protect

THE ART OF POETRY


 The art of poetry? Look at the trees,
an old discovery. The wood
is what you cannot see. Your work
is finished when the words
protect something!


Gösta Ågren, from Hid ("Hither"), translation by David McDuff.


In art something is always concealed, even if it's only the occasion of making, or sometimes not even that, but only the acquired skillset that produces the making, or the thought behind it.

But "protect" implies more than "conceal". The hidden substance in the poem has life of its own.

Or rather.... (thinking of Ågren's tree image) it's the poem as a whole that is the living entity.

You can imagine the poem protecting its vital organs... or its cambium... but it's the act of protecting that reveals life.

I'm not getting metaphysical here. A poem doesn't live in the same way as a living creature. It can't wander around on its own, it needed writing and it goes into suspension until it's read.

But all life depends on others to a large extent. I even believe that a poem has some rights. As an artefact it deserves my reverence, I think.

Ågren's trees, we must suppose, are the tall straight timber trees of the north... pine or birch, spruce or aspen. But this reminds me that readers, like country folk who depend on wood stoves to get through winter, always have their own motives for coming close to the forest of poetry. Readers are practical in that respect.

And indeed without some motive the reading is apt to be anodyne. In the same way that though we don't much like a friend who wants to change us, we soon grow frustrated with a friend who doesn't have an interest in what we do and plainly doesn't want to do anything with us apart from completing a thin social ritual. Who just wants us on their list.

When I was younger I read vast numbers of poems in that spirit, and it didn't do either them or me much service.

*

But on this matter of the poem protecting, concealing, or at any rate containing something. It raises a question about honesty in poetry (I am talking about poetry though I think it applies to all the arts).

Ordinary, open, transparent language is the language used by dishonest people. I am one of those. Most often, the dishonest people believe that they are honest.

*

But Gösta Ågren's poem doesn't I think refer to the inevitable inscrutability that all artefacts possess. He talks about a quality that comes into existence only eventually, signalling work as complete. It must mean that the poem protects something other than its own circumstances.

The something is valuable but cannot be seen directly. We can provisionally call it content,  not inscrutable content but specifically unparaphraseable content.

This is quite a good description of Ågren's kind of poetry. As is usual with such prescriptions, it doesn't fit other poetry so easily.

the lemon-yellow tints

Topeliusesplanaden, Nykarleby, Finland

[Image source: https://leifsfoton.blogspot.com/2015/10/esplanaden-i-nykarleby.html. Photograph by Leif Sjöholm.]


Nykarleby's main street. Here, as in many other northern towns where the buildings were principally of wood, a double row of birches down the middle of the main street was designed to prevent house-fires spreading right across the town. A fire on 25th  June 1888 burnt down much of the city of Umeå, now famed as  the "city of birches". I remember noticing these double lines of birches when I stayed in Jokkmokk.










*


----------
the ones that do not separate
the guffaws the derision  the invective
the tricks
'us lot' the proof of those fit for existence
that they are within their rights


they have made it up and are plucking
withered flowers out of the rubbish bins
and I see before me a funeral procession
as I saw it more than twenty years ago
when I was reading Bellman
I see again the lemon-yellow tints
in the black and the white
and perceive again
the eternal recurrence
with fresh recognition as though it were for the first time
I realize
that it is that yellow colour
that constitutes the streak of the macabre
forms tone and foundation in this whole
even though it is the black and the white
that dominate
while the yellow exists as dwindling
distant flecks
but


'Moses, you that killed our Jesus'
scream further back in time
the flax-fringed boys to the Jewish boy
in front of the staircase in the inward-turned crescent
a primordial cavern
that the sun found
and the most prickly cactus
they beat him
and his eyes accept more and more the suffering
slightly contemptuous and very reticent expression
I thought was Christ's




----------






Watteau's L'Indifferent in shimmering yellow
Bellman's funeral cortège
Mozart's C and D
Villon's 'The Ballad of the Hanged'
which without the least waste of time
with the cool delight of the spring
serves up truth
self-evident birdsong
even though pecked and eaten by birds
with the rope dangling around his neck
jester in green and yellow
the unique the solitary
which a few seconds centuries earlier
was the spring's oblation
sometimes ready for mutual death
a few seconds centuries later
the child's dismayed smile
when it died of wounds this morning in Korea
its sudden indifference
as its face turned pale
yellow against the black hair
so indifferent was the encounter
with the knowledge of the powerful
in a land where the many cultures have met together
in order to liberate enrich teach cure
penetrate     with violence    cause    illness    and     splitting


but then also cure
civilise help
but with knowledge for death
lemon-yellow skin against black wisps
'they say what does not need to be said
they make visible what does not need to be made visible'
eyes so turned-away that only the whites are prepared to meet


experience of mutilation of the irreconcilable
and yet capacity for reconciliation
if not with .....


-----------


Extracts from "Retrospect", published in I tunga hängen mognar bären  (In Heavy Clusters The Berries Ripen, 1959). English translation by David McDuff.


The complete poem "Retrospect", along with various other Tuominen pieces, is available online on David's own website:  http://www.halldor.demon.co.uk/tuompage.htm














*

Mirjam Irene Tuominen 1913 - 1967






Mirjam Tuominen in Nykarleby, memoir by her daughter Tuva Korsström (in Swedish):




http://www.nykarlebyvyer.nu/sidor/texter/prosa/tuominen/div/tkommt.htm




She lived there, especially in the 1940s (the time of her marriage, the birth of her two daughters, and the publication of her well-received short stories); thereafter more sporadically, leaving the town finally in the mid-1950s.  The small town didn't make her happy. She was remembered as causing outrage by smoking cigarettes while walking down the middle of the main street -- I suppose the birch trees were not there then.




Tuva Korsström: "Dark gods: on the prose and poetry of Mirjam Tuominen" (in English):


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1991/12/dark-gods-on-the-prose-and-poetry-of-mirjam-tuominen/




David McDuff on Mirjam Tuominen:


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1995/12/facing-catastrophe/


Mirjam Tuominen's Selected Writings, translated by David McDuff, was published by Bloodaxe in 1994. The jacket uses one of her own pastel drawings, from 1958.












*


Nykarleby is a town in Finland  more or less directly opposite Umeå in Sweden. The gulf of Bothnia (Sw: Bottenviken) lies between, and is quite narrow at this point. Nearly 90% of Nykarleby's inhabitants still speak Swedish rather than Finnish.




The poet Gösta Ågren also has Nykarleby connections, as did the nineteenth-century author Zachris Topelius, after whom its main street is named.

waves of our native soil

Summer weather forecast for Vaasa, Finland

A DAY AT SEA


The oarsman's bronze face
looks timelessly at the summer day.
A sculpture consists of darkness
that reflects the light. Accordingly
it is invisible. Really
only its existence exists, not
it itself. I know the oarsman
well; yet his face is
nameless. When a mountain breaks
among the clouds we turn homeward.
The black sound overwhelms
like the mother's booming pulsebeat
in the foetus. There is no defence
against defencelessness. Through the rain
we see the church towering above the
town.
They punish their unbelief with belief,
says the oarsman. They believe
in what does not exist:
a life after this
and death.


(Gösta Ågren, from Jär (1988), translated by David McDuff as Standing Here (Kindle Book))


*


Jär's epigraph is these famous lines from "The Prisoner" by Emily Brontë: 


Oh! dreadful is the check, intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.


"A Day at Sea" subscribes to Brontë's argument against heaven: life is only meaningful in connection with our world. Brontë uses the word "earth" to express the latter concept. For Ågren, the boat rowing across the low waves of the gulf of Bothnia (Östersjön) does as well, the thunderstorm a mother's heartbeat. This being the life without which there is nothing for us, we are both as secure as the unborn, and as defenceless.


And the oarsman's face, holding still as the boat glides, with the sun shining on it... this face is a sculpture, because it is timeless and because it is immanent in the world, it doesn't belong entirely to Ågren's friend, who after all does have a name. 


(Ågren has also mentioned that he is an admirer of R.S. Thomas, which seems like a good excuse for a Thomas poem with a sea theme.)




*


THE CAT AND THE SEA


It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes anticipate
The gorse petals;

The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea's mirror.         


(R.S. Thomas)


*


Neither of these poems mentions waves directly. But this is sophisticated poetry. In poems of national pride and patriotism waves are somehow important.


           Britannia rules the waves!


Partly this is something to do with the increased visibility or thereness of a land when you are at its border ("White Cliffs of Dover"...).  A coast makes an unmovable topographical argument for the unique identity of a place and its people.  And then, ever since the Athenians and probably long before. the coherence of local identity often begins with the exploitation of the sea as highway, harvest and battlefield.


With my English-speaking head on, I deplore patriotism and I see states as mere systems of coercion, discrimination and injustice... And in fact I agree with Gösta Ågren's tart aphorism, "If states really existed, there would be no need for borders".


But with my childish Swedish-speaking head on, I'm a helpless sentimentalist and patriot. Which is why, earlier today, I was reading the traditional county songs that appear in Sjung Svenska Folk! And the waves danced and glittered, visibly testifying to the inherent living spirit of each place. 




Känner du landet (SÖDERMANLAND)


Minns du den stranden, där Mälarens bölja
Suckar av kärlek och dansar av lust?


Do you remember the shore where Mälaren's waves
Sigh with love and dance for joy?


Ostgötasång (ÖSTERGÖTLAND)


Så grant står Östergyllen i sommarfager prakt,
Och skördarna, de gyllene, de bölja.
Väl hundra vita kyrktorn på slätten håla vakt
Längs insjöstrand, som glittervågor skölja.


So fair stands Östergyllen in summer beauty's splendour,
And its harvest of gold that swells up.
And a hundred white church-towers keep watch across the plain,
Beside the lakeshore where the glittering waves lap.


Bohusvisan (BOHUSLÄN)


I Bohuslän det gamla
Drog viking över våg
Att segerbyte samla
På dråpligt draketåg.


In ancient Bohuslän
Sailed the Vikings o'er the wave
To win victory
For the mighty dragon fleet


Hallandsången (HALLAND)


Vår kust nu ligger fager
Vid Västerhavets våg
I tidig sommardager
Med böljors glittertåg.
Jag älskar böljesången
Med dur och moll uti
Och doften ifrån tången
Där vindar dansar fri.




Our shore extends so fair
beside the Western Sea's* waves
In days of early summer
With the glittering of the waves.
How I love the waves' song
Its major and minor melodies
And the smell of the bladderwrack
Where the winds dance free.


*i.e. the North Sea, as opposed to the Baltic.

The water

Grisselören, on the E. Baltic coast near Nykarleby, Ostrobothnia (Österbotten), Finland

[Image source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/106517732 . Photo by Marcus Soininen.]






June night


The motionless sea
is waiting for the rock to go.
This is not the answer
but the silence
afterwards.








28. If states existed there would be no need of borders.


(from Aphorisms)






Gösta Ågren, translated by David McDuff (In the 1992 Bloodaxe selection, A Valley in the Midst of Violence)







Leo, hans liv
Det var svårt att vara, inte
för människan i honom, men för
djuret, som inte orkade bära
medvetandets bly. Vetskapen om,
att han levde, hindrade honom
från att leva. Den utgjorde
ett sömnlöst ansikte, som såg
på hans känslor tills de smög
sig bort som skådespelare
från en dålig föreställning
och som tänkte, att han tänkte,
tills varje tanke djupnade till
intet i detta kalla ljus. Han
var själv fienden, och skrev
böcker för att besegra sig,
men i en sådan kamp är den enda
möjliga segern alltför stor.
Han segrade. I tystnaden
efteråt hördes några
sista, trevande ord.




Poem, from Jär (1988), about the novelist Leo Ågren, Gösta's elder brother, who died in 1984. (Source: http://www.nykarlebyvyer.nu/sidor/texter/poesi/agreng/div/leojar.htm)




LEO, HIS LIFE


It was difficult to be, not
for the the human in him, but for
the animal, which had not the strength to carry
the leaden weight of consciousness. The knowledge
that he was alive prevented him
from living. It formed
a sleepless face that looked
at his emotions until they crept
away like actors
from a bad performance
and that thought that he thought,
until each thought deepened to
nothing in this cold light. He
was himself the enemy, and wrote
books in order to defeat himself,
but in such a battle the only
possible victory is too great.
He won. In the silence
afterwards came a few
last fumbling words.




(Translation by David McDuff, from Standing Here, now available on Kindle.)




*


Gösta Ågren has been a supporter of "Ostrobothnian separatism". The small coastal county of Österbotten is (along with the Åland islands) the only part of Finland where Swedish remains the majority language, and it is linked to Sweden by a daily ferry across the Baltic between Vaasa and Umeå. Ostrobothnian separatism, however, is not about reunification with Sweden. The region's culture of independence from the state goes back much further than Finnish independence in 1917 and the rising status of the Finnish language during the 1920s. Already in the early eighteenth century, Pietist movements in Österbotten were seeking independence from Sweden and its "Grand Duchy" (i.e. modern Finland). As with other quiescent separatist movements in Scandinavia (Tornedalen, Jämtland, Åland), an outsider doesn't always know how seriously to take it. But Ågren's poetry is absolutely serious.


Background: (Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Vol 2: 1520-1870))
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=d9agDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT878&lpg=PT878&dq=%C3%96sterbottens+separatism&source=bl&ots=6-15tF6QW-&sig=qnHWME2N1bfvldSCXP3jQsp21OE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiDzOvUn8fVAhVRUlAKHTeADWoQ6AEIWjAF#v=onepage&q=%C3%96sterbottens%20separatism&f=false
Background: (David Kirby, "Nationalism and National Identity in the New States of Europe: the examples of Austria, Finland and Ireland" in Peter M. R. Sirk, ed., European Unity in Context: The Interwar Period)
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lXHqDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA118&lpg=PA118&dq=ostrobothnian+separatism&source=bl&ots=HQeT0q8345&sig=Sw2YC-vP97Ve0TV69dEX8KYXH58&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjA04C5oMfVAhXEPFAKHc05AV8Q6AEILTAB#v=onepage&q=ostrobothnian%20separatism&f=false










[As usual, I've labelled Finland-Swedish literature as both Finnish and Swedish (on the basis that its  readership straddles both sides of the Baltic).]

im not sacred of you any more

April is the cruellest month, sang T.S. Eliot (1922); Ja visst gör det ont när knoppar brister - Yes of course it hurts when buds are breaking (1935), lamented Karin Boye - (this was one in an unfortunate succession of stupid ideas that eventually provoked the authorities to step in and impress upon the poetry community that ideas were really not their forte, an opinion that most later poets have been very ready to submit to, especially the clever ones, the stupid ones aren't so easily led).

The obvious problem with spring isn't so much fear of one's own metaphorical rebirth as fear of the indifferent largesse of the sun, which gives nourishment and warmth to everything no matter what you think about it, to spiders as well as valerians.



But both are equally lovely! you say. And goes your heart with this? I reply suspiciously (in our imaginary conversation I'm allowed to throw in ridiculous pedantic quotations without anyone taking me properly to task) - Do you feel the loveliness of the baby spiders in just the same way you feel it of the flowers, or do you merely state your belief in it while really experiencing their presence as a sort of pustular rash?

Plants are for food, but we have a seasonal sense of rightness in which the plants are allowed their spring festival, and harvest comes later. At this time of year, animals should discreetly tweet and bleat and be sweet - not, for example, like the starlings who (with offensive publicity) were pecking a housemartin to death in the dust of the kerb.

So it's something of a shock to see, at this jouncing Chaucerian Maytime of the year (yes, apparently I can get away with talking like that, too...), that some of the fresh green hedgerows are - how can I see it differently? - disfigured by large black webby patches of something else...



The culprits - if one can attribute moral culpability to the act of having been born in a certain spot, which of course is what many humans believe - are the caterpillars of the spindle ermine moth Yponomeuta cagnagella; the food-plant, entirely stripped but just about recognizable from its stripy green bark, is Spindle-Tree (Euonymus europaeus).



Within their "tent" or "nursery" the caterpillars make a food factory of the shrub, consuming all greenery. Inside it's a busy, messy scene:



The webby material is presumably a creative use of excreta; those excessive sugars that present a logistical problem to the consumers of tender foliage; the sticky mass prevents birds and other insects from interfering.

When there's nothing left to eat of the spindle, the caterpillars have to make do with the surrounding foliage of field maple, hawthorn, and anything else they can stomach. Ermine-moth population explosions are intermittent and the shrubs recover the following year.



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ADDENDUM (2009):

That last glib sentence was copied from some other Internet article, but it evidently isn't that simple. Every one of the plants that was covered in webs last year is covered in webs this year, too. Plus there seem to be a whole lot more of these webby patches, too (unless I'm just getting sharper at spotting them). We'll see what happens next. I'm keeping an eye on one plant which has green shoots growing out of the top of the web. I'm wondering if the caterpillars will be unwilling to expose themselves above their tent, and thus the spindle might be able to outgrow its predators.

ADDENDUM (2010):

Same again - the webs cover all the same places, and more too. Evidently the insect wasn't at all troubled by the coldest winter for thirty years.

ADDENDUM (2011):

Same again - more than before. Seems like a gradual build-up in the population. Plants in hedges seem to be more vulnerable than unpruned plants.


[with acknowledgement to Gösta Ågren]


*

A related species, the bird cherry ermine moth (Yponomeuta evonymella), can be even more spectacularly devastating.