Getting it right

Another commonplace book entry, offered as encouragement.

Proofs

Death will not correct
a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died
is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death
a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

Tadeusz Rózewicz
translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski

The best intentions

Olav H. Hauge

A Poem Every Day

I want to write a poem every day,
every day.
That should be easy enough.
Browning kept at it, though
he rhymed and
counted beats
with bushy eyebrows.
So, a poem every day.
Something strikes you,
something happens,
something catches your notice.
– I get up. It’s light now.
I’ve the best intentions.
And see the bullfinch rising from the cherry tree,
where he’s stealing my buds.


translated from the Norwegian by Robin Fulton

from Olav H. Hauge, Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses, Translated by Robin Fulton, Anvil, 2003.

Four of the best

Bloodaxe has recently started publishing a new series of slim anthologies, each of which features generous selections from four poets. Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2, published in June, brings together four major European poets: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Miroslav Holub, Marin Sorescu and Tomas Tranströrmer. Each selection is prefaced by introductory materials – essays, interviews, profiles and commentaries by the poets. Below, as a sampler, is one poem from each of the selections.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Optimistic Little Poem

Now and then it happens
that somebody shouts for help
and somebody else jumps in at once
and absolutely gratis.

Here in the thick of the grossest capitalism
round the corner comes the shining fire brigade
and extinguishes, or suddenly
there’s silver in the beggar’s hat.

Mornings the streets are full
of people hurrying here and there without
daggers in their hands, quite equably
after milk or radishes.

As though in a time of deepest peace.

A splendid sight.

[1999] translated by David Constantine




Miroslav Holub

At last

At last we were masters of our heads,
masters of the city,
masters of our shadows
and our equinox.

Someone fired a shot to celebrate,
but only the kind with a cork
tied to a string.

And then we opened the cages
and ferrets ran out.
Out of the skull ran brown and white
spotted rats.
Out of the heart flew
blood-soaked cuckoos.

Out of the lungs
a condor rose, croaking with rage
because of the way his plumes had been squashed
in the bronchi.

Even a panther showed up,
on the loose from an obsolete circus,
starved, ready to eat
even the Emperor Claudius.

You could hear squeaks in the streets –
the groans and shouts
of expiring fiends.

And at last we were masters
of our new moon.

But we couldn’t step out
of our doorways;
someone might cast
a spell on us.

We might even
be hostage
to ourselves.

[1998] translated by Mirolsav Holub and David Young.

Marin Sorescu


The martyrs

Just the usual lion-fodder, no one
whose name will ever make the calendar,
anonymously rattling into death.

Fed to bestial mud, your bodies are
frail as flowers. The life that you enjoy
will have to be the next one.

To carry off a crucifixion, talent
is required. It takes skill, as well, to plunge a trident
deep in someone’s throat. The goggling
crowd awaits the miracle to follow,

which won’t, of course, take place.
There’s just am ugly pool of blood
where the ripped-to-pieces die. That’s it.
Matinees on Tuesday. Bring a friend.


translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski (2001)

Tomas Tranströrmer

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only thing that shines
is yellow flowers.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.

[1996]

Translated by Robin Fulton.

In one of the pieces republished here, Tomas Tranströrmer’s acceptance speech of his Neustadt prize, the poet talk about the importance of poetry translation:

Let me sketch two ways of looking at a poem. You can perceive a poem as an expression of the life of the language itself, something organically grown out of the very language in which it is written – in my case, Swedish. A poem written by the Swedish language through me. Impossible to carry over into another language.
Another, and contrary, view is this: the poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation. A transfer into English or Malayalam is merely the invisible poem’s new attempt to come into being. The important thing is what happens between the text and the reader. Does a really committed reader ask if the written version he reads is the original or a translation?

Probably not, is the answer to that question. The reader consumes the text and doesn’t worry about its origins. But the consumption will be greatly aided by the quality of the text – that is, the quality of the translation. How well the translators gathered in this volume have pulled the invisible poems into the light is something you can judge for yourselves as you make your way through this interesting book.


Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2, edited by Neil Astley, 96 pp. £7.95 in UK.

Thomas Street Is Happening (just not today)

14 June 2006

To St Catherine's Park to do a reading for the Thomas Street Is Happening Festival. The brief is to read poems that in some way relate to this area, a project that appeals because I have written quite a few pieces set in this part of the city or in some way inspired by it. For years I lived opposite Christchurch Cathedral and now live down the road in the Tenters. I was, though, a bit wary about reading in St Catherine's Park. Park is probably a bit of an exaggeration; it is in fact the graveyard at the rear of St Catherine's Church in Thomas St, with the entrance in Thomas Court – not by any means a major thoroughfare. I used to drop in with the mutt to give him a bit of greenery until I realised it seemed to be used exclusively by dealers and users. I find it hard to visualise it being packed with poetry lovers on a Wednesday lunchtime. And indeed there is no-one in the park except for one of the organisers and two sound technicians who have brought an impressive bank of equipment in their Dublin City Council truck, which sits in the middle of the park, taking up about a third of it. The podium and mike are set up and waiting. It's five minutes after the advertised time and there's still no-one. A woman comes in and sits at the other end of the park. This is briefly interpreted as the act of an audience member and there is the real possibility of delivering the reading to a single distant auditor, though the sound equipment will safely carry my voice all around the Liberties. The woman, however, proves not to have come in search of poetry and faced with the prospect of enduring some, promptly flees the park.

The users who were evicted when the sound men came to set are out there somewhere, waiting for us to leave. There is some talk of reading to the organiser, or reading, as it were, speculatively, in the hope that people in the area, magnetised by my amplified poems, will pour into the park. Em, don't think so. Eventually the effort is abandoned and the cheerful soundmen – 'it's all the same to us, we get paid anyway' – load up the truck, and we all drift off. Through Pimlico and The Coombe and back home. I close this dismal chapter in the freelance life with a couple of the poems I'd intended to read, a kind of compensatory virtual reading, both featuring Peter Lewis, proctor of Christchurch Cathedral in the mid sixteenth century, some of whose words I've taken from the account ledger he left us.

After a Day in the History of the City


What vagabond bones
and you, too, Ivar the Boneless,
come together now
stench of what plagues
thriving again
and everywhere one turns
places of execution

Who should not prefer
to cross the river
and walk in procession
down the aisle of his own cathedral
with Samuel
Metropolitan of Oxmantown
wanting nothing from him but his title

or say, with Peter Lewis, cathedral proctor
Today came with his men Tady the hellier
to renew the slates
after the heavy snows of Christmas and the frost

(Selected Poems, Gallery Press, 2005)

Cathedral

I dyd byllyd and pyllyd with oke timber
I fyllyd hit the foundacion with roche lyme
The masons paid, the carters paid
the smith, the cooper, the casters of sand

What I really wanted was to stand
for once empty handed
by the vanishing spires and the bells
beautifully dumb, pealing quiet

as we waited, the world rinsed out of us
Stone by stone the city returned
these streets mapped by desire
the light that seemed to flare

from our own skin to press
the district towards us.
As if in a small rain of touch
we stood, and watched it grow

I leaned towards you, provoking
a dark bricked brewery palazzo
you kissed me and caused
black tramlines to loop and veer

When you stopped, they disappeared
So greedy the desire
the whole place seemed to fall
and my spirit, that had been light, was air

(Selected Poems, Gallery Press, 2005)

Taking Bearings: Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle

District and Circle is Seamus Heaney's twelfth book and it is very much a re-visiting of his own past, a circling and remapping of terrain familiar from forty years of previous work. Few poets are likely to abandon their lifetime's concerns and preoccupation and jump on board some skittish new craft, but what's remarkable about this collection is the extent to which it situates itself in the essential elements of the earlier work – as if the poet wanted to re-ground himself by testing the old sources again and subjecting them to the pressure of experience and craft. In their solidity and immediacy the early poems in the book give the same kind of pleasure as the first Heaney collections, though it’s a pleasure somewhat diluted by familiarity. From the outset Heaney was a poet of extraordinary materiality: the visible world swarmed in to be reconstituted in dense stacks of language – those processions of thickly textured nouns and adjectives, that lust for exactitude, for a language that answered the demands of memory and clanged with the force of hammer on anvil.

District and Circle is full of the physicality and richly textured responsiveness that announced itself forcefully in Death of a Naturalist, charged with the 'thingness' of totemic implements: turnip-snedder, hammer, spade, harrow-pin, 'the weight of the trowel' with its ‘lozenge-shaped/Blade’, the blows of Barney Devlin’s 'midnight anvil'. The poems set themselves to pinning down 'the mass and majesty of the world'; they’re a bit like the remembered railway sleepers in one poem, 'block-built criss-cross and four-squared'. Take a poem like 'Höfn', for example, with its turbo-charged Anglo-Saxon pith:

The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats

And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff.....

All this 'thingness', this vivid intensity, is lent an extra force by the book's sense of working on the edge, on the boundaries between life and death, between the real and the imagined – or unimaginable, as in 'Anything Can Happen', the poet’s response to 11 September – or between one realm of experience and another, as in the prose pieces which evoke the arrival at the school porch with its 'rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall', or the arrival of gypsies in the district, 'as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out'. The book is haunted by death; there are elegies for Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, George Seferis, and the superb 'The Lift' for his sister.
One of the highlights of the collection is the title poem, set, like the opening poem in Station Island in the 'vaulted tunnels' of the London Underground, a place realised in extraordinary concrete detail, intensely alive and yet a visionary underworld to which the poet has descended like Dante or Orpheus to meet 'My father's face glazed in my own waning/And craning' and to be ‘transported/Through galleried earth with them, the only relict/Of all that I belonged to. . .' Like many of the poems in this book, it is hyper-alert to the world's surfaces, and glazes every realised thing with an eerie plangency. Some have seen this as a response to the July 2005 bombings in London but it is really another Heaney underground or underworld poem – as a poet gets on he begins to be 'aware of the underground journey a bit more', as he said in a recent interview. Like almost all of the poems in the book it is as much a journey into his own past, as much as the district as the wider circle. The strap-hanging figure in the underground train, 'well-girded, yet on edge,/Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,/Listening to the dwindling noises off' is the poet performing his delicate balancing act on the 'flicker-lit' threshold of past and present, life and death.
We see the same investment in the weight of the real in the poem to which the pieces that make up 'District and Circle' originally belonged, 'The Tollund Man in Springtime', which returns after more than thirty years to one of Heaney’s most famous poems. The original poem concluded with a fatalistic identification with the sacrificial victim; the new take is a denser imagining, the Tollund Man spirited from the man-killing parishes to investigate the world that has revived him, 'the thickened traffic/Swarm at a roundabout five fields away/And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.' Again it's a poem thick with the world, this ghostly presence like a 'bulrush, head in air, far from its lough' hovering over 'check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues/Of wired, far-faced smilers.' But the Tollund Man is also a guardian-like figure come to release Heaney from his Parnassian obligations. In an interview in The Telegraph he described him as a kind of releasing revenant: 'He came again to remind me that lyric poetry was OK. The Tollund Man releases me into pleasure… love poems… bits and pieces… little quickies… more personal stuff towards the end. They're more spontaneous.' In a way maybe this is part of the point of a book like District and Circle. Most of it is a consolidating kind of book, the book that someone would write at the latter end of a career, the book of a poet at ease with his material and his craft, reconfirming, re solidifying, remaking that, reminding us of what went before.

If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.

(‘The Aerodrome’)

This is a books that takes bearings and markings and stands by them, the poet saying this is my map, these are the co-ordinates, this is its scenery, its psycho-geography, its sustaining comforts. Nothing is left unremembered or unmemorialised. Once that consolidating impulse has been satisfied, maybe the poet will be released out of habitual Heaneyness into a dimension of risk and unease, and maybe this is what is intended by the closing poem, 'The Blackbird of Glanmore' with its echoes of previous Heaney poems and its Janus-like glance at life and death:

The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel

In front of my house of life.

Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,

In the ivy when I leave.

Seamus Heaney, District and Circle. Faber and Faber, 2006. 74pp. UK £12.99.

Lost Country: Dunya Mikhail

I was in Cúirt the other week to give a reading and to enjoy some of the fare on offer. I read with Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet currently based in Michigan. She speaks and writes in three languages: Arabic, English and Aramaic. The Aramaic comes from her Christian background – Aramaic, the language Christ spoke, is the language of the Chaldeans, the Iraqi Christians who pre-date Islam. Mikhail has published five books since the 1980s, and New Directions publishes The War Works Hard , translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow (winner of a 2004 PEN translation Fund Award). Carcanet will publish it in July of this year. As that title implies Mikhail’s chief subject is war. The poems are blunt and satiric and return obsessively to war and its effects, not surprising for a body of work produced between 1985 and 2004.

Born in 1965, at the juncture of the most atrocious campaign the Baath party waged to trounce the smallest pockets of popular resistance, Dunya Mikhail’s imagination was saturated with horror stories of imprisonment, torture, death, disappearances, massacres, and rape; she was surrounded by uprootedness and endless wars.

(Saadi Simawe, Introduction to The War Works Hard)

Again according to Simawe, her work is fresh and innovative in the Arabic literary tradition: '.... in her poems, the Arabic language is liberated from traditional clichés of idiom and of style...' The following lines are from the title poem, written in Baghdad though not published until after the poet emigrated to the US in 1996:

The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed...

The poems in The War Works Hard are like this, direct, sardonic, downbeat, stripped of rhetoric or grandiosity. 'War poet' is a hard tag to bear, it tends to excite a fake kind of excited attentivness rather than the genuine attention that all poetry needs. Mikhail is a poet whose subjects happen, because of the sheer pressure of circumstance, to include war and the absence, loss and separation that come from it.

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn't notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky.....
....If anyone stumbles across it,
return it to me, please.
Please return it, sir.
Please return it, madam.
It is my country. . .
I was in a hurry
when I lost it yesterday.

The War Works Hard.Translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow.Introduction by Saadi Simawe. New Directions,2005.

Dunya Mikhai's site

The Charm Factor

Today the wannabe poet progresses like the academic, the civil servant, the manager, up a series of marked steps to become a member of the fraternity and sorority of Published Poets. The obedience such an ascent requires can be at odds with the very principles of the art. It is an art of speculation not in the old sense but entirely in the new, speculating on the prize, the publisher, the public -- poetry has become as keen to embrace the main chance as the basest prose.

The above is from Michael Schmidt’s lecture ‘What, How Well, Why?’ given at the StAnza festival in Scotland this March. Schmidt, the founder of Carcanet and Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University argues for a critical culture that’s open and receptive as well as rigorous: ‘If we want our poets to develop and grow without pollarding, trellising, pruning, grafting, we need a diverse and vigorous culture of reception.....’ The kind of insularity that routinely dismisses Modernism and post-Modernism ends up privileging the literal and the banal. Down with the poetry cheerleaders, Schmidt argues, poets need ‘to demand a little less solidarity, a little less local backslapping, more debate and engagement, at the same time giving the reader less of a condescending embrace.’



One of the points Michael Schmidt makes is that Britain is ‘a nation of countless poets and a strictly limited number of poetry readers’. However much we might like to delude ourselves (and we do, we do) that is pretty much the situation in this part of the world. The Cat Flap knows many excellent poets who sell three books a year, of which two to circulating libraries. One acquaintance recently produced his annual royalty statement, lamenting: ‘I seem to have sold minus three books last year. How is this possible?’ It is, of course, entirely possible. You think you have sold those three books and all your boats have come in, and then the bookseller returns the things and you’re back in the red again, quashed entirely.

How many readers does a poet need, in any case? Need for what?, you might think. To be considered a viable entity, to be eligible for an IDA grant or a VAT rating or an Aosdána nomination or a productivity audit by the Muses? It’s a question that vexes August Kleinzahler in a recent review in the LRB of The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 by Roy Fisher. He begins by quoting John Ash in 1979: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ And then continues: ‘This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and Hughes enjoy; it’s not clear he has aspired to much of a readership at all.’ Indeed, Kleinzahler makes it sound as if Fisher went out his way to repel all boarders: ‘Astringent in tone, the voice denuded of personality and with all the warmth of a lens, exploratory, restless, difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm.’

This begs all kinds of questions: what exactly is charm in poetry and why should we necessarily think it a good thing? Do we have to have the comforting print of a ‘personality’, preferably a ‘warm’ one, before we can investigate a poet’s work? Kleinzahler goes on to consider Fisher’s poetry in some depth, but we’re left feeling that Fisher really should have tried to come a little closer to the reader, should have withheld himself a little less – which would have made him a much different and probably a less interesting poet. But isn’t the consideration of audience a distraction from the main business of writing poetry? Doesn’t the audience come after the event rather than before or during it? It seems to this reader that a lot of poets get the order wrong and write as if the audience were already filing into the room, wanting to be comforted, reassured, ready to applaud at the appropriate cues. Which is what Schmidt is saying too as he writes of the obedience that often attends the successful poetry career. Healthier, maybe, to write for the Unreader, the Absent Reader, than the eager face in the front row. Perhaps we should end with a charmless, reader-repelling Fisher poem:

3rd November 1976

Maybe twenty of us in the late afternoon
are still in discussion. We’re talking
about the Arts Council of Great Britain
and its beliefs about itself. We’re baffled.

We’re in a hired pale clubroom
high over the County Cricket Ground
and we’re a set of darkening heads,
turning and talking and hanging down;

beyond the plate glass, in another system, silent,
the green pitch rears up, all colour,
and differently processed. Across it in olive overalls
three performance artists persistently move
with rakes and rods. The cold sky steepens.
Twilight catches the flats rising out of the trees.

One of our number is abducted
into the picture. A sculptor innocent of bureaucracy
raises his fine head to speak out;
and the window and its world frame him.
He is made clear.