An Early October Cold :: from American Life in Poetry

Here we repost the weekly poetry column brought to you, free of charge, by American Life in Poetry – an organization supported by The Poetry Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, Ted Koosner. This week is presented a windy-cold and haunting poem by Don Thompson:

October

I used to think the land

had something to say to us,

back when wildflowers

would come right up to your hand

as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,

the wind would begin to make sense

if I listened hard

and took notes religiously.

That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:

the cloudless sky has a flat affect

and the fields plowed down after harvest

seem so expressionless,

keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves

blow across them

as if autumn had written us a long letter,

changed its mind,

and tore it into little scraps.

Pretty Absurd, Absurd Pretty Pictures

Hayagriva has fallen to musing.

We don't have a lot of money. But what we do have is a murder of talented friends (just incase that doesn't make sense: "murder" is a term used to describe a flock of crows – e.g. a murder of crows – but I like it here: a group of artist, or cantors squawking for a purpose comprehensible only by themselves; and if they're doing it right, waking people up in the early morning with their bull shit and bombast). Anyway, some very talented friends of ours are making a short-short Artichoke Haircut film, which should be up on our website in the coming weeks. This is just a taste. A few stills from the set. Click here to see a few more.

Photos by Melissa Streat

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Dr. Samuel Johnson

Percy Bysshe Shelley :: Editors' Picks

Bill Henson
Untitled # 20,  2000-3

To the Moon
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

 Art thou pale for weariness?
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

    Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth, --
And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

I’m not exactly sure what it says about man, that he is always looking for something beyond himself, something greater than his surroundings? It could be that this question springs from, as La Rochefoucauld said, the fact that we can neither look the sun nor death directly in the face?
 
And what does it say about the human race that we must mythologize these forces, and every force, for that matter, we do not understand. What manic insecurity we must have that we find it necessary to make up fantastical stories in order to escape from the thoughts born of those treacherously quiet moments, those moments that otherwise would be filled with thoughts of the smallness we feel pushing us into the ground, only to be mocked by the stars and the growing night?
 

I must confess, I find it too horrible to consider the stars, or even a tree or a rock completely on their own – they laugh and destroy everything I believe makes me a conscious man. So they too must have stories forced upon them. They must be told their reason for being, a story that does not include them watching us, watching me.  But, as all stories do, these stories will eventually no longer satisfy our longing for answers, our longing for understandable forces, so we then tell stories of supermen living amongst the stars, playing conductor to the music of the spheres. But, today, these stories too have lost their truths. So much so that we have made up stories of men to replace them. Men who were like us and like the stars – Abraham, David, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Mohammed. Men who are their own myths, and who can bring the sky, brightly, to the earth.
 
Even these stories now are suspect, maybe because our skies are so dark. A black sky with, as far as the eye can see, only stars in the form of Justin Bieber, Charlie Sheen and Glen Beck. Now don’t get me wrong, I am endlessly fascinated with these guys. I, like everyone else, gaze at them as if gazing into the absence we hope is in heaven, the spotless mind on the other side of the Lethe. Nonetheless, I have to answer yes to Shelly’s question. I am weary of climbing to black heaven. So weary that I have turned back many times to the comfort of Geico ads (the Achilles’ heel of my aversion to consumer culture). The stories I know no longer chart a reliable path to the moon; they could be anywhere, go anywhere and seem absurd even to exist, if in fact they still do.
 
So I guess this brings me my last question: What does it say about man that he must, despite his weariness, continue to search the path that brings him further from his home in an effort to find himself? I don’t know. But I keep going down that same path hoping to find the answer to that question.      


-Adam Shutz

Juxtaposition :: Editors' Picks

Cy Twombly: Apollo and the Artist 1975

It is impossible that one with even a tangential interest in modern culture has not suffered through a conversation on the power of language, a topic discussed ad nauseam in political discourse, academia, literary circles, theology, blah blah blah. Yet what is little discussed outside the arts (and esoteric, modern philosophy -- hi, Derrida), is what the desire to speak says about the human condition. We find it necessary to cognitively coral things within our experience, yet beyond another's, so that through speech they may indeed experience it. The human animal finds its own reality so endlessly fascinating, or unbearably terrifying, that it is impossible not to blather on about it, no matter who is or is not listening. What else explains the constant speaking into the void that is Twitter?



The three writers below speak to the absurdity that we need to speak, by speaking, which is of course an absurdity of its own. The first poem has trickled down through the centuries from the far-away-lands of India, by the pen of the mystic poet Kabir. The subsequent pieces are modern interpretations on a similar theme: the use of language saying, and saying away ourselves.

Except That It Robs You of Who You Are

    Except that it robs you of who you are,
    What can you say about speech?
    Inconceivable to live without
    And impossible to live with,
    Speech diminishes you.
    Speak with a wise man, there’ll be
    Much to learn; speak with a fool,
    All you get is prattle.
    Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make
    A loud sound; strike one that is full,
    Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

(translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)
Taken from New York Review of Books

Flame, Speech

By Octavio Paz

    I read in a poem:
    to talk is divine.
    But the gods don't speak:
    they make and unmake worlds
    while men do the talking.
    They play frightening games
    without words.

    The spirit descends,
    loosening tongues,
    but doesn't speak words:
    it speaks fire.
    Lit by a god,
    language becomes
    a prophecy
    of flames and a tower
    of smoke and collapse
    of syllables burned:
    ash without meaning.

    The word of man
    is the daughter of death.
    We talk because we are mortal:
    words are not signs, they are years.
    Saying what they say,
    the words we are saying
    say time: they name us.
    We are time's names.

    The dead are mute
    but they also say
    what we are saying.
    Language is the house
    of all, hanging over the abyss.
    To talk is human.

(translated from Spanish by Mark Strand)

Taken from The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry

Excerpt from the play, The Maids

by Jean Genet

              Solange: She would like to smile but she is dead…. She enters her apartment – but, Madame is dead. Her two maids are alive: they’ve just risen up free, from Madame’s icy form. All the maids were present at her side – not themselves but rather the hellish agony of their names.

(translated from the French by Bernard Frenchtman)

                                                                                      -By Adam Shutz

Vasko Popa :: Editors' Pick

Ancient rock painting at Horseshoe Canyon, Utah

I could ramble on and on about Popa's use of myth, folklore, surrealism, etc. I could talk about the humor and sly intelligence which springs out of his deceivingly simple poems. I could talk about his use of repetition and cliché . But these labels and explanations would do little but distract attention from the man's voice. Instead I'll just let the 'lame wolf' poet from Serbia say it, and hopefully you will see it for yourselves:

Echo Turned to Stone

Once upon a time there were so many echoes

They were slaves of one voice

Built him arches

The arches tumbled down

They’d built them crooked

The dust buried them

They gave up the dangerous labor

Turned to stone from hunger

Turned to stone they flew

To find to rip to bits the lips

From which the voice came

They flew no one knows how long

Blind fools, didn’t they see

That they flew along the edge of the lips

They were seeking

Translated by Charles Simic.

For more on Vasko Popa go to www.oberlin.edu/ocpress/Books/Popa.htm


-By Adam Shutz

Gerard Manley Hopkins :: Editors' Picks

It isn't that I dislike religious imagery in poetry, it's just that a part of my brain rebels and fights and screams whenever I hear it. It takes a bit of work and an excellent poet to crack through that prejudice and make me listen. Hopkins does, and his poem "God's Grandeur" shows the reader the wonder this planet can instill if carefully observed. He pulls you from ephemeral beauty into the blear of humanities' devastation of their environment. Yet there is no "the end is nigh" in this poem. With a touch of grace he pulls you out of the mortal tragedy in time to show you it's eminent rejuvenation. Such is the hope of religion I guess. Lets hope he's right:

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.



-Posted by Adam Shutz