Hope of Love Poems

FACEBOOK REDUX

  the army deposed Mubarak
    with the help of unarmed people

Facebook doesn’t depose
  it poses
but in Egypt it was better than the telephone
  and it still is in countries
   where the police isn’t on Facebook yet
     (there is no such country: Facebook is the police)

  pretending to be just hanging out
    discussing the quirks of their dogs
       their tastes in music and what they want in a mate
         Facebook is just pixel puff off a virtual dog
           its data bots eat your brain and make you buy stuff
and if you make a move that looks vaguely human Facebook arrests you
   and connects you to Twitter LinkedIn and other social groups
    where communication will rehabilitate you

for a writer Facebook is especially deadly
  a novelist mining for stories will run only into lies
    there are no smells and no skin
a poet is quickly bored by the nanitudes mouthed there
  an essayist meets there only herm public face
    and whatever looked real in reality
      (which wasn't much)
is secretly spirited away from your soul and made into zuckerbergs

  it’s always sunny on sugar mountain

  I felt lighter already
    I looked for my friends at the bar
      couldn't find them
but look: a real dog is falling in love with a fire hydrant!


  oil
    engines
        behind the scenes at night
           they are working for you
even when they look like they are making money
             for someone else
                 (they do)

  they are attached with
      to you
that one just dangling with a puddle on the end
        is the gulf of mexico
          it used to be rich

   then it will be esthetic
     you won't even know it was there
        like a shrimp in reduction sauce

  then they attach themselves
    to you
      with new umbilicums
yummy it feels yummy

  where to go
    something outside of them tells them
       where to go
something inside them says yes
  and then it's off to mexico
    but never again to the gulf of mexico

    dead verbs nouned
         remember
           derivative was once to derive
 and so the body was derived from the need to feed
              and the puddle dried up

   but everything is fast now
      don't bet on language
         to be on your side
                  it's not
       not because it's venal
                    but because it's in constant use

          and kept quiet with our needs at a minimum
we might turn into finer animals horses let's say

               now volition does

                        I hate ducks
                        I like birds
                    I hate ducks
                    will they make a difference to my grade?


                                    why do the french look french?
                                    do the people of the 20th century look different?
                                    do plumbers?
                                    do ideas?
                                    what makes them look like they do?


                          the consequences tragic
                              where is the gulf of mexico

Translation from Yiddish by Sarah Traister Moskovitz

[The following, as explained in the translator’s note below, comes from as remarkable cache of manuscripts written & buried by Yiddish poets many of whom were victims themselves of the Nazi-directed khurbn (= holocaust) of the mid-twentieth-century.  Stark & shattering in content & context, they raise, not for the first time, the necessity of a poetry of witness even or especially when the poem (“the poem supreme,” as Robert Creeley had it) is addressed to emptiness.  Of the poem reprinted here, Sarah Traister Moskovitz writes: “This poem ‘The Street’ has thirty seven verses. But from the last line on of verse 34, which is missing, and appears to have been torn away, more parts of lines disappear until by the very last verse [as shown here], so little remains that the poem is gradually destroyed and made to disappear as was its author Shmuel Marvil.” The complete cache of manuscripts, with English translations, can be found at poetryinhell.org.]

from the street (sections 4-6) by Shmuel Marvil

[4] I trembled and hardly could hold together,
on my bad feet already ruined by death,
I begin to shake, want to apologize,
Staring from walls all around are corpses eyes.

At night they all had died like dogs.
The icy cold took them away from their lives,
So for whom my apology?! – Tell me who should be first!
Maybe just curse our bitter time?!

And I did curse. Believe me I cursed,
myself and the people and even the streets,
and my aching heart growled like a lion,
a broken prayer to the sky, the sky.

A crow wandered in lost, black as time,
and walks with the strut of a demon no less,
walks over the corpses and looks them over,
and who can disturb her in this, oh who?!

In times past she’d watch the stalls of the butchers,
and in fright disappear on the roofs like smoke.
Today she strides freely around on dead people,
and pecks at their bodies – makes big gaping holes.

She gorges on meat of human bodies,
and walks with the steps of a devil no less,
stepping on bodies, befouling them.
And who can disturb her in this, oh who?!

[5] Often one encounters a chunk that is frozen,
covered and swaddled in ice and in snow,
nearby a dog, frightened and scrawny,
tears at the meat and eagerly licks.

You recognize the hand, the foot of a person,
that has been lying long and forgotten,
and there is not enough left for burial,
so the dog can freely tear and feed.

The wailing wind roused me from bed
at dawn of one of these terrible days
A look and a sigh, a blow to my heart -
a child in mid street lay dead.

Like a holy offering he laid himself down,
people look on at this and reflect,
- not the first, not the last, – someone mumbles, who?
a scream and a cry in bleak twighlight:

Who knows whose this is there? Who gave birth to it?
for whom too soon sacrificed from this world?!
No mother, no father, no one comes to claim it,
just simply abandoned to death!

And here something tore me away from it all
A man, stark naked running out in the snow
trembling with fever, shaking with cold
teeth rattling and shouting!


[6] And how can you help him? One can only sigh,
when you too are as a tree that’s been stripped?
And soon there comes toward you a Jew!
and looks at you with a tear of death!

His eye light has vanished and so has his strength.
His bones are wrapped only in rags,
soon he will fall, in just minutes,
and vanish forever with the sound of his fall!
__________________
So rise these pictures before my eyes,
Gruesome abandonment suffering pain,
And we go around spinning in horror,
pushed and crushed by them in the time that remains!

So don’t torture me poem, I’ve had enough
Why submerge under blood anew?
See how clear the days are, the nights

Let me still sing how
And you my song be my
Remember how we once
Both drowning

Let my singing
of pale moon
Let us,
and become of

So and
He
So is when
He

[translator’s note. Poetry in Hell is a web site dedicated to the poets, both in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere whose poetry, under the leadership of Emanuel Ringelblum, was secretly collected by the members of the “Oneg Shabbat Society“ and preserved and buried in milk cans in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation. The efforts of the Oneg Shabbat Society were to document life in the ghetto for future generations. The poetry in this website was found postwar, buried in milk cans and photographed onto microfiche by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland in conjunction with support from the United States Holocaust Museum. I am grateful to both of these institutions for making these documents and the microfiche available to me for translation to English

Shmuel Marvil (1906-1943) was born in countryside near Warsaw. After study in a yeshiva, he worked in sales in Warsaw. He debuted in the journal Unzer Hofnung, (“Our Hope”) with a play in four acts published in installments called Libe(“Love”).  He published in book form Trern in der Nakht, (“Tears in the Night”), Warsaw 1937, Keynig Shaul, (“King Saul”), 1939. The poems Lid Tsu di Hern, (“Song to the Gentlemen”) and Di Gas (“The Street”) that were unearthed in the Ringelblum Archives are eyewitness accounts, in poetry, of his Warsaw Ghetto experience. Exact place of death by the Nazis is unknown. He was 37.]

It never—mattered, which came first, the father, or the mother, or the egg. Go ahead, my good thief.  Go ahead, my bad angel. Bless. Happy morning.     She held the warm oval.

Scrolls is a new 'experimental' collaboration in progress by James C. Hopkins and Yoko Danno.  One of us writes the first half of a sentence and the other follows up with the rest of the sentence. The latter begins the next sentence and drops it halfway, which is taken over by the former. Writing thus in turn we draw 'picture scrolls' with words. There is no rule except that a scroll should consist of five paragraphs. When we start a scroll we never know how it will develop and end. We have set out for adventures in an unknown land without a map or a compass.


After all the lights have been turned off I watch shafts of moonlight shooting in through the blinds. The bare room starts to reverberate with film-noir certainty. Tonight the moving is finished. All the pictures and photos have been removed from the walls and all the drawers and closets emptied, and only the laptop on the table remains to remind me of what I had formerly considered important. No more ordering the world, and no more maps and calculations. Only some strawberries are left in the empty refrigerator, and tomorrow waiting in a car across the street.

When will I ever learn why I must keep on moving? The road ahead seems like the only real thing. The rearview mirror scrolls out like a dream behind me, and a long train of cars is closing in like a persistent malady. Looking for a bypath is like looking for a cure. The next time I take this road I hope to see again the deer's family I glimpsed in the bush by the roadside. The mother and her fawn disappeared into the woods as the car approached - I could see only their white tails bounding through the trees, long after the other shapes had merged. Without nature the road ahead is a fleeting mirage.

The moment the car reaches the bridge the moon appears behind the pine trees. Is there ever a moment when, upon meeting the moon, white cranes take wing one by one and fly across her luminous face? I wish I could forget the possibility of forgiveness - it would make distance and asphalt and night easier than watching the edges of wings. Where is it that I hid my yearning - in the backseat there is only a dog-eared atlas of the USA and an expensive bottle of wine. It is easy to get lost when you have a wrong map. Especially after midnight when the road is in complete darkness and the cats are out hunting. Their eyes shine like alarms set off.

I hear a siren wailing in the distance and ignore it - disaster comes and goes and has nothing to do with this world. When I was young even a pimple on my face was a disaster. Let alone this. Call it calm after the storm, but the combination of tires and lives turning on the road at night is like a flight from ever-chasing hunters. No sanctuary ahead unless you count the all-night diners. But even there is only pie and stale beer. When will I ever be able to sit in an outdoor cafe again, spreading thick butter on crunchy baguette, in the middle of the afternoon? These images only drive me to blissful distraction.

I can't get off the highway now if I wanted to. I drive until I know my destination. I have a plenty of time, and even space, and as long as there is a radio station I will keep moving towards the desert heat. In heat there is a castle wavering, towers flickering, loopholes blinking in the walls. And I can hear the guard dogs barking already. Soon there will be only animal instinct and cunning left anyway, when the engine stops and the machine comes to a halt. The moon shines over the dune of clouds as if waiting for me to arrive. I flick on the turning signal, slow down, and look around. She is chasing me as ever.

As always, I ordered a glass of Bordeaux, a small pot of black tea, and a slice of anything chocolate. It was still too early for the pageant to start. The sun was still far above the horizon, and yet I could sense the day winding down as the afternoon descent began. A car passed by with the radio on, and the song took me back to the highest plateau of the world. Suddenly my chair began to wobble and I wished I had something to hold on to besides memory. When you've heard too much music, only the sound of waves can still surge over you. Before my eyes the wine disappeared, and the glass refilled itself. How these things happen is still a mystery, but here I am on the stage.

I don't know why I am among these actors and actresses with masks of ordinary citizens. A waiter passes by, a businessman, a thin teenage girl - but they all are gods and demons in disguise, I know. In fact they are testing me for a new role in a new play, but one that hasn't been written yet. Another car goes by, and then another, until finally only a distant barking of dogs is monitored on the back screen. I am obliged to speak my lines unknown to me, but that too is becoming easier. The thing that I can't get out of my head these days is a stray dog I find lying at my doorway every night when I come home. I try to turn her away, giving her some food, but every morning when I wake up she is lying by the door.

There is something comforting in that, but I am wondering what she really wants to get from me. I know she is also disguised with a mask, and that she barks when she sees blue cars -- but other than that we don't know each other well. Tomorrow I will bring her a gift, and perhaps she will leave her post. The trouble is I don't know what kind of gift she likes most, or if she can read the book I'm thinking of buying her. Once you teach an animal to stand on her own, you never know what she will be up to. But one thing is clear - she can easily smell intruders without learning from detective stories, and protecting my home is her only concern. I have never had a companion who is so persistent.

Tomorrow I will set out on a long journey, and she may know better how to read when I return. In the meantime, I'm wondering how much it costs for the rescue of a stray woman trapped in a swamp. Some say it may destroy my songs yet to be born, but if I don't save her she will haunt me for the rest of my already-haunted life. Some things sink and some things rise, but the thing that matters is to know the bottom line. All creation has two aspects, smiling and angry, like the moon that we see and the one that we don't see. The trick is to know what we see is also what we don't see. Ghosts are real and the real doesn't exist, say some people. As for me, both are true as long as there's a breeze blowing through the trees.

Coming back to the half-emptied glass of Bordeaux was like rising back to the surface of the ocean. Cars were still passing like waves on the beach, the sun had ripened in the sky, and the pedestrians got flurried by a honk. Someone was shouting but I couldn't understand what they were saying -- I was alone on the stage in a foreign land. The best thing about being a stranger is I can recognize birds' songs and crickets' chirps much better than I do when I am surrounded by my mother tongue. I can even see the faces behind masks that everyone wears. But what if everyone is without his or her persona? We would never know what to say, how to act on the stage or even when the show was over. This show will be over when the eyes of the sky blink.

[NOTE. The full series of Scrolls, still in progress, can be found on the Ikuta Press web site, from Kobe, Japan, at http://ikutapress.com/index.html  About Yoko Danno’s equally experimental move from writing in Japanese to writing in English, Gary Snyder has written in his “Introduction” to a projected collection of her poems, Heading for A Futher Center: “Yoko Danno has chosen to write poetry in English rather than Japanese. She has been doing this for more than 20 years. It is not that she has lived a long time out of Japan. Although she herself might not say so, I think that her choice of English is part of a strategy toward the solution of contemporary dichotomies and unearthing of the deepest roots. If she wrote these poems in Japanese she would run the risk of sounding precious or archaic. The bluntness of English is an excellent foil for her subtleties.”  Excerpts from her translation of the ancient Japanese Kojiki can be found elsewhere on Poems and Poetics.]

                                    get

                                                better


                        arrives

can be said
written
in a line


on
her
back

another


                        asks

                        only

                        is
                        yet

                        give

                        g i v e n

sees
mind
sees

                           face



                                                short black hair
                                                flick in frames


[2]


strokes


time



                        some
                        same




                             circumference

                             centering




flower
in a
perfect
cracked
vase


so
close
that
mind

can
touch
smell

taste

her

clearly

contradicting


briefly
confused

his
look
is
to
get

a
better
sense

of

her
in
heat

before
breath

who
says
now

and
what
to
whom

allows
creation

girl

image

language

inherent

[NOTE.  Ed Baker’s Stone Girl  E-Pic, a massive gathering of drawings & writings, was published earlier this year by Leafe Press (Nottingham, England, and Claremont, California).  It is as such the celebration of a poet/artist/calligrapher whose work attests to its almost outsider status, in the quasi-rawness of the print & pages in the paper version, not visible as posted here, & in the play between visual images & minimal, often scroll-like versings.   The opening citation in Conrad DiDiodato’s foreword has something to say of this: “It is important to collect these writers because, as has been the case over and over in the history of literature, the best and most innovative writing, the writing that advances the art and that in the future becomes the classic and defining work of a period, is almost always the work of outsiders.”  (John M. Bennett, Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State University).  Or Baker himself: “... the facts that provoke (or precipitate) a poem or a piece of art that is inside or outside or simultaneously inside/outside ... the poem/piece.”  The line between inside & outside is accordingly called into question, even into doubt.  
      A detailed review by Joseph Hutchison can be found at http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-bakers-stone-girl-e-pic.html. (J.R.)]

            The internet may promise something entirely different.  Maybe, if one isn’t forced to mimic the way things are arranged or positioned in anthologies and books.  I once made a joke in an interview with Chris Funkhouser, when Poems for the Millennium first came out, that there should be an Anthology of Everything.  Maybe the internet will make that possible.  Maybe the internet IS that anthology.




      On the other hand I can say that what I’m looking for – part discovered and part made up – are multiple forms of poetry, all the different possibilities of poetry, poetry that we make on our own and poetry that has been made in different forms in other times and places.  It doesn't matter to me, the accuracy of what we bring to light, as long as it ADDS to and shows the dimensions of things we hadn't imagined before. 
      But then there is, maybe as with all translation, that other question that gets raised, maybe too often, and to which I don't have a final answer: about the problem of translating works from threatened cultures and by doing so bringing them into imperial contexts, thereby breaking the sense of the sacred and esoteric that certain people, certain cultures, hold dear.  Such an attitude, precautionary and protective, is a matter, in no trivial sense, of maintaining boundaries, whereas my own goal in translation, which includes ethnopoetic translation, is the breaking down of boundaries.  (I will however never be absolutely certain on this point.)
      There are also, let me say, various forms of ethnopoetics.  I worked for a number of years with Dennis Tedlock.  Dennis was a good poet ... is a good poet.  He is also a trained linguist and anthropologist and went through the material that he was translating with a much greater sense of detail and accuracy than I could conceivably have given it, since I was working, in most cases, from outside the language in question.  What someone like Dennis does is very serious work, and I'm not really sure the poet's work can ever be serious in exactly that way.  There's just so much of an impulse to play!


      In general, I haven't tried to so much anthologize "The New" as to, in Ezra Pound's terms, find ways of “making it new.”  I've dealt a lot with things that happened in the past; even Poems For The Millennium is largely a compendium of what's already happened.  (So was Donald Allen's New American Poetry for that matter – things that had recently happened.)  Poems for the Millennium, Volume One, deals with what happened during the first fifty or sixty years of the twentieth century, close to a hundred years and more before we put the book together.  And the new one that we're doing – the romantics and postromantics and early modernists – is going back two hundred years and maybe more than that.
      I think I set out very early to explore the old.  I don't know if that remains important for people now, the way it was for my generation, coming out of poets like Pound who were very much concerned with things that happened a long time ago in order, as the Chinese characters on the emperor’s bathtub put it, to make it new.

JR:  I ... don't .... know.  When Pierre Joris and I finished Volume Two, I didn’t think there was going to be a Volume Three.  Then Jeffrey Robinson showed up and talked to me about doing an anthology of Romanticism along the lines of Poems for the Millennium.  And finally Pierre Joris may also, as a sort of Volume Four, do something like an anthology of North African/Mediterranean poetry covering a span of something like 2000 years. 
      Then too, a book of my own, Triptych, just came out from New Directions, and it pulls together two older books, Poland/1931 and Khurbn, along with a new series of poems, The Burning Babe.  I've also got enough material now for another New Directions book, but they can't any longer do one every year or so, so you may not see that next one until two, maybe three years down the road.