your short wings

Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum)

Stopgap post. I went into Oxfam and someone had handed in a load of poetry books. I came out with four, so you can expect to hear the odd reference to them in posts to come. Two well-known US books, a Palestinian poet and a Finnish poet. Anyway here's some short and fairly random extracts.

Steps

Have you noticed?

You cross the earth with your steps and your singing,

leaving for a faraway place, 

after years that have seemed as tired as the houses

but as free as the clouds

as the vehicles of the wind quit pounding the days

and you depart with them

as they shake the dust from their invisible bodies

and fling their bridles at words, shadows and wooden benches.

Have you noticed?

You slip away with your dreams, your blood,

with horses, heights, water, sky,

cars, boats, and trains.

You've run away.

Have you noticed?

After all this

the earth is still wider than the ways of

you narrowing steps, 

your short wings, 

and your singing is barely complete. 

(Ibrahim Nasrallah (b. 1954), from Rain Inside, selected poems translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London (Curbstone Press, 2009). The Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT) is "dedicated to multicultural literature that reflects a commitment to social awareness and change". The Palestinian experience, i.e. the acute and problematic nature of homeland, is a background to all this poetry, even when the poems don't mention it specifically. That background makes acute an existential pressure of Where Am I? Who Am I? What Must I Do? "Wings" here and elsewhere refers to writing poetry, but more than that: artistic expression, political voice, realizing oneself and one's potential . . .)

Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum)

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!

           Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long

           streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-

           tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose

           smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch

           whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch

           whose poverty is the spectre of genius! Moloch

           whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! 

           Moloch whose name is the Mind!

(Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997), from section II of "Howl" in Howl and other Poems (1956). I've never read Ginsberg before, never even read "Howl" before, though like everyone I felt I knew the opening lines. It's a book that still, I discovered, has the power to seize you by the arm and drag you away from all other thoughts. I'm very glad I read it while still knowing as little as I did about the beat generation, the author, the cultural legacy of the poem . . . Now I've done a bit of reading around it and I'll never be able to read it that way again. 

I found this half-centenary collection of pieces in The American Poetry Review useful. (By Jason Shinder, Vivian Gornick, Mark Doty, Amiri Baraka and Ginsberg himself.)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20683131

Being a really revolutionary poem, "Howl" is inevitably seen to be an ersatz revolutionary poem. I mean, if you title your poem "Howl", aren't you pretty much announcing how you want your poem to be heard, aren't you pretty much saying "This is a performance" ?

And then another part of the reaction is backward projection arising from fakenesses manifested by some of the many people who were inspired by it. 

Part of it is the genuine recognition that "Howl" has many quite traditional influences and Ginsberg is an adept in making music using devices as old as Shakespeare and the Bible. 

We literary folk are always apt to insist that if something is new and popular, then it wasn't really new. And actually that's true in a way. 

The revolutionary and the new are two quite different things. 

Here's a thought-provoking example of this kind of qualification of Ginsberg's achievement:  

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20874288

This piece by Nick Selby (in Revue française d'études américaines, 1996) argues that "Howl" isn't truly a gay poem but uses gay sexuality in pursuit of a very traditional and American vision of the sexually explorative poet-seer going back to Emerson and Whitman: an essentially heterosexual idea in many ways.  And "Howl" perceptibly deploys the tough machismo styling of the 1950s. (This latter idea rings entirely true to me, but I may be importing it into Selby's argument.)

It's strange to think that the first part of "Howl" was written in 1954. It's a jazz poem, not a rock'n'roll poem. My sense of a pounding musical rhythm, a sort of groove, must be a bit anachronistic. Or else it came from within Ginsberg's own body, as he wrote. 

Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto)

There where every wound is registered

as scar tissue

A cave of scars!

ancient, archaic wallpaper

built up, layer on layer

from the earliest, dream-white

to yesterday's, a red-black scrawl

a red mouth slowly closing

Go back so far there is another language

go back far enough the language

is no longer personal

these scars bear witness

but whether to repair

or to destruction

I no longer know

(Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012), from "Meditations For A Savage Child", in Diving Into The Wreck (1973). The meditation has arrived here from considering a cat's ear. I'm looking forward to reading this; her distinct voice reassuringly invites new arguments. A long time ago I wrote about a couple of her collections, but not this one.) 

Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto)

A giant bites off the sky:

soon the mountain-village lights are twinkling

like gold fillings.

In the darkness you could take them for stars.

The moon's milky breast shines over all. 

There's a sob of water, like pantings in a park,

like a rustle on a bench

when the thin folds of a dress rest open.

The river laps the bridge piers,

an astounded cat flashes between the trees,

and for an instant a black queen sits

on a bench

with her hat askew.

(Eira Stenberg (b. 1943), from "The Bearded Madonna" in Wings of Hope and Daring, selected poems translated by Herbert Lomas. I've read and owned this collection before, but was never satisfied that I really got on its wavelength, so I thought it was time for another look.)

Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto)

["Hungarian Oak", like "Norway Maple", is one of those English common names that isn't very happily chosen. The heartland of the native species is the Balkans, on very acidic soils. They were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but that ended a century ago. Within the borders of modern Hungary the species is rare (there isn't much acid soil). Yet these trees seem perfectly happy growing in downtown Frome (on soil that will not support calcifuges like Camellia and Rhododendron). So it seems that Hungarian Oaks are well able to flourish on basic soil if they are planted and looked after and far away from the natural ecosystems (and pests and diseases) of their native land. But being self-sustaining in the wild is a whole different kettle of fish.]