Two Poems: Samuel S. Vargo

Shagbark Hickory trees line the hollow

Shagbark Hickory trees line the hollow
Like old men sitting around telling lies
- The rutted road calls, beckoning me
In the night and I can feel my own mortality
Screaming out, like death is amid that forest
And it’s waiting there, for me like a referee

Above the road, up there somewhere is the face
Of sin, and she calls and beckons like a siren
Though I know she’s not here in any real sense
- She’s just some tyrant who plays quarters
And orders the men to do things they know
They shouldn’t do, but will do anyway

For her and her hairy horns in the trees of death
Always run like smeared paint over the moors
Of this Appalachian coal town’s inertia and heat
In the snows of winter so sublime and white,
Like the death that awaits us all, but we never
Hear its voice. Until it’s upon us with the fangs

Of the Mummers Dances and witches of October’s
Cold nights and crisp, harrowing, deafening days
Or of the wolf. I wish I could turn around, go back
Leave this place and all its darkness and slime.
But I can’t. I couldn’t if I wanted to – it’s far too late.

* * *

The Pecking Order

About ten blackbirds sit high on a wire
Above the snow struck Ohio-Pennsylvania
Line. Points unknown. Pickups sputter,
Slide all over the road under the birds.
Ten blackbirds on a wire and 11 tons
Of angst and hunger soar the sour skies –
They’re crying, loving and leaving Ohio’s
Cold for more of Ohio’s cold –
Not migratory birds but scavenger pickers all:
They would not more travel south
Than shed their feathers for snake skins.

About a dozen blackbirds perched high
On a telephone wire black and brittle.
Now there’s 11, soon there will be 12
Again, maybe 15 and then, back to 10.
Those birds just sit there, perched,
Their red wings ready to blur the moment
Like so many starving starlings under skies
Gray and cold, spitting out sleet droplets
Like the broken teeth of some idiot god,
High above. Scarecrows aren’t scary
Anymore and the birds cackle cynically
In the freezing air. The field corn dining:
Tough and sparse. The landing: cold and risky.

Field corn is buried underneath
This glistening cold. Warm underbellies
From the wired heat wave. High above skunk,
Fox, bobcat, roaming wild dog and coyote,
Ten to fifteen blackbirds on a telephone wire
Are as wise as drunk derelicts in a rural roadhouse
Saloon. The wire carries information
To the masses but the wire was made for their perch,
Nothing more, nothing more. Oh, you ugly birds -
Sing sour for the morning. Not songbirds,
But survivors; in it for always and never.
Tomorrow, it’ll be more of the same. Nothing
Will be accomplished. Maybe a pecking order
Will come about in the warmer afternoon,
Maybe not, maybe just more wire roosting,
You crows, you killers of Halloween;
You barking bad harbingers of
A first blizzard of a new year stark and sad.

* * *

~ Samuel S. Vargo has taught English Comp. at Youngstown State University, West Virginia State University, Univ. of North Florida, Florida Metropolitan Univ., Hinds Community College (Jackson, Miss.) and Jefferson Community College (Steubenville, Ohio). He has an MA in English (from Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA) and has worked most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter. He was fiction editor of Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, for 12 years. He has had poetry and fiction appear in the following: Ascent Aspirations, Blue Fifth, Centrifugal Eye, The Circle, Clark Street Review, Connecticut Review, The Cynic Online Magazine, Dandelion, Edifice Wrecked, Electric Acorn, Gypsy Blood Review, Higgensville Reader, Late Knocking, Licking River Review, Lynx Eye, Mastodon Dentist, National Lampoon Humor Network (College Stories, The Frown, The Phat Phree, Points in Case), The Nocturnal Lyric, nthposition, Ohio Teachers Write, Poetry Motel, Projected Letters, Red Dancefloor, Reed, Small Press Review, Verve, undergroundwindow.com, Yasse, and numerous other presses and literary journals. A literary press will be publishing my first collection of short stories sometime during the first half of 2008.

Tags: Samuel S. Vargo, poetry, The Pecking Order, Shagbark Hickory trees line the hollow

Three Images: Vitaly Geyman

Buddha Sitting In The Fire

*

Desert Dancer

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Buddha's Mystery

~ From his web page: "Vitaly’s soulful, dreamlike fine art photography has also been greatly influenced by the work of John Wimberley, a well known photographer who has a great collection of B&W photography, with over 50 exhibitions. It is John’s belief that great photographic art transports us into another dimension. Vitaly's artistic journey is an ongoing exploration of the beauty, simplicity and wisdom of nature. It is a continuous learning process, inspired by passion and love of life."

Tags: Three Images, Vitaly Geyman, photography

Red Pine: Dancing with the Dead: Language, Poetry, and the Art of Translation

A nice essay on the art of translation from Red Pine, a fine poet and a master translator or Buddhism texts - courtesy of Cipher Journal.

Dancing with the Dead:
Language, Poetry, and the Art of Translation

Every time I translate a book of poems, I learn a new way of dancing. The people with whom I dance, though, are the dead, not the recently departed, but people who have been dead a long time. A thousand years or so seems about right. And the music has to be Chinese. It’s the only music I’ve learned to dance to.

I’m not sure what led me to this conclusion, that translation is like dancing. Buddhist meditation. Language theory. Cognitive psychology. Drugs. Sex. Rock and Roll. My ruminations on the subject go back more than twenty-five years to when I was first living in Taiwan. One day I was browsing through the pirated editions at Caves Bookstore in Taipei, and I picked up a copy of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl. It was like trying to make sense of hieroglyphics. I put it back down and looked for something else. Then a friend loaned me a video of Ginsberg reading Howl. What a difference. In Ginsberg’s voice, I heard the energy and rhythm, the sound and the silence, the vision, the poetry. The same thing happened when I read some of Gary Snyder’s poems then heard him read. The words on a page, I concluded, are not the poem. They are the recipe, not the meal, steps drawn on a dance floor, not the dance.

For the past hundred thousand years or so, we human beings have developed language as our primary means of communication—first spoken language and more recently written language. We have used language to convey information to each other, to communicate. But there are a set of questions just below the surface that we prefer not to address. How well does language do what we think it does? And what does it do? The reason we prefer not to address such questions is because language is so mercurial. We can never quite pin it down. It is forever in flux. And it is forever in flux, because we, its speakers and writers and translators, are forever in flux. We can’t step into the same thought twice. We might use or read or hear the same word twice, but how can it mean the same thing if the person who uses or reads or hears that word is not the same person? We speak of language, as if it was a fixed phenomenon, and we teach it and learn it, as if it was carved in stone. But it is more like water, because we are more like water. Language is at the surface of the much deeper flux that is our riverine minds. Thus, if we approach translation by focusing on language alone, we mistake the waves for the river, the tracks for the journey.

But this isn’t all. Many linguists and anthropologists are of the opinion that language was developed by early humans not simply for the purpose of communication but for deception. All beings communicate with each other, but at least on this planet only humans deceive each other. And for such deception, we rely primarily on language. It isn’t easy for us to hide our feelings and intentions in our facial or bodily expressions, but language offers ready and endless opportunities for altering and manipulating the truth. Thus, the question for a translator is not only the efficiency of language, but its truthfulness. That is, does it actually do what we think it does, and does what it does have any basis other than in fiction?

We live in worlds of linguistic fabrication. Pine trees do not grow with the word “pine” hanging from their branches. Nor does a pine tree “welcome” anyone to its shade. It is we who decide what words to use, and, like Alice, what they mean. And what they mean does not necessarily have anything to do with reality. They are sleights of the mind as well as the hand and the lips. And if we mistake words for reality, they are no longer simply sleights but lies. And yet, if we can see them for what they are, if we can see beyond their deception, they are like so many crows on the wing, disappearing with the setting sun into the trees beyond our home. This is what poetry does. It brings us closer to the truth. Not to the truth, for language wilts in such light, but close enough to feel the heat.

According to the Great Preface to the Book of Odes, the Chinese character for poetry means “words from the heart.” This would seem to be a characteristic of poetry in other cultures as well—that it comes from the heart, unlike prose, which comes from the head. Thus, prose retains the deceptive quality of language, while poetry is our ancient and ongoing attempt to transcend language, to overcome its deceptive nature by exploring and exposing the deeper levels of our consciousness and our emotions. Though poetry is still mediated by language, it involves a minimal use of words, and it also weakens the dominance of language through such elements as sound and silence, rhythm and harmony, elements more common to music than logic. In poetry, we come as close as we are likely to get to the meaning and to the heart of another.

This, too, isn’t all. Poetry is not simply “words from the heart.” A poet doesn’t make a poem so much as discover a poem, maybe in a garden or a ghetto, maybe in a garbage dump or a government corridor, or in a galaxy of stars. In poetry, we go beyond ourselves to the heart of the universe, where we might be moved by something as small as a grain of sand or as great as the Ganges.

So what does all this mean for the translator? For me it means that I cannot simply limit myself to the words I find on the page. I have to go deeper, to dive into the river. If language is our greatest collective lie, poetry is our attempt to undo that deception. When I translate a poem, I don’t think of the Chinese on the page as the poem, only evidence of the existence of a poem. Poetry shows itself in words, and words are how we know it. But words are only the surface. Even after poets give their discoveries expression in language, they continue to discover a poem’s deeper nuances, and they make changes: maybe a few words, maybe a few lines, maybe much more. The poem, as I see it, is a never-ending process of discovery. And it isn’t just language. It’s the unspoken vision that impels a poet and to which the poet tries to give expression. But the poet never gives complete expression to that vision, only a few fragments from a kaleidoscopic insight, a few steps on the dance floor impelled by music even the poet hears only imperfectly.

Then a translator comes along, and things change. It is only then that the poet no longer dances alone but with a partner. And together they manifest a deeper insight into the poem, into the music that motivates the dance. Thus, I have come to realize that translation is not just another literary art, it is the ultimate literary art, the ultimate challenge in understanding as well as performance. For me, this means a tango with Li Bai, a waltz with Wei Yingwu, a dance with the dead.


~ “Dancing with the Dead” was first presented as part of the Simmons College International Chinese Poetry Conference, October 8 - 10, 2004.

Tags: Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead, Language, Poetry, Art of Translation, Cipher Journal, essays

Twiction

Do you Twitter?

If so, there is a new meme starting in the Twitterverse, Twiction. Post a very short story (140 characters minus 9 for #twiction, the hashmark to make the post searchable) and you are writing twiction. Takes flash fiction to a whole new level.

Still working on gettin the old content moved over here.

Tags: twiction, flash fiction, Twitter

Welcome Back to Elegant Thorn Review

Elegant Thorn Review has returned to the Blogger platform with the old URL: http://elegantthorn.blogspot.com.

Over the coming weeks, I will be moving the most recent work posted at the Polysemy site back to this platform.

Hang in there and ETR will be back soon.

Tags: announcements

Elizabeth Alexander - Praise Song for the Day, A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Here is the complete text of Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem, to be published by Graywolf Press, courtesy of Hill Sheperd.

Praise Song for the Day, A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.

praise song for walking forward in that light.
Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.

Tags: Elizabeth Alexander, Praise Song for the Day, A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration, poetry, Graywolf Press

The Inaugural Poet - Q & A with Elizabeth Alexander

Having an "official" poet for the Obama Inaugural brings poetry front and center in American culture, at least for a day . . . back where it belongs.

From The Root:

The Inaugural Poet - Q & A with Elizabeth Alexander

The selection of Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander to write and deliver a poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama marks not only the return of poetry to a place of prominence in presidential history (she is only the fourth to read at a presidential swearing-in), but represents a true mind-meld between the president-elect and his chosen bard. Professor Alexander is a virtuosic writer and a shrewd analyst of American letters, a polyglot who moves fluently from essay to sonnet, from free verse to drama—and in her teaching, traces equally diverse themes. As the big day approaches, it’s hard to tell who will serve as muse to whom—Alexander and Obama share ties to Chicago and to the classroom, and a demonstrated commitment to the power of words and of community institutions.

I recently caught up with my former teacher to discuss her work and the now-finished poem she will deliver at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The Root: Congratulations! How were you chosen for the honor? Who called who?

Elizabeth Alexander: I actually don’t know! You’d have to ask the inaugural committee what happened. I just got a phone call saying that they were asking me to write a poem and deliver it. It was a tremendous thrill. Kind of like Sarah Palin, I didn’t even think about saying no.

I think one of the really exciting things about the Obama campaign and his election is that so many more people than in the past have felt called to serve, have felt that they needed to step up their game, do what they could. You know, not much has been asked of us in the last eight years—now is the time. So I thought that this question was a continuation of the same mission we heard expressed on the campaign trail.

TR: Have you read the president-elect’s college-era poetry? It’s pretty bad. How can you trust his judgment on you? What kind of poetry does he enjoy? (I think that he must have loved your “Stravinsky in L.A.”)

EA: Well, most 19-year old poetry is pretty bad! As to what poetry he favors now, that’s a question better left for him. I do know that when he was photographed a few days after the election, he was holding a copy of Derek Walcott’s collected poems. And let me tell you, an audible collective whoop rose up from the poetry world. It was so wonderful to see that three days after he was elected leader of the free world that he would literally model for us a book of poetry, show the value of taking a moment to see what wisdom could be found in a poem. And with a great poet like Walcott, who, of course, doesn’t shy away from politics and serious sociological thinking.

TR: Who have you been reading for inspiration, and how is that different from what you teach at Yale?

EA: I did a lot of rereading—and then I stopped. Because it was important that I remind myself what it was possible to do in poetry, but at the same time to create a space to listen to what I had to say. I have learned that the greats inspire, but they can also daunt. So to know when to put them aside is a key calibration. I certainly returned to Walt Whitman, thinking of his lines about “I hear America singing; the varied carols I hear,” and that vision of a multivocal, loud America, speaking in many different voices and different registers. Conveying a sense of expansiveness in America was important to me.

And Gwendolyn Brooks, as usual, provides me with her intensity, her fierce intensity of language, the way that she begins simply with the lives she might see outside her window on the South Side of Chicago. I thought particularly about Brooks because, were she living she would absolutely be the one giving the inaugural poem. She’s the bard of the South Side and one of the unheralded geniuses of the last century. And I’ve been thinking, of course, about her connection to Obama’s stomping grounds and what it means to be from Chicago, but also her sense of occasion—her sense of what it means to be a community and to hear it all in the tiniest things.

Also, I thought a lot about the poet Robert Hayden, and poems of his such as “American Journal,” where he meditates on “this variegated people” and a poem like “Frederick Douglass,” when he tries to define freedom, to define this concept that we all know, we say we want it—but what is it? And Frederick Douglass is in the poem and tries to make sense of freedom. Those are actually all poets that I teach—at one point or another I try to make it a point to teach what I love.

Read the whole interview.

Tags: The Inaugural Poet, Q & A, Elizabeth Alexander, Root, interviews

Poet and President-elect Obama

From NPR's Weekend America:

Poet and President-elect Obama
Larissa Anderson
JANUARY 3, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama has a lot of writers excited about the next four years. He'll have a poet at his inauguration. He's said he's going to have more poetry readings at the White House. He's even quoted poetry on the campaign trail. In the speech he gave on Super Tuesday, Obama said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." That line is from June Jordan's "Poem for South African Women." Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has been thinking about what it means to have a president who reads poetry. He talked with Weekend America's Larissa Anderson.

You can read the article at their page. Or listen, too, for that matter.

Tags: Poet and President-elect Obama, NPR, Larissa Anderson, essays

Thanksgiving Poems

I promise to get back to regular posting soon. Until then, here are some "thanksgiving" poems in honor of the holiday, courtesy of The Academy of American Poets.

* * *

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin
Listen...

The Thanksgivings
by Harriet Maxwell Converse
We who are here present thank the Great Spirit...

Around Us
by Marvin Bell
We need some pines to assuage the darkness...

A List of Praises
by Anne Porter
Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing...

Dusting
by Marilyn Nelson
Thank you for these tiny...

For the Fallen
by Laurence Binyon
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children...

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to...

What Was Told, That
by Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks
What was said to the rose that made it open was said...

Lift Every Voice and Sing
by James Weldon Johnson
Lift ev'ry voice and sing...

Rabbi Ben Ezra
by Robert Browning
Grow old along with me...

For the Twentieth Century
by Frank Bidart
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand...

Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape
by Christian Hawkey
At the time of his seeing a hole opened—a pocket opened...

The Routine Things Around the House
by Stephen Dunn
When Mother died...

The Teacher
by Hilarie Jones
I was twenty-six the first time I held...

The Triumph of Time
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Before our lives divide for ever...

Two Countries
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Skin remembers how long the years grow...

Visiting Pai-an Pavilion
by Hsieh Ling-yun
translated by Sam Hamill
Beside this dike, I shake off the world's dust...

Tags: Thanksgiving Poems, poetry, The Academy of American Poets

Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia

A very interesting and somewhat controversial article by Paglia on her selection process for Break, Blow, Burn. She disses some "canonic" poems and poets, which is sure to provoke some anger in professors.

Posted at Arion.

Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn

CAMILLE PAGLIA

(click here to view the pdf version)

BREAK, BLOW, BURN, my collection of close readings of fortythree poems, took five years to write. The first year was devoted to a search for material in public and academic libraries as well as bookstores. I was looking for poems in English from the last four centuries that I could wholeheartedly recommend to general readers, especially those who may not have read a poem since college. For decades, poetry has been a losing proposition for major trade publishers. I was convinced that there was still a potentially large audience for poetry who had drifted away for unclear reasons. That such an audience does in fact exist seemed proved by the success of Break, Blow, Burn, which may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.

On my two book tours (for the Pantheon hardback in 2005and the Vintage paperback in 2006), I was constantly asked by readers or interviewers why this or that famous poet was not included in Break, Blow, Burn, which begins with Shakespeare and ends with Joni Mitchell. At the prospectus stage of the project, I had assumed that most of the principal modern and contemporary poets would be well represented. But once launched on the task of gathering possible entries, I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension. Or poets whom I fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies turned out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no single poem that could stand up as an artifact to the classic poems elsewhere in the book. The ultimate standard that I applied in my selection process was based on William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” a masterpiece of sinewy modern English.

Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influence on other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams), should have been automatically included in Break, Blow, Burn. But to my dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature. The equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my original list. But after reviewing Auden’s collected poetry, I was stunned to discover how few of his poems can stand on their own in today’s mediasaturated cultural climate. Auden’s most anthologized poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” inspired by a Breughel painting, felt dated in its portentous mannerisms. A homoerotic love poem by Auden that I had always planned to include begins, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.” But when I returned to it, I found the poem perilously topheavy with that single fine sentence. Everything afterward dissolves into vague blather. It was perhaps the most painful example that I encountered of great openings not being sustained.

Surely the lucid and vivacious Marianne Moore, so hugely popular in her day, would have produced many poems to appeal to the general reader. However, while I was charmed by Moore’s ingenious variety of formats, I became uncomfortable and impatient with her reflex jokiness, which began to seem like an avoidance of emotion. Nothing went very deep. Because I was so eager to get a good sports poem into Break, Blow, Burn (I never found one), I had high hopes for Moore’s beloved odes to baseball. Alas, compared to today’s highimpact, aroundtheclock sports talk on radio and TV, Moore’s baseball lingo came across as fussy and corny.

Elizabeth Bishop presented an opposite problem. Bishop is truly a poet’s poet, a refined craftsman whose discreet, shapely poems carry a potent emotional charge beneath their transparent surface. I had expected a wealth of Bishop poems to choose from. With my eye on the general reader, I was keenly anticipating a cascade of sensuous tropical imagery drawn from Bishop’s life in Brazil. But when I returned to her collected poems, the observed details to my surprise seemed oppressively clouded with sentimental selfprojection. For example, I found Bishop’s muchanthologized poem “The Fish” nearly unbearable due to her obtrusively simmering selfpity. (Wounded animal poems, typifying the anthropomorphic fallacy, have become an exasperating cliché over the past sixty years.) Even splendid, monumental Brazil evidently couldn’t break into Bishop’s weary bubble, which traveled with her wherever she went. It may be time to jettison depressiveness as a fashionable badge of creativity.

Charles Bukowski was another poet slated from the start to be prominently featured in Break, Blow, Burn. (Indeed, he proved to be the writer I was most asked about on my book tours.) I had planned to make the dissolute Bukowski a crown jewel, demonstrating the scornful rejection by my rowdy, raucous 1960s generation of the genteel proprieties of 1950s literary criticism, still faithfully practiced by the erudite but terminally prim Helen Vendler. I was looking for a funny, squalid street or barroom poem, preferably with boorish knockdown brawling and halfclad shady ladies. But as with Elizabeth Bishop, I could not find a single poem to endorse in good faith for the general reader. And Bukowski was staggeringly prolific: I ransacked shelf upon shelf of his work. But he obviously had little interest in disciplining or consolidating his garrulous, meandering poems. Frustrated, I fantasized about scissoring out juicy excerpts and taping together my own ideal Platonic form of a Bukowski poem. The missing Bukowski may be the surly Banquo’s ghost of Break, Blow, Burn.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Final Cut, The Selection Process, Break Blow Burn, Camille Paglia, Arion, essays