A while back I bookmarked this essay by Kathy Lou Schultz, but when I returned to it the URL had expired. I have found it elsehwere, however, and feature it here. It seems to me to be an authentic and honest grappling with the intractable issue of class as it pertains to writing, writers, MFA programs, and identity.

Here is Kathy Lou Schultz's web site:

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~klou/


And here is the essay:

"Talking Trash, Talking Class: What's a Working Class Poetic, and Where Would I Find One?"

by Kathy Lou Schultz

for my grandmothers: Donna Gene (Ewing) Manthey and
Christina Katherina (Sanders) Schultz


I've spent years trying to reconcile being a poet with being working class. Yet, walking home from work one day it occurred to me, such a reconciliation is not only improbable, it is also undesirable. My language comes out of, indeed is exalted toward, the space created where these two identities refuse to meld inside of me. In that messy, dangerous space the possibilities of language are expanded.

What does a "working class poem" look like?
How does it sound?
How does it behave?
What if I'm "too intellectual," "too confident," "too experimental," "too fragmented"?

Growing up working class has given me skills, perspectives, and knowledge which are a part of every decision I make. Growing up working class taught me how to survive. Growing up working class is part of my very breathing. How are "poetries of identity" created? How are they made normative? When I say "working class poem," "working class writer," what do you hear? Tillie Olson, Kevin Magee, Mike Amnasan, Karen Brodine, Rebecca Harding Davis, Meridel Le Sueur, Agnes Smedley, Dorothy Allison, Mike Davis, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Barbara Smith.

And who? Who does not survive in our language?

Anxiety is a sticky substance infused with fear. Dollar for dollar. Or, for instance, poverty. My own collusion in bourgeois appearances bleeding me dry. The need to be seen or recognized outweighing other emotional vaunts.

This is the most difficult essay I have ever not written, for as much time as I spend writing it, I spend more not writing it, carrying it around knotted and unruly.

•••

A discourse around class and poetics is lacking, if not invisible. While it is now possible to identify a trajectory of experimental women's writing, to inhabit a vocabulary of gender and sexuality, references to class often remain just that: mere codes. Several problematic issues arise both in the writing of, and writing about, what we might call "working class poetry."

First, the drive to create "poetries of identity" (a phrase I've been using for some time) tends to solidify normalizing tendencies in terms of form, style, and content, i.e. does a poem have to be narrative, "I"-based and "about" work in order to be considered "working class"? Furthermore, drawing a straight line between one's identity and one's poetics is problematic at best and confuses the biographical information about the poet with poetic works that genuinely seek to explore, unseat, complicate subjectivity.

The obvious point to be made is that identities are infinitely mediated and complex; coming from a particular class, race, gender is not--and should not be--the map through which one can trace a trajectory toward a particular type of poetic expression. That said, I still consider Lorine Niedecker (along with being a great Modernist, experimental, American, woman writer) to be a great working class writer. It is part of providing myself with a history.

Dear Hilda, Dear Wallace, Dear Michael, Dear Frederick

Dear Marianne, Dear ball and stick, Dear K, Dear K, Dear K, Dear K



A language of provisional objects

A language of hunger



The head of the hammer

flying off and cracking



Or a spade unable to overturn

the solid earth



Does the word "proletarian" refer?

See now, a figure described as my grandmother crossing a room



Replace "I" with "salt in a bag"

In the face of my parents' illiteracy

all the ravages

My anxieties race through me at a difference pace, clutching at my lungs, my throat, making it difficult to swallow or breathe. My childhood anxiety wasn't made up of monsters in the closet, or fear of the dark. My anxiety was tied to something which my parents could only haltingly save me from, something which they toiled vigorously to save the entire family from: poverty. The threat of falling into poverty, losing one's health, losing a job, that looms over the working class creates particular anxieties, mental health issues, and survival strategies. I learned to take care of myself early because it was required. During much of my childhood, my parents each worked two jobs, and I was often alone. Now in her fifties, my mother faces health problems which I can only attribute to years of overwork.

I took care of myself. I struggled. I got angry. Though the idea that I would go to college was with me from a young age, there was no such thing as a "college fund" to pay for it; my parents had no money to sent me to college. If I were to go, I had to figure out the way myself. And I did. I became an incredible over-achiever. I racked up academic awards, anxiety, and rage. I knew I must always do more, be better, to prove myself worthy. I took nothing for granted.

Education is like a religion for the working class. It's the "way out." Of course, at the present moment, that both is and isn't true. This news has reached even popular journals, such as Spin, which reports in its October 1997 article on "Sucker Ph.D.'s":

More than one third of all new history Ph.D.s will never find full-time teaching work, according to the American Historical Associations' own newsletter, paltry numbers given the mammoth amount of time you have to invest to discover your fate. Across all fields, 40,000-plus students will receive their doctorates this year. Few have illusions about what awaits them: a handful of good jobs, each sought by hundreds of applicants; university presses less and less willing to publish the academic books needed to gain tenure; protracted separations from loved ones. Grad school, an option nearly every halfway idealistic college student contemplates, has become an invitation to purgatory.

This brings me to the inevitable discussion of MFA programs. Camille Roy, in a recent discussion on the SUNY Buffalo Poetics ListServ interestingly points out that when she first came to the Bay Area, there were resources available in the community for writers to learn more about their craft, such as the free workshops offered by Bob Gluck through Small Press Traffic. Roy attributes the current institutionalization of such resources into university MFA programs, where people must pay for access, to dwindling funding for the arts.

This is a very difficult situation, and while it is true that few poor and working class people will apply themselves to a graduate program, such as an MFA, which virtually guarantees that they will not find a job, some institutions such as San Francisco State University are historically very working class. Like other working class folks, I worked full-time while completing my MFA in poetry at State. It took me five years to complete the three-year program, and during that time I endured a level of exhaustion and stress which had adverse effects on my health. (I was almost hospitalized in the middle of it in 1993.)

In addition, it must be pointed out that not everyone enters such a program with equal amounts of privilege, and completing a degree, while providing for the acquisition of particular cultural capital, is not a great leveler. Working class people are often worse off when graduating because of the massive student loan debts they carry with them.

So why did I do it? Because my working class heritage has imbued me with a stubbornness which allows one small part of myself to refuse to accept that I am not allowed to have what other people have just because they come from wealthy families and I don't. I wanted to learn. I wanted an intellectual community. I wanted a writing community. Are MFA programs the best answer to all of that? Certainly not, but I did gain some of what I wanted in all three of those areas. And I existed at State, much more than I did as an undergraduate at Columbia University and Oberlin College, because I could look around and see my experience reflected, and not feel so much the horrible grating of isolation.

the passage of place
in desire
a geometric development
heretofore opposed to wake
pronouncements and sedentary acts
the startling possibility of collectivity
when money has everything and nothing to do with it
"I'm just trying to get us both on the same page"

People assume they know who I am because I am white, because I am "educated," because I am reasonably articulate. But my efforts to be "good enough" have been too successful: they have helped to erase who I am. I pass so well, but you look through me, and what you do not see says so much.

My own writing comes out of those points of pressure and contradiction. The education which introduced me to Anne-Marie Albiach, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Blanchot, post-structuralism, and experimental narrative, also ensures that I am a stranger to my own family. I now speak at least two languages. I cannot forget, or erase, one in favor of the other in the difficult act of writing. Amphibious, we live in both worlds, but belong to neither.

Writing which brings to bear the full force of one's psychic, material (body and word) power is not sweet or delicate. It is not "safe." To fully inhabit the world of working class subjectivity in a poem requires that I withstand an incredible emotional pressure. I scratch away at the codes or placeholders which seem to want to denote class, and try to find what lies underneath. In the face of silence, only my stutter.

While literacy is certainly an issue when discussing the "accessibility" of innovative works, I have sat with readers with high school educations and Ph.D.'s alike while they encountered similar challenges and delights in unlayering a poem. I refuse to assume or presume my audience–any audience–during my writing process. To assume that the "true" working class poem is only a narrative exposition of working class "experience," is to buy into normative reading patterns established by post-WWII academic poetries in the U.S. This assumption precludes the full possibilities of language, isolating working class poets to a particular kind of expressionism. It would be difficult to find a parallel prescription placed on the depiction of class in other art forms.

The difficulty in discussing class and poetics reflects the larger obfuscation of class within American culture. While Labor is becoming more visible as we near the end of the 20th century, and the intelligentsia faces a job market of dwindling opportunity and wealth is concentrated in the hands of an increasing few, the myth of a "classless" society persists. (Have you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps lately?)

Too often, class is conflated with race in a fuzzy-headed analysis that fails to account for the conflicting privileges/oppressions of race and class. I continue to believe that it is extremely valuable for white working class people to speak out about their experiences and interrogate what it means to live simultaneously not only with racial privilege, but also under economic oppression. Exploring these kinds of contradictions is the only way that theory will catch up with praxis.

As someone both white and working class, I have often been painfully invisible, particularly in academic environments where it was much more comfortable for white academics to assume that I was "like them" despite evidence to the contrary. One woman at Oberlin repeatedly insisted to my face, "You're like me? your parents have money." The fact that I was not supported financially by my parents was a foreign concept to her, and far too many others. I had to insist on my own existence, insist on the right to my own experience, and avoid being put in the position of taking care of their feelings of guilt.

Writing is thievery, as in stealing time. I will forever be envious of those who are afforded the material conditions and privilege in which to write. Those whose parents paid for them to go to college. Those who grew up blissfully unaware of financial struggle. Those whose families are able to provide them with a crucial safety net in times of crisis. These people have the things that I always wanted, but will never have. I can't go back and change that. I can only fight to harness my fear and rage in a way which returns me to the page in a productive way as a poet who believes that issues of power and privilege are of vital importance.



This essay first appeared in tripwire: a journal of poetics, no. 1, Spring, 1998.

Kathy Lou Schultz was born in Burke, South Dakota and grew up in central Nebraska. She left Nebraska at age 18 to attend Columbia University in New York. She finished her B.A. at Oberlin College and earned an MFA at San Francisco State University. Her publications include Genealogy (a+bend press, 1999) and Re dress (San Francisco State University, 1994). She is a founding editor of Lipstick Eleven and Duck Press.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAMES BALDWIN

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations. Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply."

Sometimes, as a teacher, I feel like one of those honeybees who come back to the hive and do a little funky dance that tells the rest of the clan where the nectar is.

Lately, I have been browsing the Michigan Quarterly Review’s site where every issue since their first in 1962 has been archived. There’s a whole lot of nectar there. You can read every word of every issue, from Saul Bellow’s essay, “Where Do We Go from Here: The Future of Fiction” in their first issue, to works by Yevtushenko, C. K. Williams, Charles Simic, and Joyce Carol Oates in 1997, or more recent issues, including Winter 2007, with work by Nicholas Delbanco, Charles Baxter, and an interview with Arthur Miller.

Here’s the URL: http://quod.lib.umich.edu:80/m/mqr/index.html

This site seems to me to be the model for how a print magazine can best offer itself to readers and researchers, i.e. for free, and in celebration of its own inclusive aesthetic.

Along these lines, Ploughshares has been busy archiving the equally fine work of its past issues at http://www.pshares.org/issues/

Not since the episode of The Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith survives a nuclear blast and has all the books of the world to himself has a reader’s fantasy so emphatically come true! Careful you don’t drop your glasses…

Anyway, that's the buzz. (Sorry.)

All depends on the skin.

All depends on the skin you’re living in.

All depends on the skin.



Sekou Sundiata: 1948 -- 2007




















July 21, 2007 — NEW YORK

Sekou Sundiata, a poet and performance artist whose work explored slavery, subjugation, and the tension between personal and national identity, especially as they inform the black experience in America, died Wednesday in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 58 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was heart failure, said his producer, Ann Rosenthal. At his death, Mr. Sundiata was a professor in the writing program of Eugene Lang College of New School University.

Mr. Sundiata's art, which defied easy classification, ranged from poems performed in the style of an oral epic to musical, dance and dramatic works infused with jazz, blues, funk, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. In general, as he once said in a television interview, it entailed "the whole idea of text and noise, cadences and pauses."

His work was performed widely throughout the United States and abroad, staged by distinguished organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A.

Among Mr. Sundiata's most recent works was "the 51st (dream) state," an interlaced tapestry of poetry, music, dance, and videotaped interviews that explores what it means to be an American in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Mr. Sundiata was born Robert Franklin Feaster in Harlem on Aug. 22, 1948; he adopted the African name Sekou Sundiata in the late 1960s. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from City College of New York in 1972 and a master's degree in creative writing from the City University of New York in 1979.

Mr. Sundiata, who performed with the folk rock artist Ani DiFranco as part of her "Rhythm and News" tour in 2001, released several CDs of music and poetry, including "The Blue Oneness of Dreams" and "longstoryshort." His work was also featured on television, on the HBO series "Def Poetry" and the PBS series "The Language of Life."

© 2007, Chicago Tribune


Here is Sundiata’s page at the Academy of American Poets:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5809

And here is the poet performing his “Bring On the Reparations”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWhnZPeW644

This is an NPR interview with the poet:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4561097

And, finally, Bill Moyers’ blog has a great clip of Sundiata performing:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2007/07/remembering_sekou_sundiata.html

Philip Booth, a Shy Poet Rooted in New England Life, Dead at 81

by Roja Heydarpour

Philip Booth, a poet known for his explorations of existence and New England in an intense, sparse style, died on July 2 in Hanover, N.H. He was 81 and had split his time between Hanover and Castine, Me., for many years.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his daughter Carol Booth.

Mr. Booth wrote 10 books of poetry, including “The Islanders,” “Weathers and Edges,” “Letter From a Distant Land” and “Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999.” He also wrote a book of essays about writing poetry called “Trying to Say It: Outlooks and Insights on How Poems Happen.” He received recognition and honors from many institutions, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

The sense of privacy that made poetry lovers appreciate Mr. Booth’s work ultimately cost him fame. He spent hours upon hours writing and revising in his room, Ms. Booth said, drawing material from deeper and deeper within his emotional landscape. He rarely traveled on book tours or did readings for large groups.

Stephen Dunn, a former student of Mr. Booth’s and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, wrote in an e-mail message after Mr. Booth’s death, “Booth’s quest was to deepen as opposed to range widely, and in that sense he was a poet of consciousness, even when his subject seemed to be the dailiness of Castine or the vagaries of sailing.”

Philip Edmund Booth was born in Hanover and spent most of his life there and in Castine, the city where his mother grew up and where he first learned to sail. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II and married Margaret Tillman in 1946.

In addition to his wife, of Hanover, and his daughter Carol, of Amherst, Mass., Mr. Booth is survived by two other daughters, Margot, of Austin, Tex., and Robin, of Rowe, Mass.; and a sister, Lee Klunder, of Hartland, Vt.

He received his bachelor’s degree in English at Dartmouth, where he studied under Robert Frost, and a master’s degree in English at Columbia University. He later taught English at Bowdoin College and Wellesley College in the 1950s but spent the majority of his career at Syracuse University, where he was a professor, a poet in residence and a co-founder of the graduate program in creative writing.

In a poem called “First Lesson,” Mr. Booth wrote to a daughter:

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

***


Here is the entire poem quoted in the obit:


FIRST LESSON

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.




TALK ABOUT WALKING

Where am I going? I'm going
out, out for a walk. I don't
know where except outside.
Outside argument, out beyond
wallpapered walls, outside
wherever it is where nobody
ever imagines. Beyond where
computers circumvent emotion,
where somebody shorted specs
for rivets for airframes on
today's flights. I'm taking off
on my own two feet. I'm going
to clear my head, to watch
mares'-tails instead of TV,
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I'm going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I'm going?
I don't. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I'll be back
I'm not going to say.

***

And here is a poem heartbreaking in its irony, given Booth’s death from Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was written when Booth first suspected the onset of his dementia?



LIKE A WOMAN

Like a woman
I loved, I say
words to the dark,
not to suffer.
Grown as I am,
I'm far from
immune: if I'm
in for it long
I want mind to
hold on, words in
my throat ready
to name it. Let
me keep fury
to stay against
pain; if it
is given me
to learn I mean
to know it all
the way, to bear
it like a woman.

***

Russell Astley’s critical essay on Booth in Patricia Eakin’s fine, now-defunct magazine, Frigate:

http://www.frigatezine.com/review/poetry/rpy02har.html


Booth’s page at The Academy of American Poets site:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/175

For a couple of years during my twenties I carried a certain book with me nearly everywhere I went: The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell. I have no idea how I came to have it (I am an inveterate browser and believer in the serendipity of bookstores, especially sprawling used bookstores, and even then I am always drawn to the piles of books on tables that the staff has not yet had time to shelve) but it seemed to bless me. It seemed to say to me, as I read slowly, often only a paragraph or two at a time, that poetry was as important as I felt it to be, that making poems was tapping into something, a deep knowledge that, with skill, could be accessed, embodied and communicated, and that as a mode of discovery, it was as valuable as its more privileged sibling, science.

In fact, that’s not really what Sewell has to say in The Orphic Voice. Tracing the split between Science and Poetry to Francis Bacon, she argues that they are the same inquiry, carried out by the same human consciousness. We are in error if we fall into the “two cultures” trap. She traces that error to the fact that Bacon, as she writes, “was a poet who did not trust poetry.” Early in the book she cites an experiment in which scientists were asked to describe what poets do, and poets to describe what scientists are after. Of course neither recognized itself in the description of the other, although both thrilled to a common description of the work of discovering how the world might be ordered, how that order might be represented, and how that system of representation is itself a process of ordering. Orpheus sings the creation into a dynamic order. Linnaeus the first taxonomer writes his book in verse. The world is the product of similarities and differences, resemblances, metaphor. So is language, its mirror and mythology.

I can only scratch the surface here, and I only mean to recommend the book to anyone who suspects that poetry has an existential, organic function in the workings of consciousness.

Interestingly enough, Sewell herself was a political poet, and not only on occasion. She was active in the civil rights movement and wrote a powerful elegy for murdered activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. I was an undergraduate at Fordham University when she was there presiding over Bensalem, the Experimental College, founded in 1967, but I had no idea about her at all. Bensalem was in an apartment building across the street from the Rose Hill campus, and I often went there for political meetings or to drink red wine and get high. I was two or three years out of college when I came upon her book, and I don’t think I even made the connection to the bent and somewhat frail woman I sometimes saw on campus.

But enough: here are some excerpts from The Orphic Voice (long out of print, but still possible to track down at your local used bookstore perhaps, or else at a good academic library):

It is of the nature of mind and language together, that they form an instrument capable of an indefinite number of developments. It matters very little whether the particular devisors or users of the instrument saw, at the point in time when they flourished, its full implications.

We always say more than we know. This is one of the reasons for language's apparent imprecision. It is no reason for refusing language our confidence.

***

Modern thought supposes that human beings are capable of two sorts of thinking, the logical and the imaginative. We are endowed with the faculties of intellect and imagination — allied, since both are mental, but distinct in their methods and fields of operation. The intellect is the "mind," properly so-called, and its essential function is abstract and logical thought. The imagination is more closely knit with the body (witness its habit, in myth, of expressing all concepts in terms of bodies, of embodying its ideas, in fact, and the close connection of myth with rite or bodily action), and it operates in the more primitive forms of dreams, myth, ritual, and art.

Science and poetry, mathematics and words, intellect and imagination, mind and body: they are old, they are perfected and tidy, they are mistaken. If we can dispose of these recurring antitheses which the last 400 years have, with the best of intentions, bequeathed us, we can turn to bequests made on our behalf by other ancestors, for they are there and ready to help. We have given ourselves credit, as human beings, for rather more and rather less than we possess. The human organism, that body which has the gift of thought, does not have the choice of two kinds of thinking. It has only one, in which the organism as a whole is engaged all along the line. There has been no progression in history from one type of thought to another. We are merely learning to use what we have been given, which is all of a piece. This means too that we have to admit and affirm our solidarity with the thinking of the child and the savage. All thinking is of the same kind, and it is this we have to try to understand and to exercise.

***

In its beginnings, language is acknowledged by scholars to have been essentially figurative, imaginative, synthesizing, and mythological rather than analytical and logical. Schelling, for instance, says, “Is it not evident that there is poetry in the actual material formation of languages?” and other writers have said the same. Myth and metaphor, living instruments of a lively speech, are not ornaments and artifices tacked on to language but something in the stuff of language and hence of the mind itself. Language is poetry, and a poem is only the resources of language used to the full.

We have come to believe, however, that there is another kind of language, not figurative but literal or logical. It is widely accepted that with advancing civilization comes a progress from imaginative and mythological and poetic turns of speech toward the logical, precise, nonfigurative. Within our own culture, philosophers, logicians, and scientists seem to have striven for this for nearly 400 years, anxious to purify language, in the name of precision, from this very element of unclearness we have glimpsed already, from myth, metaphor, and poetry. Analytical thinking — logic and mathematics, in unison — has been set up as the model to which word-thought was to conform. Recent endeavors to develop languages which are mathematical structures of propositions are the outcome. This is a language-as-science, in its more or less extreme form.

***

The nature of language has been much studied. So has its history. We're after something else: not nature or history but something nearer what we mean by natural history, a dynamic inquiry into process, a natural history of mind and language. Language is to be conceived of not as an entity but as an activity; not in itself, for one must always avoid the metaphor of saying that language is alive, but in conjunction with a mind, with numbers and series of minds in time. Language utterances become events in this kind of thinking. Every poem and recounted myth and scientific hypothesis and theological statement and theory of politics or history and every philosophy become records of happenings at particular times, all of which, if they have any life in them at all, have the capacity to be taken further, in varying degrees, by other minds present and to come. This means giving up the right to abstract language into timeless pattern, and making the effort to grasp it not as a fixed phenomenon but as a moving event, language plus mind, subject to time and process and change — to try to think in biological terms, perhaps.

To further whet your appetite, here is the book’s Contents page:

Preface

Part I Introduction

Part II Bacon and Shakespeare: Postlogical Thinking

Part III Erasmus Darwin and Goethe: Linnaean and Ovidian Taxonomy

Part IV Wordsworth and Rilke: Toward a Biology of Thinking

Part V Working Poems for The Orphic Voice

Notes

Index


***

And so. Read The Orphic Voice. Go slowly. Think. Reflect. You may find there an old well-spring satisfying to your thirst.

Here is a link to some of Sewell’s poems:

http://www.questia.com/library/book/poems-1947-1961-by-elizabeth-sewell.jsp

And here is a reminiscence of Sewell which was published as an obituary. There’s a lot of mention of the philosopher Michael Polanyi in it. The Orphic Voice is dedicated to him:

On Reuniting Poetry and Science: A Memoir of Elizabeth Sewell, 1919-2001
by
David Schenck and Phil Mullins

(This essay is an obituary notice for Elizabeth Sewell, a long-time friend of Michael Polanyi and a well-known poet, novelist and critic.)

Elizabeth Sewell, internationally known poet, critic, novelist, and friend of Michael Polanyi died January 12, 2001, in Greensboro NC. She was 81. Sewell was born in India in 1919 of English parents and educated in England, taking her B.A. in Modern Languages from Cambridge University in 1942. She performed war service in the Ministry of Education in London from 1942-45, and then returned to Cambridge to complete her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in Modern Languages. Sewell received from her family background and classical education a familiaritywith English literature, history, liturgy, and style that marked her entire life's work. She came to the UnitedStates in 1949, just after completing her graduate work. After many years of trans-Atlantic commuting, she became an American citizen in 1973.

Some readers will recall that Sewell was a participant in the 1991 Kent State Polanyi Centennial Conference where she enchanted the audience by reading a lengthy poem. She was delighted by the Kent State meeting where she renewed old friendships (some other earlier Polanyi-related conferences at Bowdoin and Dayton that she attended she reported were not so pleasant). After this 1991 gathering, she prepared and deposited in the University of Chicago Polanyi archives a 44 page memoir that comments on the ways in which Michael Polanyi's friendship contributed to her work as a poet. Becoming acquainted with Polanyi was altogether serendipity: Sewell met Magda Polanyi in thesummer of 1954 at an international conference at Alpback in Austria, where she was running a seminar on the modern European novel. Magda and John Polanyi showed up the first day in her seminar; although Mrs. Polanyi did not take the seminar, she one day invited Sewell to join her for conversation in a local cafe. Sewell described herself to Mrs. Polanyi as a poet who had woven together mathematics, logic, physics and poetry; she was now beginning to explore the connection between poetry and natural history and was soon to depart for a year at Fordham University. By chance, Sewell reports that she made a comment that ultimately led to her coming to Manchester University on a fellowship from 1955-57 and to her friendship with Michael Polanyi: “But as I look back I have a funny sense that I uttered a key word somewhere along the line,and that word was crystallography. Magda in response uttered two key words, keys to my life though neither of us knew that at the time. She said, "You must meet my husband," and "You must apply for a Simon Fellowship at Manchester University.”

Sewell applied for the Simon Fellowship after her year in New York and, with strong support from Michael Polanyi, received the award, although a poet had never previously been awarded this fellowship. She came toManchester, a city that she grew to love, in 1955, and eventually became a frequent guest at the Polanyi household. She was formally attached to the Philosophy Department and this was an uneasy marriage that contributed to her link to the Polanyi family. In Manchester, Sewell began work on The Orphic Voice, a work that was dedicated to Michael Polanyi and her most popular book in North America. Clearly, Sewell found in Polanyi's interests and his writing a kindred spirit. She describes her joy in first reading Science, Faith and Society: at finding “an unimpeachable scientific voice so friendly, as it seemed to me, to what I wasgroping after in this second attempt on my part to reunite the disciplines of science and poetry as I had tried to do with my first book, The Structure of Poetry, originally my dissertation which had aroused so much antagonism, at college and university level, atCambridge, that amnesiac place since poetry and science are its two great glories which it now determines to keep in total separation each from each.”

Sewell was in Manchester in the years just prior to the publication of Personal Knowledge. She is identified in the "Acknowledgments" as one of four people who read the whole manuscript and suggested improvements. In her memoir, she describes the process of reading and responding to several chapters of the manuscript. She was particularly appreciative of "Intellectual Passions," which she found aptly described her work as a poet: “Intellectual Passion was Michael's subject-matter but also that which he embodied superbly and communicated to us, and when my own work suddenly and decisively found its own method and metaphor, that kind of passion, known to me since my first such experience at Cambridge and then resting awhile as one pursued other paths, returned with vehemence, indeed almost one might say, obsession.”

Sewell was a visiting writer or professor at many colleges and universities in the United States including, in addition to Fordham, Vassar, Princeton, Bennett, California State, Tugaloo, Central Washington State, Hunter, California at Irvine, Trent, Notre Dame, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, LehighUniversity, Converse College, and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received honorarydegrees from many colleges and universities including Fordham University (1968) and the University ofNotre Dame (1984). In addition to the Simon Fellowship at Manchester University (1955-57), Sewell also held the Howard Research Fellowship at Ohio State University (1949-50), and was an Ashley Fellow at Trent University (1979), and a Presidential Scholar at Mercer University (1982). Sewell's major works include criticism —The Structure of Poetry (1951, l963), Paul Valéry: TheMind in the Mirror (1952), The Field of Nonsense (1952), The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History(1960, 1972), and The Human Metaphor (1964); novels —The Dividing of Time (1952), The Singular Hope (1955), Now Bless Thyself (1962), and The Unlooked-For (1995); poetry-Poems, 1947-1961 (1962), Signs and Cities (1968), and Acquist (1984); essays — To Be a True Poem (1979); and a memoir — An Idea(1983).

In addition to these volumes, Sewell published dozens of short stories, essays, articles and poems in periodicals in the United States, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Russia. At her death, she left completed manuscripts on William Blake, and on the French reception of Lewis Carroll. Left incomplete was a translation and commentary project on Giordano Bruno and the Renaissance tradition of high magic. Her papers are on deposit with the Department of Special Collections of the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University.

Phil Mullins (mullins@mwsc.edu) has been the editor of Tradition and Discovery since 1991. He tried on more than one occasion to get Elizabeth Sewell to publish something in TAD.

David Schenck was a friend of Elizabeth Sewell. He studied with Ruel Tyson and did a dissertation directed by Bill Poteat.

***

And then I checked my email and this poem arrived from Poetry International, a poem that speaks to this very subject (if it is a “subject”) — I told you I believe in serendipity!

THE FIRST NOISE

No, it is not the intonation
It is not the rhythm
Not even the meaning.
It is the word by itself
Mouthless.
And who would ever care about
What the poet says?

What matters is the ritual
The metaphor of what we’ve always been
The memory of the first vocal sound
“the secret language of the birds
of the first day”

Today’s man is out of tune
He has forgotten the words.
Someone stammers something
And everyone arrives, it’s the ritual
The transition
Memory,
the substitution,
The endless metaphor
What strange analogy is man?

The poet says nothing
But a living being comes out of his throat
Invisible, having only sound
And an ancient music.
We remember then the original sound
The first sound in the world
When the word became blood
And collective food.

With time came verses
But the birds no longer cared about it
The poet speaks, sings or prays
And wants to name the world
In all forms.
He invokes the spirits
And calls the other
“I will people myself with voices,” he says,
and turns to his metaphor which is of fire.

But the word keeps silent
The word is the grandfather of the species
The word is sense
It is power and walking stick.


© Álvaro Marín
© Translation: 2007, Nicolás Suescún

Poem of the Week:
http://colombia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=9618

Álvaro Marín’s page:
http://colombia.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=9608

This poem, along with visual art by Lisa Sette, is the latest offering from Broadsided Press. (See links.)


The Car Covenant

O give us individual mobility and daily we will embrace death.
Give us miles to the gallon and things made small by moving swiftly away.
We will sacrifice certain teenagers to the oak tree.

Make the sunrise manifest in the sideview and the periphery a roar of shouldercorn.
Make our existence portable beyond the white picket fence with internal combustion.
Ours will be the Kerouac and the Conoco, those empty shells of orangegreen HoJos.

Give us eternal direction divided by nice green strips, the whirring sound of pistonbirth.
Make the miles a whetstone to our way, the highmetal quick to the skyheavy horizon.
We will aisle it with junk and liquid drug, with the sacrament of Big Mac and more gas.

Make us in you all ergonomic and airconditioned, arrive us deodored and relieved, ready
whenever to leave.
Take us fast into the samemore, diminish everything left behind us.
We will eat the doubleyellow in the blackscreennight.

We will go wakka wakka wakka,
O sing, wakka wakka wakka.


Poet Robert Strong lives north of the Adirondack park and bikes to work year round. He is editor of Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry and author of Puritan Spectacle, from which this poem is adapted.

My friend the poet Mario Noel Rodriguez of El Salvador sent me the following statement, signed by many of Colombia’s writers, artists, and intellectuals, addressing the intractable bloody civil war there. I have brought it over into English as best I could, but I include the original also for those who can read Spanish.

For those who do not know about the recent history and present situation of Colombia, you’ll find the women’s commission report on the war here. It is clear why this conflict continues to rage out of control, not so clear how to stop it.

http://www.womenscommission.org/pdf/co_wl.pdf

CNN calls this “War Without End” — their site is a fine place to start to try to understand the complex issues that are driving the ongoing slaughter:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/colombia.noframes/

And so, here is the letter:

A LETTER FROM THE ARTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS
by La Paz of Colombia

Indignant and hurt by the war that devastates our country, by the continuation of paramilitary barbarism, by the infamy of clandestine cemeteries and schools of butchery, by a Law of Justice and Peace that is neither peace nor justice, but prizes and the pardon for the worse assassins in the history of Colombia, by laws that, in addition, hide the truth, the very principle and essence of justice; by the politicians throughout the country who sponsored the formation of those criminal groups, by the ruling corruption in the Colombian State; by three million displaced, the majority of them mothers and their children. By increasing social inequality, by the despoliation of the territory of the indigenous populations and the black communities, by increasing violations of sovereignty, by internal and external powers that profit from the business of the war, by kidnapping, and by the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the violence that has bathed the entire country in blood, and by the grief we feel for all those whom we have lost, the Colombian artists and intellectuals, reunited in Medellín in National Encuentro of Art and Poetry by La Paz of Colombia, want our voice heard in the middle of the roar of the war. Witnesses of this tragic historical moment, we propose the creation of a cultural movement ample and united in diversity, impelled by artists and intellectuals, who are the eyes, the ears and the critical reflection of our reality, that maintains bridges with other social movements that today show in the street their refusal of the war, the injustice, the social inequality, the privatization of public education, the exploitation of our natural patrimony and the Free Trade Agreement with the US. United, we will look for the truth, inseparable from justice. This kind of justice has never existed in the history of Colombia. We cannot find meaning in our lives if there is no memory, if there is no truth, if there is no justice — and if there are no reparations for the victims. A humanitarian agreement is the first and foremost condition for the ccreation of La Paz. As artists, writers and intellectuals we are called to resistance by the culture, by principles of tolerance and justice, by life itself. If the armies in struggle want La Paz, they must cease fire and accept an honest dialogue, facing the country and the international community. The indigenous territories must be respected and the displaced ones cannot continue carrying the burden of exile in a context of indolent indifference. We want the country to change; let this be pronounced from the factory, the office, the house, the school, the street and the fields. We pledge to make available all our capacities of thought and creativity to construct ways that allow us to surpass these times of barbarism. We know that it is possible.

Signed: Francisco Zumaqué (composer and musician), Vicky Hernandez (movie actress and TV), Nicholas Suescun (poet), Antonio Arnedo (composer and musician), Alvaro Miranda (poet), Santiago Garci'a (dramatist), Hollman Morris (journalist), Libardo Sarmiento (journalist), Jotamario Arbeláez (poet), Fernando Rendón (poet), Gabriel Frank Jaime (poet), Julian Malatesta (poet), Jorge Enrique Wineskin maker (journalist), Alvaro Marín (poet), Ricardo Camacho (dramatist), Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy (poet), White Marisol (journalist), Guillermo González Uribe (writer and publisher) Sergio de Zubiría (philosopher), Eduardo Go'mez (poet), Horacio Benavides (poet), Gustavo Tatis War (poet), Juan Carlos Moyano (director of theater and actor), Manuel Giraldo ˆMagil- (novelist), Fabio Martinez (writer), Patricia Ariza (actress), Diego Arango (painter), Jaime Barbini (dramatist), Pedro Badrán Padauí (writer), Ignacio Go'mez (journalist), Pedro Arturo Estrada (poet), Carlos Lozano (journalist), Noelle Schonwald (TV actress), Daniel Rocha (actor), Alberto Donadío (journalist and investigator), Silvia Galvis (journalist and novelist), Lucia González (director of the Museum of Antioquia), Constanza Vieira (journalist), Harold Kremer (narrative), Arming Orozco (poet), Lucia Estrada (poet), Andrea Cote (poet), Giovanny Go'mez (poet), Robinson Quintero (poet), Light Mery Giraldo (poet), Ramon Cote (poet), Fernando Linero (poet), Miguel Iriarte (poet), Tallulah Flórez (poet), Efraim Medina (writer), Federico the Distinguished Diaz (poet), Marine Light Aguirre (actress), Eva Durán (poet), Oscar Yearling calf (journalist), Ricardo Cuellar (poet), Darío Sanchez (poet), Berrío Morning call (poet), Jose Martinez (writer), Edgar Bastidas (writer), Jairo Ojeda (musical), Tatiana Mejía (poet), Ricardo Go'mez (musical), Amalia Lu Posso (writer), Julian Rodriguez (musical), Zabier Hernandez (poet), Gloria Chvatal (painter), Jorge Iván Grisales (actor), Ángela Garci'a (poet), Carlos Satizábal (actor), Haydé Marín (music), Marine Light Lopez (journalist), Winston Clubs (painter), Put Honorio (theater director), Catherine King (promotional cultural), Dark Frame (promotional cultural), Libardo Clubs (writer), Iván Cepeda (defending of DDHH), Hugo Ceballos (painter), Luis Galar (poet), Trimming Cajamarca (dramatist), Arming to Rodriguez Crossbowmen (poet), Gonzalo Márquez Christ (poet and publisher), Francisco Javier Buitrago (designer), Ana Milena Door (poet), Luisa Aguilar (poet), Fabio Garrido (singing of rock), Shelter Ines Osorio (poet), Winston Moral (poet), Nahum Múnera (actor), Alfredo Ortiz (promotional cultural), Rafael Field of broom of Andreis (poet) Pablo Mauricio Lopez (lawyer), Freddy Chicangana (poet), Edgar the Lozanos (poet), Ana Magdalena Renjifo (educational), Marleny Mejía Jaramillo (poet), Jairo Buitrago (writer), Jesus Gualdrón (university professor), Hernando Moral (composer), Hernando War (poet); Maria Isabel Borrero (designer), Irina Junieles (poet), Jácome Daisy (investigator), Jose Left, narrative Ignacio; Everardo Rendón (poet), Janeth Núñez Maroquín (poet), Víctor de Currea Soon (poet and doctor), Hildebrando Vélez (environmentalist), Carlos Fajardo (poet), Carlos Patiño (poet), Francisco Amín (investigator), Manuel Pachón (poet), Claudia Roa (translator), Gilberto Ávila Creek (musical), Matilde Eljach (educational college student), Javier Rodrizales (poet), Miguel Beltrán Angel (university professor), Estheiman Amaya Solano (journalist), Héctor Sands (manager), Mauricio the Vidals (poet), Miryam Montoya (poet), Augusto Field of broom (university professor), Hope Stolen Saravia (sociologist), Marta Renza (writer), Thorny Fabio (Lic. Literature), Castilian Abadio Green (poet), Luis Darío Bernal Pinilla (doctor), Omar Ardila (poet and ensayista), Carlos May (poet), Víctor Raul Jaramillo (poet), Olga Lucia Field of broom (cultural manager), Sophia Sophia (cantautora), Hernando Urriago (poet), Heraclio Ant Ordo'ñez (Distrital Committee of the Function and position of agent), Odilia Leon (Association of Women by La Paz of Colombia), Ana (Corporation of Colombo-Cuban Solidarity), Second Cardozo, Dark Diva (Committee of Political Prisoners), Luis Carlos Domínguez (lawyer), Crispín Otavo (indigenous leader), Manuel Aguirre (Aceu leader), Iván Mallet (poet), Jose G. Daniels (poet).

and here is the Spanish original:

Carta de los artistas e intelectuales por la paz de Colombia

Indignados y dolidos por la guerra que arrasa al país, por la continuación de la barbarie paramilitar, por la infamia de sus cementerios clandestinos y sus escuelas de descuartizamiento, por una Ley de Justicia y Paz que no es de paz ni de justicia, sino el premio y el perdón para los peores asesinos en la historia de Colombia y que, además, esconde la verdad, principio y esencia de la justicia; por los políticos de todo el país que patrocinaron la formación de esos grupos criminales, por la corrupción reinante en el Estado colombiano; por los tres millones de desplazados, la mayoría madres de familia y sus niños y niñas. Por la creciente desigualdad social, por el despojo del territorio de las poblaciones indígenas y de las comunidades negras, por la creciente violación de la soberanía, por los poderes internos y externos que se benefician del negocio de la guerra, por el secuestro, y sobre todo por los centenares de miles de víctimas inocentes de la violencia que ha bañado en sangre al país desde siempre, y por el dolor de todos los que han perdido a sus seres queridos, los artistas e intelectuales colombianos, reunidos en Medellín en el Encuentro Nacional de Arte y Poesía por la Paz de Colombia, queremos que nuestra voz se oiga en medio del estruendo de la guerra.

Testigos de este trágico momento histórico, proponemos la creación de un movimiento cultural amplio y unido en la diversidad, impulsado por artistas e intelectuales, que sea los ojos, los oídos y la reflexión crítica de nuestra realidad, y que tienda puentes con otros movimientos sociales que hoy manifiestan en la calle su inconformidad con la guerra, la inequidad, la desigualdad social, la privatización de la educación pública, la expoliación de nuestro patrimonio natural y el Tratado de Libre Comercio con Estados Unidos.

Todos juntos buscaremos la verdad, inseparable de la justicia. Justicia que, por lo demás, no ha existido en toda la historia de Colombia. No encontraremos sentido a nuestra vida si no hay memoria, si no hay verdad, si no hay justicia y si no hay reparación para las víctimas. Un acuerdo humanitario es el primer paso para la necesaria e inaplazable construcción de la paz.

Los artistas, escritores e intelectuales llamamos a conformar una resistencia por la cultura de la vida, la tolerancia y la justicia. Si los ejércitos en pugna quieren la paz, que detengan el fuego y acepten un diálogo honesto, de cara al país y a la comunidad internacional.

Los territorios indígenas deben ser respetados y los desplazados no pueden seguir arrastrando la crisis del destierro en un contexto de indolente indiferencia. Deseamos que el país se mueva, que se manifieste desde la fábrica, la oficina, la casa, la escuela, la calle y el campo. Y ponemos a disposición toda nuestra capacidad de pensamiento y creación para construir caminos que nos permitan superar estos tiempos de barbarie. Sabemos que es posible.

Fiman:

Francisco Zumaqué (compositor y músico), Vicky Hernández (actriz de cine y TV), Nicolás Suescun (poeta), Antonio Arnedo (compositor y músico), Álvaro Miranda (poeta), Santiago García (dramaturgo), Hollman Morris (periodista), Libardo Sarmiento (periodista), Jotamario Arbeláez (poeta), Fernando Rendón (poeta), Gabriel Jaime Franco (poeta), Julián Malatesta (poeta), Jorge Enrique Botero (periodista), Álvaro Marín (poeta), Ricardo Camacho (dramaturgo), Hugo Jamioy Juagibioy (poeta), Marisol Cano (periodista), Guillermo González Uribe (escritor y editor), Sergio de Zubiría (filósofo), Eduardo Gómez (poeta), Horacio Benavides (poeta), Gustavo Tatis Guerra (poeta), Juan Carlos Moyano (director de teatro y actor), Manuel Giraldo ˆMagil- (novelista), Fabio Martínez (escritor), Patricia Ariza (actriz), Diego Arango (pintor), Jaime Barbini (dramaturgo), Pedro Badrán Padauí (escritor), Ignacio Gómez (periodista), Pedro Arturo Estrada (poeta), Carlos Lozano (periodista), Noelle Schonwald (actriz de TV), Daniel Rocha (actor), Alberto Donadío (periodista e investigador), Silvia Galvis (periodista y novelista), Lucía González (directora del Museo de Antioquia), Constanza Vieira (periodista), Harold Kremer (narrador), Armando Orozco (poeta), Lucía Estrada (poeta), Andrea Cote (poeta), Giovanny Gómez (poeta), Robinson Quintero (poeta), Luz Mery Giraldo (poeta), Ramón Cote (poeta), Fernando Linero (poeta), Miguel Iriarte (poeta), Tallulah Flórez (poeta), Efraim Medina (escritor), Federico Díaz Granados (poeta), Luz Marina Aguirre (actriz), Eva Durán (poeta), Oscar Becerra (periodista), Ricardo Cuellar (poeta), Darío Sánchez (poeta), Diana Berrío (poeta), José Martínez (escritor), Edgar Bastidas (escritor), Jairo Ojeda (músico), Tatiana Mejía (poeta), Ricardo Gómez (músico), Amalia Lu Posso (escritora), Julián Rodríguez (músico), Zabier Hernández (poeta), Gloria Chvatal (pintora), Jorge Iván Grisales (actor), Ángela García (poeta), Carlos Satizábal (actor), Haydé Marín (música), Luz Marina López (periodista), Winston Porras (pintor), Honorio Posada (director de teatro), Catalina Rey (promotora cultural), Marco Prieto (promotor cultural), Libardo Porras (escritor), Iván Cepeda (defensor de DDHH), Hugo Ceballos (pintor), Luis Galar (poeta), Orlando Cajamarca (dramaturgo), Armando Rodríguez Ballesteros (poeta), Gonzalo Márquez Cristo (poeta y editor), Francisco Javier Buitrago (diseñador), Ana Milena Puerta (poeta), Luisa Aguilar (poeta), Fabio Garrido (cantante de rock), Amparo Inés Osorio (poeta), Winston Morales (poeta), Nahum Múnera (actor), Alfredo Ortiz (promotor cultural), Rafael Escobar de Andreis (poeta), Pablo Mauricio López (abogado), Freddy Chicangana (poeta), Edgar Lozano (poeta), Ana Magdalena Renjifo (docente), Marleny Mejía Jaramillo (poeta), Jairo Buitrago (escritor), Jesús Gualdrón (profesor universitario), Hernando Morales (compositor), Hernando Guerra (poeta); María Isabel Borrero (diseñadora), Irina Junieles (poeta), Margarita Jácome (investigadora), José Ignacio Izquierdo, narrador; Everardo Rendón (poeta), Janeth Núñez Maroquín (poeta), Víctor de Currea Luego (poeta y médico), Hildebrando Vélez (ambientalista), Carlos Fajardo (poeta), Carlos Patiño (poeta), Francisco Amín (investigador), Manuel Pachón (poeta), Claudia Roa (traductora), Gilberto Ávila Rivera (músico), Matilde Eljach (docente universitaria), Javier Rodrizales (poeta), Miguel Angel Beltrán (profesor universitario), Estheiman Amaya Solano (periodista), Héctor Arenas (gestor), Mauricio Vidales (poeta), Miryam Montoya (poeta), Augusto Escobar (profesor universitario), Esperanza Hurtado Saravia (socióloga), Marta Renza (escritora), Fabio Espinosa (Lic. Literatura), Abadio Green (poeta), Luis Darío Bernal Pinilla (médico), Omar Ardila (poeta y ensayista), Carlos Mayo (poeta), Víctor Raúl Jaramillo (poeta), Olga Lucía Escobar (gestora cultural), Sophia Sophia (cantautora), Hernando Urriago (poeta), Heraclio Hormiga Ordóñez (Comité Distrital de la Personería), Odilia León (Asociación de Mujeres por la Paz de Colombia), Ana Castellanos ( Corporación de Solidaridad Colombo-Cubana), Segundo Cardozo, Diva Prieto (Comité de Presos Políticos), Luis Carlos Domínguez (abogado), Crispín Otavo (dirigente indígena), Manuel Aguirre (dirigente Aceu), Iván Mazo (poeta), José G. Daniels (poeta).

Eduardo Galeano





Uruguayan essayist, journalist and historian.





Galeano's best-known works include the trilogy Memoria del fuego (1982-1986, Memory of Fire) and Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971, The Open Veins of Latin America), which have been translated into some 20 languages. Galeano’s work transcends orthodox genres, and combines documentary, fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. Among the writers at work now, he has most successfully integrated the aesthetic and the ethical, or in other words, the joyful and the political. His work is at once engaged, playful, and deeply respectful of the real wisdom of la gente, the people, the democracy in exile, if you will, that is our real homeland, no matter where we live in the capitalist economy, no matter where we have been born in the history of imperial greed. The author himself has denied that he is a historian: "I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."

Here are some places to begin to learn about Galeano:

Writer Without Borders
By Scott Witmer

Eduardo Galeano disdains borders, both in life and in literature. Exiled from his native Uruguay after the 1973 military coup, he returned to Montevideo in 1985, where he continues to live and write. Galeano’s books subvert the distinctions between history, poetry, memoir, political analysis and cultural anthropology. With a graceful sense of craft, he uses “only words that really deserve to be there” to convey a humanely moral perspective on matters both personal and political. His writing honors the experiences of everyday life as a contrast to the mass media that “manipulates consciousness, conceals reality and stifles the creative imagination … in order to impose ways of life and patterns of consumption.” By multiplying seldom heard voices, Galeano refutes the official lies that pass for history—his work represents an eloquent, literary incarnation of social justice.

Witmer’s interview with Galeano

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2699/

excerpts from the book Upside Down: A Primer For The Looking Glass World

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Eduardo_Galeano/Upside_Down.html

Galeano’s “Democracy Now” interview with Amy Goodman

http://www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=06/05/19/1324216

Eduardo Galeano: the open veins of McWorld an interview by Niels Boel

http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_01/uk/dires.htm

another interview at Identity Theory

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum174.php

More Herbert

Among the poems of Herbert I want to include here is this one, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp” which has at least the minor virtue of irony, given the fact that I am “blogging” it; on the other hand, maybe that fact belies the “dark” of Herbert’s ending. Here’s the poem:

ELEGY FOR THE DEPARTURE OF PEN INK AND LAMP

1
Truly my infidelity is great and hard to forgive
for I do not even remember the day or the hour
at which I abandoned you my childhood friends

first I address you humbly
pen with a wooden holder
painted or finely laquered

in a Jewish shop
— creaking steps a bell over the glass door —
I picked you out
in the shade of indolence
and before long you bore
on your body
my pensive toothmarks
traces of school’s angst

O silver nib
outlet of the critical mind
courier of consoling knowledge
— of the fact the earth is round
— of straight and parallel lines
in the shopkeeper’s box
you were a fish waiting forr me
amid a school of other fish
— I was amazed there were so many
objects ownerless and completely
mute —
then
forever mine
I put you piously in my mouth
and felt on my tongue
the long taste
of sorrel
and the moon

O ink
honorable Sir Encaustum
of a distinguished lineage
highborn
as the evening sky
slow to dry
deliberate
and very patient
we turned you
into a Sargasso Sea
drowning blotting paper
hair flies and curses
in your wise depths
to mask the odor
of a gentle volcano
the call of the abyss

who remembers you now
my fond fellows
you disappeared quietly
behind time’s last cataract
who remembersyou gratefully
in an era of harebrain ballpoints
of arrogant objects
without grace
name
or past

if I speak of you
I’d like to speak
as if I were hanging an ex voto
on a shattered altar


2
Light of my childhood
blessed lamp

sometimes I come upon
your dishonored body
in a secondhand store

yet once you were
a shining allegory

spirit stubbornly battling
aganst gnostic demons
given over to the eye
open
transparently plain

at the bottom of your reservoir
kerosene — elixir of primeval forests
a wick’s slippery snake
with a head of flames
slim maidenlike glass
and a silvery tin shield
like Selene at full moon

your princesssy moods
O beautiful and cruel
hysterics of a prima donna
not sufficiently applauded

hark
a cheerful aria
summer’s honey glow
above the glasss mouth
a fair braid of sunlight
and suddenly
dark basses
ravens and crows alight
invective and swearing
prophecies of destruction
a fury of smoke bombs

like a great playwright you knew the tides of passion
and the swamps of melancholy black towers of pride
blazing glow of fires rainbows the unleashed oceans

effortlessly you summoned out of nothingness
landscapes cities gone wild mirrored in water
at a sign from you the crazy prince of the island
and the balcony in Verona appeared obediently

I was devoted to you
O luminous initiation
lever of knowledge
under night’s hammers

and my other
flat head cast on the ceiling
looked down menacingly
as if from a box of angels
at the theater of the world
knotted
evil
cruel

I thought then
I should save
one
small
warm
true
thing
from the flood

yes so it might go on living
and we inside it as in a shell


3
I have never believed in the spirit of history
a puffed-up monster with a murderous eye
a dialectical beast kept on a torturer’s leash

or in you — four horsemen of the Apocalypse
Huns of progress galloping across the steppes of heaven and earth
destroying on your own way everything honorable old and defenseless

I wasted years learning history’s simplistic workings
the monotonous procession and the unequal struggle
between the thugs at the head of addled crowds
and a handful of the righteous and reasonable

not much is left
not much at all

objects
and compassion

lightly we leave the gardens of childhood the gardens of things
scattering manuscripts oil lamps dignity and pens on our flight
such is our deluded journey along the cliff side of nothingness

forgive me for my ingratitude O pen with your archaic nib
and you inkwell — you still contained so many good ideas
forgive me oil lamp — you die out like a deserted campsite

I paid for my betrayal
but then I didn’t know
you were gone forever

and that it would be
dark

THE PEBBLE

by Zbigniew Herbert





The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

Translated by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz



I have been reading The Collected Poems, 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. Ed. and tr. by Alissa Valles, from Ecco Press. I have been reading Herbert for several years now, and this is a beautiful volume. Recently the review article below appeared in Poetry: it suggests that the translator and publisher ran an end-run around the poets who have been translating Herbert for the past several decades, and that in some respects Valles was not well-suited to the task of a collected poems. I am no scholar of Polish literature, but I will say that the great majority of these poems have been brought over into a simple and colloquial English that leaves me appreciative of Herbert's genius, his ferocious insistence on a stoical moral stance toward the world, his sardonic wit, his ability to see clear through to the essence of a human situation.

Here is the link to Michael Hofmann's review essay:

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0507/comment_179593.html

And here is an essay by Charles Simic on Herbert from the New York Review of Books that includes a number of Herbert poems:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20132

And here are two sites with poems, information, interviews and commentaries on this remarkable poet. In the coming days I may type a couple of my favorites from the Collected Poems here as well.

http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Herbert.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/336

Some time ago I wrote this short essay explicating what must be one of the most incisive critiques of patriarchal power ever offered in a single poem, Linda McCarriston's "Le Coursier de Jeanne D’Arc," from her second book, EVA-MARY, nominated for the National Book Award in 1993. I reprint the poem here, followed by my commentary.


La Coursier De Jeanne d'Arc

You know that they burned her horse
before her. Though it is not recorded,
you know that they burned her Percheron
first, before her eyes, because you

know that story, so old that story,
the routine story, carried to its
extreme, of the cruelty that can make
of what a woman hears a silence,

that can make of what a woman sees
a lie. She had no son for them to burn,
for them to take from her in the world
not of her making and put to its pyre,

so they layered a greater one in front of
where she was staked to her own--
as you have seen her pictured sometimes,
her eyes raised to the sky. But they were

not raised. This is yet one of their lies.
They were not closed. Though her hands
were bound behind her, and her feet were
bound deep in what would become fire,

she watched. Of greenwood stakes
head-high and thicker than a man's waist
they laced the narrow corral that would not
burn until flesh had burned, until

bone was burning, and laid it thick
with tinder--fatted wicks and sulphur,
kindling and logs--and ran a ramp
up to its height from where the gray horse

waited, his dapples making of his flesh
a living metal, layers of life
through which the light shone out
in places as it seems to through the flesh

of certain fish, a light she knew
as purest, coming, like that, from within.
Not flinching, not praying, she looked
the last time on the body she knew

better than the flesh of any man, or child,
or woman, having long since left the lap
of her mother--the chest with its
perfect plates of muscle, the neck

with its perfect, prow-like curve,
the hindquarters'--pistons--powerful cleft
pennoned with the silk of his tail.
Having ridden as they did together

--those places, that hard, that long--
their eyes found easiest that day
the way to each other, their bodies
wedded in a sacrament unmediated

by man. With fire they drove him
up the ramp and off into the pyre
and tossed the flame in with him.
This was the last chance they gave her

to recant her world, in which their power
came not from God. Unmoved, the Men
of God began watching him burn, and better,
watching her watch him burn, hearing

the long mad godlike trumpet of his terror,
his crashing in the wood, the groan
of stakes that held, the silverblack hide,
the pricked ears catching first

like driest bark, and the eyes.
and she knew, by this agony, that she
might choose to live still, if she would
but make her sign on the parchment

they would lay before her, which now
would include this new truth: that it
did not happen, this death in the circle,
the rearing, plunging, raging, the splendid

armour-colored head raised one last time
above the flames before they took him
--like any game untended on the spit--into
their yellow-green, their blackening red.


KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW
Richard Hoffman

"Le Coursier de Jeanne D’Arc" by Linda McCarriston is a poem that asks where the truth lies, whether it lies in what we can trust ourselves to know or in the lies that abusive power foists on us to obfuscate, distract and reassure.

It is a poem of direct address. It implicitly asks the reader to recall what he or she knows of cruelty and tyranny, of the behavior of what Carol Bly has called “The Bully Who Rules the World,” thus it begins,

You know that they burned her horse
before her. Though it is not recorded,
you know

already opposing real knowledge, shared between speaker and reader and based on experience, with the official record. As the poem proceeds, McCarriston continues to assay the story, biting down on the shiny hard coin of the historical record and finding a suspicious absence of teethmarks:

But they were

not raised. This is yet one of their lies.

To picture her lifting her eyes to heaven is to, after the fact, conscript her into an allegiance with the god these tyrants call their own. Jeanne D’Arc watches instead, meeting the eyes of her horse, creature to creature, suffused with the earthly glory of strength and beauty:


the gray horse

waited, his dapples making of his flesh
a living metal, layers of life
through which the light shone out
in places as it seems to through the flesh

of certain fish, a light she knew
as purest, coming, like that, from within.

The cruelty in this poem does not take place off-stage. It is meant to awaken outrage. We are meant to see this event, to “picture” it in all its horror. While the poem is a poem of ideas, asking us to question a history written by torturers, that history must be truly grasped first before its significance can be understood.

To the men who have built such an ingenious and literally infernal machine of greenwood and ramps and brands, the horse is not a creature at all merely a kind of leverage they have, or hope they have, over Jeanne D’Arc. We know, again because we are experienced in a world in which religion is sanction for cruel tyranny, that had she had a son,

She had no son for them to burn,
for them to take from her in the world
not of her making and put to its pyre

he would not be seen as human either, merely as similar leverage. Think of Abraham and Isaac, Agamemnon and Iphigenia.

Where does such sadistic power come from? How does it legitimize itself? How does it provide for its own continuance? These are questions the poem takes up and asks us to answer as it describes

the routine story, carried to its
extreme, of the cruelty that can make
of what a woman hears a silence,

that can make of what a woman sees
a lie.

The ultimate legitimacy, the sanction of the Almighty, is claimed (as always) by sadists called “Men/ of God”, but refused to them by Jeanne D’Arc. This is ultimately, her crime — that she does not acknowledge their ideology as sacred. She knows power, real power, and its beauty and integrity, in the person of her beloved Percheron, sounding in the flames “the long mad godlike trumpet of his terror,” and she can never consent to define power as merely the power to coerce. Nor can she assent to a demeaned definition of goodness that is mere obedience.

Finally, we see (though once again if we stop and consider we already know) that any recantation now must deny the heinous and barbaric act we are witnessing in the poem, because truly understanding it — “state sponsored terrorism” if you will — undermines their false claim of legitimacy. Jeanne D’Arc’s recanting would gainsay what the poem depicts so clearly: that this power derives from neither nature nor justice nor deity but from cowardice, sadism and evil.

So this is a poem about Jeanne D’Arc. Or about Antigone before Creon. Or perhaps about a Chinese student standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square. Or about Nelson Mandela choosing to remain in prison rather than cave in. Or about Nathan Hale, or Martin Luther King, or Muhammad Ali, or Mahatma Gandhi refusing to obey despotic power.

But it is not only about standing fast. It is about seeing clearly and knowing fully “the routine story” of repression, of tyranny and the cowardly manner with which it wields power. It involves us, our individual experiences of cruelty and injustice, in that seeing and knowing. It asks us to refuse the lies that tyrants everywhere set down and call history.

HAPPY MAY DAY!


Reprinted from an essay by Neal Towart, found at

http://www.mayweek.ab.ca/archives/2003/history.html


May Day Connections


May Day as a modern working class celebration and commemoration began from the 1886 events in Chicago where workers were demonstrating for an eight hour day. But the day already had special significance for working people before then.


PreIndustrial May Day and Working People

As a working peoples celebration its origins go back much further, with connections to Ancient Roman rituals. In pagan Europe it was a festive holy day celebrating the first spring planting. The ancient Celts and Saxons celebrated May 1st as Beltane or the day of fire. Bel was the Celtic god of the sun.

In the 1700s the Churches banned the pagan rituals, just as bosses today want workers to forget any traditions of solidarity and celebration of workers rights, but many peasants continued the tradition. Church and state were the butt of many jokes at May Day celebrations, and this certainly did not endear the craft guilds and others, who organised celebrations, to the authorities.

The Goddess of the Hunt, Diana, and the God Herne led parades. Later, with a move to a more agrarian society, Diana became a fertility goddess, and Herne became Robin Goodfellow, a predecessor to Robin Hood. This also indicated a shift in the division of labour and perhaps to a shift in power relations, with Robin remaining a symbol of the hunter from the woods, while Diana changed from being a hunter to a symbol of the fertility of the fields.

May Day was popular through to the nineteenth century, with the form of the celebration changing. The two most popular feast days for Medieval craft guilds were the Feast of St. John, or the Summer Solstice and Mayday.

The Diana myth was transformed into the Queen of May, who was elected from the eligible young women of the village to rule the crops until harvest. Besides the selection of the May Queen was the raising of the phallic Maypole, around which the young single men and women of the village would dance holding on to the ribbons until they became entwined, with their ( hoped for) new love.

Robin Goodfellow, or the Green Man who was the Lord of Misrule for this day. Mayday was a celebration of the common people, and Robin would be the King/Priest/Fool for a day. Priests and Lords were the butt of many jokes, and the Green Man and his supporters; mummers would make jokes and poke fun of the local authorities.

Industrial era May Day

Our modern celebration of Mayday as a working class holiday developed from the US workers struggle for the eight hour day in 1886. The working class movement in the USA began campaigning for an eight hour day in the 1860s, following the Civil War. The historic strike of May 1st, 1886 was a culmination of a concerted struggle. Chicago was the major industrial centre of the USA. Police attacked striking workers from the McCormack Harvester Co., killing six.

On May 4th at a demonstration in Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of police killing eight of them. The police arrested eight anarchist trade unionists claiming they threw the bombs. To this day the subject is still one of controversy. The question remains whether the bomb was thrown by the workers at the police or whether one of the police's own agent provocateurs dropped it in their haste to retreat from charging workers.

In what was to become one of the most infamous show trials in America in the 19th century, but certainly not to be the last of such trials against radical workers, the State of Illinois tried the anarchist workingmen for fighting for their rights as much as being the actual bomb throwers. Whether the anarchist workers were guilty or innocent was irrelevant. They were agitators, fomenting revolution and stirring up the working class, and they had to be taught a lesson. Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer were found guilty and executed by the State of Illinois.

In Paris in 1889 the International Working Men's Association (the First International) declared May 1st an international working class holiday in commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs. The red flag became the symbol of the blood of working class martyrs in their battle for workers rights.

Another of those odd things I'll never publish elsewhere, so what the hell...




THE END OF TIME: A SHORT PLAY


Scene 1: (Idyllic setting: a family is picnicking on the grass.)

ENTER Chicken Little (running): The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

(Confusion. Alarm.)

EXEUNT ALL


Scene 2: (A publisher’s office.)

Writer: So, if I change it so that Chicken Little’s an idiot, you’ll publish it?

Publisher: Absolutely. It can’t miss. I think it’s the next big thing, exactly what readers are looking for.

Writer: OK, then, 50-50 on film and TV, 50/50 on foreign sales, but I retain the merchandising rights.

Publisher (rising from behind his desk): It’s a deal!

(They shake hands.)


Scene 3: (Idyllic setting: a family is picnicking on the grass. One child, a girl, is playing with a Chicken Little doll. The other, a boy, with a toy gun.)

ENTER Chicken Little (running): The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Mother: Oh, for goodness sake! We’ve read that story. What do you take us for, a bunch of morons?

Father: Yeah, go cluck yourself!

Boy: Bang! You’re dead.

Girl: Chicken Little, it’s you!

(Parents laugh.)

(The sky falls.)

THE END

One of my photos: I call this one Free Verse Piano Solo.

I want to say so much in response to this writing by my Stonecoast colleague, poet Kazim Ali, but there's really nothing to add, so I post it here without comment.


Poetry is Dangerous
Kazim Ali


On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white beetle and carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don‚t have the heart to take off these days, says: Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America.

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us "safe."

These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most innocuous of places — a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry — we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn‚t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who'd ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description — a Middle Eastern man driving a white beetle with out of state plates — and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, "What country is he from?"

"What country is he from?!" she yelled, indignant.

"Ma'am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice," he told her.

At some length several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. "When I recycle?" I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an „honest mistake,‰ not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university's bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the "suspicious package" beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, "We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community."

What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall — who was watched, noted, and reported, all in a day's work? Today we gave in willingly and whole heartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became "suspicious" because of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.

Last October I had the chance to read my work as part of the Fifth International Festival of Poetry in El Salvador. Although I had sent a number of poems to the Fundacion Poetas for translation, their translator managed to accomplish only one. When I arrived, I had only one poem which could be read on our tour (12 readings in 5 days!) But I was surrounded by wonderful Latin American poets with whom I spent every waking hour (along with poets from France, Spain, Italy, Nigeria, and elsewhere) and this convivial bunch set out to remedy the problem. It was like a dream to be present while other poets, none of whom would settle for approximation or consent to lyrical, musical, or idiomatic collapse, worked on my poems, asking me questions from time to time, arguing with one another over nuance and emphasis. We worked in the hotel, in cafes, bouncing along over rutted roads in the back of a beat-up van. Here are the results, several of which are coming out in magazines in Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Costa Rica.


REFUGIADO

Un hombre carga su puerta,
la puerta de su casa,
cuando la guerra termine
regresará a casa.

Adonde la colgará
en sus bisagras
y le pondrá llave
cuando se trata de acordar
de la palabra para la bienvenida.

Si su casa ya no está
cuando regrese
la forjará desde la nada
con esta puerta.

Si no puede regresar
la puerta se acordará
y el resto de la casa
así la podrá construir
otra vez en otra parte.

Y si no puede seguir
su puerta puede ser una paleta
para su descanso, una tijera
para cargarlo, sombra para el sol,
su escudo.


DESPUES DE LA GUERRA DE BOSNIA

La trucha en la orilla del rio
sabe donde está el rio;

el zorro en la trampa
sabe el tiempo,

pero el hombre o una mujer
sólo conocen la historia

que el temor o la esperanza cuentan
y con frecuencia escogen mal.

Ninguna hormiga entrará
a otra hormiguero

ni una abeja a otra colmena,
y el cuervo en la copa de

un roble muerto
Sabe de que' lado está,

pero un hombre o una mujer,
guiados por mentirosos,

van a discutir, calmadamente,
quién debe cavar la fosa,

y si descuartizar
a los bebes de los vecinos

antes o después
es una mejor leccion.

Una ardilla rasca profundo
en el tronco hueco;

la osa regresa
a su oscurecida cueva,

pero un hombre o una mujer,
henchidos de sangre,

desde el fondo de la historia, dormidos,
sueñan con la paz

y despertando dicen:
la paz es un sueño.

Un conejo puede estremecerse,
pero sólo por un tiempo;

un gorrión común
conoces las estaciones,

pero un hombre o una mujer
solo quieren una cancion, un poema,

profesar un religión
que nadie que ha conocido el bien,

aunque sea sólo una vez...
nunca estará completamente perdido.

tr. Norbert-Bertrand Barbe and Andres Norman Castro


LO QUE TOMA

El cucu solitario
en la oscuridad ensaya
durante 59 minutos
su acto.

tr. Alejandro Marré


DESDE LA VENTANA DEL FRENTE

1.

Hay una ciudad de cristal y dinero allá afuera,
y se acerca con las noticias de cada día.
Hombres mentirosos sin identificar
interpretan las mismas viejas imágenes,
los pies sangrantes de los refugiados,
las manos sangrantes de los soldados.
Aquí viene alguien, no es un vecino,
y trae un cuadernillo y una calculadora.
¿En dónde crecerán los niños y las rosas?
¿En dónde nos haremos viejos?

2.
Porqué las madres le dicen a sus hijos
que no pongan cara fea
o se quedarán así,
yo tengo menos miedo.

Cuando los padres limpian las caras de sus hijos
con esos pañuelos olorosos a sudor,
ellos difícilmente los olvidarán,
y cuando lo aprendo
yo soy más feliz como padre
y más tranquilo como hijo.

3.
Y los cuerpos de los amantes
hacen rápidamente un nudo
lo suficientemente bueno
como para reparar la sed.

tr. Alejandro Marré, Andres Norman Castro



NORMAS DE HABITACIÓN

En el Paraíso tienes que prometer
de nunca olvidar
que estás en el cielo.

En el Infierno tienes que prometer
de nunca olvidar
querer estar en otra parte.

En la Tierra tienes que prometer
de nunca olvidar
que no hay promesas.

tr. Belkys Arredondo Olivo, Mario Noel Rodríguez


MILAGRO EN EL BETANIA

¿ Por qúe? preguntó Lázaro.
¿ Por qúe me devuelves?
¿ Hay paz aquí?
¿ Estamos ahora en el tiempo de la Justicia?

Sueño de esas cosas
en la oscuridad, en la tierra.
Es mi trabajo, hermano.
Déjame hacerlo.

tr. Norbert-Bertrand Barbe, Nicola Licciardello


PERDÓN

Aparta tanto de la certidumre de los mapas
como del pánico al perderse repentinamente

es un lugar abierto como una gran plaza
en una ciudad antigua de calles tortuosas.

Tú lo sabes. Una o dos veces lo hemos encontrado
justo cuando íbamos a rendirnos.

Si nos separamos por cualquier razón
y primero lo encuentras, espérame allí.

Hagas lo que hagas no des la vuelta,
y si primero lo encuentro, esperaré por ti.

tr. Norbert-Bertrand Barbe, Alejandro Marré, y Belkys Arredondo Oliva

“Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.”

— Nazim Hikmet


Some months ago I was part of an extraordinary evening at the Boston Public Library, sponsored by PEN New England, at which writers and actors read works by writers who had been denied entry into the United States. The purpose of the evening was to point out what beauty and power is lost when the voices of those deemed “undesirable” by our government are silenced. I had the great honor of reading three poems by the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. Hikmet spent more than half his adult years as a prisoner, in and out of prison solely by virtue of the vicissitudes of Turkish politics. A good resource on Hikmet is:

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/nazim_hikmet.html


The entire evening is available as a streaming video on the MACLU website:

http://www.maclu.org/lib/index.html


The poems are my versions of translations by Randy Blasing and Taner Baybars.



IT’S THIS WAY

I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can't get enough of the trees--
they're so hopeful, so green.

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I'm standing at the window

of the prison infirmary
but I can't smell the medicines--

I think carnations
must be blooming nearby.

It's this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.



THE STRANGEST CREATURE ON EARTH


You're like a scorpion, my brother,
you shrink and hide in the dark.
You're like a sparrow, dear brother,
always in a sparrow's flutter.
You're like a clam, closed, like a clam,
my brother, smug, content,
And brother, you are frightening
as the mouth of an old volcano.

Not one, not five, no --
unfortunately, you number millions.
You're like a sheep, my brother:
when the cloaked drover raises his stick,
you quickly rejoin the flock
and run, almost proud of yourself,
right to the slaughterhouse.

You are the strangest creature on this earth —
even stranger than the fish
that couldn't see the ocean for the water.
All the oppression in the world is thanks to you.
If we are hungry, tired, covered with blood,
and after all this time,still being crushed
like grapes to make wine,
the fault is yours —
I can hardly bring myself to say it,
but most of the fault, my dear brother, is yours.


RUBAI*

I hope I don’t sound like I’m boasting,
but I’ve gone like a bullet
through ten years of captivity,
and if we discount the occasional liver pain,
nothing has changed, not my heart, not my head.

So send me books with happy endings:
where the plane with broken wings lands safely,
and the doctor leaves the operating theatre
with a big smile on his face;
where the blind boy sees the light again,
and just before the partisan is about to die
before the firing squad, he is rescued and freed;

where the letter I’ve been waiting for
for ten long years
arrives amid a clamor of birds,
and my poems sell by the millions;

where lovers meet, wed, and celebrate in joy,
and no one is deprived
of bread, roses, sunshine, and liberty.

Send me books with happy endings
because I believe, even in here, that
one day our great adventure will end happily.


* Rubai is the name of the prison where Hikmet wrote this poem.

I sent this short poem to several newspapers as a letter to the editor but none chose to print it. Is that because I explicitly call bigots bigots? Or do they just shy away from verse? I don't pretend it's a terrific poem, but there are some times when you want the broad brush and the bold statement. As Louis MacNeice said, in 1941, "All poems are not written the same way. Critics forget this. There are occasions for flatness and hyperbole, for concentration and diffuseness, for regular and irregular form, for both the unusual and the obvious, for uplift and understatement." Anyway, I'll publish it here; maybe somebody will find it and stick it up on their bulletin board or refrigerator:

SOME VERSES VERSUS BIGOTRY

The bigots are building a ghetto again,
this time for the lovers they hate.
They want to change the constitution,
invoke the power of the state

to wall off anybody they find odd
with ready-made bricks made of words
left over from invoking law and God
last time to keep out “the coloreds.”

Their hatred is what I’m afraid of,
not my gay sisters and brothers.
True and false are the two kinds of love
and there aren’t any others.