, the dance steps of an awkward, modern, towering biped; and in "High Talk" the turn at the ninth line proclaims a new identity and an embarkation for a change of worlds so momentous that the memory of the old world of the octave is annihilated.

Sonnet Jests

"High Talk" makes an amazing joke about the two compounded sonnet forms: in this poem Yeats has pried out the ending couplet of the English sonnet, like a piece of lumber, and hammered it over and across the Petrarchan sonnet form, turning the whole of this sonnet of the end, about the end, and at the end, into a sequence of endings upon endings upon endings: a poem of the end, built entirely out of endings—endings which are furthermore pronouncedly end-stopped in most of the octave (as heroic couplets and dactylic hexameters are), jammed into the structure of the octave but not enjambed, although in the sestet mere anarchy begins to be loosed among the end-stoppings.

But Yeats knows of course that one of the strengths of the Petrarchan sonnet is precisely that it does not have an ending couplet: its couplets occur in the middle of the octave (abbaabba), where, so far from summing the sonnet up or clicking it closed, the couplets are on the move, easily drawing the lines forward through the octave, as if on magic wheels. And there is more jesting to this: in English, couplets are not only sonnet enders but are independent forms with their own associations. In English, the "heroic couplets" (in the hands, for example, of Samuel Johnson) and the "mock-heroic couplets" (in the hands, for example, of Alexander Pope) are imbued with their usage for both elevated, high talk and for trafficking in mockery—and "High Talk," both bristlingly hubristic and self-belittling, is, at one and the same time, heroic and mock-heroic.

And there is another, larger jest here: the sonnet, especially because of the ending couplet, is renowned as a closed form, a legendary locked box for which poets have sought and sought the key. Yeats upends and subverts the brevity and shallow solutions of the meaning conveyed by the ending couplet: after hammering his ending couplets all over the closed box he has constructed, contrary to any lingering logical or emotional or musical expectations, he simply blows the sonnet up—not formally but metaphysically. The sestet, having jettisoned the octave, forgets what it leaves behind and melts down toward a horizon-bending, unforeseeable, and unbelievably powerful "ending" (metaphysical, physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional, poetic, superhuman), as the possessed craftsman veers into a state of being which can't be contained by anything, much less by a sonnet couplet.

This final jest about sonnet endings is also a jest about the end of life, not neatly locked with a rhyme like a key on a charming Elizabethan ribbon but violently exploded in an immense, stilt-staggering shock, unforeshadowed and cosmic.

The Sestet

No reader could foresee, from the end of the octave, the cataclysm of the sestet. We last saw Yeats at the end of the octave, trapped in the circus world, fiendishly taking to chisel and plane (I always think of him chiseling away the rungs from a ladder in the rag and bone shop, using its twin rails to build his stilts). But a change of worlds occurs between the eighth and ninth line (we are not shown how, when, why, where): the octave, with its reprehensible, run-down, pathetic atmosphere, vanishes. Malachi Stilt-Jack has finished constructing his stilts and has already mounted them, and he is hugely striding away, abandoning the human world—possessed, maniacal, disengaged, unreachable, and implacable, in a sudden, furious momentum. Instantaneously, at the ninth line, the disabused stunts and tricks in the octave fall away: cynicism about poetry reverses into mysticism, the performer's base and tawdry motives for writing poetry reverse into inspiration, gross conduct metamorphoses into high-flown, heroic aspiration, the run-down circus-performer metamorphoses into an awe-inspiring, god-touched humanoid, a metaphysical alien, a sort of possessed, Hephaestus-derived automaton, the transformation occurring out of sight, off-site, in the space between the eighth and the ninth lines which is, we now understand, an abyss.

Malachi

"Malachi Stilt-Jack am I."

I hesitate before the name Malachi, knowing that Malachi in Hebrew means "messenger," but I am not at all persuaded of the likelihood of a meaningful Hebrew reference in this unbiblical, pagan poem; and, having pondered the information from Richard J. Finneran's footnote to the poem that Malachi has three possible references—the biblical prophet, the medieval Irish saint, and Oliver St. John Gogarty—I can't believe that Yeats means to refer to any of these. In part because of the declamatory way he announces his new name, with a stilted, distance-creating, reversed grammar, it seems more a declaration of a nonidentity than of an identity. In Greek Religion, Walter Burkert writes that to the Greeks the names of the Greek gods—even Zeus's name—are without etymologies, that the names are, in a sense, empty. This news is disconcerting; both ancient and modern people reflexively seek the meaning of the names of the gods, and of heroes and humans. (Again, when I was writing The Throne of Labdacus, I learned that Apollo's name is perhaps uniquely mysterious among the gods' names, and I became almost fixated on the two lambdas in the middle of Apollo's name, wondering if the letters could hint that perhaps the god is a secret double of Oedipus, knowing from the Etymologicum Magnum that the lambda is "the same as Labda," a Greek nickname for a lame person.)

But Burkert's observation about the names of the Greek gods contradicts this instinct:

One very conspicuous peculiarity concerns the divine names: it is not only the modern historian who expects divine names to enshrine some meaning . . . By contrast [to the names of the gods in Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, and Hittite], the names of the Greek gods are almost all impenetrable. Not even for Zeus could the Greeks find the correct etymology. But in this paradox there is plainly a system: at most semi-intelligibility is admitted . . .

But the names of the heroes are . . . to a large extent encoded . . . or else simply inexplicable like Achilles or Odysseus. Clearly the object is to make the individuality of a person, especially a person not physically present, stand out more memorably by giving him a striking name . . .

"Impenetrable," "semi-intelligibility," "inexplicable"—it is strange to think of the superhuman names as without derivation, etymology, reference, parallel, counterpart, history, or meaning. But when set beside the sestet of "High Talk," these words reverberate for me behind Malachi Stilt-Jack's proclamation of his name—a proclamation from the heights that does not invite a response:

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits, and the dawn
breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

This is insanity, as well as crazed, fabulous poetry: this Malachi-Nijinsky has escaped from an asylum, encumbering his legendary footwork with stilts, self-obliterating yet self-assertive: a visionary exponent of poetry is revealing the irrational ecstasy of poetry's source and showing us the conditions, however grotesque and unassimilable, out of which poetry is engendered. "Those images which yet / Fresh images beget . . ." At which point (or before which) the unknowable Malachi Stilt-Jack is seen to be abandoning the human world, unaccompanied and unaccompaniable.

Cheap Thrills

"I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on."

Is poetry cheap thrills, then, mere amazement, dream states, rhapsodies, and trances, ecstasy for its own sake, something to gape at, a medium for bringing on goose bumps, shivers, the jimjams? (Is revelation?)

Yeats answers: No. The wish that he made so often in his poems, as he figuratively blew out the candles, year by year, herein comes true—that he stay aroused, that the fury intensify rather than wane, that he keep faith with his poetry's ecstasy and "its bitter furies of complexity" until his death. And that his poetry prove that intellectual ecstasy, in dragging its language through the fury and mire of existence, engenders meaning.

Of course, poetry means multiple things to Yeats, but I want to concentrate on one aspect here: a vision of poetry as the final cause. I think of "High Talk" as a companion sonnet to "Leda and the Swan," where Zeus's sacred fury and sacred crime engender images in which we glimpse, in a phosphorescent flash, the Trojan War, or rather a vision that the Trojan War, meaningless as it unfolds, is engendered in order to become the Iliad, its meaning. "High Talk" is another step in Yeats's experience of thinking about poetry as the purpose of meaning for which existence is engendered and upon which existence is spent: history exists, the cosmic drama exists, the human story exists, spiritual insight exists, existence exists, in order to be turned into poetry; that is, all that desire and suffering of human life, all the fury and mire, all the labor of insight, all that has happened—"the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead"—all are brought about, and all unfold, in order to be turned into poetry. In this vision, poetry is the end-state meaning for which the Creation is engendered (poesis is Greek for "creation"). That mortals should live and die to this end is another discussion entirely, and it needs to be acknowledged that, of course, this is a poet's revelation and explanation for the Creation and human suffering. But perhaps it is more than that; perhaps other kinds of minds, other than the minds of poets, are opened in reading poetry to a consideration that poetry turns human existence into the realization of its meaning.

Begetting Images

And "High Talk," with its brazen oracle music, its gigantic exertion, and its unholy grasping for sublimity, is a knock-down, drag-out fight with death. Yeats is still standing at the end, precarious and perched, savagely unrecognizable, wobbling, but still able to see because of the height of his stilts, and still able to report that he can see ahead of him, presumably beyond his own death, "that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."

Toward which, when we last see him, he still is stalking.

Mr. Yeats

"Mr. Yeats was able only to take short walks in the gardens of the house where he stayed. He was confined to his bed since Tuesday." (via)

The Terrible Novelty

"High Talk" is also a valediction forbidding mourning—although, in any case, we aren't mourning. Such heights, transport, insight, and metamorphosis—and such oracularly metered fulfillment—can't be mourned.

We see the dancer who is the dance taking his last steps in "High Talk." He is a vestige, a remnant, but so high that he is "Far up in the stretches of night," almost lost to the living, still frenzy-struck, a teetering spectacle of apotheosis—precarious, inalienable, magnificent, awkward, heroic, barbaric.

But because this is the end, we are able to see the dreadful rictus of the sea horses, and to hear the inextinguishable laughter of the gods, savagely marking this farewell as mortal. Yeats persists, implacable, undissuadable and not dissuaded, still gaining momentum and keeping his foothold, transported on the hexameter stilts he has laboriously fabricated and ingeniously mastered. This is, indeed, the end. But "no modern stalks upon higher."

Exit, self-catapulted.

*

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington. Her retrospective Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001) includes her four collections, Portraits and Elegies (1982), The Lamplit Answer (1985), A Gilded Lapse of Time (1995), and The Throne of Labdacus (2000), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her latest collection, Heavenly Questions, was the International winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. Published in hardback in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010, the first UK edition is published by Bloodaxe Books in paperback in September 2011, price £8.95.

This essay first appeared on the FSG books blog The BEST WORDS in the BEST ORDER. Many thanks to Jonathan Galassi for permission to republish it here. The section entitled "A Twice-Appearing Foot, in the Singular, with a Third Meaning" is a later addition. Jonathan Galassi interviews Gjertrud Schnackenberg about Heavenly Questions elsewhere on Bloodaxe Blogs.

POSTSCRIPT BY JENNIFER CLARVOE

Perhaps this is already more generally known, but I couldn't help thinking that the stilts in the poem are also related to the stilts worn by Ancient Greek actors.

Years and years ago in Paris, I took a course in "Tragedie," for which, in the last two weeks, after we had explored tragic dimensions in a variety of vocal and physical exercises (including such practices as reciting the same lines about Achilles, over and over again, while throwing a rubber ball as hard as we could, while running across a room and jumping over a bench, while walking and pausing walking and pausing down a steep flight of stairs—the French modes so different from American Stanislavskian energy-draining inner-directed work), we strapped on our stilt shoes and recited while walking in a dark room toward the light shone on our faces. "Achille aussi bondit. Il dit et tire le glaive aigu..." (or that's what sticks with me, from 1981). It was amazingly resonant—we were and were not ourselves, our ordinary classmates; we were given over, instead, to the scale of the story.

At any rate, in between ancient Greece and 20th century Paris, I'm sure there existed/exists a tradition of performing tragedy on stilts, alive metaphorically like Malachi etc even when not in actual practice.

A quick on-line search turns up these two quite different images, suggesting the range of possibility (and the storage jar image suggests that comedy, too, used stilts):

Storage Jar with a Chorus of Stilt Walkers, black-figured amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, Greek (Attic), active about 550-525 B.C. Terracotta, 16 1/8 x 11 7/16 in. (41 x 29 cm). James Logie Memorial Collection, University of Canterbury.

Paul Klee: Tragedy on Stilts (Tragödie auf Stelzen), 1912. MOMA, New York © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Jennifer Clarvoe is Professor of English at Kenyon College.

The Skull Beneath the Skin: A verse-film by Damian Gorman marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11

2011-09-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

This is a remarkable film: do watch it. It's essential viewing both this coming week and anytime. This note shares information from director Hugh Thomson and producer Ben Taylor. To see The Skull Beneath the Skin, see details below on screenings in London on Monday 5th or Tuesday 6th September. Otherwise, you can see an initial version of the film via this internet link:
http://houseofhoney.org/mediaplay/play.php?id=20
Film length 20 minutes.

The Skull Beneath the Skin
A verse-film by Damian Gorman

We know the journalistic story of 9/11. We know all too well what happened on that day. But what we need to be reconnected with is the emotion. What happened to us all just in watching those horrific events unfold – to the way we think about the world, about good, about evil.

What the story needs is a poet.

Damian Gorman is that poet, with the Irish gift of speaking directly to the viewer. Sometimes described as Northern Ireland’s best-kept secret, he has made a celebrated verse-film about the Troubles (Devices of Detachment, ‘a television masterpiece’, Sunday Telegraph) as well as many other films for both BBC and Channel Four; a play set and acted out in the old Belfast court-room which attracted world-wide interest; and has a public profile as a performance poet and campaigner for peace and reconciliation that has led to him being awarded an MBE.

This will be the premiere of an initial version of the film, with a special score performed by renowned cellist Matthew Barley.

Director Hugh Thomson has a strong award-winning record as an ambitious film-maker, often with a rock and roll twist, and with what the Observer described as ‘a daring commando-style’. With a background as a cameraman, he has often shot sections of his films himself and has constantly re-invented his documentary approach. His acclaimed Dancing in the Street: A Rock and Roll History won plaudits (‘Hugh Thomson’s magnificent ten-part history is the most radical and the most ambitious history of rock ever attempted on television' – Daily Telegraph) and a BAFTA nomination, and he has made many authored programmes with writers including Devices of Detachment with Damian.

Producer Ben Taylor concentrated solely on a successful acting carer until 1985 then expanded his creative interests to include event production, music, musical production, and documentary film making. A partner in independent film production company Orpheus Films.

In collaboration with ‘The Bee’ & experimental conductor Ya’acov Darling Khan, Matthew Barley has composed a haunting ‘Requiem for 9/11’ bringing together an ambient electronic soundscape with a passionate, melancholy improvised cello melody. One of the finest cellists of his generation, Matthew has appeared as soloist with orchestra and in recital in many great concert halls around the world. Equally comfortable with improvisation, Bach Suites or making music with Indian, Sufi, African or Jazz musician. 'I wish more people would think about music the way Matthew Barley does' – The Times (London).

There will be a chance to ask Damian and the other film-makers questions after the screening.

Venues:
Monday 5th September, 8pm: The 'Games Room' at The Zetter Town House, 49-50 St John's Square, London EC1V 4JJ
Tuesday 6th September, 8pm: The 'Electric Shadow Box' at The Electric Shadow company, Unit 1, 63-67 Rosoman Street, London EC1R OHY
Please note that there are only 30 places available for each of these free screenings: if you want to come, contact Ben Taylor: thebee@houseofhoney.co.uk

otherwise:
http://houseofhoney.org/mediaplay/play.php?id=20

Damian Gorman

Tributes to Samuel Menashe

2011-08-29T04:48:00.000-07:00

Samuel Menashe in Ireland, writing one of his short poems in the sand: 'Pity us / By the sea / On the sands / So briefly'. Photo: Martin Duffy.

Click on the blue lines below to read any of these tributes to Samuel Menashe:

Joseph Woods: 'US poet who lived for the here and now', Irish Times, 27 August 2011.

Daniel Thomas Moran: 'Samuel Menashe obituary: 'American poet whose intense and concise works were like psalms', The Guardian, 26 August 2011.

Daniel Thomas Moran: 'Humanist Voices in Verse: Remembering Samuel Menashe', American Humanist Association: Humanist Network News, August 2011.

Richard Brody: 'In Memoriam: Samuel Menashe', The New Yorker, 25 August 2011.

William Grimes: 'Samuel Menashe, New York Poet of Short Verse, Dies at 85', The New York Times, 23 August 2011.

Carolyn Kellogg: 'Poet Samuel Menashe has died', Los Angeles Times, 23 August 2011.

Don Share: 'Samuel Menashe, 1925-2011', Poetry Magazine | Obituaries, 23 August 2011.

Reader's Almanac: 'Samuel Menashe (1925-2011), The official blog of The Library of America, 23 August 2011

'Samuel Menashe: 1925-2011', Bloodeaxe Blogs, 23 August 2011.

Samuel Menashe: 'Giving the Day Its Due'

2011-08-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

This short essay by Samuel Menashe was first published in Metre in 2000, and was reprinted as one of the introductory pieces to his New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). This photograph of Samuel Menashe, in his later years, was taken by Martin Duffy during a visit to the west coast of Ireland. Yesterday's tribute to Samuel Menashe (1925-2011) includes more material on his life and work, including photographs, poems and a video.

Of late, that old man’s expression “in my day” surfaces when I look back at my life. In my day I knew of no poetry workshop except for one in Iowa – not that I ever thought of attending it. After World War II, I was in Paris under the G.I. Bill. I had been an infantryman in France, Belgium – the Battle of the Bulge – and Germany. At twenty-two I had a glamorous image of myself as a writer. Since I was fluent in French and Spanish, I would be a foreign correspondent, but at the Paris office of The New York Herald Tribune, I was told that hundreds knew these languages. Serbo-Croatian was needed.

I never expected to meet a poet, let alone become one. Poets were dead immortals, some of whose poems I knew by heart. I was writing short stories evoking my childhood or the War. One night in February 1949, I woke up in the middle of the night and there was the first line of a poem, entirely unforeseen. Had someone told me when I went to bed that night that this would happen, I would not have believed it. It was not that I did not “give myself permission” to be a poet – to use a phrase now prevalent. I just did not aspire to that exalted state. Moreover, how can one decide to be a poet? Here is my first poem, never published:

All my life when I woke up at night
There was darkness in a room
And quickly I must sleep…
Now I have found a bed beneath a window –
No purpose in this place –
By an unpatterned hazard of neglect, and yet
In its crossing of my ordinary fate
It is among stars that I awake

In 1950 I presented a thesis at the Sorbonne called Un essai sur l’éxperience poetique (étude introspective). By poetic experience, I meant that awareness which is the source of poetry. I had been a biochemistry major before enlisting. Although I was well read for my age, the only literary influences on my work so far as I can tell were the short poems of William Blake and the English translation of the Hebrew Bible. “The still small voice” of Elijah was my article of faith.

Upon my return from France, I looked into little and literary magazines, but I found nothing in them that corresponded to what I was doing. Although a few poems were accepted – the first by The Yale Review – I could not find a publisher for a book. Kathleen Raine came to mind because she was a Blake scholar. Thanks to her, my first book was published in London in 1961. She wrote the Foreword. Despite favorable reviews by Donald Davie, P.N. Furbank and others, I still could not find a publisher in New York, my native city, until 1971. October House was a small firm, few people knew the name. In London I was published by the well-known Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Those who approve of my poems call them economical or concise; the others dismiss them as slight. When the Beat poets “made the scene,” I heard the pious platitude that it was good for poetry, but it was not good for my poetry. If confessional poetry was to the fore, I had nothing to offer its devotees. The only award or grant ever given to me was for a war story I wrote when I was thirty. Nevertheless, how many poets still alive were praised by Austin Clarke in The Irish Times (1961), where Derek Mahon reviewed my poems in 1987? My good fortune in England and Ireland seems miraculous to me. Although I was published by Penguin UK in 1996, I could not find a publisher in New York for my next book.

When I read a good short story I feel like an addict must feel when he gets a fix, but my poems do not tell stories. I never wrote a sonnet, yet in a way the poems are formal and they rhyme. Rhyme seems natural to me. There is a lot of rhyme, unnoticed, in ordinary speech.

At my age, more than ever, one thinks of death. Of course, as a survivor of an infantry company, I was marked by death for life when I was nineteen. In the first years after the war, I thought each day was the last day. I was amazed by the aplomb of those who spoke of what they would do next summer. Later, each day was the only day. Usually, I could give the day its due, live in the present, but I had no foresight for a future. Perhaps it is why I am still in the flat to which I moved when I was thirty-one years old:

At a Standstill

That statue, that cast
Of my solitude
Has found its niche
In this kitchen
Where I do not eat
Where the bathtub stands
Upon cat feet—
I did not advance
I cannot retreat

Samuel Menashe (1925-2011)

2011-08-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Photo: Samuel Menashe (1970) by Richard M. Gummere

We are very sad to report the death of the American poet Samuel Menashe. He died on Monday night (22nd August), peacefully, in his sleep. He was frail and weak but lucid until the end. There will be a quick burial service following Jewish custom and a larger memorial service most likely in October at the New York Public Library.

Samuel Menashe was born in New York City in 1925, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He served in the US infantry during the Second World War, and afterwards studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to New York in the 1950s where, apart from frequent sojourns in Britain, Ireland and Europe, he lived in a tiny "cold water" apartment until a year and a half before his death – at the age of 85 – in 2011.

He was first published in Britain, thanks to Kathleen Raine, in 1961, before he achieved any recognition in America, where he remained a marginal figure over five decades. In 1996 a selection of his work was published in the Penguin Modern Poets series. In 2004 he became the first winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Neglected Masters Award, a prize that both paid tribute to his excellence and made reparation for the years in which his achievements were overlooked. Don Share has just published an obituary on the Poetry Foundation's website.

His New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, was published by the Library of America in 2005. An expanded edition, published with Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film on DVD by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2009.

Samuel Menashe’s poetry has a mysterious simplicity, a spiritual intensity and a lingering emotional force. For over 50 years he practised his art of ‘compression and crystallisation’ (in Derek Mahon’s phrase) in poems that are brief in form but profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. As Stephen Spender wrote, Menashe ‘compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds’.

Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe’s work stands apart in its solitary meditative power, but it is equally a poetry of the everyday. The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms, here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open.

Dana Gioia wrote that ‘Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed. Nearly every poem he has ever published radiates a heightened religious awareness.’ Reviewing the Bloodaxe edition in The Guardian (full review via this link), Clive Wilmer wrote:

These are religious poems. They are, in particular, the poems of a Jew, not a Hebrew speaker, but one whose holy book is the King James Version of the Jewish Bible. They are not doctrinally Jewish, nor are they exclusive in their sense of holiness. They are imbued with a sense that - in the words of William Blake, a poet who looms large in Menashe's pantheon - 'Everything that lives is holy'.

This video is an excerpt from Life is IMMENSE: visiting Samuel Menashe, a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce included on a DVD with the Bloodaxe edition. This features a visit to Menashe (with Neil Astley) in the tiny New York apartment where he lived from the 1950s until 2009. Even in his 80s, Menashe still knew all his poems by heart, and between engaging digressions on poetry, life and death, he recites numerous examples with engaging humour, warmth and zest. The poems included in this clip are 'Daily Bread', 'Family Silver', 'Night Music (pizzicato)', 'Improvidence' (now suddenly a highly topical poem!) and 'Voyage':

Daily Bread

I knead the dough
Whose oven you stoke
We consume each loaf
Wrapped in smoke

*

Family Silver

That spoon fell out
Of my mother’s mouth
Before I was born,
But I was endowed
With a tuning fork

*

Night Music
(pizzicato)

Why am I so fond
Of the double bass
Of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding—
In perfect accord—
To one another
Across this pond
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew’s harp
I hear in the dark?)

*

Improvidence

Owe, do not own
What you can borrow
Live on each loan
Forget tomorrow
Why not be in debt
To one who can give
You whatever you need
It is good to abet
Another’s good deed

*

Voyage

Water opens without end
At the bow of the ship
Rising to descend
Away from it

Days become one
I am who I was

*

SAMUEL MENASHE (1925-2011): SOME PICTURES

Samuel Menashe with his father, New York City, 1920s.

Samuel Menashe experienced the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 as a runner for the US infantry.

Picture taken after the war.

Samuel Menashe, in his later years, during a visit to the west coast of Ireland. Photo: Martin Duffy.

Samuel Menashe in Ireland, writing one of his short poems in the sand: 'Pity us / By the sea / On the sands / So briefly'. Photo: Martin Duffy.

Samuel Menashe at the grave of W.B. Yeats at Drumcliff near Sligo in Ireland. The epitaph on Yeats's headstone is taken from the last lines of his poem 'Under Ben Bulben': 'Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by!' Photo: Martin Duffy.

Neil Astley on Stanley Kunitz

2011-07-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine, with photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson:
The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (W.W. Norton & Company) £12.99 paperback.

Stanley Moss (ed): To Stanley Kunitz, With Love From Poet Friends (Sheep Meadow Press, $15.95 paperback)

A shorter version of this review was published in Poetry London, 52 (Autumn 2005), shortly after Stanley Kunitz celebrated his 100th birthday.

When Stanley Kunitz celebrated his 100th birthday on 29 July 2005, hundreds of other American poets were there in spirit. The extent of the great love they feel for Kunitz is clear from the many occasions they’ve wanted to celebrate his birthday. His 75th was marked by a special issue of Antaeus in 1980. Gregory Orr’s Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry was published to coincide with his 80th birthday in 1985, followed by two festschrifts from Sheep Meadow Press, both edited by Stanley Moss, the latest produced for his 96th birthday.

Celebratory readings have been held in New York, where Kunitz spends each winter, in his birthplace of Worcester, Massachusetts, and in Provincetown on Cape Cod, his summer home for the past 40 years, where he has created the remarkable terraced garden beautifully portrayed in The Wild Braid, published by Norton to mark his centenary. Of all these tributes, The Wild Braid will be the most lasting and influential. Like the garden it brings to life, the whole book is infused and touched by the poet’s caring, thoughtful presence, largely thanks to the tact and sensitivity of Genine Lentine, who edits herself out of the picture in the manner of the best documentary filmmakers, so that Kunitz seems to be speaking directly to the reader in conversations recorded by the invisible assistant. These discussions are counterpointed by a selection of seminal Kunitz poems and illustrated by over two dozen richly evocative colour photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson.

To Stanley Kunitz includes an essay by Susan Mitchell, much of which first appeared in Poetry London (41, Spring 2002), where she notes the debt owed by 'a party of American poets' to Stanley Kunitz: 'There are scores of volumes of American poets that are substantially different because of the critical attention given them by Kunitz. Theodore Roethke, James Wright, Louise Glück, and a pack of poets from the far reaches of American poetry come to mind. In the 1960s, Kunitz spent many a Monday evening going over Robert Lowell’s drafts.' To Mitchell’s list can be added many of the contributors to Stanley Moss’s latest festschrift, including Sharon Olds, who dedicated the reading she gave this July in Provincetown to Kunitz.

The net spreads still wider and further back. His first publisher, in 1930, was Ogden Nash, and his friends have included E.E. Cummings, Allen Ginsberg and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as the many artists who’ve been part of Provincetown’s gloriously eclectic community, notably Mark Rothko. Kunitz was one of the founders, in 1968, of Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, which has helped launch the careers of many American writers and artists, and which receives all proceeds from the sale of Stanley Moss’s anthology.

Kunitz edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 1969 to 1977, offering first book publication to poets such as Robert Hass, Carolyn Forché and Olga Broumas. He introduced many American poets and readers to modern Russian poetry through his exemplary translations of poets such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Voznesensky and Yevtushenko, and he knew Brodsky in Russia years before his American exile.

He has also made an immeasurably significant contribution to American poetry as an editor and fearless critic, managing to be both generous and scrupulously critical. Carolyn Forché credited him with changing her life after he turned her down for the Yale series with a letter of encouragement which led her to re-work her first collection Gathering the Tribes: 'I might have written for the cupboard all my life…He forced me to think about my art in the most serious terms, not to be deflected from it. He would never allow us to languish. He insisted upon growth.'

Growth is the keynote in Kunitz’s own work. His much celebrated poem 'The Round' (the final poem in The Wild Braid) ends: 'I can scarcely wait till tomorrow / when a new life begins for me, / as it does each day, / as it does each day.' His well-pruned Collected Poems (2000) traces the growth of his work from the early collections, with their metaphysical arguments and echoes of Herrick, Donne and Marvell, reaching a first flowering in Selected Poems 1928-1958, which won him a Pulitzer Prize and real critical acclaim for the first time for his then unfashionably bold poetry of inner vision.

In To Stanley Kunitz Sharon Olds acknowledges Kunitz as 'our forebear, and yet his is the freshest voice', as if recalling how his poetry renewed itself and opened out during the 1960s, at a time when he was editing the poetry of both Keats and Lowell while learning from the example of William Carlos Williams. The first fruit of that sea change came with The Testing-Tree (1971), which showed how his reinvigorated poetry had become more accessible while 'not sacrificing its more complex inner tissue', as he later observed, as well as more openly autobiographical but at the same time more fiercely visionary. Drawing upon Jungian symbolism, Kunitz engaged with personal tragedy and public conscience to produce a resilient poetry of testing wisdom with a purer voice and an outward reach. In 'Reflections', the preface to The Collected Poems, he tells how Miró’s style changed 'several times, in fact, during his long life. But these changes did not imply a rejection of what he had done before.'

The Testing-Tree embodied his search for 'a transparency of language and vision…I keep trying to improve my controls over language so that I will not have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters because they infect me with human possibility…The poetry I admire most is innocent and luminous and true.' That open-mindedness and inclusive spirit are the source of his appeal for many of the poets who pay him tribute in To Stanley Kunitz, together with his continuing engagement with masters they hold in common, especially Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Hopkins and Yeats, and his ability to be both Wordsworth’s 'man speaking to men' and a believer in poetry as 'a secret language', as he says in The Wild Braid: 'It is not the language of the day. It is not the domestic language. It contains within it the secret sources of one’s own life energy and life convictions.'

Stanley Moss’s chorus of contributors is one very much in tune with Kunitz’s own poetic lineage, formally inventive and musically expressive. His own sense of lyric tension (expounded in 'Reflections') could apply to many of these poems, notably Paul Muldoon’s 'Hard Drive': 'There’s always a song lying under the surface of my poems. The struggle is between incantation and sense. Incantation wants to take over. It really doesn’t need a language: all it needs is sounds. The sense has to struggle to assert itself, to mount the rhythm and become inseparable from it.'

The most memorable contributions come from those poets whose relationship with Kunitz and his work is expressed almost organically in the language of their poems, and in how they root their poetry in the natural world (Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver), nature being the fount of Kunitz’s poetic vision, or in how they pick up on arguments pursued by Kunitz throughout his poetry, especially his ruminations on death. Tory Dent’s 'When Atheists Pray' is a dialogue with Rilke’s First Duino Elegy set off when told she was HIV positive.

For anyone already familiar with Kunitz and his work, the poems by Galway Kinnell, Gerald Stern, Stanley Plumly, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Yusuf Kumunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Louise Glück, Carolyn Kizer, Gregory Orr and Elise Asher are especially rewarding. The most private note is struck in two poems by Asher, the poet and artist he married in 1958, to whom 'Touch Me' (1995) – see below this review – was written, and who died in 2004. Kunitz speaks in The Wild Braid of how the childhood summers he spent on a Masschusetts farm helped him 'understand death as apart of a natural cycle', and the harmony of nature’s life cycle is the central thread uniting all his poetry. In her poem 'Cycle', Elise Asher writes: 'The day is inconsequential, my love, / it seems inconsequence exists for us', as wind-chimes sound 'felicitious as ancient temple bells / over the vast inconsequence of living, / our intimate forgiving.'

Grace Schulman’s 'In the Café' offers a tragic personal parallel to Kunitz’s own history of loss. Both poets are of European Jewish stock, Schulman writing of her father’s flight from Poland without his brother 'who cursed hunger in song, / and who was found at last on a dirt road // beaten, frozen, dead'. Kunitz’s father committed suicide a few weeks before his son’s birth, as he writes in 'The Portrait' (included in The Wild Braid):

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.

Sharon Olds’ 'Meditation on "The Portrait"' considers the shock delivered by that poem, 'the moment where the widow strikes her son as he’s holding the portrait of his late father', and how her understanding deepened with each re-reading: 'And then my heart was opened by the poem’s longing empathy for the lost one – brave, deep, level. Kunitz wisdom, Kunitz passion, Kunitz accuracy and balance.'

Reading To Stanley Kunitz in tandem with The Wild Braid – and re-reading The Collected Poems – what emerges most strongly is the unity of Kunitz’s vision of man and nature, both in what he writes and says, and in how those poets best-tuned to Kunitz respond to his worldview. The Wild Braid takes its title from his poem 'The Snakes of September': 'At my touch the wild / braid of creation / trembles.' One of its epigraphs reads: 'The universe is a continuous web. Touch it and the whole web quivers.' Later, he says: 'When an individual dies, the web connecting all life remains. It is reconstituted. The whole construct is renewed; the individual creatures who inhabit the web keep changing.'

Yet To Stanley Kunitz presents an awkward challenge to the British reviewer. This festschrift from an American press is not available in the UK. I’ve mentioned a number of its more illustrious contributors, but most will not be known here, and some don’t appear to me to engage much with Kunitz or his work, their offerings being perhaps more poems for Kunitz himself to savour as opposed to poems which illuminate his achievement for the reader. Although editions of Kunitz’s poetry have been published in Britain (1959, 1974, 1979), his Norton Collected Poems won’t be found in many bookshops, and despite the best efforts of Poetry London, very few readers here seem to be familiar with his work. As a reader of Kunitz, I can respond to a good chunk of Stanley Moss’s festschift, but as a reviewer I can’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already know Kunitz’s work.

The Wild Braid, on the other hand, is far more than an evocation of a poet’s garden. Like Derek Jarman’s garden patch at Dungeness, Kunitz’s seaside garden is both real and metaphorical, leading him to 'an appreciation of the natural universe, and to a meditation on the connection between the self and the natural universe'. And the book celebrating his garden grows into one of the most revealing and thought-provoking commentaries on poetry, nature, life, death and the creative process I’ve been privileged to read. The Wild Braid makes me feel I’m in the presence of a master, a seer, listening to the distilled wisdom of a lifetime’s service to poetry. Its generous inclusion of some of Kunitz’s most luminous poems makes it a perfect introduction to his work as well as a book to treasure. And any reader who is fortunate enough to read this book (currently available from Amazon.co.uk at £12.99) should then want to get hold of Kunitz’s Collected Poems.

Exactly how and why Kunitz is such a salutary poet for us to read now should be clear from this comment on poetry, death and the erotic in The Wild Braid: 'The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? That is certainly one of the problems when making a poem is thought to be a rational production. The dominance of reason, as in eighteenth-century poetry, diminished the power of poetry. Reason certainly has its place, but it cannot be dominant. Feeling is far more important in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it’s all like erotic play.'

TOUCH ME

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s ﬂown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

This poem was included in my Bloodaxe anthology Being Alive (2004), reprinted from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (WW Norton, 2001). It was written in his 90s, and is the last poem in the selection from his last collection Passing Through: The Later Poems (1995) in The Collected Poems.

VISITING STANLEY KUNITZ

This account is reprinted from my Introduction to the DVD-anthology In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), published in Bloodaxe's 30th birthday year. In December 2005, in the course of a week’s stay in New York, Pamela and I met a number of remarkable people, including three in particular who are sadly no longer with us: the novelist Marianne Hauser, an old family friend, then aged 95; Louise Bourgeois, one of the most inventive, deﬁantly unconventional artists of modern times, who was 94 that Christmas; and Stanley Kunitz, who’d turned 100 a few months earlier. Those three meetings were the catalyst for our project of filming poets for Bloodaxe's archive, website and DVD-books. We have now filmed over 100 poets and a second DVD-anthology is planned for 2013, Bloodaxe's 35th birthday year.

Our next day in New York couldn’t have been more different. We’d been in touch with Stanley Kunitz’s assistant and co-author Genine Lentine over a 100th birthday tribute review of their book The Wild Braid I’d written for Poetry London, and had been invited for tea at his apartment. By late 2005 Stanley was spending most of his days reading or resting while others looked after his correspondence and general welfare. As well as reading any book, newspaper or magazine he happened to ﬁnd by his armchair, he loved listening to poems. Genine would read him poems by the writers he admired most, along with new poems from the many books and magazines he was sent by younger poets. She was reading whole books to him in instalments; most recently, Moby-Dick. And Stanley himself could still recite poetry with gusto, as we discovered in the course of a wonderful hour spent in his company.

We had brought copies of two anthologies in which I’d included his work, and he was soon persuaded to read us some of the poems. Tracing the words with a shaky, gnarled ﬁnger, he read each line of ‘Touch Me’ in a quavering voice, but with a power and feeling which seemed to connect with the source of

Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two…

And putting the book down, he intoned the last few lines from memory:

Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

We were so captivated that I found myself almost holding my breath, not wanting to miss the tiniest nuance. Then Stanley wanted me to read some of the poems I especially liked from the two anthologies, and I chose Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s ‘Snow Melting’ and Brendan Kennelly’s ‘Begin’. This time I was reading poems to just three people – including one of the poets I most admired in the world – and as I read each line, I was acutely aware of the extraordinary nature of the occasion, and the need to give of my best if the reading were to pass muster. I remember concentrating hard on giving just the right weight to the sounds of the poems, the rhymes, chimes, assonances and other musical effects which only reading aloud can fully sound. I wanted to give something back to Stanley, and to share this with the others just as we’d shared his reading.

Afterwards, we talked about how amazing it would have been to have filmed Stanley giving that magical reading to three people; and also how ﬁlming such an intimate encounter would have required particular sensitivity and tact.

Before we left New York, Pamela would see Marianne Hauser again, possibly for the last time. Marianne also had been a formidable reader, but at 95 she was in failing health, and Pamela wished she had been able to film her friend years earlier. The idea of filming Bloodaxe’s writers grew from these conversations. When both Marianne Hauser and Stanley Kunitz died the following summer, the latter just two months short of his 101st birthday, we felt the urgency of capturing the older poets on ﬁlm for posterity. As well as ﬁlming the older writers, we wanted to catch some of the poets who visit Britain from overseas each year to give readings. However, we didn’t want to point a camera at them at a public event, nor did we want to ﬁlm people in the artiﬁcial environment of a recording studio; what we wanted was something more like the intimate reading Stanley Kunitz had given us.

Pia Tafdrup's poem for Norway

2011-07-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Seven Dresses for Visibility
by Pia Tafdrup

I am sewing a dress that can be worn
proudly by one who is born with
an expectant spark in the heart’s vessels,
it will perfectly fit large and small,
is spun strong by the bow of the rain
it can be enjoyed a whole life long,
if the cloth is looked after well.

I am sewing a dress that can be worn
silently by new victims of fear,
it can fit large and small,
does not hide vulnerability
as droves of birds are hunted
out of the tree's dense crown,
the fabric flutters in the wind.

I am sewing a dress that can be worn
lightly by new victims of hate,
it is coloured red by blood
and has thunder-black borders,
it can fit large and small,
those who least of all will think
that one should change before the night.

I am sewing a dress that can be worn
by the victims of a cold cynicism
it can fit large and small,
its crazy fabric is made
of fire no downpour will quench,
it will be a reminder that the earth
may open up at any time at all.

I am sewing a dress that can cover
dried blood on the victims of death,
it can hide large and small,
it is shaped by the deep furrows
of tears across the cheek,
the cloth matches the walls of the dark,
the peace in each grave on the planet.

I am sewing a dress that can be worn
in a misty haze of sorrow’s
victims, designed for relatives
and friends of the deceased,
it can fit large and small,
anger’s first light is visible
between lead-grey threads of pain.

I am sewing the dress that can be worn
securely by one who knows hope,
woven in are the laughter of friends,
quiet tears of joy, the desire
to wake up in spite
of life the disaster took
– it reflects the rays of the sun.

translated from the Danish by David McDuff

Syv kjoler for synlighheden

Jeg syr en kjole, som kan bæres
stolt af den, der fødes med
forventningsgnist i hjertets kar,
den passer fuldendt stor og lille,
spindes stærkt af regnens bue,
den kan nydes hele livet,
hvis der værnes godt om klædet.

Jeg syr en kjole, som kan bæres
tyst af frygtens nye offer,
den kan passe stor og lille,
skjuler ikke sårbarhed,
som flokkevis af fugle jages
ud af træets tætte krone,
flagrer stoffet op i vinden.

Jeg syr en kjole, som kan bæres
let af hadets nye offer,
den er farvet rød af blodet
og har tordensorte kanter,
den kan passe stor og lille,
den, der mindst af alt vil tro,
der skulle skiftes tøj før natten.

Jeg syr en kjole, som kan bæres
af en kold kynismes offer,
den kan passe stor og lille,
kjolens vanvidsstof er gjort
af ild, som ingen skylregn slukker,
den skal minde om, at jorden
når som helst kan åbne sig.

Jeg syr en kjole, som kan dække
størknet blod på dødens offer,
den kan skjule stor og lille,
den er formet efter grådens
dybe furer over kinden,
klædet matcher mørkets vægge,
freden i hver grav på kloden.

Jeg syr en kjole, som kan bæres
i en tågedøs af sorgens
offer, viet til en slægtning
og til venner af den døde,
den kan passe stor og lille,
vredens første lys er synligt
mellem blygrå smertetråde.

Jeg syr på kjolen, som kan bæres
trygt af den, der kender håbet,
vævet ind er venners latter,
stille glædestårer, lysten
til at vågne op på trods
af liv, som katastrofen tog
– den reflekterer solens stråler.

Pia Tafdrup is one of the major contemporary Danish poets working today, and her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the author of more than twenty books, several of which have been translated into English, and the recipient of numerous awards – including Scandinavia's prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize for Queen's Gate (1999), which was published in David McDuff's English translation by Bloodaxe Books in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. Her latest work translated into English is Tarkovsky's Horses and other poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), combining The Whales in Paris (2002) and Tarkovsky's Horses (2006).

She wrote 'Seven Dresses for Visibility' after the July 22 tragedy in Norway. It was published in Politiken (Denmark’s most important newspaper), was read on Danish radio, and will be published in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. This English translation by David McDuff was first published by World Literature Today, and then reprinted in The Times and on Nordic Voices. Many thanks to the poet and translator for their permission to reprint it here.

Tomas Tranströmer at 80

2011-07-28T02:55:00.000-07:00

Sweden's greatest living poet, Tomas Tranströmer, celebrated his 80th birthday in April of this year. To mark the occasion, Bloodaxe Books published a new expanded edition of his New Collected Poems, the award-winning definitive translation of all his poetry by Robin Fulton.

In Sweden, Daphne Records released Dagsmeja: Emma Tranströmer sjunger Tomas Tranströmer (Noon Thaw: Emma Tranströmer sings Tomas Tranströmer). This is a recording of settings of eighteen poems by Tranströmer performed by his daughter Emma Tranströmer, pianist Andreas Kreuger, guitarist David Härenstam and violinist Bernt Lysell. The main musical emphasis is on Fredrik Jakobsson, an outstandingly talented Swedish composer largely unknown to the general public. Emma also includes a couple of songs by the more established Maurice Karkoff, who recently completed two new Tranströmer settings, plus a few songs by Håkan Parkman, who died in a tragic drowning accident in August 1988, aged only 33.

The project began, Emma says, with the Dagsmeja concert performance at the Gävle Concert Hall in 2007. 'Dagsmeja is a tribute to my father, above all perhaps as a guide in the art of humane living, but also as reflected through his own poetry. Pianist Andreas Kreuger and I had a labour of love in finding the very music which felt perfectly fitting for the occasion.'

Three of the poems they chose for the concert and CD are printed below, with the translations by Robin Fulton from Tranströmer's New Collected Poems which accompany them in the CD booklet – this includes all the poems in the Swedish original with Fulton's translations, along with accounts of the project by Emma Tranströmer and by scholar Niklas Schiöler (who contributes a fascinating piece called 'Reading is listening' on Tranströmer and music). The CD cover shows J.M.W. Turner's painting Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), which hangs in the National Gallery in London. Tranströmer's poem 'A Sketch from 1844' pictures Turner making a sketch possibly featuring the same train.

About Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer has been called a ‘buzzard poet’ (by Lasse Söderberg) because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states.

He is Scandinavia’s best-known and most influential contemporary poet. His books sell thousands of copies in Sweden, and his work has been translated into 50 languages, with substantial or complete editions of his work published in 19 languages.

Tranströmer was born in 1931 in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reﬂecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences.

Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conﬂicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. His translator Robin Fulton has noted how such images ‘leap out from the page, so that the ﬁrst-time reader or listener has the feeling of being given something very tangible, at once’, which has made Tranströmer’s poetry amenable to translation into other languages. But while acknowledging Tranströmer’s view that ‘a poem can exist beneath or prior to a particular language and can therefore emerge in any number of tongues’, Fulton maintains that ‘the best versions of his poems are those he made himself in his own language’. Yet such is the power of Tranströmer’s ‘deep image’ poetry that several American poets have been inﬂuenced by his work, through translations by Robert Bly in particular.

Tranströmer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Södra Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in Alf Sjöberg’s Frenzy, which was ﬁlmed there, the young Tomas amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects, especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where he worked his way through most of the non-ﬁction shelves. However, this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents’ divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a winter of psychological crisis (described in ‘Exorcism’, printed below). He published his ﬁrst collection, 17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23.

After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Västerås, where he spent the rest of his working life.

Like the scientist-poet Miroslav Holub, Tranströmer sees no division between his own two ﬁelds, poetry and psychology. In an interview in 1973 he responded to Gunnar Harding’s question about how his writing related to his work as a psychologist:

'I believe there is a very close connection, though it can’t be seen. Everything one writes is an expression of a gathered experience. And the problems one meets in the world at large are present to a very great extent in what I write, though it doesn’t always show directly. But it’s close to hand, all the time.'

In 1990, a year after the publication of his tenth book of poems, Tranströmer suffered a stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play.

Since his stroke, he has published a short book of ‘autobiographical chapters’, Memories Look at Me (1993), and a new collection, The Sad Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton’s translation of his New Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), expanded from his 1987 Collected Poems from Bloodaxe. In 2004 he published The Great Enigma, a slim volume containing ﬁve short poems and a group of 45 even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to the New Collected Poems to form Tranströmer’s ﬁrst collected edition to appear in the States, licensed by Bloodaxe Books to New Directions in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. That edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK as the latest revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems in 2011.

Tranströmer has also translated other poets into Swedish, including Robert Bly and Hungary’s János Pilinszky. In 1990 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His other awards include the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize. In 2007, he received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Grifﬁn Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Grifﬁn Poetry Prize.

Tranströmer has been tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature on a number of occasions, most recently in 2010, as the Guardian reported, only for Mario Vargas Llosa to pip him at the post.

Robin Fulton has worked with Tranströmer on each of his collections as they have been published over many years, and his award-winning translation New Collected Poems is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere. It received a highly appreciative review from Paul Batchelor in The Guardian in June: 'Fulton is to be applauded for bringing into English a unique sensibility, a haunting voice, and images of such incisive clarity that they can permanently alter your perceptions.' To read the whole review, click on this link.

Basil Bunting's advice to young poets

2011-07-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

Basil Bunting beside the River Rawthey by Jonathan Williams (1980)

Basil Bunting was asked so many times for advice by young poets that he had a postcard printed with his key points:

I SUGGEST
1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape

Put your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain - your reader is as smart as you.

Basil Bunting reads from Briggflatts
This video features four short extracts of Basil Bunting reading from his long poem Briggflatts (not in order), from Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting, included on a DVD issued with the new Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts (which also has a CD of an audio recording Bunting made of the whole of Briggflatts in 1967). Peter Bell’s superb film Basil Bunting: An introduction to the work of a poet was made by Northeast Films and first shown on Channel Four in 1982. The first two extracts here follow the sequence used in the film, not that of the poem itself (the second extract is the opening of the poem: 'Brag, sweet tenor bull...'). Most of the film was shot around (and in) Brigflatts meeting house near Sedbergh, Cumbria, and at Greystead Cottage in Northumberland’s Tarset valley, where Bunting lived from 1981 to 1984. The film is from the Arts Council England film collection, and is copyright Arts Council of Great Britain 1982. (Note: Briggflatts the poem has two gs, Brigflatts the place has one.) To order the new Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts with free DVD and CD, click on this link to Amazon.co.uk

Basil Bunting at Brigflatts by Derek Smith (1983)

Basil Bunting reunited at Brigflatts with his childhood sweetheart Peggy Mullett (to whom Briggflatts is dedicated), after 50 years. Picture by Jonathan Williams.

Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures

2011-07-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Bloodaxe Books has worked with Newcastle University for the past ten years on a series of publications linked not only to the lecture series but also to poetry conferences and other educational projects.

One of our readers, José Maria Prieto, wanting to order books from Spain, has asked if there is a list of books in the Newcastle/Bloodaxe poetry series. These are listed below: clicking on the titles will take you to a description of the book on the Bloodaxe Books website; click on AMAZON and that will take you straight to the Amazon ordering page for that title. NBPL indicates Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures. Publication of Jo Shapcott's book of lectures, The Transformers, has had to be delayed. The next titles in the series will be an anthology portrait of Britain by black and Asian poets called Out of Bounds, edited by Jackie Kay, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (March 2012), followed by Sean O'Brien's Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, which he will be delivering in autumn 2011 with publication in 2012.

1: Linda Anderson & Jo Shapcott (eds.): Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (2002). AMAZON
2: David Constantine: A Living Language. NBPL (2004). AMAZON
3: Julia Darling & Cynthia Fuller (eds.) The Poetry Cure (2005).
AMAZON
4: Jo Shapcott: The Transformers. NBPL (delayed).
5: Carol Rumens: Self into Song. NBPL (2007). AMAZON
6: Desmond Graham: Making Poems and Their Meanings. NBPL (2007). AMAZON
7: Jane Hirshﬁeld: Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry. NBPL (2008). AMAZON
8: Ruth Padel: Silent Letters of the Alphabet. NBPL (2010). AMAZON
9: George Szirtes: Fortinbras at the Fishhouses: Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the sense of history as knowledge. NBPL (2010). AMAZON
10: Fiona Sampson: Music Lessons. NBPL (2011). AMAZON

Clare Pollard reads from Changeling

2011-07-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

Clare Pollard reads four poems from her latest Bloodaxe collection Changeling and talks about the book. Steeped in folktale and ballads, Changeling takes on our myths and monsters, from the Pendle witch-trials in 17th-century Lancashire to modern-day London and Iraq. The poems are 'Tam Lin's Wife', 'Pendle', 'The Two Ravens' and 'The Caravan'. Neil Astley filmed Clare Pollard at her home in London in June 2011.

Luljeta Lleshanaku interviewed by S.J. Fowler

2011-07-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

Luljeta Lleshanaku was interviewed by S.J. Fowler in 3:AM magazine's Maintenant series

S.J. Fowler writes: 'It is hard to make a case against Luljeta Lleshanaku being the greatest Albanian poet of the modern era. Such is the measure of her work, and her repute across Europe and America. Her poetry reflects her marked humility and reverence for the written word, utterly unique and yet universal in a way that belies the overuse of that concept. Though a child of political exile and marginalization, let alone physical danger, her work remains dignified and singular, and nor does she allow her poetry to be dominated by the issues of her nation, of its politics and history. She is a voice that would be recognized as truly poetic in any language, in any setting and this perhaps her most remarkable achievement. A winner of the International Kristal Vilenica prize (following the likes of Peter Handke, Zbigniew Herbert & Milan Kundera) it is wonderful to announce her first work published in the UK, Haywire: New & Selected Poems, will be released this September with Bloodaxe Books, already a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. She will be attending this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November. It is honour to introduce the 60th edition of Maintenant, a pioneer of Balkan poetry and a rightfully major figure in the current European poetry landscape.'

3:AM: Albania remains a unique country, both in its language, its culture and to a certain extent, in its isolation. Was there an expectation post 1985 and 1992, that the country would become more integrated and expansive in its actions, and that this might affect the literary culture?

Luljeta Lleshanaku: This is a very good question. I was 17 years old, when they announced the death of the dictator Enver Hoxha. It was April 11th, 1985. I was in high school, and I couldn’t wait to go back home, and celebrate it. I think a lot of people felt in that way. We thought, something was going to happen after it…a positive change…or something. But it was just an illusion; the family Hoxha and the new president Ramiz Alia went on governing with an iron hand…and the restriction was even higher, to try to keep the situation under control. Then we understood that the regime had to resist… The economy was catastrophically failing day after day…and the displeasure was not only political, but economic too. The longer the situation would last, the more dramatic the change of the system would be. In July 1990, around 5000 Albanian people occupied the Western embassies in Tirana: the German, Italian, French embassies. It is still a mystery how they could jump so easily into the yards of diplomatic residences, but for many people is already clear now that everything was projected by the communist government… as a plan to discharge the tension by pushing away the most dangerous part of population, the most rebellious part, those who could be really the first squadron of any movement. The point is this provoked exodus and didn’t calm the situation in Albania, but only increased the tension. I remember that in September 1990, the Secret Service sequestrated my passport, so it was clear that they were not tolerating any resistance and they were resisting in a frightening way…until 1991.

After 1992, Albania was totally exposed to any kind of cultural “attack”, all at once. I remember well the “Beatles” music shouting from radios, second-hand clothes exposed everywhere, cowboy movies, pornographic literature in the street… everything which was forbidden for a long time. The bookshops in Tirana were filled with American and French books, translated and printed in a hurry, in spite of their low technical quality. It was a urgent run towards the world which was refused us for about 47 years.

3:AM: The legacy of Albanian writers and poets is considerable in places. Ismail Kadare is obviously a world reputed writer. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to consider you the most reputed poet in Albania’s history since independence in 1912…

I was lucky to have the chances of publication abroad, in the US at first, and then in Italy, Austria, Poland and the UK in September. But I don’t want to be unfair: nobody can imagine what would be the Albanian literature situation… if we would ignore for a moment all the political repression and the fact that Albanian language is a small unique language. In such conditions, the promotion of Albanian literature in the world is an indicator of talent as much as a question of “accident”. But it was another writer of the 30s, an Albanian Franciscan friar who was the first Albanian nominated writer for Nobel Prize… His name was Gjergj Fishta, he was one of the anathematised writers by the communist regime, mostly because of his religious Catholic background.

3:AM: Has there arisen a stereotype because of the writing of the likes of Kadare that Albania is somehow inflected with an “old world” mentality - the kanun, the blood feud etc…that might not perhaps be accurate?

LL: It was a smart gesture of Kadare to avoid sometimes the extreme propagandistic reality of Communist Albania, through creating stories about Albanian myths, habits and all the spiritual infrastructure of the past. Blood feud was a part of “Kanun”- the medievalist code of self-governing in Albania. This stereotype is created by the anthropological perspective of foreign visitors and writers in the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century like Edith Durham and Rose Lane and it was fortified and mystified by the long time isolation of Albania to the world. It is true that there was a metamorphosis, a refreshing of the phenomenon after the 90s…in the conditions of a legal vacuum and the political mess of Albania.

Also the Albanian cinema after the 90s “played” with this “blood feud”, but mostly for sensational reasons. To identify Albania with blood feud is like identifying USA with some vandalistic acts in schools, or like identifying Buenos Aires with those wallet robbers in the street, experienced by the tourists. I personally am surprised when I am faced with such a topic: is blood feud really our identifying culture element?! Perhaps it is, but not in the wide dimensions it is perceived from abroad.

3:AM: The poets who wrote in exile and underground under Hoxha have left a considerable legacy, perhaps Arshi Pipa most of all. What is his legacy with contemporary Albanian poets?

LL: I think…the ideology could influence more the poetry than prose. The subjectivity was the target of ideology, considered the most dangerous thing. All the strategy aimed to flatten the individual voices and to encourage thinking in a group and for a group. That’s the way the Mayakovskian Futurism was easily embraced in the Albanian poetry of sixties and seventies. The collective awareness, “muscular” reality, the optimistic point view of life were a part of what was called “romanticist soc-realism”. The image of construction of a country in construction, and a new mentality of peoples who have no time to worry about “small things” was predominant. I don’t think this chapter is going to be interesting anymore for the new generations except as some stylistic exercise. But, there are still some poems which could survive due to beautiful metaphors or the lyrical moment they capture.

The other literature is the “underground” literature and the literature of exile. The “underground” literature-the literature of prison or the hidden literature – perhaps didn’t have the epochal power of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Mandelstam or Brodsky’s work, but at least it has a testifying value of the real Albania. Perhaps…because of being published later, after 1990, it couldn’t affect the reader as is it could’ve done in the right moment. Let’s remember the fact that it was impossible to create some literary groups in Albania, as in some other countries of Eastern Europe. The grouping and the solitude were both considered dangerous enough.

3:AM: The Albanian language itself is very unique, does it lend itself to poetic expression?

LL: It is always interesting to hear the comments about Albanian language, when I give readings in foreign countries. They say 'it is a beautiful language!' Some perceive it as Italian…some as Slavic… some even can’t indentify the similarity. I think Albanian language has the dolcezza of Latin…but enamelled with the toughness of Balkan temperament. It is a language rich with natural sounds of onomatopoeic words. It is very interesting making an anatomy of languages to understand the people: the Albanian language, in my opinion, created its own code of communicating with nature, perhaps as the only way to survive as a verbal language (only) for centuries. Albanian lexicon suggests a high diversity of dialectic forms. But, sometimes I feel that my poems sound better in English, for example, than in my language. Why? The long words…especially the verbs, give some solemnity to the poem, appropriate for a philosophical or rhetorical poem. But, for an imagistic poem like mine, the short words and the simple grammatical forms of English are better. The length of words in English corresponds with the speed of visuality, of observation and thoughts. Perhaps I look a bit crazy saying it but I always had the impression, that there is a parasite time between one image and the other, when the language can’t catch the rhythm of the imagination. So, for example, you can enjoy a rhetoric poem of Borges in Spanish… full of 'e' and 'rr', and see how the sound opens a parallel horizon before you. But, you can’t say that about a poem of Simic for example, in any language it will be offered.

3:AM: Your work maintains much of the elegance of the great post-Second World War European tradition, it evokes the likes of Herbert, Amichai, Pagis, Cassian. Perhaps you share something of their deftness, their care, their sense of responsibility, as poets. Do you think is true?

LL: I would like it to be true. I like Herbert, and I adore Amichai. For the first time I read his poems around ten years ago. It is not an accident I would have something similar with him: the first, because he is my favourite poet. And the second: we both belong to countries who have suffered greatly. What is in common? I think he dials into the real world, real history and the collective ego that dominates the individual ego. He never speaks about himself, even when he pretends to do so. His observation exceeds the white circle of private life. And especially there is always a “why” in his air, something which asks a response in history, and its rotation. And he always gives a response, the best artistic solution, through metaphors, through creating parallel realities. Any other solution is more arbitrary. He is from Israel, the motherland of metaphor (let’s remember the way God communicated with human beings). And…it was not difficult for a person “infected” with life like him, to create such amazing metaphors. He has such a rich life: World War II, Holocaust, the life in New Israel… Perhaps, the only way a poet can reorganise all this chaotic life, is making a system from it. And metaphor is the key. Metaphor became an instinct for him.

I saw a lot of suffering around and the question “why” became an instinct for me too. There comes a moment when I can’t wait out the destruction to understand the “why”. I admire his sensitivity about the world. His observation is always the observation of “the edge”, clear, like being in the last day of his life. Amichai always leaves me the impression of a full room, where there is no place for fighting, resisting or quarreling.

3:AM: Your work appears very fluid, it seems to be very descriptive, working at images, very carefully. How do you begin to write? Do you set yourself time aside to do so, or follow moments when you feel you must?

LL: Strangely I was a hyperactive and very moody child. My mother told me I used to speak regularly during the sleep, except when sleep-walking (somnambulism). I began writing when I was eleven years old. My first poem was a question of “honour”: I was asked to recite a poem, when I didn’t know any poems by heart. I never remember poems by heart. I don’t remember even my cellular phone number by heart. I have difficulty learning by heart; I’ve always had. So, in such conditions I had to improvise something, which sounded like a poem.

Then, (God knows why…) I went on writing humorous poems, and I read them in those little boring parties in high school. Perhaps I needed attention, and asked it in every way possible. I remember that I complicated the relations with my teachers just because of those jeering verses. But at least… I could see the others laughing and I laughed myself, and that was enough for a while.

The other side of my personality was a kind of melancholy which I never understood where it came from. I didn’t worry so much about the concrete hopeless and poor circumstance; what I worried about was something beyond them. Some existential questions. My advanced imagination encouraged me to see what a child never should see: the end of things. Once, I decided to say them in a loud voice: to write them. So I was around 18 years old, when finally I wrote a poem.

3:AM: You are a poet not directly bound to your nation in your work it seems, you maintain a ambiguity of subject. Do you avoid commentary on your nation in some manner, or do you just write how you wish to write?

LL: You are absolutely right. As I just said, my perspective of thinking didn’t have to do with the things which were before my eyes. Any small town in the world is enough for somebody to understand the rules of the world, the rules of the life. Each community functions as a cell of the world, as a micro-cosmos, programmed with all the virtues and vices, geniality and incapacity, vulnerability and ambitions, aggression and tolerance to create the table of human world. You don’t need the test of all your body’s blood, to examine your genetic code; even a single hair is enough.

As you can see, I am sensitive and instinctively seek protection when hearing about my country, like everybody would do. But, I never was convinced enough that nationality says something more than our common intimate relations. The nationality doesn’t determine who we are, but what we are compromised to do. And I never was interested in that.

And furthermore, I think that if the archetype exists, there is stronger inside me. Some unexplainable melancholies and some strange sensations were always an obstacle to be in my time and in my place. That’s why perhaps my identity is determined by an “anonymous” voice (more than universal), than from an active determined voice.

3:AM: The Vilenica Kristal prize has been awarded to some of the greatest European poets of our age, did it feel vindicating to receive the award?

LL: Oh, yes. It was a beautiful surprise. I didn’t even know they give prizes, and to be sincere, it was a moment when I didn’t get any sense on participating in literary festivals. Until that moment, I was also not sure if the Europeans would like my style of writing, since I was published only in the US. So, it was a test for me, and I was really happy to be the preferred one, even if I had a high temperature that day (39 degrees Celsius) and I wore three blouses and a jacket over each other. And… I really can’t forget how nice the Slovenians were and everything during the festival, the days were curated so carefully, with much elegance. But the prize I am awarded with, was not the International Prize, the “grand prix” of career which went to Claudio Magris, but the Kristal Vilenica Prize, for the best writer participant. And…anyway…it was very competitive. I still remember a Croatian writer who was really excellent…the Bulgarian poet attending… All excellent! Thank you for bringing me these emotions back!

This interview was first published in 3:AM magazine on 9 May 2011. SJ Fowler is a postgraduate student of philosophy at the University of London and a poet. He is also an employee of the British Museum.

Luljeta Lleshanaku belongs to the first “post-totalitarian” generation of Albanian poets. In Haywire she turns to the fallout of her country’s past and its relation to herself and her family. Through intense, powerful lyrics, she explores how these histories intertwine and influence her childhood memories and the retelling of her family’s stories. Sorrow, death, imprisonment, and desire are some of the themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku’s hauntingly beautiful poems.

She was born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She later studied Albanian philology at the University of Tirana, and has worked as a schoolteacher, literary magazine editor and journalist. She won the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, and has had a teaching post at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has given readings in America, Europe and in Ireland at the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire in 2010. Luljeta Lleshanaku is reading at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Sunday 6th November (with Robert Hass and Maurice Riordan) and at London's South Bank Centre on Tuesday 8th November (with Amjad Nasser and Soleïman Adel Guémar).

Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) is her first British publication, and draws on two editions published in the US by New Directions, Fresco: Selected Poems (2002) and Child of Nature (2010), as well as a selection of newer work. Published in September 2011, it is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Available now from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on this link.

Click on this link to watch a video of Luljeta Lleshanaku reading four poems, with the texts of the poems below.

Brian Turner reads his Iraq War poems

2011-07-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Brian Turner reads six of his Iraq War poems from his Bloodaxe collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise: 'Here, Bullet', 'Hwy 1', 'Eulogy', '16 Iraqi Policemen', 'The Inventory from a Year Sleeping with Bullets' and 'At Lowe's Home Improvement Center'. Neil Astley filmed Brian Turner at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2011.