RICHARD'S BLOG

Powerless To Amend a Broken World – The Power of Poetry in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Novel – Under Heaven

May 16, 2013 – 1:05 am

images[1]A woman, exquisitely dressed, spins lightly on her feet, then stops, her back to a man directly behind her. The man pulls her tight and calmly drives a knife through her heart.

And so dies Wen Jian, consort to an emperor and so-called most beautiful woman of the age. This scene is from Under Heaven published in 2010. Written by Canadian Guy Gavriel Kay, it’s a historical fantasy modeled on the Chinese T’ang Dynasty.

The death of Wen Jian is made more poignant when a witness, the book’s main protagonist, asks “Should there be birdsong?” His friend, a poet based on noted T’ang poet Li Po answers: “ No, and yes. We do what we do, and the world continues. Somewhere a child is being born and the parents are tasting a joy they never imagined.” And later the poet says: “We will pick our way through the shards of broken objects folly leaves behind. And some of what breaks will be very beautiful.”

(A quick note on the anglicizing of Chinese names: the old so-called Wade-Giles system has been replaced by the Pinyin system. But what makes it confusing is that many of the best-known Chinese poets still are known by their Wade-Gilles names and in some cases had a few different Wade-Giles names! For example, Li Po, who is now officially Li Bo or Li Bai under the new system, was known under the old system as Li Po, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po and Li T’ai-pai. But since he is perhaps still best known as Li Po I will stick with that name in this post! The other great T’ang poet featured in this post is best known as Tu Fu but in the new system he is called Du Fu.)

Although Under Heaven is set in an imagined empire it’s based on 8th Century T’ang China at the moment when the empire was about to descend into a civil war (the An-Lushan rebellion 755-763). This war ravaged the country with estimates of up to thirty-six million killed or displaced making it one of the worst man-made disasters in human history. (Wen Jian is modeled on Yang Kuie-fei, infamous and extraordinarily beautiful young concubine to the far-older emperor Hsuan Tsung. By all accounts her influence over the emperor, who was besotted by her, played a major role in the events that led to the catastrophic rebellion.)

In his book Great Big Book of Horrible Things – The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities, Mathew White quotes a more “modest” figure of 13 million dead for the An Lushan rebellion, still ranking it number thirteen among his so called top one hundred disasters. White also calls it the Poets’ War because two of their [China’s] greatest poets lived and wrote during this time. He is referring to Li Po (701-763) – and Tu Fu (712- 770).

Think of that: the Poets’ War. The poems written by these men are a fine reportage of the inner and outer reality of that devastating time. And so revealing that it can be named after their telling of those dark days. When critics say poetry shouldn’t be a documentary art I can point to these poets and say: really?

These two poets and their poems come alive in Under Heaven, especially Li Po, the so-called Banished Immortal, (named Sima Zian in the novel). He is a central character in the book. And Tu Fu (called Chan Du in the novel) is referenced. especially, through his poem Overnight in the Pavilion by the River. The excerpted version of that poem in Kay’s book stopped me cold in my first reading. In a wonderful moment Kay has Sima Zian (Li Po) recite an excerpt from Tu Fu’s poem. Here it is:

Full moon is falling through the sky.
Cranes fly through the clouds.
Wolves howl. I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.

Here is a full version translated by David Young:

Overnight at the River Pavillion

Evening is walking
up the mountain paths

I lie in the high chamber
here at the River Gate

thin clouds
rest against the cliffs

a lone moon
swims among the waves

some cranes fly past
in silence

far off, a pack of wolves
howl as they chase their quarry

I lie awake
worrying about war

I have no strength, I know,
to set this world to rights.

Tu Fu from Du Fu – A Life in Poetry, translated by David Young, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

In Under Heaven Sima Zian responds to the poem this way:

I love the man who wrote that. I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du (Tu Fu). Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it is always, always is.

To try and understand the intricacies of translating Chinese poems into English is a hard task. I found a number of versions of Tu Fu’s poem in my library but the version in Under Heaven (not attributed to a translator) moves me the most with it’s last lines:  ..I cannot find rest/ Because I am powerless/ To amend a broken world.
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And There Is No More – But Lots More of Poet, Christopher Locke

May 9, 2013 – 4:55 pm

Christopher Locke

Christopher Locke

In January 2007 I was preparing to lead my first Recovering Words poetry writing workshop at The Orchard, a drug and alcohol recovery centre on Bowen Island, offshore West Vancouver. I was looking for poems on addiction from an addict’s point of view. I had found a chilling one called Half-Hearted Moon from the section The Addiction Poems in Patrick Lane’s book Go Leaving Strange (2004) but I wanted to find another. (At that time I had not found what has become an invaluable resource: Last Call – Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction and Deliverance published by Sarabande Books in 1997.)

Since I didn’t have a chemical dependency I was feeling vulnerable about trying to convince recovering addicts about the power and relevance of poetry for their recovery. I was afraid I might be laughed out of the room. (Somehow I had managed to ignore the devastating impact of alcoholism and food addiction in my own family.) As a diversion I picked up a copy of The Sun, the literary journal from North Carolina, that had arrived that day. Without thinking I opened it up and read this poem:

New Weather

There is no horse,
smack, h, tar, heroin,
china. No more oxy, percs,
Percocet, Vicodin, Vikings,
V for Victory. There is
no more coke, blow,
white, cane. There are
no more raves, parties,
throw-downs, shindigs,
soirees, or get-togethers.
There is no bliss, blissed
out, stoned, fucked up,
higher than a mother fucker,
nod, nodding, passed out.

There is no more vomiting,
bile, dry heaves, drool, spit,
cursing, clenching, blood,
crying, weeping, shaking, sweating,
sheets wet as a full bandage.

There are no more highs,
exquisite lows. There are
no more evenings collapsing
into morning, the horizon
rolling up its sleeve
to bleed pink and red
against the kitchen window.

And there is no more
me looking at you
from the doorway, trying
not to sway, defiant,
insisting I’m not gone,
I’m fine, OK, no problem,
got it together, straight, sober,
right as rain.

Christopher Locke, The Sun, January 2007
(With permission)

I was gob-smacked. Life had dropped what I needed right into my lap. A poem of such visceral intensity from someone who was obviously writing from a first-hand experience. This was as good an example of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) I had ever encountered! All I remember from that workshop is three of the poems I used: Lane’s Half-Hearted Moon, a poem of Rainer Maria Rilke from the Book of Hours (III, 1) and Locke’s poem. And a line one of the participants wrote: An addiction is loving what will never love you back. Yikes, the horrifying truth of that.

For a number of years Locke’s poem was a mainstay of my workshops. (For Locke’s background for the poem see the interview with him below.) I used the line And there is no more as a prompt for participants to write from. And so many wonderful and varied poems have come from that prompt. And many of its lines haunt me still. Especially these ones:

There are
no more evenings collapsing
into morning, the horizon
rolling up its sleeve
to bleed pink and red
against the kitchen window.

The contemporary American poet Tony Hoagland  claims in a wonderfully provocative essay  in Harper’s (Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America) that real live American poetry is absent from our high schools. He adds later: This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, it’s willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plantive truth-telling about the human condition… Read More »

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“The Book” and the Art of Poetic Provenance

April 28, 2013 – 9:18 pm

The Beloved is Dead

The beloved is dead. Limbs
And all the body’s
Miraculous parts
Scattered across Egypt,
Stained with dark mud.

We must find them, gather
Them together, bring them
Into a single place
As an anthologist might collect
All the poems that matter
Into a single book, a book
Which is the body of the beloved,
Which is the world.

Gregory Orr from Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved, Copper Canyon Press, 2005

I refer to the American Poet Greg Orr a lot in my blogs and especially in my blog – O is for Orr. Click here. (Orr has a new book coming out in June – The River Inside the River . I look forward to it!) For this blog I am concerned most with his concept of “The Book” which he has described in an interview as being the book that contains every poem or song ever written. In the poem above he refers specifically to poems that matter being collected into a single book but no time for quibbling!

What strikes me about Orr’s book is the idea that all poems and songs are connected. Each is part of a greater whole. We never write in isolation. And ultimately all poems come down to common themes that human beings have been singing and reciting for thousands of years.

When I Open the Book

When I open the Book
I hear the poets whisper and weep,
laugh and lament.

In a thousand languages
They say the same thing:
“We lived. The secret of life
Is love, which casts its wing
Over all suffering, which takes
in its arms the hurt child,
Which rises green from the fallen seed.”

Gregory Orr, ibid

Orr’s concept of the book is a large one. It makes a big claim. But it gathers special traction for me when I can trace the specific genealogy or provenance of a poem or poems! Where I see how poems grow out of each other yet be strikingly different!

Recently, I went on quite a trip tracing poetic genealogies! I owe this trip, which started quite accidently, to Erin Murphy and her poem Covetous which I discovered in an anthology she co-edited called Making Poems – Forty Poems with Commentaries by the Poets published in 2010 by State University of New York Press. Murphy is an American poet who has written five poetry collections and is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State’s, Altoona College.

So, hold on as I take you on a poetic trip that spans more than seventy years! It starts with Murphy’s poem Covetous and its epigraph: After Eamon Grennan’s Start of March, Connemara. Before I could say thumbed and wind-scumbled!, phrases in Murphy’s poem, I was searching for Grennan’s poem and Grennan who I didn’t know. I found him, an Irish-born poet who has lived and taught in the U.S. for almost fifty years, but even better I was set on another chase!

Murphy had referenced the influence of Elizabeth Bishop on Grennan’s poem in her commentary of her poem Covetous in her book Making Poems. And as a clue for this there’s Grennan’s dedication line in his poem: In memory of Elizabeth Bishop. Thanks to Murphy I had a direct reference to Bishop’s influence on Grennan’s poem. So away I went to find Bishop’s poem – The End of March. Phew! Final destination I thought. But no!

It turns out, according to an article written by Shaune Bornholdt in the journal Per Contra (issue 23), that Bishop’s poem was directly influenced by Wallace Stevens’ poem The Sun This March and also shows direct influences from other Stevens poems! Enough already!

So please join me on the trip I took starting with Murphy.

COVETOUS

After Eamon Grennan’s “Start of March, Connemara”
You ask how the gulls find the right angle in the gale,
how they adapt to the current and let it take them

the way they were going. I could ask the same of you:
how do you find thumbed and wind-scumbled,

thrusting them together like lost lovers,
letting them glance off each other, polished stones

on our tongues? Or glitterwings making their mark,
a dance linguists call the fricative,

a word I love because it is what it means,
unlike palindrome, which resists mirroring itself

and sends me, instead, to a girl I knew in college,
the one from Glenelg – g-l-e-n-e-l-g, the same

forward and back. She had hips that looked good
in boy jeans and a way of making the professor

believe she’d done the reading when she hadn’t
even bought the book. Do you see what just happened,

how I started in your lyrical world of shorelines
and wave-peaks and wound up recording

slumber party giggles through a thin wall? Your gulls:
maybe they don’t harness the wind after all.

Maybe they give in to each gust and forsake their plans,
having learned long ago to want what they have.

Erin Murphy from Making Poems – Forty Poems with Commentaries by the Poets, State University of New York Press, 2010

Her poem, as the epigraph suggests, is utterly connected to Grennan’s but then she takes her own astonishing turn, completely out of context with Grennan, or so it seems, when she talks about palindromes and a girl she knew at college! And then flys, so to speak, right back into Grennan’s poem! Also notice right from the get go she addresses Grennan. We are overhearing a poetic conversation inside The Book! And in a wonderfully sneaky move she also uses an image of stones in her poem that doesn’t come from Grennan but from Bishop!

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10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1… Lift off! Poems from Planet Earth Now Available

April 18, 2013 – 10:00 pm

660[1]Last Friday at 7.30 PM more than a hundred of us crammed into the The Moca House on Hillside in Victoria. There were line ups at the bar for cookies and such, coffee and beer but we were there for even stronger and more nourishing fare. It was the launch of the anthology Poems From Planet Earth edited by Yvonne Blomer and Cynthia Woodman Kerkham and published by Leaf Press from Nanaimo. Click here for a book description dates  and for launches in Vancover and Nanaimo

An embarassment of riches! I know many of the poets whose poems are in this volume including me! So many I couldn’t possibly ask them all for permission to highlight their poems here! So  I  asked just a few. But I didn’t expect all the enthusiastic responses! So I am going to profile just three of the poems here and beg forgiveness for those I have missed. My choices say nothing about the quality of the poems not included. I almost decided to ditch the post to avoid misunderstandings but that would be unfair to this strong anthology! I hope to include some other poems in future blogs!

An unusual aspect of this book is the range of the poets it features. It includes many well known Canadians such as Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Jan Zwicky, John Barton, Derk Wynand, Wendy Morton, Brian Brett, Susan McCaslin, Pamela Porter  and Sheri-D Wilson amd former Washington State Poet Laureate Sam Green and his wife Sally. But it also showcases many other fine poets who are not household names but whose poems don’t feel in any way out of place with those of their better-known counterparts. This blend of voices creates the secret sauce that makes this volume so easy to digest.

Here’s a first taste of the fine poems in this collection: an uncharacteristically short poem! by Linda Thompson from Port Alberni, here on the island. I picked this because of Linda’s strong sense of place. She originally hails from the Pemberton area in B.C . This landscape is her blood and bones! And I couldn’t resist the wonderful sound of Lillooet.

Friend, Listen

These are in my bones:

The five o’clock sun on the canal.
Trees that rise to their shapes,
dark and deep.

Blue clay dug from the coulee
that cuts through the Glover ranch.
Soft grey silt from the Lillooet.

I say this now:

It will be a long time dark.
Bring your own light to the grave.

Linda K. Thompson, with permission.

What an anthology! And what a reading series. Planet Earth Poetry in one form or another (and in different venues) has been a Friday night fixture in Victoria for years. But since 2006 it’s been ensconced in the Hillside location but with a change of owners in 2010 the name was changed to The Moca House! Wendy Morton, a poetry impresario if there ever was one ran the series for ten years and since 2010 its Artistic Director has been Yvonne Blomer who has kept the series thriving! Read More »

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A Follow-Up To The Post: To Make Us Consider How Our Light Is Spent

April 13, 2013 – 5:13 pm

I am so glad to have attentive readers of my blog! And they were working overtime earlier this week thanks to poem called The Purposes of Poetry by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, a professor at the University of California. Here’s her poem:

The Purposes of Poetry

To find a way of putting what can’t be said
To startle us into seeing
To train words to dance
To rescue worthy words from slow death

To reassert the power of whim
To combat mind erosion
To make us feel what we think
And visa versa

To resuscitate the media-impaired
To remind us that truth is round
With holes and corners
To notice what will never happen
Just that way again
To make us consider how our light is spent

Or that the world is too much with us
Or petals on a black bough

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

 

So what caught the eye of two of my readers? The last three lines! The ones that pay direct homage to three celebrated poets. Those lines amended, ever so slightly, are from poems by John Milton, William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound. I caught the Pound reference but missed the other two entirely.

So many thanks in particular to two readers and friends! First, to Andy Parker, a poet and Episcopal priest from Texas who, with his wife Liz, also a priest,  have so warmly welcomed me into their church family to lead a poetry workshop  – Poetry as Prayer – once a year for the last four years.

And second, to D.S. (Don) Martin who I first encountered through a wonderful interview published in Image Journal that he did with the late Margaret Avison, a celebrated Canadian poet. In recent years I have kept in touch with him on a regular basis through his wonderful blog Kingdom Poets which profiles poets of Christian faith every week. You can find it by clicking here: http://kingdompoets.blogspot.com . You will surprised at the list of of varied poets in his extensive archives. You can see Don and Andy’s comments in the previous post!

Here are the three poems where McEntyre’s lines come from!  And so the line that knocked me for six as a cricketer might say – To make us consider how are light is spent – is from Milton! I missed it. Then there is the Wordsworth line – THE world is too much with us; late and soon – and the Pound -  Petals on a wet, black bough. Ageless. That is the nature of great poetry. And I so appreciate how these lines live so comfortably inside a contemporary poem!

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

John Milton (1608-1674)

The World Is Too Much With Us; Late And Soon

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

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To Make Us Consider How Our Light Is Spent – An Evening With Dana Gioia

April 8, 2013 – 10:23 am

A few days ago I was high up – about 900 feet – on a mountain top overlooking hills and vineyards, stretched along the valley floor, in California’s wine country. I have a glass of Chardonnay in one hand – it would seem heretical not to – in this area that celebrates the ubiquity of the grape – and my mouth is trying to scan the poetry of taste in my mouth. Do I taste lemon and grapefruit? Is the acid balanced with the sugar? Do I feel the buttery complexity provided by aging in oak?

But other poetries also are singing inside me. In front of me, growing up on a steep slope is an imposing native Black Oak. I am struck by its size: it’s at least 30 feet tall and by its canopy, at least as wide. But what mesmerizes me is the contortion of its sinuous limbs as it reaches up high above the porch where I stand. In particular, I marvel at one limb, the circle it made, before straightening and lengthening out again.

Earlier my host had pointed out the circle with a fierce intensity. Then later in a talk he had described the beauty of that tree, the circled limb, as a result of  a one hundred year-old conversation with wind and weather. The beauty and poetry of that. And the poetry of his love poem to his wife which he recited by memory with such a musical cadence – the double sonnet The Lunatic, The Lover, And The Poet  from his 2012 collection Pity The Beautiful published by Graywolf Press.Here is the first of the poem’s four stanzas:

The tales we tell are either false or true,
But neither purpose is the point. We weave
The fabric of our own existence out of words,
And the right story tells us who we are.
Perhaps it is the words that summon us.
The tale is often wiser than the teller.
There is no naked truth but what we wear.

My host, the author of this poem, was Dana Gioia (1950 – ), the American poet (and more). Gioia may well truly qualify for the extravagant sobriquet – renaissance man. His range of expertises is impressive – from business marketing and management at General Foods, to languages, to music ( author of two opera  libretti), to poetry (four collections), to editing (literary anthologies) to teaching (currently a professor at USC)  and to his role as Chair for six years (2002 – 2009) of the American National Endowment for the Arts.
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“The” Love Poems – Join the Conversation

April 1, 2013 – 12:46 pm

At the 2013 Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the American poet Jane Hirschfield (1953 -)  was asked to pick a poem that had inspired her.  She demurred by saying she owed most to all the poets who have been sharing their words for the past 40,000 years.

And  Greg Orr (1947 – ), another fine American poet (see previous Blog – O is for Orr) frequently references the The Book in his recent books of lovely small poems. For him The Book contains all the songs and poems ever written.

Both these poets capture an essential thing: we never write in a vaacum. Each poem or song we write is an echo of other voices: the crying out of what it is to be human. But sometimes the echo is very specific and very direct. Often a poet will write a poem directly influenced by another. Sometimes the influence is credited. Other times not.

At the Palm Beach Festival I was fortunate enough to be in a workshop with the 2010 National Book Award winner, Terrance Hayes (1971 – ). One of his exercises was based on using other poems or an aspect of other poems as a launching off point for your own poem. This made me curious to find other examples and later that day I asked Pete Fairchild (1942 – ), acknowledged as one of the finest narrative poets of his generation, if he had written a poem that was deeply influenced by another. Without hesitation he said:  The Grapes, by  Anthony Hecht (1923 – 2004) was a large influence in his poem Freida Pushnik. And although these two dramatic monolgues are very different  the impact of The Grapes on Fairchild’s poem is clearly evident once you know the connection.

But already I had another example – two poems, written almost 400 years apart, but deep in conversation! They are  Love III  by George Herbert (1593 – 1633) and Love After Love by Derek Walcott ( 1930 – ), the  1992 Nobel Prize Laureate in literature. I owe the credit for the connection to these two poems to my former wife, Susan. I have seen one interpretation on-line that Walcott’s title references a failed relationship. But when you put the two poems side by side clearly Walcott’s poem is after Herbert’s. Closely connected.
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Words Make A Difference – Kay Jamison and Alfred Lord Tennyson On Grief

February 24, 2013 – 1:29 pm

Grief. I read Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Nothing Was The Same last night. It is her 2009 memoir to her husband who died in 2002 at 63 from a chronic illness. Grief is never an easy subject but poets have made it a prime subject for generations. It is how we sing out our losses and griefs. Redfield is an accomplished prose writer but poetry, especially Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam, has provided  solace and meaning to the grief of her husband’s loss.

I first discovered Jamison (1946 – ) when I read her astonishingly candid book,  An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, her memoir of successfully fighting suicidal depression – an awful irony- because she was a mental health professional, a doctor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins where she still teaches. This book was a brave endevour by any measure but it is also a true measure of a woman recognized in so many ways for her work and life. According to Wikipedia she has won numerous awards , published more than one hundred academic articles, has been named one of the “Best Doctors in the
United States” and was chosen by Time Magazine as a “Hero of Medicine”.

Her mind is quieter now but no less quick. Her latest book is a love letter most of all. The inside of the hardback cover and first page of the book have two letters facing each other. Love letters. Hers and her husband’s in their early days. Letters full of love and gratitude but set clearly within the context of her past history of manic depression. The letters celebrate their “now” without ignoring her past; they celebrate total acceptance, as her husband says: “allowing us to be one.”

The book’s last part – two chapters – is about loss and grief. It is called Of Something Lost, which comes from a line in In Memoriam.

She has much to say about grief and how different it is from depression. And Tennyson was key to her in her grief journey. Read More »

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Shocking Intimacies – A Correspondence in Poetry between Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg-

February 3, 2013 – 11:19 pm

In 1981 the American poet Linda Gregg published her first poetry collection, Too Bright To See – a remarkable debut in its own right. But it was made even more memorable by the raw and forthright poems directly and indirectly referencing her eight year marriage/relationship with poet Jack Gilbert and his infidelities.(See previous blogs dated Dec. 4th, 2012 and Nov. 30th, 2012.) The book has many surprises but one stands out the most. In spite of not pulling her punches in her poems about Jack she dedicated her book to him: For Jack Gilbert. It Was Like Being Alive Twice.

That phrase It was like being alive twice, which I believe is originally from Li Po, the Chinese Tang Dynasty poet, shows up twice in the book, most notably, in light of the dedication, in this excerpt from the poem The Defeated.

I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken.
It wa sunny outside. I miss you. My head is tired.
John was nice this morning. Already what I remember
most of the happiness of seeing you. Having tea.
Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake
in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.
I’ll try to tell you better when I am stronger.

What does the moth think when the skin begins to split?
Is the air an astonishing pain? I keep seeing the arms
bent. The legs smashed up against the breasts,
with her sex showing. The weak hands clenched.
I see the sad, unused face. The she starts to stand up
in the opening out. I know ground and trees.
I know air. But then everything else stops
because I don’t know what happened after that.

Linda Gregg from The Defeated in Too Bright To See, Graywolf Press, 1981

Ouch! Ouch! How she captures the “isness” of the shock, the moment. And the poem ends, as if at a cliff’s edge. Everyone, including the reader, swaying at that edge.

And another. Her emotion again palpable. And again the stopped time at the end. The emotional vertigo. The stark shock of the first line. The unsettling strangeness of the last line. Its irony. To grow specific without being specific!

The Wife

My husband sucks her tits.
He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive.
Toward that outer love. I wait in the hotel
until four. I lurch from the bed
talking to myself, watch my face in the mirror.
I change my eyes, making them darker.
Take it easy, I say. It is a long time to wait in,
this order of reality. My presence stings.
I grow specific without consequence.

Linda Gregg,  ibid

Coincidence? In 1982 Gilbert published Monolithos, just his second book after a twenty year gap. It was dedicated To Linda Gregg with admiration and love. It in no way tried to rebut Gregg. Quite the contrary. While he doesn’t explicitly own up to the infidelities Gregg charges him with (that comes later in other books) he also documents the end of their marriage but the tone is so different, more distant, measured. It begins an extraordinary published poetic correspondence between them that goes on for another twenty plus years. And in spite or because of it they remained devoted friends to the end of Gilbert’s life in late 2012.
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And Still We Sing – A New Year’s Eve Celebration of the Life and Poems of Patrick Lane

December 31, 2012 – 4:31 pm

It is late October, 2012, last evening of the Vancouver Writers’ Festival. There is music in the big room already. Music made by voices. The event starts in thirty minutes but many of the four hundred-or-so chairs are already filled. The music is sweet and unique. Those particular voices. Those places in the room where people greet each other – men and women brought here by another music – the songs, the poems of one of Canada’s most accomplished poets, Patrick Lane age 73, published in their entirety in his Collected Poems from 2011.

Today, it’s the last day of 2012 and I greet this last day in words motivated by a promise to myself that I would capture something of that special celebration of the life and poems of Patrick Lane held on an autumn night in Vancouver more than two months ago.

As I have read Patrick Lane’s poems over and over I have been struck by the many references to singing, to music, inside his poems. This was brought further home to me during Patrick’s celebration when in the eight or so poems he chose to read there it was a few times but especially in his poem The Beauty: And still we sing./ That is beauty. This is a poem he often recites at a reading by memory. It is that important to him. (This, and all other Patrick Lane poems and excerpts are included here with the kind permission of the author.)

The Beauty

This too, the beauty
of the antelope in snow.
Is it enough to say we will
imagine this and nothing more?

Who understands that, failing
falters at the song.
But still we sing.
That is beauty.

But it is not an answer
any more than the antelope
most slender of beasts
most beautiful

will tell us why they go
going nowhere
and going there
perfectly in the snow.

from The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane, Harbour Publishing 2011

Today, as I talked to Patrick about last minute details of the retreat he is leading for nineteen of us starting this Thursday, I asked him about all the singing references in his poems and he said in so many words that, of course, poetry is music. Then specifically he added: poetry is a voice raised to deliberate song.

And such songs Lane sings! That night in October he sang us poems including The Bird, Stigmata, Witnesses, Fathers and Sons, Moths, The Beauty and Red Bird Bearing on His Back an Empty Cup. Read More »

By Richard | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)