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.]  

Two poetry collections by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich in 1979

[Image source: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/schlesinger-newsletter/finding-adrienne-rich-in-cambridge . Photo by Susan Wilson, in the Radcliffe Archives, Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University).]

The Dream of a Common Language (Poems 1974-1977)

The title refers to poetry; that much, you could conclude from the poem in which the words appear, Origins and History of Consciousness. But not just any old poetry – this poetry. I think I wasn’t so off-track in at first supposing that it also has a specific feminist weight; a connexion with the dream of a common sisterhood.

So the book is to some extent meta-poetry, poems about a search for a new poetry (I suppose many good poems are like that to a certain extent; stopping short of being just Klein bottles...). But NOT just any poetry. The art that is being sought and dreamt of is so close as to be identical with a life (but not any life) and a power and a society.

Perhaps it might all be mixed up with the sort of polemical assertions that new love tends to induce in poets. But Rich gives an honest answer to that:

                       I want to call this, life.

But I can’t call it life until we start to move

beyond this secret circle of fire

where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall

where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps

like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

It so happens that the central part of the book is a sequence called Twenty-One Love Poems. In fact there are twenty-two of them, and only the unnumbered one is truly a love poem, an aching concession to feeling. The rest is taut with watchfulness, open to the world and to unmendable wounds. And the relationship it memorialises, fails. It wasn’t the Nirvana that she wanted it to be,

and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

                                                                                                (XX)

But this is a momentary dejection (the anger is less momentary). In an earlier part of the sequence she says:

            Your small hands, precisely equal to my own –

            only the thumb is larger, longer – in these hands

            I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,

                                                                                                (VI)

Do I trust Adrienne Rich’s hands?

It’s a collection that you’re compelled to read as a whole, straight through; all of the poems are focussed on and veering towards the “common language” of the title. But some of the poems I don’t like. Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev is one (and it’s the second poem in the collection, and substantially longer than the first, so that’s offputting). The Lioness, the last poem in the first part (which is called, and is about, Power) is another. And, in the third part, Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff – and a few others. At first I just shrugged my shoulders about these perversities of taste, but if I stop to examine them there seems to be a pattern. I seem to have a problem with the poet speaking through the mouths of, or pretending to look through the eyes of, other women. Basically I feel that she’s somehow co-opting them to say what she thinks – that she isn’t showing them enough respect. And that also applies to the lioness. I find myself thinking: We men have used women enough; must you do it too?

But now it’s possible that I’m reacting to something right, and righteous, and right-on in the book. Perhaps to the pride in these words:

                                My guilt is at least open,

            I stand convicted by all my convictions –

                                                                                    (Hunger)

It really wouldn’t be surprising if my hopeful stance of the man-who-would-understand (Natural Resources) was found out and thoroughly implicated by this book, of all books.

The poetry leaps out of a voice that is often plain, even skeletal.

  

while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me

than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning    on these hills

                                                                                    (Splittings)

The drift of the sentence actually tries to undercut the evocativeness of “coolly burning” – not to mock it, but to accept its limits.  It wants to speak freely and not be constrained to putting out a steady production line of flowers. “mind and body in Manhattan” is the best way to talk.

Nevertheless there is a continuous subtlety of form in the poems. The best ones, it seems to me, are Origins and History of Consciousness, Splittings, Cartographies of Silence, and the three poems at the end of the book: Natural Resources, Toward the Solstice and Transcendental Etude. 

All these poems are medium-length – a few pages – and I suppose they might all be called meditations. There is a great deal of cross-current between the poems: for instance, “the gap / in the Great Nebula” (Natural Resources) and “the rift / in the Great Nebula” (Transcendental Etude); or the spiders’ webs in A Woman Dead in her Forties, Natural Resources and Toward the Solstice. Nevertheless, each poem keeps its own identity; it has a distinct music, a distinct form though it is nothing so mechanical as a stanza form. You have to read the poem to hear it.

In the first of these poems, Origins and History of Consciousness, the key word “simple”, which ties it all together, is delayed until the beginning of the third paragraph:

Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their

experienced crucifixions,

my envy is not simple.

The poems often circle before dropping down on their chosen line of progression. Their right-on-ness, their compulsion to tell the truth and to be on the right side, is what can’t be wished away, for it makes them what they are: confrontational, directly challenging, unapologetic. They nevertheless admit to complexities: consider how in the lines just quoted the word “experienced” can mean both “something they actually felt” and “something they were practised at”.

There is insecurity, too. Cartographies of Silence ends with this positivity:

            what in fact I keep choosing

            are these words, these whispers, conversations

            from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

But the poem is haunted by a different power, the power of silence. Or perhaps “power” is the wrong word, since Rich views it with such misgivings:

            She died     a famous woman    denying

            her wounds

            denying

            her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

(Marie Curie in Power)

Natural Resources, again, ends forthrightly enough:

            I have to cast my lot with those

            who age after age, perversely,

            with no extraordinary power,

            reconstitute the world.

But the poem has insecurities. In the “circling” opening we happen on the image of a woman miner. Immediately the poet is on the defensive: “The miner is no metaphor”. Well, perhaps. There were more than three thousand woman coal miners in the US in the early seventies. Still, the image can’t help but make us consider that, after all, most miners have been male. And that’s allowed to undercut the argument. There was no need: women’s labour is in fact a main component in our world, as Rich more straightforwardly persuades us in Divisions of Labor (a poem in Time’s Power). But Natural Resources gains from the subtle fault. It circles its way to a vision of a barn sale, of things – not words but silent, practical things - collected by women of the past (“These things by women saved / are all we have of them”).  Their silence was a weakness – was it? but if power is called into question, perhaps weakness might be strength. In those closing words (quoted above), the meaning of “cast my lot with” is now vulnerable. It sounds like it means “stand up for”, but it also sounds like it can’t mean “be one of”. In short, the poem is open to questioning: one is lucky, perhaps, to have a public voice, and necessarily separated from the people one stands up for.

Toward the Solstice is equally uncertain, and I think (perhaps I’m not meant to) there’s a promise in its uncertainty. The solstice is a hard, physical fact; it’s a time that does come. Is it a winter or a summer solstice? And what does it mean, for the speaker? “It seems I am still waiting / for them to make some clear demand...” The poem is about a revolution, but isn’t 100% committed to revolution though it would like to be. A vein of images ties the speaker to continuities. She finds herself

                   trusting to instinct

the words would come to mind

I have failed or forgotten to say

year after year, winter

after summer, the right rune

to ease the hold of the past

upon the rest of my life

and ease my hold on the past.

That ringing phrase, “the right rune”, jumps out of the flow of the sentence. You could say that it epitomises the confrontational, idealistic, engaged position that The Dream of a Common Language often arrives at, and always dreams of.  

In the rather random lines I’ve quoted, a preoccupation comes to light: time after time, age after age, year after year. These phrases are absolutes: they assert the conviction, the amassed evidence, with which the poet puts forward a proposition. But they also suggest continuity, waves of time that go round. That seems to me characteristic of much of the revolutionary art of the 1960s and 70s. It starts with folk music, not with futurism.

Time’s Power: Poems 1985-1988

This collection, too, has a mannerism. You can see its origin, in fact, in the lines just quoted above:

            to ease the hold of the past

            upon the rest of my life

            and ease my hold on the past

The lines describe a relationship, and then they switch it round. So the first poem here, Solfegietto, addressed to the poet’s mother, ends:

            What was worth fighting for? What did you want?

            What did I want from you?

(The title means something like “in the manner of scale exercises” and the poem is about the mother’s failed attempt to make her daughter a virtuoso. In Transcendental Etude Rich had spoken out about how little she trusts that kind of achievement. This poem attempts to probe beyond that statement.)

The next poem ends:

            – Do you think I don’t remember?

            did you think I was all-powerful

            unimpaired    unappalled?

            yes    you needed that from me

            I wanted this from you

                                                                        (This)

It’s a sort of companion-piece to the first poem (now it’s Rich who is the mother). But the double questions and the reversals of relationships continue through the poems that follow:

            does she ever forget how they left, how they taught her leaving?

                                                                        (Harper’s Ferry)

            What would you bring along on a trek like this?

            What is bringing you along?

                                                                        (Turnings)

Time’s Power is less absorbed with the poet’s own mission. It has less wrong with it than The Dream of a Common Language, and is less urgent; less exciting, maybe. The double questions admit the otherness of the world. Yet the poem I like best is Harper’s Ferry, not least because the abused child’s wounded leg is a covert allusion to the poet’s own disability (the poem that comes after it begins with her “walking in a walker on the cliffs”). Harper’s Ferry is complex, and owns up to the poet’s own involvement in its docu-fiction. It’s about armed struggle, and the verse is urgent, from the “October-shortened sun” of the third line; time, it seems, moves forward rather rapidly, for later we find

                     the decanter of moonlight pours its mournless liquid down

            steadily on the solstice fields

I suppose solstice continues to imply a millennial or critical moment (see Toward the Solstice, above). I want to quote this, too:

            But this girl is expert in overhearing

            and one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,

            the translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl

            with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?

(The answer is, quite a lot...) These two passages give an idea of the odd, excited nature of the poetry. You could say that it’s a poem that’s in love with guns. But it’s in love, too, with cold mint tea. And it’s also horrified, for example, by the brothers who have

                                                climbed her over and over

            leaving their wet clots in her sheets

The other poems that I’ve gone back to most often are Living Memory and Turnings. I haven’t pondered the desert imagery in the collection as much as I might; I think the image of God’s eye through a microscope at the end of Turnings resonates with the un-quaint slides in the attic (The Slides)...    

*

Adrienne Rich 1929 - 2012

Another gleaning from my old website; I wrote this in 2003.

Audrey Lorde, Meridel Le Sueur and Adrienne Rich. Austin, Texas, 1980. 

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich#/media/File:Audre_Lorde,_Meridel_Lesueur,_Adrienne_Rich_1980.jpg . Photo by K. Kendall.]

Mary Wortley Montagu

Selimiye Mosque, Edirne

In late 1716, Mary's husband was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The family travelled overland to Costantinople; en route they spent several weeks in Adrianople (=Edirne).

Mary enthusiastically described an incognita visit to the magnificent Selimiye Mosque in her letter of May 17th (O.S.) 1717.

These letters were mostly, or wholly, a literary device. They were shaped, after the author's return to England, drawing on material from her diaries.

Nobility calls to nobility, landowner calls to landowner, so Mary presents a pretty favourable picture of the Ottoman nobility, despite the enclosure of women, the dominance of lawless janissaries etc. On the other hand, her account (in the same letter) of the Jews, who she says control all the city's finance,... is typical of its era. Antisemitism took its particular character from the diaspora, from the (enforced) landlessness of the Jews. They were citizens of nowhere.

*

In a letter from Pera (Constantinople), Mary expounds an object-letter; a coal means "May I die, and all my years be yours!"; a piece of paper means "I faint every hour!" But she laments: "I am in great danger of losing my English... I live in a place that very well represents the tower of Babel : in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Sclavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian ; and what is worse, there are ten of these languages spoken in my own family. My grooms are Arabs; my footmen, French, English, and Germans ; my nurse, an Armenian; my housemaids, Russians ; half a dozen other servants, Greeks ; my steward, an Italian ; my janissaries, Turks ; so that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here ; they learn all these languages at the same time, and without knowing any of them well enough to read and write in it. There are very few men, women, or even children, here, that have not the same compass of words  in five or six of them. ...."

"Sclavonian" probably means Serbo-Croat. "Wallachian' means Romanian.

Despite this lament the purity of her English style was much admired at the time. (It's difficult, now, to get a sense of just what this meant; it's an aesthetic or moral value that we rarely talk about now.)

*

The 52 letters are referred to under various designations; Turkish Embassy Letters, Letters from Turkey, Turkish Letters, etc. All a bit misleading, since many of the letters describe the journey there and back. The letters can be read in full here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17520

The book I've read is a 1921 selection edited and annotated by Hilda Chatwin, entitled Letters from Constantinople. Methuen's English Classics were aiming this one at girls in private education.

*

Like other noblewomen, Mary was an ur-feminist more by  personal example than general precept. (Most famously, by adopting the Turkish practice of smallpox innoculation,  which western physicians had dismissed as folklore.)

That is a very sketchy link to Adrienne Rich, but I wanted to mention Mark Ford's fine article on Rich in the current NYRB:


https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/11/08/adrienne-rich-inventing-new-ways-to-be/

Here's a post of mine on Adrienne Rich, written back in 2003:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/05/two-poetry-collections-by-adrienne-rich.html