Hope of Love Poems

for Francesco Conz

Swollen-eyed, rested,
lids sinking, darkness unconscious
.......
And before hell mouth; dry plain
and two mountains

[1]

head down,
screwed into the swill

I am led into a home
where no one
– not a dog or cat –
drops by.

The body of a
tortured child
sticks out
& spooks me.

Warriors & creatures
blind my eyes.

[2]

A lady asks me.
I speak in season.

With my old
suburban voice
my prejudice
grows ripe.

I am not empty
but without a taste
for differences
I atrophy.

The dance gets harder
as the mud gets high.

[3]

I mate with my free kind
upon the crags.

I neither wait for you
nor need you,
feel the pressure of your tongue
that calls me down.

I know extremis
better than than the cackling
of my fellows,
gaunt & green with pain.

In my hand a flower
blosssoms, does it not?

[4]

I let down the crystal curtain
& watch the moon.

Men & animals surround me,
I am led by these
into a hole, brown-colored
like my arm.

I wait for words the night
once brought me,
luminous, the sky a changing
field of light.

While here below,
their sightless eyes
confound me.

[5]

Nor can I shift my pains
to other.

Much less my words – like yours
that face me down
high on my wall – an afterthought
to careless speech.

We teach forgiveness
to the idle only.
For the rest the suffering
leaves its own mark.

I back away from yours,
old face like mine.

[6]

I am the help of the aged;
I pay men to talk peace.

With my hands I raise
a sagging body. I am keen
& run before you,
meaning to escape.

I pay a price for
bounty. Deaf
I hear a call
to war.

Somewhere within me
armies clash.

[7]

singing: O sweet and lovely
o Lady be good

the song is traveling
from my time into yours,
like Ella’s song, is
wordless

hear me sing it see me
dance on water
I coast down the street
the while my eyes

like everyman’s eyes
fill with blood of apparitions
a dead bullock

[8]

Blown around the feet of
the God,

the landscape hides from us,
the little castle
shows its face at night
and shamans walk the streets

communing with the dead
the terror of the folk
in agony the cries
of those who fled to open water

gathered into caves
who took their lives.

Okinawa 1945/2000

[9]

Where the dead walked
And the living were made of cardboard
their shadows disappeared.

I lost track of eternity
that makes things new.

Nothing here improves
while time is lost.

Clean as any whistle
I come forth.

But still I can't shake off
the memory of mud.

In meiner heimat.

[10]

"I am noman,
my name is noman"

I wait where road
crosses road,
where hunters fly from
their quarry.

Not me but those
that I point to!
Not those but the dead
fed with blood!

Their hands rise in fury.
They hammer us down.

[11]

I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.

I have made a pact with someone
& have botched it. Freed from time
my fingers have grown frail,
my pen lies helpless on the floor.

I have desires that my flesh
still harbors. Little help or gratitude
will come from those
my turnings have betrayed.

I watch the dead file by
& feel a stirring.

[12]

The yidd is a stimulant
and the goyim are cattle

and the words once written
stay writ all his words
bounding back to the speaker
laying him flat.

What a downfall I had
& what havens I reached for
too late. None remained
to embrace me, but

jews, real jews, not shades
in my mind but avengers.

[13]

First must thou go
the road to hell

must see the millions
thou hast smitten
with thy thoughts must cry
the cry of killers

if thy hands are clean
as mine are
why then the swelling in thy throat
the smells of vomit

blinded as the dead are blind
the kings of hell

[14]

Time is the evil.
Evil.

Is what is always lost,
what takes me by the throat
& leaves me, shrunken
begging with the other thieves

then drops me in the pit
called bolgia, where a silly
rhyme I can’t erase
repeats forever.

For others other pits
shadow their lives.

[15]

the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots

fascists at banquets,
pandars to authority,
jackboots,
& skinheads with iron teeth

sucking hard at our flesh,
shoving old men
like books in their fires,
images of shit

too raw for feeling, where the flux
inside the corpse
changes to stone

[16]

And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Nor bring it, at a dare,
into my focus,
where the sunlight even now
turns ashen,

heavy with burnt matter,
stinking, where the century
has turned a corner,
like a swollen foetus

it has pulled you down,
old vanity
has pulled you down.

[Commissioned by Francesco Conz in cooperation with Mary Rachewiltz & the Pound estate at Castle Brunneburg in the Italian Tyrol, these 16 poems were part of a larger project in commemoration of Ezra Pound's life & work. My original was printed on colored stock & pasted onto 16 paper boards beneath a xeroxed & degraded photograph of Pound. In an attempt to fuse (or to con-fuse) our two voices, alive & dead, each numbered section begins with two lines of his, & what follows lies ambiguously in the void between us. -- JR]

English version by Howard Norman, after Jacob Nibenegenesabe

[1]
One time I wanted two moons
in the sky.
But I needed someone to look up and see
those two moons
because I wanted to hear him
try and convince the others in the village
of what he saw.
I knew it would be funny.
So, I did it.
I wished another moon up!
There it was, across the sky from the old moon.
Along came a man.
Of course I wished him down that open path.
He looked up in the sky.
He had to see that other moon!
One moon for each of his eyes!
He stood looking
up in the sky
a long time.
Then he suspected me, I think.
He looked into the trees
where he thought I might be.
But he could not see me
since I was disguised as the whole night itself!
Sometimes
I wished myself into looking like the whole day,
but this time
I was dressed like the whole night.
Then he said,
“There is something strange
in the sky tonight.”
He said it out loud.
I heard it clearly.
Then he hurried home
and I followed him.
He told the others, “You will not believe this,
but there are ONLY two moons
in the sky tonight.”
He had a funny look on his face.
Then all the others began looking into the woods.
Looking for me, no doubt!
“Only two moons, ha! Who can believe you?
We won’t fall for that!” they all said to him.
They were trying to send the trick back at me!
That was clear to me!
So, I quickly wished a third moon up there
in the sky.
They looked up and saw three moons.
They had to see them!
Then one man
said out loud, “Ah, there, look up!
up there!
There is only one moon!
Well, let’s go sleep on this
and in the morning
we will try and figure it out.”
They all agreed, and went in their houses
to sleep.
I was left standing there
with three moons shining on me.
There were three . . . I was sure of it.

[2]
One time
all the noises met.
All the noises in the world
met in one place
and I was there
because they met in my house.
My wife said, “Who sent them?”
I said, “Fox or Rabbit,
yes one of those two.
They’re both out for tricking me back today.
Both of them
are mad at me.
Rabbit is mad because I pulled
his brother’s ear
and held him up that way.
then I ate him.
And Fox is mad because he wanted
to do those things first.”

“Yes, it had to be one of them,”
my wife said.

So, all the noises
were there.
These things happen.
Falling-tree noise was there.
Falling-rock noise was there.
Otter-mud-sliding noise was there.
All those noises, and more,
in my house.

“How long do you expect to stay?”
my wife asked them. “We need some sleep!”

They all answered at once!

That’s how my wife and I
sometimes can’t hear well!
I should have wished them all away
first thing.

COMMENTARY

Trickster stories go far back in Cree culture (as elsewhere), but the figure here is the invention, specifically, of Jacob Nibenegenesabe, “who lived for some ninety-four years northeast of Lake Winnipeg, Canada.” Nibenegenesabe was also a teller (= achimoo) of older trickster narratives, the continuity between old & new never being in question. But the move in the Wishing Bone series is toward a rapidity of plot development & changes, plus a switch into first-person narration as a form of enactment. In the frame for these stories, the trickster figure “has found a wishbone of a snow goose who has wandered into the Swampy Cree region and been killed by a lynx. This person now has a wand of metamorphosis allowing him to wish anything into existence, himself into any situation.” Howard Norman’s method of translation, in turn, involves “first listening to the narratives over & over in the source language, then re-creating them in the same context, story, etc., if notable, ultimately to get a translation word for word.”

[Originally printed in Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. The book, first published by Doubleday in 1972 & last by University of New Mexico Press in 1986 & 1992, has now been out of print for several years. The full gathering of Howard Norman’s Swampy Cree translations, The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians, was published by Ross-Erikson Publishing, Santa Barbara, & went out of print with the demise of that press.]

Translations from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato

IN PRAISE OF MAY

May is a fancy month, a flower month,
The month of buds, the month of scents, the month of colors,
The month of poplars, marrons, plantanes,
Azaleas, tree peonies, wisteria, redbud,
Lilacs, tulips, poppies,
The month women’s cloths turn
Light and thin, the month of love,
The festival month Kyoto residents
In twirled crowns, arrows on their backs,
Compete in horse races,
The month girls in the City of Paris
Choose for the Flower Festival
A beautiful, noble queen;
If I may speak of myself,
It’s the month I crossed Siberia, crossed Germany,
Longing for my love,
And arrived in that distant Paris,
The month to celebrate our fourth son,
Auguste, born last year,
With irises, swords, and streamers,
The breezy month, the month of
The blue moon, of platinum-colored clouds,
When the bright sky and the hemp palm
Outside the window of my small study
Remind me of a Malay island,
The month of honeybees, the month of butterflies,
The month of birth when ants turn into moths
And canaries hatch their eggs,
The sensual month, the month of flesh
That somehow incites you,
The month of Vous voulez wine, of perfumes,
Of dances, of music, and of songs,
The month of the sun when
Myriad things inside me
Hold one another tight, become entangled,
Moan, kiss, and sweat, the month
Of the blue sea, of the forest, of the park, of the fountains,
Of the garden, of the terrace, of the gazebo,
So here comes May
To toss at us a giddiness
Sweet as the lemonade you suck with a straw
From a thin, skinny glass.

AUGUSTE'S SINGLE STRIKE

My lovely two-year-old Auguste,
I write this down for you:
Today, for the first time,
you struck your mother on the cheek.
It was the power of your life
that wanted to win —
the genuine power for conquest
took on the form of anger
and a spastic fit
and flashed like lightning.
You must have been conscious of nothing,
must have forgotten it at once.
But your mother was shocked,
was also deeply happy.
You can, some day, as a man,
be on your own defiantly,
you can be on your own purely, resolutely,
also can love man and nature decisively
(The core of conquest is love),
also you can conquer suspicion, pain, death,
jealousy, cowardice, derision,
oppression, crooked learning, conventions,
filthy wealth, and social ranks.
Yes, that genuine strike,
that’s the totality of your life.
Such were the premonitions I felt that made me happy
under the pain of the sharp blow
you struck with your palm
as a lion cub might.
At the same time I felt the same power
lurking in myself
and even the cheek you didn’t strike
became hot like the cheek you did.
You must have been conscious of nothing.
must have forgotten it at once.
But when you’ve become an adult,
take this out and read it,
when you think, when you work,
when you love someone, when you fight.
My lovely two-year-old Auguste,
I write this down for you:
Today, for the first time,
you struck your mother on the cheek.
My still more lovely Auguste,
You, in my womb,
walked through Europe, sightseeing.
As you grow up,
your wisdom will remember
the memories of those travels with your mother.
What Michelangelo and Rodin did,
what Napoleon and Pasteur did,
yes, it was that genuine strike,
that ferocious, blissful strike.

COMMENTARY

with Jeffrey C. Robinson

The day when mountains move has come. / Though I say this, nobody believes me. / Mountains sleep only for a little while / that once have been active in flames. / But even if you forgot it, / just believe, people, / that all the women who slept / now awake and move. (Y.O., a “new-style” poem, translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

The appearance of her first book, Tangled Hair (Midaregami), in 1901, created a scandal, not only for its explicit female sexuality but for its complexity & presumed unintelligibility within the framework of the traditional tanka form. As a by now acknowledged masterwork of “Japanese romanticism,” already influenced by symbolist & other fin-de-siècle European writing but drawing as well from older Japanese & Chinese sources, it provided a vehicle for women’s liberation – a “battleground poetry,” in Janine Beichman’s phrase, not as a form of rant, but as Yosano described it, writing of her own “first poems,” “I realized that if women didn’t really exert themselves they would never mix with men on an equal footing. That was the first time I made a poem.” The resulting innovations – both in tanka (five-line closed verse) & in “new-style” poetry – went beyond most poets of her time: a use of multiple voices (male as well as female); an unprecedented focus on the naked body derived, it was said, from European painting & from the erotic side of the ukiyo-e (floating world) tradition of print-making; & a sense of mystery & ambiguity, created by formal means (“asymmetry, ellipses, and numerous allusions”), that she called shinpi & that Beichman delivers further as “the palimpsestic effect.” Her work, as it moved into the new century, was voluminous; by Kenneth Rexroth’s count, “she wrote more than 17,000 tanka, nearly five hundred shintaishi (free verse [poems]), published seventy-five books, including translations of classical literature, and had eleven children.” She was also an active pacifist & a socialist sympathizer, who openly opposed Japan’s military adventures in the twentieth century, as in a fiercely anti-war poem addressed to her brother (1904), which brought denunciation as “a traitor, a rebel, a criminal who ought to be subjected to national punishment.” (In the light of her radical independence, her relation with her poet husband, Yosano Hiroshi [a.k.a. Tekkan], assumes far less significance for her work than it’s usually given.) Writes Rexroth further: “She is one of the world’s greatest women poets, comparable to Christina Rossetti, Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, and Li Ching Chao. She is certainly one of the very greatest poets of her time – the most perfect expression of the ‘Art Nouveau’ sensibility – like Debussy, who should have set her poems to music.”

[From Poems for the Millennium, Volume 3:The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, copies now available & scheduled for formal publication in January 2009. Earlier excerpts from Volume 3 appeared on June 11, June 18, June 24, July 6, July 13, July 21, July 29, August 7, August 16, September 7, September 22, October 3, October 9, October 20, November 27, & December 11. The full table of contents for volume 3 can be found at http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10540/toc.pdf]

PREFACE TO "CONVERSATIONS WITH STALIN"

I was what was called in the days of the old left, a red diaper baby. My mother was a Stalinist and though I had a father nobody ever listened to him because he was just a socialist and everybody knew they were wimps. It was hard in those days, senator McCarthy was putting people in jail, people were losing their jobs. but we were strong because we always knew what was right. Comrade Stalin told us. Or he would have told us if he wasn't so far away. But there were always other comrades one could turn to. Important comrades who wrote for his newspapers and were bigwigs in the party. Sometimes they would travel to the Soviet Union and they always came back with glowing reports. The workers were dancing in the streets. There was a chicken in every pot. Everybody had a job. Not like here, they spat. No breadlines. No prejudice against colored people. Unions flourished. Jews danced and sang in their own special state in Birobidzhan. A paradise set apart for the jews so they could sing Jewish songs and dance horas and till the land and grow big and strong. I had a cousin who was a psychiatrist who was invited to visit Soviet hospitals. He was amazed at the fine treatment the sick at heart received. Not like America where his poor patients had to pay him thousands of dollars a year to ease the pain of their unfortunate lives. But I also knew an artist who had spent a long life, he was already an old man, doing political cartoons for the Stalinist magazine "New Masses". One night, his best friend, a Yiddish poet, just back from a visit to the Soviet Union, told him in an agonized whisper, that all the beloved Russian Yiddish writers they loved so well had either been killed by Stalin or sent to the gulag to die. The old man went home quietly, didn't say a word to his family, went into his bedroom, had a heart attack and died. He seemed like his usual self that night everybody said, except that instead of taking the subway home as he always did, he took a cab. Now he was a very frugal man of the old fashioned sort. If he ever took cabs at all, it would only be for a very special occasion like a wedding or a funeral.

Through the years, I too lost Stalin. It wasn't easy. Even when I knew better, it was difficult. I would look guiltily over my shoulder when I said something bad about the Soviet Union. As if my mother were listening. How could she be, she had Alzheimers. She didn't know Comrade Stalin any more, she didn’t even know me

______________________________


ART HISTORY

I fall in love with ancient Greece.

I play hookey from school and get to the museum early so I'm the only one in the Greek rooms. Except for the guard, of course. The guard's a killjoy. But when he isn't looking I can go up to a youth on a pedestal and stroke his cool white thigh, if I can reach it. I'm pretty short for my age. But I can peek under his tunic. I wish I could slip my hand under there and feel his balls but I'm chicken. I can't tell if he's attracted to me. He looks down at me with blind eyes. Ancient Greeks don't have eyeballs. I pull my hand away before the guard sees me and gets all uptight. But my heart breaks at the loneliness of marble. The poor thing has only one arm, the other one must be on a pedestal in London or in a bank vault in Japan. Cripples every one of them. They're cemented together, you can see the seams. Some don't have heads and only half of their chests. I want to comfort them, even though I know that some of them aren't Greeks. They're Romans, Romans aren't as good as Greeks. But what the hell! They're all in the same boat now. Sometimes the guard catches me feeling them up and throws me out of the museum. But I change my hair style and sneak back.

One day, Comrade Stalin says the ancient Greeks were bad. They didn't let everybody vote and they looked down their noses at foreigners. "They were stuck up, little Elly. Aristocrats. Their slaves ploughed the fields and baked the bread and sewed those sheets together to cover their naked flesh. Without slaves they would never have invented philosophy." I think of those great blank eyes staring down at me. It's clear now what they're thinking. Send her around to the back. She's a foreigner, a daughter of Abraham. Out! I'm heartbroken. Tears burn my eyes. "So the museum is off limits, comrade?" "Of course not, little Elly. Culture elevates the soul and makes it sing. Consider the ancient Egyptians. They were working people. Their artists carved bakeries and factories and warehouses and granaries and markets. They valued the labour of the common man."

So I did, but it wasn't the same. Knowledge is hard and strewn with bodies. The next time I played hookey I went to the movies

______________________________

ROBIN HOOD

I am into petitions. Every week I have a new one. That's because every week they are electrocuting a different black man in Mississippi or Georgia or Carolina. Sometimes several black men in one night. Rape is a big thing in those states. I feel so sorry for the electrocuted men that I have no sympathy for the women. They're always white, those women. Their little rodent faces look nervously out from the grainy black and white pictures in the newspapers. They're always escorted by big sheriffs in dark sun glasses. I look at them scornfully. Such floozies. Who would rape them? And if they were raped it must have been by somebody else. What if the sheriff did it and he's covering his tracks. I read "The Scarlet Letter", I know perfidy when I see it. 'course I have no proof. It 's just that electrocuting 7 black men in Martinsville, Georgia for the rape of one white woman is kind of overkill. I take my new petition for the Martinsville seven around school. The same few people who always sign my petitions sign this one too. I try to sneak past Pat Pimboy in the cafeteria but she sees me and pokes her friends. "Who are you saving today, Missy?" she calls out. "The guy who cut up Susan Dengan and shoved her pieces into a garbage can?" Her friends look superior and laugh. They smirk at my clothes. So I don't wear pleated skirts and angora sweaters. So my mother isn't rich. So she gets up at 5 oclock in the morning to open the restaurant for breakfast. She's a manager isn't she? That's better than a waitress. Just because their mothers sit around and play mah jong all day, doesn't make them so swell. I'd be embarrassed to have such a useless mother, anyway. What do they care about the rights of man? That gets me going, again. Who the hell do those bitches think they are with their parasite mothers? " No," I answer in a fake sweet voice. "I don't carry petitions for murderers." That stops me for a minute. What if a guy murders somebody in self defense? What if the sheriff of Martinsville is just about to electrocute the prisoners when progressive forces attack the jail and the sheriff is killed by accident? Actually, that's what I hope will happen. But it never does. "There's murder and murder," I say in a hoity toity voice, "the world isn't black and white. Its filled with shades of grey." But it is black and white. That's what my petition is about. "So the world is a mess of ambiguities," I finish lamely. "So there!"

A week later the Martinsville sheriff electrocutes the 7 men. One after the other. I sit at the kitchen table in the west Bronx nursing a glass of chocolate milk but I'm really far away in Martinsville. At 7 oclock he comes for the first one. Which one was that? The papers never distinguished them. They were never single people like Ray or Bob. They were always 7. Like the 7 dwarfs. Who can remember the names of the 7 dwarfs? I did'nt know how long it took to electrocute somebody but I figured it for a few minutes. Later it turned out that it took longer. People don't die so fast.

It took Ethel Rosenberg almost 20 minutes. They kept pulling their switches and she jerked around and wouldn't die. Lucky for me I didn't know about this until I saw the papers the next day. It was bad enouph as it was. It was a warm summer night and I was in Dr. Honig's car going upstate to mother's hotel. I sat by myself in the back seat imagining the Rosenbergs dying. For his last meal, he ordered flanken and potato pancakes but she was higher class and asked for filet mignon with asparagus. I heard their tender farewells,. "Courage," she whispers. "our time will come. We will be vindicated. We shall have the last laugh." "You're braver than I am, Ethel," he moans. He went first, I learned later they hoped she would give in and confess to save him. I got so agitated I had to vomit and Dr. Honig stopped the car so I could walk it off. He sympathized with me but he still laughed and chatted with his wife in Hungarian. She was very pretty but not too smart. Before she caught him, I used to give her culture lessons for 2 bucks an hour so when they went to a concert together she knew who Shostakovitch was. I told her funny stories about Mozart to regale him in the intermissions. He admired her for those stories. He had never heard them before. Naturally. I made them up. They must have worked because they got married. My mother glared at my father and said Dr. Honig was a good husband. But I think she was a good wife too. But I didn't tell my mother that. She knew justice didn't exist.

Later I told Comrade Stalin about my petitions. How I never saved anyone.

"And until they pulled the switch, I kept on hoping," I confessed. "Until the last minute, I dreamed that the rescuers disguised themselves as undertakers. They knocked out the sheriff and stuffed him into a coffin. They had plenty of room for all his deputies. There were 7 coffins. It was harder to disguise the prisoners. They had dark faces. But they gave them black suits and they cried and wailed and acted like relatives of the deceased. And they all walked out of that place and nobody knew what hit them until everybody asked where the prisoners were. The electric chair was juiced up and there were no prisoners. It was in all the papers. They only found one prisoner, that was years later, and only because he came back from Barbados to visit his mother on her death bed. But by then, the case was dismissed. It had been a rigged jury. People were bribed." I buried my face in Comrade Stalin's warm, strong shoulder. "But Robin Hood never came, Papa Stalin. There were no merry men. It wasn't Nottingham. It was only a nasty, little town in Georgia with a lot of heartless goyim."

He said that was because I was barking up a wrong tree. An experienced revolutionary takes on only those fights he knows he can win. "Then you will never lose," he explains. "You will be invincible. People will follow you wherever you go."

"But causes are like measles. They pop up all over ."

"So don't scratch. Turn the other cheek. Keep your eye on the future. That is where we must lead. We must not be distracted by lost causes. As a rival said once, "He who has shall be given and he who has not, even that little bit shall be taken away."

So I tore up my petitions and became Pat Pimboy's campaign manager in her race for school president. I wrote her great speeches and much to my chagrin she won.

[Widely acclaimed as a performance artist, filmmaker, photographer & installation artist, Eleanor Antin is also a writer of many years standing, whose verbal compositions show a range of ironies & self-creations not unlike those in her visual workings. Her previous books include Being Antinova, Eleanora Antinova Plays, 100 Boots, Man Without a World: a Screenplay, & Historical Takes (her three-part series of quasi-historical photoworks: Roman Allegories, Last Days of Pompeii, & Helen’s Odyssey).]

[The following was originally printed in the catalogue for an exhibition, Too Much Bliss, a twenty-year retrospective of Granary Books & its founder, mounted at the Smith College Museum of Art in 2006.]

The history of poetry in our time has also been a history of those who provide conduits & vehicles, containers & wrappers, for the physical presentation of poetry: publishers, typographers, printers, designers, or those artists-as-such who are often the collaborators in making poetry a visible, even a visual, art. For this the book has remained the principal vehicle – the material book, like the material poem, still active in the age of virtuality. In the true history of American poetry, which I have long threatened to write & never will, Granary Books, as a press & resource, is exemplary of how poets & related artists in the post-World War Two era were able to establish shadow institutions that operated, nearly successfully, outside the frame of any & all self-proclaimed poetic mainstreams.

There is by now a history of poet’s books as there is of artist’s books, & the convergence of these two interests is more the norm than the exception. From Blake’s illuminations through the craftsman-artists of the later nineteenth century & the livre d’art collaborations of high modernism, the book emerged as both a physical object & itself a work-of-art conceived anew or re-created through the art of those who make it. Still closer to the present moment, poets & artists with new & often democratized technologies at their disposal, have been papering the American landscape with books & paper works at an unprecedented rate. That development began to pick up speed by the middle 1950s & was central to movements of that time with generalized names like the New American Poetry as one pole or pivot & Fluxus as another. Their accomplishments have been chronicled elsewhere, & there are still others outside those frames to further “thicken the plot” – as John Cage said in another context.

If Steve Clay & Granary Books were not the first participants in this history, they have played a major role in it, both as makers of books & as chroniclers of poets’ & artists’ books – their own & others’. For Clay the beginnings of the work go back to 1986 – not a book but a card-sized poem by Jonathan Williams, wrapped in a printed envelope inside a second printed envelope. But there is already a clear sense of predecessors – Williams’ Jargon Society publications, Cid Corman’s Origin, Dick Higgins’ Fluxus-connected Something Else Press, Simon Cutts’s Coracle Press in London, & Charles Alexander’s Chax Press, with which an early collaboration was also possible. The start was slow – an occasional book but mostly cards & broadsides – until the 1991 publication of Nods, Barbara Fahrner’s drawings which illuminate texts derived, using chance operations, from John Cage’s published writings. From that point on, something like 120 publications followed – mostly books – that brought together a diverse range of poets, artists, printers & craftsmen: David Antin, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, bill bissett, Paul Celan, Emilie Clark, Robert Creeley, Tennessee Dixon, Toni Dove, Henrik Drescher, Johanna Drucker, Timothy C. Ely, Ed Epping, Philip Gallo, Max Gimblett, Mimi Gross, Julie Harrison, Lyn Hejinian, Yvonne Jacquette, Daniel Kelm, Alison Knowles, Ligorano/Reese, Emily McVarish, Maureen Owen, Ron Padgett, Archie Rand, George Schneeman, Carolee Schneemann, Buzz Spector, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Trevor Winkfield, John Yau, & myself, among others.

What’s on view in this exhibition is a display of works by many of these artists, working alone or, typically, in collaboration. The books as such come in different shapes & sizes, & the production methods involved vary as well – from standard letterpress & offset to incredibly fine printing & graphics, plus a degree of handwork in the more limited editions. The flood of work links both to what had come before & what continued to be conceived & realized contemporaneously. This linkage shows up as well in a series of bigger books – anthologies & histories – that made Granary the principal purveyor – both artistic & critical – of what was a virtual renaissance of American poetry & book making. Of such works two by Johanna Drucker set the standard for a historicizing of this movement in the arts: The Century of Artists’ Books and Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics. These were followed by Renée & Judd Hubert’s The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books, & my own attempts by way of anthology, The Book, Spiritual Instrument and A Book of the Book, the latter in collaboration with Steve Clay. And Granary & Clay, at his most ambitious, began to produce large collections of works by individuals or groups of artists – The Angel Hair Anthology of the pivotal magazine of that name, or Jackson Mac Low’s Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955–2002, or A Secret Location on the Lower East Side as a heavily illustrated history & compendium, circa 1950-1980, of underground literary activity in New York & elsewhere, among other examples.

The Granary project has been not only useful but essential, an incomparable gathering when laid end to end, as it is here. Those who have collaborated with Steve Clay know him as a facilitator for the work of others, with a sense of detail & finish that allows those works to find the form & texture needed for their realization. In this pursuit, whether it’s the bigger books or the small works where craft & artistry are at the forefront, the Granary collaborations aren’t limited to the poets & artists whose names appear on covers & title pages, but Clay calls also on the skills of typographers, printers, designers, & binders – an ensemble that he brings together with the skills of a consummate director or producer. The process is therefore active & marked by an interdependence & coordination that has, for those of us participating, the feel of a nearly communal project – a work, even a working through, in common. The results – speaking here as a poet & writer – go beyond & above what lackluster print can do by itself, so that each work is a new work & every part illuminates or transforms every other.

The current exhibition, then, is a celebration of Granary as a collective entity & a tribute beyond that to Steve Clay as a publisher who raises publishing to an art in itself. I am reminded here of David Antin’s definition of an artist as “someone who does his best,” & yet it seems to me that Steve Clay & company, like David, do something even more. I don’t know what that does to David’s definition but maybe points to something we less often get to, something that may be “more than art.”

Jerome Rothenberg, Encinitas, California, August 2005

[For further & more recent information on Granary Books, check its web site at http://www.granarybooks.com/]

with Jeffrey C. Robinson

“One must not turn one’s back on the mysterious and the unknown. The rare moments when myth consents to grab you by the throat . . . to seek entry among the everyday facts of life . . . ; the hallucinated minutes that can nonetheless be measured with a watch, whose ticking then resounds over the years: none of this ought to be neglected” (V. Segalen).

The subversive gap in the nineteenth-century colonialist drive for control over non-European peoples appeared in the domain of culture, & particularly of poetry. That is, “orientalism” had a double inflection: the colonization of peoples mostly from the Middle East, North Africa, & India but including China & the Far East, & the objectivizing of the exotic Other. Yet the sheer acknowledgement of the Other instilled a vision of what Victor Segalen, writing from the 1870s onward, called “le divers” & produced in readers the capacity to revel in these multiple differences. At the end of the eighteenth century the plethora of new information about the East “put into doubt the basic legitimacy of the Christian state and cut to the heart of anxieties about European power and identity” (Nigel Leask). If governments thought of the outcome of colonialism as appropriation of other cultures & economies, poets, often inventing or emulating the Other’s voice, would typically seize the “orientalist” occasion as the horizon beyond the familiar, the locus, in Emily Dickinson’s phrase, of the “unreportable place,” unknown myths, unknown subjectivities.

The East not only represented diversity, it also—in the hands of Sir William Jones, Gottfried Herder, Friedrich & August Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, & others—contained “the sources” of religion & language in the West: for example, Friedrich Schlegel, Germany’s first competent Sanskritist, looked to India for the origin of European languages, & his brother August saw Indian religion as the likely source underlying all religions. Goethe’s interest in Islam & Emerson’s in Hinduism are further instances of the pervasive attraction of western poets to eastern spirituality. Nowhere, exclaimed the Indic encyclopedist Friedrich Majer, has the “eternal, infinite, self-sustaining Being” (here called Brahma) been described “in more beautiful truth and splendour than in those bewitching countries that in all probability were the cradle of humanity and the first workshop of God on earth.” This turn toward origins fed the Romantic drive for the recovery of basic human energies, the sources of life made inaccessible through centuries of kings & through modern bourgeois society. In this regard orientalism joined with the resurgence of interest in Grecoroman & Hebraic myths & images (included here is Byron’s Hebrew Melodies—a culture & people then often viewed as oriental), with a notable stress on myths of passion & the erotic. Drawing on sources from Indian religion, Friedrich Schlegel launched (at times in the spirit of Blake, whose figure of Asia in The Book of Los, is here included) a compelling account of visionary Romantic poetics. The Indian “doctrine of Emanation” Schlegel wrote, includes “the eternal progressive development of the Divinity, and of universal spiritual animation.” And he continued: “True [modern] poetry [emerges] when art has annexed so much to the original germ, becomes so only when it breathes a kindred spirit with those old heathen fictions, or because it springs from them.” Such poetry “contemplate[s] the inner life of that mythology.”

The section that follows this prologue includes the following works:

William Blake
From The Book of Los: Asia

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Arabian Ballad

George Gordon, Lord Byron
From The Giaour: Leila As Gazelle
From Hebrew Melodies Ancient & Modern: The Wild Gazelle

Victor Hugo
From Les Orientales: Bounaberdi

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brahma

Walt Whitman
From Passage to India

Charles Baudelaire
L’Invitation au Voyage

Victor Segalen
From Stelae: Roadside Stelae

[From Poems for the Millennium, Volume 3:The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, scheduled for publication in January 2009. Earlier excerpts from Volume 3 appeared on June 11, June 18, June 24, July 6, July 13, July 21, July 29, August 7, August 16, September 7, September 22, October 3, October 9, October 20, & November 27. The full table of contents for volume 3 can be found at http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10540/toc.pdf]

1
Speak to a configuration of stains
even a silk shirt of the man from Marrakech
even a configuration of stains will be
made to speak sublime yellow-green
smears of avocado pulp the man from
Marrakech enemies at his feet the son
of a Macedonian his peach porcelain chin
its cleft pierced by a thorn pierced
is the man from Marrakech the son of a
Macedonian he crouches over a vanity sink
dappled with mother-of-pearl bearing
the weight of a nightmare a nightmare
about iron stairs about a long row
of embryos luminous organs fibrous pits
Narcissus purging
jabbing his two-inch pinky nail evil it feels
into the cleft of his chin
a levantine hook on a rampage
from out of Ur into the hotel his private
quarters red hot mosaic tiles hooks for
every hang-up made by master craftsmen
the man from Marakech
eyes of pale gray-green pale gray-green eyes
son of a Macedonian
mummified is his code of honor

In ancient Phoenicia
a woman holds a sublime yellow-green
fabric smeared with avocado pulp
years later her unmarried hump-backed
son will unfold the cloth
Even a configuration of stains
will be made to speak

2
An urge for rhythms of Marrakech
gilded the row of upper teeth of the school master
listening to American jazz smiling at a man
from Sudan an engineer wearing a necklace
and a diamond stud in his ear
The man from Marrakech rises from the
Greek revival chair feeling the rays of the sun
resurrecting the dead

The false door of lust opens
frustrates and disappoints
famous the false door of lust
slamming the head breaking the nose
cracking the jaw splitting the gums ejecting
the gilded row of upper teeth teeth
of Cavafy Donatello Passolini Versace
small dark solid men mavericks
with spleens of hot lava
orbiting the mediterranean sun

3
A djellaba is a djellaba is a robe a robe of roses
sings the man from Marrakech
letting fall around his ankles purple roses
the djellaba its distinct parts is like a fluid
a fluid of roses is a chemical analysis—proof
le bien et le mal
drop by drop its sound distinct
le bien et le mal
And he sings to pierced nipples nipples
on the sculptured torso—a man from Sudan
And when he sings the words
the words are pigment cells vegetal to vegetal
cooling the skin the words are hairs
pushing through layers pushing through
layers of skin scalp armpit bones in a sac
words of a song from out of Ur from out of Ur
from out of the throat of the man
from Marrakech

4
The children always crawl to golden coins
golden coins draw the children
whispers the man from Marrakech
And he grants wishes to a man from Sudan
and desire breaks its molten outer core
then drawing upon his economic advantage
whispers I am the Alpha and Omega
world without end

5
In the picturesque Medina
two old men are trading photos
cruise ships voyaging to America
Inside a galaxy a cloud of dust and gas
gas and dust inside a galaxy
Two old men are smoking water pipes
in the picturesque Medina
two old men are playing cards talking politics
sipping coffee
hearing the call to prayer
the man from Sudan an engineer
wearing a necklace
and a diamond stud in his ear
the man from Marrakech
eyes of pale gray-green pale gray-green eyes
son of a Macedonian
an athlete whose stamina was tested
with javelin hammer and discus
smiling and remembering a silk shirt
smeared with avocado pulp
hammer and discus are thrown
and the weight of the athlete
spirals in as dense as a star

6
Come see what has been called
the poignant picture--a father bearing
twin sons in his arms—poignant the chanting
aramaic words and they were born
from frozen embryos
Forced deeper the weight of a dream
about a gold ostrich egg and shining through
the shell the form that you should put
your money into—a two-headed child
two pairs of pale gray-green eyes
colors and patterns of the iris painted
with a fine sable brush
And dread is a light transparent veil
over the eyes of the man from Marrakech
smoking a water pipe eating sleeping reading
playing computer games
then feeling for his wallet for the accordian-fold
interior, credit cards, driver’s license, bills
receipts , coins and photos
of the winged cherubim their halos
glittering circling red orange yellow
the young always crawl to golden coins
then chanting in aramaic a prayer
‘And they are the winged cherubim
with the faces of children’

[Originally published in The New Verse News, November 10, 2008, http://newversenews.blogspot.com/2008/11/song-from-out-of-ur.html]

COMMENTARY
with Pierre Joris

I dreamed of a birdwoman. A fantastic creature with a human body and the head of a bird. She fed her young with chunks of flesh that she savagely tore out of her body with her beak. Always the flesh grew quickly back so that there was no loss or end of herself. (R.O.)

There is a voice in Owens' work that seemed to some of us — when first heard — like a fierce & unrelenting force of nature or like that, more aptly, of some biblical Isaiah or Devorah, or of some other cracked (but real) Prophet mockingly come back to life. "Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be," André Breton had written in setting the Surrealist agenda, by which he meant (or we do) not beauty so much as poetry, with regard to which beauty is but one half (at best) of what we put into our workings. And Owens — while she proclaimed herself, New York style, as "simply a poor working girl [from Brooklyn] who was not even a graduate of Brooklyn College or C.C.N.Y." — spoke a language even in her first poems ("Hunger / It is luck too. Hullabaloo Vishnu") that called forth voices (Ball or Khlebnikov or Tzara) from a recent past that she & we were newly claiming, making into our present. With her base in poetry, she came to a first public recognition through a series of plays (Futz, Beclch, He Wants Shih, The Karl Marx Play, others), to create what one of us would call "her theater of impulse" & to make her for a time "perhaps the most profound tragic playwright in the American theater" (Ross Wetzteon, The Village Voice). What she had tapped into in herself were the sources of tragedy in ancient "goat-song" (pace Aristotle): a deliberate but disruptive mode of poetry, moving from what Toby Olson describes as "the grating nature of the inappropriate" to what he & Jackson Mac Low both speak of as "controlled hysteria." Writing further of the intelligence — as well as passion — that drives her work, Mac Low says: "I mean ... by 'controlled hysteria' ... that the speaker, whether the poet, a persona, or a blend of both, while often incredibly vehement, threatens to cross over the line from vehemence to uncontrollable emotional outburst, but never actually crosses that line. This arouses a feeling of suspense even in those who do not realize whence that feeling arises: a very 'theatrical' experience." That it also arouses — in us — a feeling of uncontrollable laughter is the further, maybe deeper secret of her art.

[Commentary from Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, volume 2, 1998.]

For several years before and for two inclusive years from 1972 to 1974, we lived on the Allegany Seneca Reservation in Salamanca, New York. Food was among the first things we exchanged – poetry only later and never really fully. From our end the items served were dishes such as sukiyaki or pumpernickel rye; from theirs the common foods of rural America and two specially prepared dishes that indicated that a uniquely Native American festivity was underway. One of those dishes was "corn soup" (more specifically "hulled corn soup" [hominy], because there are other ways of using corn in soups), and the other one was "fry bread." During the years that we lived in Salamanca, we encountered both of these dishes many times and in variant versions. Different people whom we knew approached their preparation in individualized ways – congruent always with their own tastes, their interest in food preparation, and their concern (or lack of it) with "authenticity." When we reproduce those dishes now for special occasions of our own, these same considerations inform our sense of how to go about it. As a reflection on the issue of "authenticity" in the preparation of traditional foods – as well as the contribution of a couple of good recipes to the present volume – I offer up the following.

"AUTHENTIC" HULLED CORN SOUP a la Archie Johnson, who knows how to do many things the "old way"

1 quart dry corn
1 pint clean hardwood ashes
Water to cover

Place in cast iron kettle, and bring to a boil. Boil until the hulls slip off the kernels (about 20 minutes). Place in corn basket, and rinse in cold water until clean. Reboil corn in water until suds form, and rinse again in basket. Repeat once more.

3/4 lb. salt pork cut up
1/4 lb. dried red kidney beans (pre-soaked)
Prepared corn (hominy) from first step

Boil all together in kettle for 3 or 4 hours. Makes about 4 quarts of soup.


"CONVENIENT" HULLED CORN SOUP a la Richard Johnny John, who loves it but, for all kinds of reasons, takes short cuts

3 large cans of hominy (undrained)
1 can of red beans (undrained)
1 lb. pork (or maybe more if using spareribs)

Water enough to create a thick soup. Cook everything together until the pork is done.


"ROTHENBERG" HULLED CORN SOUP, being a variation of Dick Johnny John's recipe, but accommodating to non-Seneca expectations

2 lbs. of pork with bones
1 carrot
Couple of handfuls of celery and celery tops
1 onion
Parsley
Salt and pepper to taste
Water to cover

Cook until pork is separating from bones. Drain through a strainer, and save the pieces of meat.

3 large cans of hominy (undrained)
1 can of red beans (undrained)

Combine broth, pork, and canned ingredients, and cook together for a few minutes. Season to taste.


FRY BREAD is known among the Senecas as "Ghost Bread," because it is always included in the feast that follows the ten days of mourning after a death. A look at the ingredients suggests immediately that even the "authentic" version depends entirely on store-bought ingredients; yet fry bread, with minor variations in shape and ingredients, is emblematically "Indian" all through North America.

2 cups white flour
3 tsp. baking powder
2 tblsp. sugar
Pinch salt
1 cup water

Knead together, and let stand for 15 minutes. Break off golf-ball sized pieces, and roll each out, using flour to prevent sticking. Stab with a fork twice through the center of each. Fry in deep fat until brown on both sides. Eat hot.


FRY BREAD a la Thelma Shane, one of the best cooks around

Same as above but add along with other ingredients:

2 tblsp. oil
1/2 small can crushed pineapple.

Proceed as above. Roll out 1/2 inch thick, and fry until brown. (Thelma usually serves these with margarine and preserves, accompanied regularly by coffee.)


"FAST FRY BREAD," which is what you usually get at our feasts. This recipe was revealed to us at an Indian Foods Dinner – a tourist-oriented feast offered, as a fund-raiser, around Thanksgiving, i.e. harvest time. One or another Seneca organization is allowed to prepare the dinner each year, at which time they serve hundreds of diners, both white and Indian, who have reserved well in advance, eager for the opportunity to taste the variety and abundance of "authentic" Seneca food. The Senecas with whom we ate would snicker a little when fry bread was presented in the following way:

Open a tube of store-bought prepared biscuits (not the sourdough type, but it hardly matters). Separate the biscuits, and flatten each using a little flour to prevent sticking. Pierce with the tines of a fork, and fry in deep fat. They rise and brown very quickly, so keep watching. Drain and serve.

With a genuine taste for the inauthentic (as much as for its counterpart), we have made this recipe our own.

[Reprinted from Diane Rothenberg’s The Mothers of the Nation & Other Essays, Ta’wil Books & Documents, 1992. An active player in the emerging discourse around an ethnopoetics, she is also the co-editor of Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics (University of California Press, 1983) and the author of Friends Like These: An Ethnohistorical Analysis (University Microfilms International, 1976). Writes Nathaniel Tarn in summation: “Biographically, Diane Rothenberg’s essays are witness to the history of ethnopoetics. They continually approach art without ever leaving unattended the disciplined language of anthropological investigations. Their continuity of concern with women’s matters, from Seneca Indian nineteenth-century adaptations to those of a populist woman artist of today, bring a feminine viewpoint to ethnopoetics perhaps more powerfully than ever before. Here is the voice of a woman who is herself becoming a ‘mother of the nation.’” Copies of Mothers of the Nation are available through Ta’wil Books, joris@albany.edu.]

Ojibwa

it is hanging
in the edge of sunshine
it is a pig I see
with its double hoofs
it is a very fat pig
the people who live in a hollow tree
are fighting
they are fighting bloodily
he is rich
he will carry a pack toward the great water


Mandan

that
that
whose
track is it like?
grandfather
two-teeth
(he means the beaver!)
if it’s like his track
if it is
follow it on
the man came to a wigwam
with worn-out feet
with a wriggled bag
up high
lay a big fat
young buffalo calf
with a soft belly-button
walking
crumbling sticks
crab shells
have a dance
he
knocked his eye out

[translations by Frances Densmore]

COMMENTARY

The “game of silence” consisted of keeping still as long as possible in the face of songs whose non-sequential & far-out expressions were meant to cause laughter. Here directed at children, the mind’s activity reflects the same energy present in more serious tribal poems: for the pleasure of the game, say, or as a simple exercise for developing & keeping those faculties alive.

A sacred version of the above follows.

A MASKED EVENT FOR COMEDIAN & AUDIENCE
Lummi (Salish)

1. A comedian’s mask is painted red on one side, black on the other; the mouth is twisted, the hair in disarray. For a costume he wears a blanket or a strip of fur which leaves his right hand free. He dances along with the other performers, often dances out-of-time to attract attention, & repeatedly annoys the dancers by quizzically scrutinizing their masks, poking at their eyes, looking at their noses, picking their teeth, etc. Sometimes the dancers whip the comedian vigorously with cedar boughs to drive him away, keeping time with the drums as they do so. When not annoying the dancers, the comedian goes around the room pretending to take lice from the singers’ hair. He sometimes goes to a very old woman or a very pretty girl to do this, using it as a pretext to caress her.

2. The audience refrains from laughing.

[Originally printed in Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. The book, first published by Doubleday in 1972 & last by University of New Mexico Press in 1986 & 1992, has now been out of print for several years. The title Poems for the Game of Silence was also appropriated for my first book of selected poems, first published in 1972 and still in print. – J.R.]

A GEMATRIA FOR JACKSON MAC LOW

Chance

made it happen.

Chance = 310.

Gematria – a form of traditional Jewish numerology – plays off the fact that every letter of the Hebrew alphabet is also a number, and that words or phrases the sums of whose letters are equal are at some level meaningfully connected. In the course of compiling A Big Jewish Book, I came across a number of traditional combinations of words associated (usually in pairs) through gematria, and I juxtaposed one of the words with the other so as to form miniature poems. A few years later I came across Gutman G. Locks’s The Spice of Torah – Gematria, which offers easy access to the numerical value of every word in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. With its more than three hundred pages of Hebrew word lists translated into English words and phrases, I began to construct new poems based on combinations that I discovered or that I calculated on my own. Unlike the traditionalists of gematria, I have seen these coincidences / synchronicities not as hermeneutic substantiations for religious and ethical doctrines, but as an entry into the kinds of correspondences / constellations that have been central to modernist and “post”modernist poetry experiments over the last century and a half. I have proceeded in these works in several different ways: by using one word or word-phrase as title and others (numerically equivalent) as poem; by using the gematria number as a title and constructing poems of single lines and/or stanzas of two or several lines that fall under or add up to that number; and occasionally by using a freer selection of words brought to my attention by gematria, but combining and adding to them with considerably more freedom of choice. To the degree that all such works are substantially aleatory, they are full of surprises that have added greatly to my own excitement in the act of writing.

FOURTH GEMATRIA
“In the Shadow”

Without God

Without terror.

____________

Gematria 372

Seven.
Plenty.
A Week.

_____________

My Heart (1)

Flaming.

My Heart (2)

Blood.

_____________

The Sign

I see
a word / spoken.

____________

In the Shadow (1)

A womb
he devours.

In the Shadow (2)

I am
nothing.

____________

Testimony
for Charles Reznikoff

The light.
The terror.

____________

Burning

Your beautiful
mind.

Dead
at the entry.

____________

A Fountain (1)

An eye.


A Fountain (2)

Shall I hide?

____________

A Window

Wherein
& forward.

____________


Colors (1)

Yellow
stars

Colors (2)

His red
throne.

____________


The Candlestick / The Fire

The yellow
Baal
eats
like a god.

____________

A Vision (1)

Beat it with power..


A Vision (2)

God
is crushed.

____________

You

& a double.

____________

The City

Broken.

.

Void.

____________

Flesh (1)

An ark
& a worm.

Flesh (2)

Before
& bitter.

____________

The Rock

fell.

____________


A Curse

Your father
shall live.

____________


A Cloud (1)

In wood.

A Cloud (2)

Forever.

____________

All

or enough.

____________


Cities, Cities

Silver
& speckled.

A tree
fallen down.

____________

My country
a fire

.

Divided.

____________

The Voice (1)

will answer.

The Voice (2)

A voice.

[Originally published in J.R., Gematria, Sun & Moon Press (1993) & scheduled for republication in a revised edition, Gematria Complete, by Marick Press in Michigan.]

Urns and sarcophagi
pagans paint into life,
dancing fauns,
dancing bands of bacchantes,
bright lines of them,
goatfooted, fatcheeked,
squeeze sounds
hot & wild
through brass horns,
percussions & cymbals
blare out,
we see & hear
on the marble
birds beating wings,
sweet taste of the fruit
on your beaks,
no noise to frighten you.off
still less to drive Eros away
who joins the bright crowds
rejoicing,
hoisting his torch.
So bounty overcomes death
& the ashes within
in the house made of silence
still find pleasure in life.
Some day
may the tomb of the poet
be graced
with this scroll
he has richly bejewelled
with life.

*

Tight little alleyway – no room
to squeeze between its walls –
a young girl blocks my way,
my rambles around Venice
knocks me off my feet,
the place, the come-on
to a stranger’s eye,
a wide canal my drifting
takes me to. If you
had girls like your canals,
o Venice, cunts
like little alleyways, you’d be
the greatest city in the world.


*

what bothers me is this:
the way Bettina gets to be so skillful
every limb in her body
grows looser & looser
till she can stick her own little tongue
up her own little cunt
a charmer who tastes her own charms
will soon lose all interest in men.

*

Is it so big a mystery
what god and man and world are?
No! but nobody knows how to solve it
so the mystery hangs on.

*

Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me
I take in my stride, as a god might command me.
But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers:
tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ.

*

Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord
preferred to live with whores
& sinners, seeing
I go in for that myself.

*

I could have made it just as well with boys
although my thing has always been with girls.
And once I get my satisfaction with a girl
I can turn her around & have her as a boy.

*

Not schwanz meaning “tail”
but some fancier word
o Priapus
me being a poet
in German
that word grinds me down.
In Greek I can call you
a phallos a marvelous
sound to my ears
and in Latin mentula
from mens meaning “mind”
another good word.
But schwanz is something
that sticks out from behind
& behind isn’t where
I find pleasure.

Translation from German by Jerome Rothenberg

[These translations will appear – in somewhat modified form – in Poems for the Millennium, volume 3: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, gathered by myself & Jeffrey Robinson & scheduled for publication in January. Our commentary on Goethe appeared in this blog on June 24.]

[The following group of translations of poems by Cavafy and commentary has been drawn from a lecture entitled “Adventures In Translation Land,” given at Tel Aviv University as the annual Nadav Vardi lecture on May 29, 2008, and on June 1, 2008, in the English Staff Seminar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.]

I first started reading Cavafy in the original in 1957 during my first visit to Greece, have continued to do so to the present day, and will surely do so for the rest of my days. The fact that I did not turn to translating his poems until some thirty years later never particularly mystified me, though once I started I did occasionally wonder why it took me so long. I believe I was too busy being quietly enriched and influenced by Cavafy in ways that have persisted in surprising me, ways that also accorded with my realization that the time had come to write my own Cavafy translations. Hence the title for this excerpt:

DROPPING ANCHOR AT ITHACA

Among the first of Cavafy’s poems I ventured to render into English is the title poem of my second small collection of poetry by him that is now in press, “Half an Hour.” Because this poem, written in 1917, was never published by the poet during his lifetime, presumably because of its homoerotic connotations, it has always been presented as one of his “Unpublished Poems,” and even ignored by the inexcusably ignorant. Ironically, there is nothing in the original Greek, and consequently in my translation of it, that assigns a specific gender to the individual addressed.


Half an Hour

Never made it with you and don't expect
I will. Some talk, a slight move closer,
as in the bar yesterday, nothing more.
A pity, I won't deny. But we artists
now and then by pushing our minds
can––but only for a moment––create
a pleasure that seems almost physical.
That's why in the bar yesterday––with the help
of alcohol's merciful power––I had
a half-hour that was completely erotic.
I think you knew it and
stayed on purpose a little longer.
That was really necessary. Because
with all my imagination and spell of the drinks,
I just had to see your lips,
had to have your body near.

A friend in Norman, Oklahoma, printed elegant postcards of this poem, which I thumbtacked alongside other literary and artistic curios on the front door of my office for the purpose of student edification when I was teaching at the University of Oklahoma. I lost count of the number of times I had to replace it there after it was ripped off, carefully I trust, by passing students whose eyes were hooked by the poem and who, I imagined, may have also perceived it as an aid to their own amatory ambitions. May their drafting of Cavafy as a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac into their campaigns to achieve true bliss have resulted in greater successes than the secret desires of either of these famous real and fictive poets ever did. Still, if ignorance is bliss, the pettily larcenous young lovers, whether winners or losers in their games of love, came out ahead.

The next two poems illustrate a theme that pervades much of Cavafy’s poetry, his unique perspective of the human condition through the trifocal lens of eros, memory, and art. Many of Cavafy’s poems deal specifically with the difficulties of the artist and poet, most notably the problem of the effects of time upon the artist’s ability to memorialize in his work a person or experience, invariably recalled for their erotic significance, for which he cares profoundly.

Craftsman of Wine Bowls

On this wine bowl of pure silver––
made for the house of Herakleides,
where grand style and good taste rule––
observe the elegant flowers, streams and thyme,
in whose midst I set a handsome young man,
naked, amorous, with one leg still
dangling in the water.–– O memory, I prayed
for your best assistance in making
the young man's face I loved the way it was.
A great difficulty this proved because
about fifteen years have passed since the day
he fell, a soldier, in the defeat at Magnesia.

In this poem from 1921, in which the personal and the political, the private and the public subtly intersect, the artist, working on a commission by a great family, has the power nonetheless to insinuate his individual celebration of his love as he simultaneously experiences the eroding effects of time upon his memory of that love. That the craftsman persona dates his loss by the critical battle fought in 190 B.C.E. that marks the onset of Roman dominance in the Hellenized East, provides an ironic historical context that may be more meaningful to the reader of this poem than to its speaker. Relative chronological proximity to the battle of Magnesia provides the speaker with poignancy, chronological distance provides the reader with ironic perspective. Perhaps the human dimensions of this context are large enough to accommodate the poet himself and us as well, revealing all of us as participants in our own private situations, full of passion and loss, and subject to historical forces that we are fated to understand only partially. Yet these pathetic, often tragic, conditions can be intermittently dignified by art’s attempt to record their sincerity and intensity.

A work that represents the consummate formulation of this rich and central aspect of Cavafy’s writing, “According to the Recipes of Ancient Greco-Syrian Magicians,” a late poem printed in 1931 two years before his death, is itself the answer to the question it states.

"What distillate of magic herbs
can I find," said an aesthete,
"what distillate according to the recipes
of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians
that for a day (if its power
won't last longer) or for just a moment
will bring back my age of twenty-three,
my friend of twenty-two,
bring back––his beauty and his love.

"What distillate can I find according to the recipes
of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians
that, in keeping with this retrospect,
will bring back our little room."

With almost every Cavafian persona, including the autobiographical one, neatly subsumed in this undiluted common denominator of an “aesthete,” Cavafy makes the essential case for poetry, for searching out the knowledge of past masters, denoted by “Greco-Syrian magicians,” in order to describe as objectively as possible the quest to which he has dedicated his life in art. If the recipes to be followed can be construed as tradition and the precious distillate as the individual work of art––an interpretation I believe the discourse of the poem supports––how are we to apprehend its singular power, extracted by ancient prescriptions from “magic herbs,” if not by experiencing the poem in its totality, as a work of art, as defined by Paul Valéry, “constraining language to interest the ear directly”? Ever since I first read this poem aloud, it has occupied a place in my private anthology of poems great with sound. So it was reassuring to learn some years later that George Seferis considered it one of the most beautiful poems in the Greek language, an observation that redeems him in my eyes for having also remarked that Cavafy’s poetry is as prosaic as an “endless plain.” Surely as some things can’t be bought or taught (or completely carried over from one language into another), this poem’s greatness resides in the highest realization of its sense through its maker’s inimitable mastery of the sounds of his own special brand of Greek.

[George Economou’s most recent books are Acts of Love, Ancient Greek Poetry from Aphrodite’s Garden (New York: Random House/ Modern Library, 2006) and I’ve Gazed So Much, C. P. Cavafy Translations (London: Stop Press, 2001). Half an Hour, a second collection of Economou’s translations from Cavafy, has just been issued by Stop Press, and his ultimate adventure in translation, Ananios of Kleitor, will be published by Shearsman in 2009. During the 1960s he was the co-editor, with Robert Kelly of the magazine Trobar and has been an active poet, translator & scholar ever since.]

Axe and animal, all able
but bleeding by blunt barbarisms
creep cowering cunningly, craggily cancelled:
death does dutiful debts, defers
even evening’s edges. Eleven eagles
fly furiously. Four foxes, furred,
gorgeously groomed, grow grandiose, groan
however hard. Headstrong hedonists, hairy
islanders in Italy, idiot inmates,
jeer Jewish jugglers, judicious Jainists,
Kantian killers, kowtowing krazy kat
lawyers, lesbian ladies, lowborn, lamenting,
mad mothers made masculine, mammals
no nereids nuzzle, not nymphs
or oracles, only on oceans
pretending. Passengers plumb plangent prows,
quote quaint quintessences, quarreling, queezy,
religious reformers return. Russian rabbis,
some sinister, sample smoked salmons.

Travelers, too tawdry, telegraph testaments,
upload unnatural utterances. Useless utopians
vilify violent videos, volatile, vain
with whatever webmails we waken:
x-rays, xerography, xanadus, xenophobes x-ed.
Yet you yearn, youthful yammerers,
zygotes zonked zigzagging, zealfully zapped.

c. 1978/2008

[A portion of this poem was recovered, along with numerous others, for a volume of Uncollected Poems to be published by Mark Weiss and Junction Press. The lines in italics were subsequently added.]

DREAM EVENT I
Seneca

After having a dream, let someone else guess what it was. Then have everybody act it out together.

DREAM EVENT II
Seneca
Have participants run around the center of a village, acting out their dreams & demanding that others guess & satisfy them.

GIFT EVENT
Kwakiutl

Start by giving away different colored glass bowls.

Have everyone give everyone else a glass bowl.

Give away handkerchiefs and soap and things like that.

Give away a sack of clams and a roll of toilet paper.

Give away teddybear candies, apples, suckers and oranges.

Give away pigs and geese and chickens, or pretend to do so.

Pretend to be different things.

Have the women pretend to be crows, have the men pretend to be something else.

Talk chinese or something.

Make a narrow place at the entrance of a house and put a line at the end of it that you have to stoop under to get in.

Hang the line with all sorts of pots and pans to make a big noise.

Give away frying pans while saying things like “Here is this frying pan worth $100 and this one worth $200.”

Give everyone a new name.

Give a name to a grandchild or think of something and go and get everything.


NAMING EVENTS
Papago

1. A shaman has a dream & names a child for what he dreams in it. Among such names are Circling Light, Rushing Light Beams, Daylight Comes, Wind Rainbow, Wind Leaves, Rainbow Shaman, Feather Leaves, A-Rainbow-as-a-Bow, Shining Beetle, Singing Dawn, Hawk-Flying-over-Water-Holes, Flowers Trembling, Chief-of-Jackrabbits, Water-Drops-on-Leaves, Short Wings, Leaf Blossoms, Foamy Water.

2. A person receives a name describing something odd about him, always on the bad side. Such names include: Grasshopper-Ate-His-Arrow, Gambler, Ass-Side-to-the-Fire, Pants-Fall-Down, Blisters, Fish-Smell-Mouth, Bed Wetter, Rat Ear, Yellow Legs.

3. A person receives a name describing something odd & sexual about the namer. Here the namer is a woman or a transvestite, who makes the name public by shouting it after the man named when others are present. The man invariably accepts it & is regularly called by it, even by his wife & family. Such names include: Down-Dangling-Pussy-Hairs, Big Cunt, Long Asshole.

4. A group of namers gathers around a dead enemy & shouts abusive names at the body. These names are then given to the shouters. They include: Long Bones, Full-of-Dirt, Back-of-a-Wildcat, Yellow Face, & Gold Breasts, the latter spoken of a girl.

5. A person buys a name or trades names with another person. For example, Devil-Old-Man exchanges names with Contrary, or Looking-for-Girls-at-a-Dance changes with Big Crazy, but has to give him four pints of whiskey in addition because of the desirability of the name.


CRAZY DOG EVENTS
Crow

1. Act like a crazy dog. Wear sashes & other fine clothes, carry a rattle, & dance along the roads singing crazy dog songs after everybody else has gone to bed.

2. Talk crosswise: say the opposite of what you mean & make others say the opposite of what they mean in return.

3. Fight like a fool by rushing up to an enemy & offering to be killed. Dig a hole near an enemy, & when the enemy surrounds it, leap out at them & drive them back.

4. Paint yourself white, mount a white horse, cover its eyes & make it jump down a steep & rocky bank, until both of you are crushed.


VISION EVENT I
Inuit

Go to a lonely place & rub a stone in a circle on a rock for hours & days on end.


VISION EVENT II
Inuit

Let the person who wants a vision hang himself by the neck. When his face turns purple, take him down & have him describe what he’s seen.


VISION EVENT III
Sioux

Go to a mountaintop & cry for a vision.


COMMENTARY

Here, as earlier in Technicians of the Sacred, the editor has taken a series of rituals & other programmed activities & has, as far as possible, suppressed all reference to accompanying mythic or "symbolic" explanations. This has led to two important results: (1) the form of the activities is, for the first time, given the prominence it deserves; & (2) the resulting works bear a close resemblance to those mythless activities of our own time called events, happenings, de-coll/age, kinetic theater, etc. It may be further noted that most of these "events" – like the (modern) intermedia art they resemble – are parts of total situations involving poetry, music, dance, painting, myth, dream, etc., as are many of the songs & visions presented elsewhere in this anthology. But a crucial point of tribal poetry- &-art is precisely that it calls for total performance & participation: a maximization of human activities to allow the world to remake itself at that level of intensity ( = reality at white heat) that [anthropologist Paul] Radin spoke of.

[Originally printed as part of a larger “Book of Events” in Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. The book, first published by Doubleday in 1972 & last by University of New Mexico Press in 1986 & 1992, has now been out of print for several years. While I’ve been engaged with other projects, big & small, I haven’t been able to work toward getting it back in print. But that may now be changing. – J.R.]

Selection from Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Work into Poetry Now, by Jeffrey C. Robinson. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2005.

[He writes] : This book is a diary that I kept for a year on the poetry of Wordsworth, mostly in diary format but at times breaking into a poetry of deformation or improvisation from Wordsworth’s own texts (with a few brief phrases from George Oppen’s Daybooks). Here the entry begins as diary-commentary on the quoted passage from The Prelude and then swings open into poetry.

November 20, 2002

Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus
Daily the common range of visible things
Grew dear to me: already I began
To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun,
Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge
And surety of our earthly life, a light
Which we behold and feel we are alive;
Not for his bounty to so many worlds—
But for this cause, that I had seen him lay
Its beauty on the morning hills, had seen
The western mountain touch his setting orb
In many a thoughtless hour, when from excess
Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow
For its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy.

Stammering: love the sun/loved the sun/ since have loved him

Moments of intense pressure in Wordsworthian blank verse in which memory of past made conscious and full of significance torques the sentences of the present—not recollected in tranquility, not a smooth surface of a stream. The passage is at once patient in its meandering elaboration, exploratory—poetics lines like a snake moving through the grass, or something that “creates itself”—independent of the “I” that initiates its motion, but also has turbulent disorientations (which may be related to the sentence’s self-creations) perhaps registered in the double personification of the sun laying His beauty on the morning and the western mountain—as if in a subsequent gesture of a peopled universe that includes the mobile sentence—touching the sun’s setting orb. Stammering marks the disruption to the chronological narrative of sentences, a voice caught in a thickening vision of a boy immersed and stretched and imbued with utterances and agencies beyond himself. But since stammering belongs to the poetic speaker, it reflects a view that at such moments of spiritual intensity the temporal separation is squeezed down to a condition of turbulent pressures in the lively vibrating, precarious sentence, which, it could be said, appears—like the speaker’s blood—to “flow at its own pleasure.” Here Wordsworth’s blank verse eschews the future-orientedness of that day when we will all be “free-standing agents,” not “reclining poets” in touch with nature and reveries, but rather “aufrechter Gang” (in an upright posture of the citizen), in which our agency will flow like the most assured, and transparent, of enjambed pentamenter lines; instead it stammers, calling attention to its materiality in the present, its ungainly reality.

The Life of Things (from The Prelude)

I was seventeen. I conversed conversed conversed with bliss ineffable coercive transferred sentiment of being and auxiliary light spread o’er spread o’er spread o’er beating living spreading gliding beneath wave and air life and knowledge and wave of air and melodious light with blessings spread around

Half an hour I watched between mute with independent life (dust as we are) watched forms half an hour watched spreading archetype of numerous accidents watched ghastly forms breathless

I looked round ere I had been I left and saw I repaired and returned repaired ere I bowed low I should need. . .words. . .looked stumbling difficult dweller at bottom difficult and dreary stumbling invested vexed and tossed the girl blowing vexed and tossed

I cannot paint nor paint colors no colors and words unknown sense of thinking beyond what I already know or what
Someone already
Knows is terrifying
words vexed and tossed unknown I cannot paint visionary
dreariness in which but the girl gone bones shaped like a grave

that things of the lower
world exist
the world moves and remains

naked pool

emotion which discloses

words vexed and
scattered hair

dreary the vision already
“winter of the book”

strong enchantment of
dying away of stars
I turn
alone
in gusty days

fashioning
fell destroyer

with gentle powers
slipping still hanging

from knotgrass
guided almost silent

strain of music
uttering
horizon

my mortal life on plain beneath gliding beneath the wave, now naked pool that lay lonely scene beneath hills dim dim abode faint memorial gleam of dim similitude having lain I register reascend bare slope trace

glittering idly
a cabinet of sensations

passion its birth
let the fiddler
scream in twink-
ling of stars

* * * * *

for Charlie Morrow

Scene One

Chorus
Jews in a ring.
Jews on a rollercoaster.
Jews who sing in a ring.
They are & they sing about everything.
Old Jews who do what they do they sing & they ride on a rollercoaster they sing in a ring & young Jews do too who move by ones & by twos they ride to the sky & over the sky they ride in Italy over the sky & on the sky Jews on a rollercoaster do who ride over Italy on a ride to the sky.

First Jew
[in black face & puffing on a stogie]
I am a Jew I am a Jew too & I have come to Italy to ride on the sky & to be blue oh yes blue yes blue blue.

Second Jew
[a pirate with a gold ring in one ear]
Over the sky in a rollercoaster I too who am a Jew & who say blow me away & shiver my timbers sweetly yes sweet my sweet Jewish timbers.

Third Jew
[in a feather bonnet he is an Indian tomahawk & all]
Yes yes I have come all the way to Italy to be a Jew like you oh like you yes yes like you I ride on a rollercoaster over the sky.

Fourth Jew
[majestically dressed he is dressed as the statue of liberty in a long gown & with a glowing torch]
I have left the golden land & I have a torch in my hand in my precious Jewish hand I have come to land in Italy too & to ride on the sky like you.

Fifth Jew
[a wolf mask over his face & a shepherd's crook in his hand]
Am I not a Jew if I am not a Jew what am I, but if an animal can be a Jew I am one too.

Sixth Jew
[in the clothes of an Arab or maybe of a patriarchal Jew]
I am a true Jew true & blue & I say barakh hu to everyone I see in Italy & here too.

Seventh Jew
[wears a military costume with medals on his chest & a cockade on his head]
A Jew who says one two & two knows one & two & can do whaever I do, he can ride on a rollercoaster & dance yes a Jew can dance too in advance of a rollercoaster.

Eighth Jew
[a faggot]
A Jew like me in Italy is a Jew & is a faggot too like me yes anyone who comes to Italy can be a Jew & he can ride on a rollercoaster on the sky & so I am true & blue.

Ninth Jew
[spherical & round he rolls across the floor]
I cannot say barakh hu & yet I am a Jew nevertheless & this is true.

Tenth Jew
[Abulafia]
But Abulafia who is a Jew is different too. He is the first to sing & the first to come to Italy. He is the first to meet the king the true Italian king & the first to meet the pope the way I do. He is the first in war the first in peace & the first in the hearts of his countrymen.

[The true Italian king comes in he is dressed like George Washington & rides on a bicycle.]

Chorus & Jews
[singing]
He is King.
He matters.
He is King.
He forgives.
He is King
He is King.
He attends a wedding.
He is King.
He attends a decision.
He attends.
He attends.
He dances.
We see.
He is King.
We siphon.
The inheritors dance.
He matters.
He is King.
We attend a wedding.
He is King.
He is King.
He forgives.

Abulafia
This is a scene.

King
In a garden.

Abulafia
In Italy.

King
What is your name.

Abulafia
Abulafia.

King
You have come a long way. What is your name, I pray, I pray.

Abulafia
My name is buried in a hat.
[He looks for it.]
Yes it is Abulafia. See. It is Abraham Abulafia.

King
I see & do you sit beside me.

Abulafia
Yes I do. Thank you I do.

King
I am a king.

Abulafia
I see that & I thank you too.

King
But I am a hidden king though I am most true.

Abulafia
Do not forget the penpoint when you do.

King
No but I forget the world in bits & pieces.

[Abulafia reads from a book.]

King
Will you read to me from a book.

Abulafia
Thank you, I pray & I pray. I will read to you from a book.

King
Begin here

Abulafia
Yes here.

[He begins to read aloud. The other Jews circle around him.]

Abulafia
Here is here now & here is here now & here is here now. And here. He does & does he sing between the curtains. Yes it says. A herd of horses crosses through his hall & circles. In a ring. What is his book called. It is called the Book of Witness. See. The little y is where his name is. It is here & here. Oh yes cries Abulafia & do it once. Once here & one here. One is called a king & two is called a king's king & three is called a king's king once. Four is fourth & goes forth to a door. He opens to begin a door. And five. Five is on a hand & is a herd of horses. Six are Jews & brightly. Seven is a proposition. Eight is also nine. And Abulafia again is ten & goes forth to a door.

[He passes the book to the first Jew.]

First Jew
He goes forth to a door. Here is Barcelona where the trip begins.

Second Jew
Begin is pleasing. Capri is rich with fish & goyim. If you can do mileage with a pencil others will find the way.

Third & Fourth Jews
When they say they say. When a month is far away they say the gay month.

Fifth Jew
Jews kiss Jews. A gay month. He is on his way to Rome.

Sixth Jew
Two Jews are on their way to Rome. One is gay & one is in golf shoes. The other is in despair.

Seventh Jew
A king a garden & a violin. The door before the Pope is open to a door. A door swings shut so sadly sadly.

Eighth Jew
Two Jews in golf shoes. Two Jews in paper hats. My hat is launched. To see the King first is to be with kisses.

Ninth Jew
Two Jews in tears. One bows before you. One is the other's keeper. The Messiah is the one called the Messiah.

Abulafia
Now Abulafia puts down the book. He is all smiles. The King is charmed by him & the Jews are irreversible. Abulafia winces. His right leg feels the skateboard still in place. Ring a rubber bell for me. He rings it. The house in Italy leads to a rollercoaster in the sky. A Jew lights a cheroot & feels a small decline. I let the King peak through my glasses. See oh yes I see. A wise Jew pisses in a tub. He rubs her ivories with lemons, then descends. Dance One: The King in Limbo. Strike a pose. Repose. Disclose. Expose. A thin Jew swings a shoe. Dance Two: The King is talking to his telephone. Where is the Pope is he in Rome of course the Pope would be in Rome. And the Messiah. Tell oh tell is the Messiah in the garden in which he fell.

King & Abulafia
Yes he is here oh yes yes he is here & here before a garden.

[The first scene of an opera conceived & planned with composer Charlie Morrow but never finished beyond the first two scenes nor ever put into production. Abulafia selbst (1240-c.1291) was a great mystic & master of a species of meditation that took the form, often enough, of a kind of mystical lettrism. In 1280, responding to a dream or vision, he set out for Rome to convert the Pope (Nicolas III) & to proclaim himself the Jewish messiah. Threatened with execution he was thrown into prison but saved by the sudden death of the pope himself. Some of his lettristic work, translated by me and Harris Lenowitz, appeared in A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present (a.k.a. Exiled in the Word), still in print from Copper Canyon Press.]