Three versions of César Vallejo in translation.

César Vallejo’s “Black Stone Over a White Stone” (the title’s literal translation) has been a poetic obsession this year. Like Donald Justice and countless others, I found myself writing from its meridians. Because my variant from that meridian, “On the Death of the Day of the Bear,” is forthcoming — and because I’m in the middle of a translation workshop— I wanted to think aloud about why it haunts me, and how different translators have approached this particular self-elegy.

Here is the original version.

“Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca” by Cesar Vallejo

Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París -y no me corro-
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…

*

According to legend, the poem was born when a very melancholy Vallejo strolled the streets of Paris in his black overcoat, and paused to sit on a white stone. This poem moves around this image, a sort of mental monument, and winds up elegizing the speaker’s life with a sort of loose irony that reminds me of Benjamin Fondane, Tomaž Šalamun, Ryszard Krynicki….

It looks like a sonnet. It walks like a sonnet. It turns like a sonnet after the octave, and this turn is a change in temporality, or the tense used by the speaker. I can’t stop palpating the posthumous voice which seems to revoke a post-ness, or a past, by layering time into an ongoing present.

“Black Stone Lying On A White Stone” translated by Robert Bly

In his 1971 translation, Robert Bly titled the poem “Black Stone Lying On A White Stone", and this subtle shift from “Black Stone Over a White Stone” seems to give the black stone more agency: the black stone is lying on the white stone rather than merely existing in a positional relationship over it.

Here is Bly’s translation.

The first line of each stanza is indented; the speaker begins in what seems to be a first-person “I” and uses the future tense, only to switch after the octave, where the envoi begins: “César Vallejo is dead.” It’s possible to read this as an identification with death, with deadness, with an epitaph or a headline. But this poem manages to avoid self-pity—there is something courageous and gorgeous in how it lays out the descriptions without being maudlin.

I don’t feel sorry for the speaker when I read it. What I feel is a sense of existential and ontological respect.

Bly’s translation, like Seiferle’s, puts a negative between the dashes in the third line: “—and I don’t step aside—”. The negative makes the speaker’s voice more passive than it might otherwise sound (which you can see in Andreas Rojas’ version, which translates that line “— and by this I stand—”.

*

“Black Stone On A White Stone” translated by Rebecca Seiferle

Rebecca Seiferle’s translation also does something with the title, namely dispenses with the positional modifier “over” and keeps the black stone simply on the white stone, which sounds less hierarchal, or begins the image without an undertone of dominance.

Here is Rebecca Seiferle’s 2008 translation.

Like Bly, Seiferle preserves the stanzaic structure: two quatrains and two tercets.

Like Bly, she indents the first line of each stanza — though she doesn’t do this in the first stanza, a practice I normally associate with prose (i.e. leaving the first paragraph unindented and beginning indentations with the second paragraph). Maybe the self-elegy plays into this choice, or maybe the translator wants to begin with a more anchored I, a more assertive first-person that will increase the impact of the shift in “I” across the poem.

In the translator’s note, Seiferle says she gave up the metric form of the original (a hendecasyllabic count, except for line ten) in order to keep the the language and images, or permit the interruption of time in grammar to be louder than the interruption of time in form.

I thought it interesting that Seiferle’s translation is the only one of the three to not use “Everyone beat him” in the third stanza, choosing a lowercase “they kept hitting him” which isn’t entirely in past tense but closer to something ongoing. “Kept” also feels talismanic here, as something the poet “kept”, or something which creates a fascinating relationship with the “witnesses” of the final stanza. Witnesses keep things they have seen; witnesses are the keeper of visual events, and in this poem, the witnesses are not humans — they are objects or abstract states or segments of time.

To me, Seiferle’s translation inflects the white stone, or draws back to the title in which a rock might speak, or see, and there are monuments in that juxtaposition.

*

“Black Stone Over A White Stone” translated by Andres Rojas

Andrea Rojas titled his translation directly, matching Vallejo’s title word-for-word. The black stone is over the white stone. The positionality leaves us wondering if the black stone covers the white stone, or reduces the white stone’s visibility. We are seeing the black stone, and the physical relationship between the stones is clear from the outset. That kind of clarity in titling provides space for visual subversion later: the obvious begs to be undone.

Here is Andreas Rojas’ translation (from his blog).

Rojas doesn’t indent the first lines (and this may due to technical formatting issues on blogs) but he, too, keeps the stanzaic structure. What I value about this translation is its proximity to a direct, word-for-word model that allows one to see the bones. Describing his translation as “inelegantly worded”, Rojas explains his choices:

I am told the 10th line should properly read “without HIS doing anything to them.” I almost instinctually translated it as “without HIM doing anything to them,” and that’s how I’ve kept it for the clarity the “wrong” usage affords.

My solution is inelegantly worded, but it conveys both meanings Vallejo implies with his switch from the past tense (“le pegaban”) to the present tense (“les haga nada”): they beat him “without him doing anything to them” to cause the beatings and “without him doing anything to them” after he was beaten. Since “he” is dead now, impunity for prior beatings is guaranteed. Vallejo’s shift in tense also implies that the beatings were carried out with impunity even while “he” was alive.

He focuses on the double-meaning of the poem’s last word, “casinos”, often translated as “paths” or “roads”:

In Spanish, however, “camino” also means “a journey taken from one place to another.” (See the Royal Spanish Academy’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language, definition 3). I have translated “caminos” as “journeys” to capture the broader meaning I believe Vallejo intended. The same translation is possible in at least one other Romance language: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“In the middle of the journey of our life”).

*

What James Wright said of Vallejo, in the way that only Wright could say things, along that blade of love and despair which drew him to other poets, and led him to memorize their poems, to preserve them as talismans, feels true to me. I leave you with his word:

“I think he is one of the greatest poets in any language I know of. There is not a single poem in which any human being is treated with irreverence. There are a great many poems in which death is hated and fought. And it is fought back, not by some vague 'spiritual value'. It is fought back by Cesar Vallejo, lying sick in a charity hospital, dying of hunger and fury.... As a poet, he perpetually took a direct part in the creation of his own identity. He turned his back on the marketplace; he denied the popular press is right, and the academic community is right, to judge the imagination by standards that have been comfortably dead for a hundred years; he was true to his inner self. He was a dangerously religious man.”

The poem from analogy: Samatar Elmi's "The Snails"

The task of poetry educators is to remind students “that the most beautiful light comes from the most unrepentant flame,” D. A. Powell wrote somewhere. In this, the distance between the literal and the figurative can be the poem’s hinge. I am compelled by how poets accomplish this in analogy.

By definition, an analogy is a comparison between two things for the purpose of explanation or clarification. The analogy works on the basis of similarity to reveal something greater about the world. Unlike simile or metaphor which aim to show, the analogy's goal is not just to show but also to explain. To point to something bigger.

An analog is a person or thing seen as comparable to another. (It is also an amorphous evocation of nostalgia for Gen X’ers who remember the days of analog with fondness.)

Some have argued that the analogy is the core of human cognition. Certainly, it relies on language—on the slipperiness of connotation and shifts in meaning, and poet Samatar Elmi makes splendid use of analogy to reveal how cognition relies on re-cognition, or knowing by recognizing.

First published in Poetry Review, 2021.

By locating the analogy itself as a subject in the poem, Elmi uncovers a tension in the analogizing, and this tension conveys a tone of displacement through disorientation and juxtaposition. Pronouns are critical to the pull of this poem, and each pronoun packs and repacks differently.

"The Snails" uses analogy as its starting point and its frame. The speaker declares this outright in the first line:

I mean, the analogy writes itself

The "I mean"  signals that the speaker is thinking, looking for meaning, using the analogy itself as a way to try and explain something difficult. The reader knows that the speaker is thinking aloud, leading into the strange unwinding of the long, enjambed sentence and its nested figurative languages:

like the onion in a grand conceit
though we are really like two slugs
in a derelict mausoleum.

Something uncanny happens inside the first stanza. The first few lines are linked by strange smilies and metaphors - and the recurring consonance of tea sticks to the tongue. T, itself, is sticky – it links in an awkward way. The onion signals that there are layers to be peeled back in a bigger “conceit,” and the next line begins with a qualifier—”though”—where the speaker brings in a plural pronoun, a “we” that designates a couple, a double, “two slugs” in a “derelict mausoleum.”

Then, in the middle of the first stanza, after this heady, strange beginning, the poet changes tone and pace with a directive:

Google “Snails are….”
Dangerous. Slow.
Destroying my garden.
Our jobs and our women.

Here, the syntax changes, sharpens the gaze, tightens the poem, creates a lexical accumulation of fragments which feel threatening and evoke the language of nativist xenophobia.

*

The second stanza begins with a direct address to “You, who cannot speak snail,” and then reclaims the analogy of the immigrant as a snail in a moving home, wearing his shelter on his back.

Read it aloud. Read across the stanza break with its gulf in the middle to hear how a chasm opens between the Google “Our” of nativists and the accusatory turn that hinges on the “You”:

Our jobs and our women.

You, who cannot speak snail,

This is a dramatic You—it is the stuff of dramatic monologue and epic poetry. I hear so many you’s in this, including Rilke’s “[You who never arrived]”…..

Now the shell is a gift and a curse – against the biological or natural view of the snail as a sneaky invader, the  the poet presents the analogy from the snails perspective.  we know this by the shift in pronoun--the way "Our" does the work of recreating a boundedness, pressing into the tension of inclusion and exclusion.

*

So much hinges on the sharp turn between stanzas in Elmi’s poem.

Gaston Bachelard described the poetic image as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.” To experience the image, we have to feel it's reverb, and what Elmi does with the snail—how the snail analog carries the shift in pronouns— reminds me of syncopation in music theory, where one holds a note while the chord changes.

We have the snail as it is seen by the gardener—the property owner—and straight from that clipped syntax, the poem moves into direct address.

In the Bachelardian frame, the empty shell evokes the empty nest, which limns dreams of refuge. But B. qualifies this by presenting the paradox of the “vigorous mollusk,” which suggests “the most decisive type of aggressive, aggressiveness that bides its time."

*

 Ancient burial grounds contain snail shells as allegories of graves in which men would waken. The shells were vessels for the regiving of life – for the return and resurrection—hence the name “resurrection shells”. The body becomes lifeless when the soul leaves it and the shell cannot move anymore; the shell cannot move when separate from the spirit.

The poet here, keeps his shell, insists on its presence, refuses to remove the perceived threat of shell, or to respond to the threat that others make of immigrant. There is something almost Rilkean in this.

Here’s “Part One, Sonnet IV” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

I read it almost as a response or a dialogue with Elmi’s poem, which focuses on the ground, the planet, the property marks and boundaries created by humans—and Rilke’s call to relinquish these heavy things, to look towards the sky. I think what these poets want is similar—to be the “Blessed ones, whole ones” of Rilke’s fifth line—and it’s transfixing to map the distances across time here.

But also, a resonance in Bachelard’s words: "Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones." To be in-between, to be trapped between the perception of threat and the home one carries: to study the poignance of Elmi’s juxtapositions and images.

A final note on the poet, who is new to me.

Samatar Elmi (a.k.a. Knomad Spock ) is a British-Somali poet, rapper and neofolk singer-songwriter “who explores musical genres as extended analogies for his own multiethnic heritage,” which includes Somali nomadic traditions and British working class communities. Elmi’s poetics hinges on what the displacements of language reveal about belonging and identity. “The Hope and the Anchor” and “The Invaders” accomplish this in a very different way from “The Snails.” Portrait of Colossus, his debut pamphlet, is available from flipped eye publishing. I am keeping my fascinated, analog eye on this poet.

Devin Gael Kelly's "walking poem"

Here I am fondling the particular mode of a poem 
that feels like a walking poem, feeling Devin
Gael Kelly's "Self Care in the Land Of A Thousand 
Horses", wherein what holds us or creates 
stillness is pace, gait, the pitch of the step-breath, 
precise pauses signaled by syntax so that  
I may be walking and thinking about onions
until fire hydrants remind me of lace – of that slip 
I must have left or else lost in the year I was losing 
everything, or else using a dash to press 
my face against the glass of a bakery 
where two women argue over cupcakes, 
using their hands, raising their hands to 
push away words, and how hands always 
fall into birds when one cannot hear 
them, when this one woman catches a bird 
in the air & kisses the less expressive 
lips & everything stops for this moment's
raw reconciliation, the scent of later sex
& cupcakes—though I am still moving.
I am haunted by break-ups, faking, lost
cats & earthquakes who keep secrets
if only to surprise or deflate us
like this thing in my ex said about forgetting, 
or how I'd already done it, before the 
chicken and the egg scenario nothing 
came first, he said he couldn't imagine 
me ever having children & this is when 
I knew his imagination was suffering 
or gutted by performance anxiety & 
I can imagine him now taking off shoes 
in a room with big windows and rising 
to greet a woman who can't imagine him 
not imagining her in stilettos. And 
I am using these sharp shoes to bring you 
back to the street, back to the surface 
of asphalt where we are walking and 
thinking about one thousand horses.

Addendum: I think the ampersand makes it move faster?

"Brink of Life" by Khashayar Mohammadi

Today I am fascinated by Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem, “Brink of Life,” published in his chapbook, Solitude Is An Acrobatic Act, (Above/Ground Press, 2020). Because I am fascinated, I want to peer closer. So I will.

1.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator. He is an immigrant who misses his first language enough to return to it, to keep it alive through translation.

I suspect that poets who translate have a different relationship to language than poets who do not. Sometimes I suspect the number of words a poet uses diminishes in direct proportion to the amount of time they spend translating other poet’s words; it’s as if each word becomes heavier or carries more. Or maybe it’s the opposite.

2.

The title of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem begins on the brink of something—the brink of life—and we expect the poem to develop this, which also links to defining life somehow. You can’t be on the brink of something undefined. The word “brink” designates an edge, a boundary, a cliff, a limit.

It is a short, one-stanza poem—everything is given to us in eleven lines—and this compactness makes its structure visually significant. The architecture stands out in a way that it wouldn’t if this were a longer poem, if it asked more from the eye, if it were busier, if it spread its energy across stanzas.

There is no punctuation, no period at the end to denote closure.

There is one capital letter at the beginning, and the word “Children” is the only word that receives this sort of visual attention.

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject an unwanted body

Right away, one senses the motion will blur the end of line from another, and this, in turn, will make it hard to distinguish which body is the subject. —And I love this. I love this. I love that the line doesn’t read “Children are delivered like parcels” because the absence of “are” is the absence of an equal sign, or an equivalence.

It’s amazing what the tiniest verb (or its absence) can insinuate. This absence shifts the weight of the address from a first person witness to a mystery. The speaker is there and not there. The speaker is thinking, and delivering images which connect.

The motion from the first line to the second line is seamless, but something happens in the middle of the second line: a tiny crack opens up, and the poet’s decision not to use a comma is (I think) a decision to keep the motion blurred, to keep the equals out.

Read it with a comma. The comma clarifies, or serves a sorting function:

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject, an unwanted body

The poet’s lack of punctuation is accomplishing something here—it is making it hard to tell which body is unwanted, or what part is a parcel—it is blurring the container and the contained.

3.

Mohammadi disorients us again with the next line, an image that pulls away from life but indicates time, indicates simultaneity:

while dolls await in triage

He doesn’t say the babies are like dolls—he posits the dolls alongside, or in the same poem-space, as children and bodies. Just when I think he is going to clarify or make a distinction, the poet swerves, shifts into swift anaphora, piling metaphor atop definition:

a child as a gift leased from the hospital
a child compounds interest daily
questions questions questions

I linger here. I know that the brink of life is not going to be the line I expected. I realize that the motion enacted by the poem is actually altering the form of a brink, curving it, turning it into a circling motion.

figures abstracted in privacy glass
mirrors are ashamed of reflecting
no longer show the woman her body

I realize that the mirrors have more agency, more power to verb, than children.

I also realize that the dolls had a similar agency—the dolls could wait. The inanimate surrounding objects could do more, or act with more volition, than the children or the child or the unwanted body who are acted upon.

Even in the woman’s relation to the mirror, it is the mirror who can show—not the woman who is looking. The poet doesn’t tell us that she is looking. The poet tells us what the mirror is doing, or not doing, namely, showing.

And so I am at this brink, where life is not something which seems to belong to the human subjects, but to the surrounding objects.

I know the poem is almost over. I know I am further from an edge because there is no line, no delineation. Picking up where the poet left off—“her body”—I read through to the end:

a soul cemented in language through names
a life nestled within life in language

Here, her body is defined as a soul cemented in language through names. Her body is defined as a life nestled within life in language. There is no reference to fetuses or babies or children—it is the woman’s body who is centered in this final, circling motion (which the repetition of life in that last line helps to accomplish).

5.

I love this poem for the way it withholds comfort somehow. I love the way it leaves us alone, separate, and yet bound by a life which names us. I’m not sure if the poet intended a larger point about the role or importance of names—and I’m not sure I need that from this poem in order to feel it does important things.

“I want my poems to keep someone company,” Mohammadi said in an interview.

I suspect many of us live in that loneliness—in the relationship we build into the poem, and the hand it stretches across an invisible room, asking to be read, to be of use, to be felt.

This is the cover image from his chapbook. Because solitude is both titular and transcendent in Mohammadi’s work, I tried to see if it speaks to this “brink of life,” and the tension in that relationship. There is a man pushing a single tree a top a hill. Or the tree has fallen over and the man is trying to plant it or re-root it. There is something that wants to stay and someone that is doing unclear things related to roots which could go either way.

There is no brink, quite. But there is the aloneness. There are two forms of life, and each as alone as the other, and maybe this, itself, is the relationship.

You can follow Khashayar on twitter here or read his incredible translations online. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

"Voice" by Jennifer Horne: Wondering towards a mother's voice.

Today I’m fascinated by Jennifer Horne’s poem, “Voice,” which can be found in her chapbook, Borrowed Light (Mule On A Ferris Wheel Press, 2019). Read it slowly.

---

Voice

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

Waking to sunlight, the smell of last night’s bonfire in my hair.
You left my dream only moments ago.
If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

Wraith-smoke. Spanish moss.
Coffee in an old diner mug, heavy as a serious thing.

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

---

1.

This is the final poem in a chapbook that explores inherited light, or the way in which various forms of light can be an inheritance which shapes and speaks into the present. The poet’s mother appears frequently in these poems—and I think you can feel the way she is both the beginning and the going-forward of the poet’s voice, or what the poet needs to say.

From this chapbook, we learn that a mother leaves multiple forms of light in her wake. We learn that Jennifer Horne’s mother was a poet, a female that lived with unabashed zest at a time when any zest in mothers was suspect. I sense a tension between the mother’s uninhibited spirit and the poet’s, and this is part of the legacy the poet brings to the page to understand.

The poem begins in the middle of this exploration, in a soft repudiation of Moses’ patriarchal visions:

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

The poet is sitting in a space where something has burned, and she is looking not to the stone tablets of a male god but to the notebook written by a human mother. The authority of some man’s prophecy is replaced by the words and visions of a particular woman, and her reckoning with life.

2.

At the end of the second stanza, the poet wakes up from the dream and wonders towards the mother’s voice:

If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

I love how the poet’s voice mingles with the mother’s voice. I love the stark brush-strokes used to depict both dream and waking, to dissolve a clear line between them. I love how the You of this poem is murky, almost incorporeal, and how this contrasts with the heavy seriousness of the coffee in a diner mug. And how Horne tacks back immediately towards the voice and what it asks of her:

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

And I think of my own mother—the way she took up space with her laughter and lust for life—and how the things which embarrassed me about her as a child are the things for which I admired her as a woman.

3.

Having a passionate, bohemian mother, or one whose spirit plays a predominant role in the visions of the child, often means that her stories frame the world more convincingly than other authorities, including peers, media, and friends. I recognize an urge to record the world for my mother since her death, to substantiate her stories and warnings somehow, and to keep her alive in this.

Is this what it means to be my mother’s daughter? To keepsake her fascination with life, her insatiable hunger for new experience, her commitment to her sensuality? Am I holding the world for her in what Dan Beachy-Quick calls “the hut of the poem”?

4.

We have reached a point of awareness about agency, and how the words or images or symbols we lay over others may be a form of disrespect. It is easier to have these conversations in the abstract than the particular. Yet, as writers, we struggle with staying in our lanes, or trying to discover which ghost shares the lane with us, and how that intersects with permission to poem them.

What is the line between elegy, tribute, portrait, and appropriation in a context where each person is the sole arbiter of their own life?

Whenever I write my mother, I worry about theft.

I worry about whether I’m recreating her in the way I want her remembered. Or whether I am ruining someone' else’s memory of her by writing my own.

I don’t have any answers or rules. I don’t know my lane when it comes to my mother who was many things to many other humans, each of whom has a different claim to remembering.

5.

I return to Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay, “The Hut of Poetry” (found in his Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales). He writes notes that a poem doesn’t have to be “funereal in its relation to death.” He continues:

“To read is the most common form of encounter with the dead. The dead on the blank page need not remain dead. Time in the page is different from time in the world….. Death in the poem is only a pause before rebirth. Death is but a delay inside the form.

Language offers a method of experiencing death without dying…The poem on the blank page houses a creative center infinitely larger than itself, than its own lined confines, but a power that has no useful ends without suffering the impossible limit of the poem’s form. The forging of limit through form is the poem’s most fundamental work, and the result of that work is that the poem becomes not a vessel of knowledge conveyed, but a dwelling where knowledge occurs.”

There is a sense in which form is actually what pushes through and re-visions death. I see this in Horne’s poem, in her syntax, in how she builds long lines like trails of crumbs in a forest where every child misses her mother—and all the bad things that happen to a child are linked to the lack of knowing which voice to trust, or what to believe of their own.

6.

In this hut of this short poem, the mother warns the child against fear—against reticence—against holding back from living a “big” life. Notice the role of the bigness here:

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

And so the poem ends with the mother’s words, which—when recorded, when heeded, when hallowed—become scripture or prophecy.

The book ends with this poem. The ghost has the last word about the future. Yet the ghost belongs, inextricably, to the daughter’s voice, to its bigness, to its motion forward.

To quote Dan Beachy-Quick again:

“But a home is never the world—a home is a separation from the world. A poem is never the world—a poem is a separation from the world. The world we read, and in reading see, never stays a world. Language’s gift to us is it’s failure. The enchantment of language is superseded in importance by its disenchantment.”

The mothers are gone. Neither the male prophets nor the wolves can help us. The poem is a temporary respite in which time and corporeality are overcome. The ghost is beautiful for this singular, liminal instant. She urges us to use our voice, to make it big enough to hold her—and big enough to wonder alone.

"The Structure of a Flower: Stem" by Andrea Rexilius

Today’s fascination is a poem by Andrea Rexilius. I found it in her poetry chapbook, Afterworld, published by Above/ground Press in Spring 2020. You can purchase a copy online. I’m sharing the text as it appears in the chapbook itself.

A title creates an expectation—it tells us what to expect from the poem. The title tells us that the poem will be about that structural part of a flower known as a stem. Notice that the poem is not analyzing the structure of a plant or a tree but of a flower—the flower is centered, the stem’s relationship to the flower is structural. This is what we are given from the outset.

And what we do know? We know the stem is the part which holds the flower-head aloft or connects the bloom to the ground, its source of nourishment. In some cases, the flower is also the vessel of fertilization which enables new flowers to be born.

But the poem does not begin with a flower or a stem or a stalk. The poem begins in a very specific moment—”the day the deer died”—and the poet’s first-person voice emerges in the space around this external death event which occurred in the world. The past tense of the poem begins with this pressure it puts on the present. We realize that the title is not going to play a descriptive role in this poem. And so we are left to wonder how this will work, and what the poet wants to subvert or re-imagine.

“I was alive in my house.” Period.

That period holds us back for a split second before the repetition creates a new sense of motion that pushes us forward, that qualifies what being alive in her house meant.

“I was alive in a watery field / of glaciers.” I love the use of repetition here, as if to thicken the onion layers, to both wrap and unwrap a globe around the speaker. The house changes to become a melting world, another grief, a silence which is someone liquid—and both coalesce in the speaker’s throat in this “realm of birchwood”, a surreal metaphor. The world inside the throat maps onto the outside world in a way that creates suspense.

The poet is describing a moment in the past and yet grappling with her presence in that moment. She will do this again. Several lines begin with “I was”. And there is a subtle and marvelous thing happening in my mind as I read the “I was alive” statements placed near the wildfires, the deer dying, the time before trees, the changing interior and exterior conditions; I am wondering what it means to be alive, or what it signifies to continue living in a circumstance where the words used to describe my condition, namely alive-ness, are not modified by surrounding circumstances.

The death of a deer becomes plural. The fires are no longer the work of imagination but the reality of a landscape. There is no border between being and having been.

And yet I am here, silent. I am reading a poem about stems which has become a poem about connections and borders which has become a condition involving water and silence in my throat. I am wondering what Andrea Rexilius wants from me as she continues this pattern of retracting and qualifying statements in a way that both undermines and develops them. It’s not a dialectic motion so much as seasonal one. It’s less systemic than loosely-plotted in a form of anticipated variance. I love the climate inside this poem, or the way that it’s motion creates a sense of climate rather than climax. But it is heavy.

It is heavier than the silence after a eulogy. It is hard to carry because, like many silences, it remains expectant. It wants words to fix, explain, and pour over. And all of this world-building or world-destroying happens in the first stanza.

How does Andrea give this poem such a strong sense of motion? Notice that there are three stanzas, that we are led to believe this will be a poem about stems, and that certain words & images are carried over from the previous stanza.

In the first stanza, we find “the realm of birchwood” in the her throat, and the stanza ends by qualifying this, by making it clear that the birchwood is on fire, and the fire is “lodged” in her “throat”, and it is making a hissing sound that fire makes which cannot be described as human. The outside world is drawn inside the poet’s throat into the space of speaking. We use our words to make sense. We use our voice to express the sense we make of an experience. We use our words to shout “Fire!” but the poet is not shouting Fire!—the poet is making the sound of wet wood burning, hissing.

Why do fires hiss? The sound comes from water being turned to vapor (or steam), and then being pushed out of the material under pressure. This pressure is “lodged", or living, in the speaker. It is a sound in lieu of words. It is also a form of silence, if we understand silence to be a space of unspoken things, or things we don’t discuss. But the hissing is important. Dead wood doesn’t hiss—it crackles. The hissing sound in the poet’s throat is the sound of living wood, or wood that holds water, burning. It is the sound of water leaving a living body.

The second stanza begins with an assertion: “There is no difference between the damsel and the savior.” I re-read that a few times for its blunt dismounting of saviors. The poet brings back the drought, this time as a “silence / resourced.” The line break after silence startled me a little; we already know that drought and silence are related, so when this word resourced appears, it thickens things. There is a tension inside the word resourced—in the idea of a source or origin being used again, in a motion that involves returning, and in the noun form of resource which is associated with mining and extraction industries.

The poet never mentions mining. She never says the phrase natural resource, and yet it insinuates itself somehow. There is the stem’s relationship to water—and the water centered in the poet’s body, in the speechless throat, in the life of the plant as well as the planet. There are no clear lines or boundaries to separate these sources of life from their resourcefulness or their absence.

And the third stanza returns with the same words, rubbing them harder, making small fires of the friction between their given meanings, the meanings acquired in previous stanzas, and how the poet expands them. The “damsel’s nightgown” is the night sky, the water is an ocean, the savior is what is “rooted.” The connection to the title is an opening, an extended metaphor that is modified in each stanza, and the closest we come to resolution is in the last line, which begins with an assertive “Only”, which feels insistent, and leaves us with a word, sanctum. This is an old Latin word whose meaning has thickened over time; it comes from the Latin, neuter of sanctus ‘holy’, from sancire ‘consecrate’.. It is a meaning-full world. It designates a sacred place, especially a shrine within a temple or church. It is also used to refer to a private place from which most people are excluded. It is a bounded word, a word that creates boundaries in its association with sacredness. But sanctum also refers to a refuge, a retreat, a safe place where one cannot be harmed.

What is the place of rest? We return to the flower parts—the root, the stem, the structure. The poet is not finished; an uncertainty is implicit in this Afterworld she is trying to imagine or to survive. I think we see a deep structural criticism in this poem as well as the book. I think Andrea Rexilius is trying to find boundaries, to look at parts, to discern responsibility and function when the borders of harm do not exist.

"Don't Disappear" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, up close, in context

On it’s face, “Don’t Disappear” isn’t extraordinary so much as sad, embarrassing, desperate. Yevtushenko’s final drafts of this poem appeared in 1977. It’s a poem addressed to a lover, and the structure is simple: six stanzas rooted around the anaphora, “Don’t disappear…”. 

The context

A love poem with a third party, or shadow, deserves a little context.

Y. married poet Bella Akhmadulina in 1954. They stayed married until 1959, but Y. couldn’t stand the attention Bella received from admirers. Jealousy, both sexual and literary, plagued their relationship. According to official rumor:

The marriage finally fell apart when Akhmadulina unexpectedly became pregnant. Yevtushenko did not want children and insisted that she terminated the pregnancy. Following the ensuing divorce, Yevtushenko said that their love “had not died; it had stopped being,” and he later attempted to win her back. Despite their difficulties, the pair did ultimately manage to remain friends, and when Yevtushenko married his last wife, Maria, Akhmadulina even came to help set the table for the wedding meal.

In 1961, Y. married Galina Sokol-Lukonina. In 1968, the couple adopted a boy named Peter. I can’t find information about when Galina and Y. divorced, so it’s possible that this poem was written to Galina with Jan Butler in the background.

Or to Irish translator Jan Butler, who was translating his work in the 1970’s—and whom he eventually married in 1978. They had two sons before divorcing in 1986.

Less than a year later, in 1987, Y. met Maria Novikova. They married in the same year. Maria became his fourth and final wife. They had two sons before Y. died in 2017.

*

And now, the poem itself. I’ll start with Albert C. Todd’s translation, because it’s the one that often comes up when this poem is mentioned. It is Wednesday and I am nit-picking. I wanted to re-read it in order to examine the ellipses. To see how Yevtuschenko’s use of ellipses changes the poem. And to compare the translations.

Don’t Disappear (translated by Albert C. Todd)

Don't disappear.... By disappearing from me, 
you will disappear from yourself, 
betraying your own self forever, 
and that will be the basest dishonesty.

Don't disappear.... To disappear is so easy.
It's impossible to resurrect one another.
Death drags down too deep.
Death even for a moment is too long.

Don't disappear.... Forget the third shadow.
In love there are only two. There are no thirds.
We both will be pure on Judgment Day, 
when the trumpets call us to account.

Don't disappear.... We have redeemed sin.
We both are free of the law, we are sinless.
We are worthy together of the forgiveness of those
whom we have unintentionally wounded.

Don't disappear.... One can disappear in an instant, 
but how could we meet later in the centuries ahead? 
Is your double possible in the world, 
and my double? Only barely in our children.

Don't disappear.... Give me your palm.
I am written on it-this I believe.
What makes one's last love terrible
is that it is not love, but fear of loss.

Rupert Moreton’s translation is richer somehow, more carnal, more intimate. It also works with a rhyme scheme that Todd likely abandons in his translation. It’s fuller. It’s thicker. It’s more formal and baroque and possibly prettier. Of course it builds this brocade over the same desperation, but in a classical mode.

Don’t Disappear" (translated by Rupert Moreton)

Don’t disappear… For if that’s what you do,
in pieces from your very self you’ll vanish,
betraying all you are for ever, too –
this basest fraud we only then can banish.

Don’t disappear… for it’s too easy and
we find we cannot resurrect each other.
Death pulls us in too deeply in its sand.
It’s careless to succumb to dying’s smother.

Don’t disappear… Third shadows cast away –
in love there are but two. The third’s deception.
And we shall both be pure on Judgement Day,
when trumpets summon us to that reception.

Don’t disappear… for sin we have atoned.
We are not under judgement, we are shriven.
Of course, we didn’t really mean to wound
our peers, so we deserve to be forgiven.

Don’t disappear. You can in but a wink –
but how then can we manage future meetings?
Of doubles – yours and mine – then can we think?
It may but happen in our children’s greetings.

Don’t disappear. So, give your palm to me.
I truly think you’ll find on it I’m written.
The final love is dreadful, for you see
it isn’t love – by fear of loss we’re bitten.

Image Source: Tarnmoor

A few notes on “showpiece dissidence”

How to determine when a poet is engaging in “showpiece dissidence”? What does “selling out” mean in the context of public poetry? Who is the riskiest risker? And who is merely mouthing the dissent that is trending?

I don’t know. I don’t know that we can know without rising to the defense of an ideology.

Y. never took a clear ideological position—he often straddled a line (or a nuance) to the point of estrangement from the Russian exile community. Joseph Brodsky, for example, resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member. "He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved," Brodsky said.

Or he doesn’t throw the right stones. He criticizes anti-Semitism and Stalin but not Marx. He questions the bonuses given to writers who celebrated Russia and the Soviet state but he stays loyal to the state, itself. He identifies as Russian, as a Soviet citizen, at a time when resistance requires the cutting of all ties. Or he solidifies a friendship with a cigarette stub. Or he works within the system and doesn’t defect. He gets published in major magazines. He receives state awards. He benefits from the right to travel abroad, one of the most coveted freedoms in the USSR and Iron Bloc states. The list of wrongs is long.

Y. was, in fact, a reformer, a reform communist rather than a revolutionist. His 1965 interview with Olga Carlisle makes this clear. Carlisle introduces the interview:

In 1965, Yevtushenko tells me that he still believes that a renewed Marxism might be reconciled with literary integrity; that the present system is not incompatible with human and artistic growth. This is an uncomfortable position today in Moscow, where a stifling Socialist Realism is the only sanctioned aesthetic doctrine.

As an idealist, an admirer of abstraction, Y.’s love poems to women never rose to the level of ardor that his love poems for Russia embody.

Can a poet be a patriot of place as well as a dissident? Would it have been better if Y. was a White Russian monarchist, a firmly-anti-communist dissident who rejected the whole rather than its particular?

Hitler hated the USSR too. We forget how close one totalitarianism nestles to another.

After Y.’s death, Dan Piepenbring suggested:

“..sometimes a poet can achieve that rare thing: popularity. All it requires is persistence, good fortune, and cultural conditions dramatically different from those of the contemporary U.S. At the height of his powers, Yevtushenko commanded audiences of thousands in the Soviet Union, where his readings gave voice to the hopes and fears of a generation struggling to come out from under Stalinism.” 

Whether Y.’s popularity came at the price of friends in high places isn’t always the appropriate question to ask. I say this because friends in high places impact the career of poets in every country—whether a democracy or a dictatorship. To different degrees, the anointment is there in the ointment of any public art.

(As for the problematic, Y., like many male poets of his generation, speaks from a socialization that marginalizes the lives and value of female or LGBTQ persons. I don’t hold him to a standard that didn’t exist when he was navigating the years of Soviet communism. Or rather, I don’t know what revelation can come from holding him that.)

"It's not enough to fight for freedom. We must also fight the misuse of freedom, and develop our idea of it. Most people don't care about freedom of speech because they don't have anything to say.” Y. said this in 2006, when he was still holding a candle of hope that Putin might usher in a new era for Russia.

Did he realize that religious nationalism would be the vehicle for consolidation of authoritarianism? How does a poetics of aspirational patriotism interact with propaganda to create a sense of complacency or fatalism? Why am I asking myself these questions aloud in a room without windows and a language with so few words for longing?

3 poems by Wislawa Szymborska

Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“I wouldn't want what happened to me to happen to anybody, because it is something that destroys the spirit and the soul, totally, there is no comparison. To talk about it is hard for me, because it all comes back at once...all that terror, that horror.”

“It's over 25 years now since I was arrested and tortured for treating a wounded revolutionary, but the memories of the pain in torture, the terror and the utter desolation of weeks in solitary confinement, are still with me. I believe it is the same for all of us, the men and women who have been imprisoned, stripped naked, hurt and humiliated. We are left with only a thin veneer over our pain, and the outraged question: how could one human being do this to another, and how could others stand by and watch it happen? What are we doing, when we turn away from other people's suffering? What is that happens in the human heart to block the natural flow of compassion that is an intrinsic part of us?”

Wislawa Szymborska’s words provide a context for her thoughts on torture, for the way she seems to play with the absurdity (and meaninglessness) of fate, placing prison next to romantic love in the context of follies.

---

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin, and the blood is just beneath it;
an adequate supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just as they were, only the earth has grown smaller,
and what happens sounds as if it's happening in the next room.

Nothing has changed.
It's just that there are more people,
and beside the old offences new ones have sprung--
real, make-believe, short-lived, and non-existent.
But the howl with which the body answers to them,
was, is and ever will be a cry of innocence
according to the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of hands to shield the head remains the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs fail, it falls, its knees jack-knife,
it bruises, swells, dribbles and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except for the course of rivers,
the lines of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid those landscapes roams the soul,
disappears, returns, draws nearer, moves away,
a stranger to itself, elusive,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.

A Opinion on the Question of Pornography

There's nothing more debauched than thinking.
This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed
on a plot laid out for daisies.

Nothing's sacred for those who think.
Calling things brazenly by name,
risqué analyses, salacious syntheses,
frenzied, rakish chases after the bare facts,
the filthy fingering of touchy subjects,
discussion in heat--it's music to their ears.

In broad daylight or under cover of night
they form circles, triangles, or pairs.
The partners' age or sex is unimportant.
Their eyes glitter, their cheeks are flushed.
Friend leads friend astray.
Degenerate daughters corrupt their fathers.
A brother pimps for his little sister.

They prefer the fruits
from the forbidden tree of knowledge
to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines--
all that ultimately simple-hearted smut.
The books they relish have no pictures.
What variety they have lies in certain phrases
marked with a thumbnail or a crayon.

It's shocking, the positions,
the unchecked simplicity with which
one mind contrives to fertilize another!
Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know.

During these trysts of theirs, the only thing that's steamy is the tea.
People sit on their chairs and move their lips.
Everyone crosses only his own legs
so that one foot is resting on the floor
while the other dangles freely in midair.
Only now and then does somebody get up,
go to the window,
and through a crack in the curtains
take a peep out at the street.

[ From View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska, Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh ,”A Harvest Original" Harcourt & Brace & Co. New York 1993 ]

Any Case

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer. Farther away.
It happened, but not to you.

You survived because you were first.
You survived because you were last.
Because alone. Because the others.
Because on the left. Because on the right.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.

Luckily there was a forest.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A frame, a turn, an inch, a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the water.

Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.
What would have happened if a hand, a leg,
One step, a hair away?

So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?
The net's mesh was tight, but you? through the mesh?
I can't stop wondering at it, can't be silent enough.
Listen,
How quickly your heart is beating in me.

Translated from the Polish by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds ]

Writing prompt from Galway Kinnell's "Don't Wait"

Or really, writing prompt from a poem you can’t stop reading, loving, admiring, and needing to engage. I’ve been challenging myself to write a poem in response to a poem that haunts me. It’s a challenge that frames my morning and ruins my placid coffee-guzzling routine.

I learn so much from the prompts and possibilities posted by fellow writers, so I’m going to share this Wait/Don’t Wait experiment in full knowledge that nothing I write in a morning compares with Galway Kinnell’s poems. This statement is both particular and general in its scope. This poem will never be submitted, published, collected, or read. It is a poem for the compost. It is critical to produce a steady stream of poems one is willing to bury. A poet’s task is to feed the flowers, which includes grinding old bones into soil.

Because I love Galway Kinnell’s “Wait”—from the way he touched depression to the way he wove a melody to free it. Kinnell wrote this poem for a student who wanted to die after a love relationship went wrong. Because it is one of my favorite poems and yet—I feel a hollow space in its promise, a sort of positivity that promises we will learn from the suffering of life. I’m not sure I believe this anymore. I’m not sure I need to believe this in order to love living—or to bear the implacable parts.

The Rub: Subvert Your Idol

Pick a poem that you adore, a poem by a famous poet, a poet you admire and emulate. You should have a fear of profaning their poems. This fear is important—it’s where the poem gets its energy.

Start by playing with the title, reading it, feeling its relationship to what the poet wants from the poem. Then subvert it. Flip it. And write into what happens.

(My example in response to Kinnell’s “Wait” is below.)

It’s worth watching the poet read this beautiful poem aloud—because watching adds layers to listening, and layers thicken the bed, broaden the available brushstrokes.

And what’s funny to me about this poem is I went in thinking I wanted to argue with Kinnell about whether we “recover” from broken hearts in the context of romantic love. As I wrote into the titular subversion, I discovered my mother—and how I needed to think about love and loss in general, how the intensity of love can attach to unromantic relationships, including parental ones.

The point of this post—the point of my daily subversions—is to schedule time for failure. To slot in a space where I write to fail, and then feel through that failure to new subjects. So I wrote the poem above (which is compost) and then discovered the poem I needed to write (which is not compost and not shared here but hopefully appears somewhere someday, ptuie ptuie).

In this way, writing “Don’t Wait” led me to a tension that I probe in a poem I do not plan to compost. But I’m not sure I would have resolved to write into the uncertainty of this space if I hadn’t first discovered its parameters through this writing exercise.

And that, friends, is the risk I need to bring to the page. Alongside the reminder that, if we are writing, then we are producing reams of nonsense alongside a few moonflower vines. And producing those reams is a good thing. A shameless thing. A facet of practice and commitment. Don’t wait.

"With Mercy for the Greedy," the ars poetica of confessional poetry.

With Mercy for the Greedy

For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession

Concerning your letter in which you ask   
me to call a priest and in which you ask   
me to wear The Cross that you enclose;   
your own cross,
your dog-bitten cross,
no larger than a thumb,
small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—

I pray to its shadow,
that gray place
where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep.
I detest my sins and I try to believe
in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,   
its solid neck, its brown sleep.

True. There isa beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!   
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

All morning long   
I have worn
your cross, hung with package string around my throat.   
It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,
tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.   
Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.

My friend, my friend, I was born   
doing reference work in sin, and born   
confessing it. This is what poems are:   
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.
 

Anne Sexton, “With Mercy for the Greedy” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

To me, this poem is the ars poetica of confessional poetry. It was written in the brief span of time after Anne Sexton’s illegal abortion. Although Anne feared the child might not be her husband’s, she also feared the demands that another child would make on her writing life. We still find it easier to talk about abortions in terms of paternity rather than female personhood.

Loss was Anne’s muse, and with this abortion she discovered a new form of loss to write, a loss more damning for the silence that surrounded it. She started keeping a journal, inspired by Dostoevsky’s line: what filthy things the heart is capable of. Although she was close to WD Snodgrass at the time, it’s interesting that Anne didn’t share this news with him or any other male poets. Instead, she confided the abortion in a letter to her Catholic friend, Ruth Soter. In response, Ruth mailed a tooth-marked wooden cross and an encouragement to seek spiritual counsel.

“With Mercy For the Greedy” came from this exchange. I’ve always suspected the title has to do with the mercy Anne sought in her choice of writing over new motherhood—the “greed” and hunger to write for which this world does not forgive us. The poem itself presents two alternate forms of mercy: one found in religion, the other found in writing poetry. Both forms of mercy rely on the act of confession.

My friend, my friend, I was born   
doing reference work in sin, and born   
confessing it. This is what poems are:   
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the last stanza burns itself to the surface of our minds. I don’t think it’s strange that abortion is fugue which structures the piece. I don’t think it’s ironic that confession alienates female poets from gendered femininity that privileges the act of mothering over the tempest of writing. This is what poems are: an admission, a savaging, an out.

*The last line is also an allusion to Anne’s favorite palindrome: “rats live on no evil star.”

"Why We Must Struggle" by Kay Ryan

With gratitude to Lucy Jaffe for introducing me to this poem.

Why We Must Struggle 

Kay Ryan

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?

(First published in Poetry, 1992)