Poetry in sports

Rob Hughes on Sergio Agüero:

There is poetry in sports when a man moves the way that Agüero can: plucking the ball out of the air with his right foot, feigning to shoot and then, as opponents cluster around him, flicking the ball to his other foot and shooting deftly.

If there's poetry here, what poem is it? As an Argentine, perhaps Agüero was reciting Borges:

Now he is invulnerable like the gods.

Or perhaps he prefers Ernesto Cardenal:

His dishes and cups are of silver, bordered with gold

With his crest upon them. 

 Or Gabriela Mistral:

Even the dust of the highway

Keeps the scent of your footprints.

Amit Majmudar, "0°, 0°"

"Inevitabilities found by accident" are what one should "look for in a ghazal," according to the final line of Amit Majmudar's ghazal "By Accident," and hte interplay between the inevitable and the accidental runs through his collection 0°, 0°—or how the accidental later seems to have been (or perhaps makes itself seem?) inevitable: "You can / Make anything sound predetermined just / By rhyming on it twice," he writes in "M. C. Escher and the Art of Tessellation," which suggest that poetry produces the sense of inevitability Majmudar keeps circling around, and that he's aware that that might be the case.

But there's something else going on here, too: Majmudar keeps looking at how things might seem if seen backwards, not from the accidental to the inevitable but the other way around. The Escher poem begins with a stanza about mathematicians:

Mathematicians make the toughest audience.
Your complexity has to arabesque a chalkboard
And then, with joyful slashes, above, below,
Cancel itself before their eyes. Simply put,
They expect you to write them a Paradise Lost
And then resolve it back to Genesis.

This provides a nice twist on Jorge Luis Borges's suggestion that the Odyssey could be read as a version of Ulysses [though I just checked "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and discovered that I had misremembered it: he speculates on reading the Aeneid as having preceded the Odyssey], but it also marks how Occam's razor cuts away elaboration in favor of simplicity—sacrificing poetry to proof? Producing a reading of history based on its outcome? [Avoid Nietzsche digression here.]

Yet the source does not inevitably contain what flows from it, for accident must still play a role, and in "Merlin," Majmudar develops an elaborate conceit (Merlin living his life backwards) to arrive at a scene in which Merlin meets the first cave painter: "How will all he has witnessed / result from that stargazing hunter?" How does the accidental come to seem inevitable? "Answers for the Whirlwind" concludes with a passage that reads like an answer to that question:

Who paved roads when they found themselves blocked off
From one another by the wilderness
Who bruised their heels against the wilderness
Who named it tasted every leaf of it at least once
Who remembered which was medicine and which
Was food and which was poison shuffled with
The rest its green no different to the eye
Who sawed and sanded it to crib and casket
And who did that to the wilderness Lord God

With nothing but hands

Experimentation, memory, and technology lead from the stargazer to us; the work of hands turns accidents into inevitabilities.

But such a process does not necessarily involve progress; a dark thread of violence runs through Majmudar's book, at great length in "Letter to the Infantry" and "The Cherry Blossoms at Walter Reed," both of which address the Iraq war, and allegorically in "Michael Reminisces about the War." That's the Archangel Michael, and the war in question is the one between God's host and the fallen angels. The poem concludes with God and Michael celebrating their victory and their soldiers:

On the throne with a wineglass, He praised me
For discovering good little killers inside
Of those golden androgynous boys.

And in retrospect, of course, it seems inevitable that the "golden androgynous boys "had "good little killers" inside themselves, even it was accidents, not inevitabilities, that gave those killers life. The darkness in Majmudar's book is alleviated by his sensitivity to the accidental, unpredictable, human side of violence, all of which it makes it possible to choose or refuse it. And (even though the poem in question is called "The Miscarriage") he ends the book with "hope dry and brittle but intact." That hope is fragile, but it survives the accident that creates it, and ends up seeming inevitable.

Voices

Why should poets try to find a "voice" when there are so many voices in our heads? And mostly it is the welter of other people's voices that speaks to us most truly. (Insert Borges reference here.) Something overheard in a bar, something murmured and misunderstood, something someone didn't mean to say. — Just a few thoughts after re-reading this poem, "Voices," (the first of the two at the link). It's from Rob A. Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage.

(And once you've read it, too, get yourself a copy of Rob's book here!)

To Make Me Who I Am

I have mentioned this line from Borges before (several times actually), but it is one that always comes back to me: "I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar."

It came back to me again in Reginald Shepherd's "To Make Me Who I Am," the long autobiographical essay which opens his Orpheus in the Bronx, when I recognized myself in this:

My gifts were also my curse, and I wished that my differences (I knew that I was smart and that being smart was better) also came with the power to defend myself against those who rejected me.

Smartish Pace 15

Issue 15 of Smartish Pace contains three of my translations from the French of poems by Jacques Réda: "The Jay," "The Milk of Dawn" (a favorite of mine), and "The Dead House." (Note that, as of this writing, the issue is not on-line; I'm referring to the print edition.)

Of the other poems in the issue, I especially enjoyed quite a few:

Gary J. Whitehead's "The Mouse in the House" juxtaposes the sound of a mouse in the house with the memory of the speaker's mother tearing up her late husband's unsent letters to his estranged sister. How's that for a unique approach to the "late-parent" poem?

Mark Yakich has two poems from a sequence called "Green Zone New Orleans," the second of which I put an asterisk by. "You'll never / See your own // Corpse and nobody / Will ever know // Your mind."

Brooks Haxton's "Consort at Bay Window" begins with the beautiful line "Pine ribs in the body of a lute" (I'm a sucker for poems with lutes and mandolins in them).

Christopher Cunningham's contribution, "The Absinthe Drinker," is an ekphrastic poem based on Degas's painting "L'Absinthe."

Jacqueline Berger's "Cigarettes" is a very unusual poem—a "my parents died" poem apparently written before the fact (or at least "before" for the speaker), with the additional twist of its being the smoking fantasies of a non-smoker:

I'm not a smoker,
but I always imagine myself with a cigarette
when my brother and I visit our parents' graves.

There are two of David Kirby's long, chatty poems; for me, the contrast between the two shows how tricky it is to make his style work: the first, "The Only Good Question" (which turns out to be "What the fuck?"), weaves its various threads together so that they disappear and return with a good sense of timing and a final sense of closure. The second, "Sigourney Weaver, Certified Public Accountant," may be as funny as its title promises, but all the riffing ends up feeling like unmotivated free association without the strong sense of timing and closure of "The Only Good Question." Or rather, "Sigourney Weaver" may provide an intellectual sense of closure, but it does not (at least for this reader) provide an emotional closure.

I read Bradley Paul's "How to Stop Your Doppelgänger from Plagiarizing You" as an excellent variation on "Borges and I," which opens up the dual scene of Borges's test into a triangle: speaker, Doppelgänger, and a "you" that the poem introduces at just the right time (the timing helps the poem be more than just a repetition of Borges).

Bob Hicok has four memorable poems in the issue: "Les fenêtres" juxtaposes a translation of Baudelaire (a translation that seems to be done by someone who does not quite understand the French) with the speaker's inadvertent assumption of a role as a midwife (!). The other three all have some great lines:

We are boring people who thrust our arms
out of cars in the belief that flying
will notice and come to wrap us in the lift-off.

("Hope is a Thing with Feathers That Smacks into a Window")

In a poem about Kenneth Koch:

... I feel free
when reading his "no rabbit stew" poems
to not read them or read bits of them or start one
and think, this is boring, because on the next page
there will be one about which I think, this is like being
a speed-boat painter while the speed boat's
on the lake and tearing my hair out.

("Why Would Your First Guess Be Cock?")

In "Reading to Jesus," which is also addressed to Jesus, the speaker wonders about apologizing to Jesus:

to apologize for ever saying "Jesus fucking Christ,"
for parsing breath into such a twisty
implication of divine self-love, though if anyone
could fuck himself it would be You

And the poem concludes with a dramatic shift of register:

... I bet
You never won at tag, and when the hammer struck
the first time, did You curse the old man or love
this last chance to feel human?

The Hicok poems are followed by Reginald Shepherd's "Miroirs." I have just finished reading his book Fata Morgana, and I am overwhelmed there and in this poem by how wonderfully Shepherd's poems fulfill an aim that he has talked about on his blog and in his essays: how the poem should be an emotional experience prior to understanding. Again and again, his poems produce an emotional effect that can be overwhelming, one that draws me in and makes me want to decipher some of the more riddling passages (the ones that non-readers of poetry would reject as "difficult").

Joseph Harrison's "The Catch" is a ballad stanza that reads like a humorous companion piece to Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish"; part of the humor comes from the fish at the center of the poem: Asian big head carp, which, the epigraph tells us, "are known for jumping into fishermen's boats."

Gail Mazur's "Little Tempest" recalls the day after the last hurricane: "Everyone was out strolling, everyone seemed pleased / in the aftermath. That cold clear light." (But then, I am a sucker for the word "aftermath.")

Dawn McGuire's "I Sleep in My Clothes" depicts a stroke victim who can still write but cannot read. McGuire, a neurologist herself, boldly approaches her figure in his first-person voice.

Finally, Joanne Lowery's "Pleasing Others" describes how "unsuccessful so far" at doing so, the speaker buries herself, to be dug up after "centuries of solitude" as a major archaeological find, when she will finally "know that I do not disappoint."

The play between understanding and emotion also features in one of my Réda translations, "The Milk of Dawn," which is about hearing Woody Herman as a youth:

In our initiation into poetry,
A major moment was the song beginning: "Milkman,
Keep those bottles quiet" — we never really fully
Understood all of what followed that command.

Heideggerian?

Adam Kirsch's essay "The Taste of Silence," in the January 2008 issue of Poetry, makes the claim that "the best document" of contemporary poetry's "metaphysical sensibility" is Martin Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art."

The way I phrased that might make you think that I find Kirsch's claim ridiculous, but I do not. The quoted phrases above are at the end of his first paragraph, and I am sure that Kirsch himself wanted to present the claim as being a bit absurd at first glance.

The essay argues cogently, however, that Heidegger's contrast between "poetry of earth" and "poetry of world" can be a useful heuristic in the interpretation of broader trends in contemporary poetry (whereby he seems to be referring primarily to English-language poetry). He paraphrases the concepts well, as far as I can tell, so if you want to know what those terms mean, read his essay (or, of course, Heidegger's).

My purpose here is to make four comments on Kirsch's essay (all of which assume you have read it):

1. At times, Kirsch seems to be arguing that the phrase I used above ("a useful heuristic") is all that he is getting at when it comes to saying that, as it were, "we are all Heideggerians now." That is, he is not saying that contemporary poets have read Heidegger; instead, he is saying that Heidegger is useful as a tool for interpreting contemporary poetry.

However, in presenting his three examples (Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Billy Collins), Kirsch does seem to make a stronger claim when he calls Simic "another poet deeply indebted to Heidegger." At that point in the essay, he has not yet discussed Collins, so by saying "another poet" about Simic, Kirsch appears to be arguing that Heaney is one poet "deeply indebted to Heidegger."

I wish he had not put it that way. Until that moment, Kirsch's essay reminded me of Borges's essay "Kafka and His Precursors," in which Borges provides a list of Kafka's precursors, none of whom Kafka himself ever read. Kafka need not have read Lord Dunsany, for example, for Kafka's work to provide a way of understanding Dunsany's work (or vice versa, Borges implies).

Similarly, I would have been perfectly happy with the claim that Heidegger helps us understand contemporary poetry, so I prefer to read the phrase "deeply indebted to Heidegger" as simply infelicitous (since I assume Kirsch did not really mean to imply that Simic is an actual reader of Heidegger).

2. I appreciate essays that do not mark their own occasion—it gets tiresome to read essays in the German press that always begin with the justification for writing about a particular author at a particular time—but in the case of this essay, I was very curious. What made Kirsch write this essay at this time? In the absence of a context, I wondered who Kirsch felt he was arguing with.

3. For two reasons, Heidegger does not seem to me to be the most appropriate twentieth-century thinker for much of what Kirsch wants to say: first, he's too mystical and obscure, even when he is trying to be down to earth; secondly, there's all that Third Reich baggage that even Kirsch feels he has to deal with explicitly in his essay.

Much of what Kirsch wants to use Heidegger for could be done as effectively, without the mystical and political problems, by referring to Victor Shklovsky and his concept of "defamiliarization," for example.

4. I have translated Heidegger's poetry (as part of my translation of the correspondence of Arendt and Heidegger). Whenever people start using Heidegger to talk about poetry, I start thinking about stuff like this:

In Jähen, raren, blitzt uns Seyn.
Wir spähen, wahren — schwingen ein.

Or, as I tried to render it:

In rare abruptness, Being's flash of light.
We peer, protect—turn towards the sight.

Heidegger may have been a good reader of Trakl, or Hölderlin, or even of Van Gogh (as in the "Work of Art" essay), but the poetry does not show that he learned much from them.

The Sensation of Writing

George Szirtes has some interesting thoughts on the "sensation of writing" (partly in response to Don Paterson's essay on "the lyric principle" in the latest Poetry Review). At the end of his post, GS writes:

"I would like to open this line of thought to others and invite any poets reading this to send me their account of the sensation of writing. Keep it honest, keep it simple. As simple as it will go, at any rate."

So I thought I'd spread the word on GS's interesting call for ideas.

Here's my take on it, at least today's. It involves three quotations:

1. In a profile in the New Yorker back in the 1990s, David Mamet said something like this: "Writing is the only thing that stops the thinking, you know. It's the only way to turn off all that dreadful noise in there." I've always loved that line, as it perfectly captures one sensation I have when writing: that it fully occupies my otherwise utterly restless mind, turning off even the almost endless musical soundtrack that plays in the back of my head (picking up on whatever I happen to have heard most recently, whether it be the music of a commercial, the theme song to a children's program I watched with my kids, or Thelonious Monk). [If anybody who reads this has the complete New Yorker in electronic form, can you try to find that profile of Mamet for me and check his precise words?)

2. One of my touchstones for a long time has been Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I": "I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." I recognize myself less in my own writing than in the writing of others (as all these quotations suggest), but in the act of writing, there is even a third person present: not the one who will later have written, and not the name that attaches itself to what that one will later have written, but the one who is writing. The one whose mind is quiet?

3. In Anna Karenina, Levin mows: "The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when it was not his arms which swung the scythe but the scythe which seemed to mow of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, as though by magic, without a thought being given to it, the work did itself regularly and carefully. Those were the most blessed moments." The "most blessed moments" in creative work are those moments when the mind is quiet, the self disappears, and the work does itself, "regularly and carefully."

Okay, I did not "keep it simple," George, but it is honest! :-)

Addendum:

And then there is the sensation of not-writing, or between-writing:

AFTERMATH

Another journey underway,
the painter on the foredeck of
the overloaded ferryboat
sees, past the sea wall and out
over the straits, the aftermath
of sunlight from behind the clouds,
a brighter form of rain. The harbor
opposite moves from blur into focus
as the ferry moves, its wake
first spray in the painter's face.
Light and cloud and mist: what is
to be captured on canvas. He'll hold
the brush in the air the way the ship,
sailing without a sail, hangs
before it falls again down on
the waves. Behind him, every stroke
he's ever painted; the unpainted
before him, this passage from one harbor
to another, the ferry rolling,
with every breaker, deeper down
in what is, what will have been.

(The Reader 16; Cabinet d'Amateur)

Jane Hirshfield (PBS Winter Books I)

Back in January, I received the Winter selections from the Poetry Book Society. This time, instead of reading them slowly, or even just shelving them unread for reading at some unspecified later date, I decided to read them all straight through, starting with the Choice, then continuing with the Recommendations in alphabetical order by author's last name:

Jane Hirshfield, After (Bloodaxe; the Choice)

Tiffany Atkinson, Kink and Particle (Seren)

Cynthia Fuller, Jack's Letters Home (Flambard)

John Fuller, The Space of Joy (Chatto & Windus)

Jacob Polley, Little Gods (Picador)

I also decided to conclude with Polley's first book, The Brink, which was a Choice that I had earlier shelved without reading.

As I began Hirshfield's book, I quickly discovered how I wanted to proceed: read fast; pay attention; wait for the poems to slow me down. And the book's fifth poem stopped me in my tracks:

HOPE: AN ASSAY

At 79 my friend says, “I feel differently now.
I thought we could change, now I am not so sure.
We are chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees fighting. I begin to lose my old hope.”

How hard he still fights, I think,
still struggling with the nature of human nature, his own and others’.
And I, who have always despaired of change,
see him change and grow hopeful.

I've always liked paradoxes, and this is a finely expressed one. Ever since I read Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality," with its analysis of Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal," I have also liked poems with two quatrains, with a turn between them, as between the octet and the sestet, but with more balance between the thesis and the antithesis than in a sonnet. I like them rhymed best of all, these poems in a form without a name (as far as I know), though strict form is otherwise not necessary (cf. Paul Muldoon's "Whitethorns"). Here, though, the back-and-forth of the paradox and the perspectives makes the poem well worth stopping and thinking about.

The next poem was "To Judgment: An Assay," but I read on. Still, a few pages later, I did come to lines, in the conclusion of another "assay," "Sky: An Assay," that slowed me down because of their connection to the change and stasis addressed in "Hope":

And so we look right past sky, by it, through it,
to what also is moody and alters—
erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distinct but death-bound.

The issues of the earlier "assay" reappear here in a new form, and again I enjoyed the paradoxes: mountains, moons, and stars are often considered unalterable, but Hirshfield's poem identifies even them as malleable, like the friend and the speaker in "Hope."

Now I had something besides individual poems to look for; I had themes, and they began popping up—sometimes in even more "assays," but also in poems that did not have that "genre" in the title:

What would it be
to take up no position,
to lie on this earth at rest, relieved of proof or charge?

[...]

'Reflection',
we call the mountain in the lake,
whose existence resides in neither stone nor water.

("Articulation: An Assay")

The dream, like the dog, went on, travelled elsewhere.
Passed by the moment when everything might have been changed.
Passed by the moment of knowing I wanted everything changed.

("Transcendence: An Assay")

Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.
Only the reminder that there is exception.

("What Is Usual Is Not What Is Always")

All this, and I was only on page 24 of a 95-page book! If I still did serious scholarship, I'd have begun collecting material for an essay (or perhaps an "assay").

But Hirshfield still managed to slow me down in other ways, too, as in "Poe: An Assay":

His stories were not intended for the canine heart that howls inside us,
though he fed it the tidbits it needed to stay near.

"Vilnius" made me stop because I had recently written my essay on Robert Frost's "The Mountain"; Hirshfield's poem begins with guidebooks on a table, then shifts gears:

Behind them—sometimes behind thick fog—the mountain.
If you lived high up on the mountain,
I find myself thinking, what you would see is
More of everything else, but not the mountain.

Hirshfield can also be quite funny, as in a prose "assay" about the word "of":

"... though one thing also connects to another through 'and,' this is not the same. Consider: 'Science and elephants.' 'The science of elephants.' 'The elephants of science.'"

It's easy and fun to just go on quoting good bits:

Yet your work requires
both transience and transformation:
night changes to day, snow to rain, the shoulder of the living pig to meat.

[...]

And so we say 'today', 'tomorrow'.
But from yesterday, like us, you have vanished.

("'To': An Assay")

Before disappears.
After transforms into others.
'And'—that strong rock—stays standing.

("'And': An Assay")

These passages, which I underlined while reading, both develop the themes of "Hope" and other poems in the book and are simply quotable on their own terms. Hirshfield proves again and again to be a great fashioner of aphoristic, thought-provoking lines.

But I wasn't just slowing down to underline passages; I also found myself stopping at several other superb poems. The following poem brought to mind "Borges and I," by Jorge Luis Borges, which I have long treasured:

THE DOUBLE

More and more I have come to wonder
about this stranger—
woman whose sweaters and coats resemble my own,

whose taste in breads and coffee
resembles my own,
who sleeps when I sleep, wakens when I awaken.

For her,
whose verb-form takes the felicitous s at its close,
what happens is simply what happens.

I fret the most slender of errors—
the name forgotten, the borrowed book unreturned—

but never have found her holding a teacup
or coin between her fingers
as if its substance and purpose were something she did not comprehend.

How self-assured she seems,
who decides nothing,
whose insomnia is to my own what the shadow of a leaf is to a leaf.

I am tired, but she is not tired.
I am wordless;
she, who has never spoken a word of her own,
is full of thoughts as precise and impassioned
as the yellow and black exchanges of a wasp's striped body.

For a long time I thought her imposter.
Then realized:
her jokes, even her puns, are only too subtle for me to follow.

And so we go on, mostly ignoring each other,
though what I cook, she eats with seeming gusto,
and letters intended for her alone I open with a curious ease,
as if I, not she, were the long-accomplished thief.

Or, as Hirshfield puts it in "I Imagine Myself in Time," two pages later:

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say?

While rereading those lines, I was reminded of the Robert Creeley poem that has always been my favorite, which, coincidentally, is, like Hirshfield's book, called "After":

AFTER

I'll not write again
things a young man
thinks, not the words
of that feeling.

There is no world
except felt, no
one there but
must be here also.

If that time was
echoing, a vindication
apparent, if flesh
and bone coincided—

let the body be.
See faces float
over the horizon let
the day end.

But back to Hirshfield. If you have read this far, and now that I have written this far, it is clear that this I was really impressed by this book. In fact, I had pretty much forgotten how impressed I had been; now, as I have finally found the time to type up my thoughts about the PBS Winter books, I am even more impressed by the book. Instead of going on even further, I'll close my comments on Hirshfield with two links to poems ("To Opinion" — the phrase "An Assay" is not in the book version — and "Bad Year") and two more quotations:

Like the radio heard while travelling in a foreign country—
you know that something important has happened, but not what.

("Termites: An Assay")

And from "Letter to C." (C. is Czeslaw Milosz):

This did not keep you from forming your theory—
Whitman's poetry as one cause of the First World War.
Incomprehensible to Americans, obvious to a Lithuanian Pole.

Some readers of this blog (if they have read this far) might well have heard me tell the story about how Milosz presented this theory to a friend of mine, a graduate student then working on a dissertation on Whitman. How my friend enjoyed telling that story (a great storyteller telling a story about another great storyteller).

One last point about After: shortly after I read it, I came across the Poetry Foundation's December list of best-selling poetry books in the U.S. After was number 12 on the list at the time; I just checked the latest list (April 2007), but it is no longer on the list. I was surprised to see Hirshfield selling so well, but in retrospect, I understand her popularity: her work drew me in and gave me a great deal to think about (as the length of my comments on her book shows).

[This discussion continues: Part Two, on Tiffany Atkinson's Kink and Particle, Part Three, on Cynthia Fuller's Jack's Letters Home, Part Four, on John Fuller's The Space of Joy.]

Songs to play

"I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges and I")

Many people have been posting lists of songs that blow their minds. My list of songs includes those that it blows my mind to play. In alphabetical order by title, with the line I most like to sing:

1. Comes a Time, by Neil Young

It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down

2. Friend of the Devil, by The Grateful Dead

Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night

(especially on mandolin)

3. I Love Paris, by Cole Porter

I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles

(Oh, that shift from minor to major!)

4. If I Had Known, by Greg Brown

Summer was invented for her to wear that dress

(That line is so cool that I stop strumming to sing it)

5. New Coat of Paint, by Tom Waits

Heard the mystery shuffle of an overflowin' day

6. No Woman, No Cry, by Bob Marley (though it was written by Vincent Ford, Marley's guitar player at the time)

In this great future, you can't forget your past

7. Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

8. Things We Said Today, by The Beatles

Me I'm just a lucky guy

9. What a Wonderful World, by Sam Cooke

Maybe by being an A student, baby, I could win your love for me

10. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, by Bob Dylan

I could stay with you forever and never realize the time