February 1, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

News and Jabber

Here is a link to an article/obituary of Nicanor Parra, Chilean poet who died on January 23, 2018 at the age of 103. He wrote what he called anti-poetry. This is stripped-down verse, somewhat in response to the broad lyricism of Pablo Neruda and other South American poets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/nicanor-parra-chiles-eminent-poet-and-anti-poet-dies-at-103/2018/01/23/debce2aa-0042-11e8-9d31-d72cf78dbeee_story.html?utm_term=.d23b10eca68fIn contemplating death and his controversial legacy, Mr. Parra created a piece of anti-poetry in 1954 called “Epitaph”:

Neither too bright nor totally stupid

I was what I was. A mixture

Of oil and vinegar

A sausage of angel and beast.

I Take Back Everything I’ve Said - Poem by Nicanor Parra

Before I go

I’m supposed to get a last wish:

Generous reader

burn this book

It’s not at all what I wanted to say

Though it was written in blood

It’s not what I wanted to say.

No lot could be sadder than mine

I was defeated by my own shadow:

My words took vengeance on me.

Forgive me, reader, good reader

If I cannot leave you

With a warm embrace, I leave you

With a forced and sad smile.

Maybe that’s all I am

But listen to my last word:

I take back everything I’ve said.

With the greatest bitterness in the world

I take back everything I’ve said.

— translated by Miller Williams 

A.R. Ammons's complete works has just been released. He's a good man to look up every now and then. Here, in my first ever embedded video, is a discussion with him. It runs 25 minutes. The link immediately below is to a review of the book. 

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-ar-ammons-20180105-story.html

Still

A. R. Ammons, 1926 - 2001


 I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

From The Selected Poems: 1951-1977, Expanded Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1986 by A. R. Ammons.

The Current Assignment

I did this early on and haven't stopped considering my drafts since. I have a number of things ongoing and did not expect this to take over. I found the assignment a trifle more interesting than I first imagined.

The Next Assignment

As we pull out of our various manifestations of SAD, an assignment that has some weight to it. In front of a mirror, write a self-portrait. Do not use a photograph or a recollection of how you think you look. Rather, be in front of a mirror as you write.  Look and see. I include here two translations of Rilke's "Salf-Portrait" and another by Frank Bidart which is  patterned on Rilke's. Consider this quotation from Rilke's "Advice to a Young Poet":
"go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows"

Self-Portrait 

     by Rainer Maria Rilke (EG note, age 31)

The bone-build of the eyebrows has a mule's

or Pole's noble and narrow steadfastness.

A scared blue child is peering through the eyes,

and there's a kind of weakness, not a fool's,

yet womanish -- the gaze of one who serves.

The mouth is just a mouth . . . untidy curves,

quite unpersuasive, yet it says its yes,

when forced to act. The forehead cannot frown

and likes the shade of dumbly looking down.

A still life, nature morte -- hardly a whole!

It has done nothing worked through or alive,

in spite of pain, in spite of comforting . . .

Out of this distant and disordered thing

something in earnest labors to unroll.

Self Portrait

The steadfastness of generations of nobility

shows in the curving lines that form the eyebrows.

And the blue eyes still show traces of childhood fears

and of humility here and there, not of a servant's,

yet of one who serves obediantly, and of a woman.

The mouth formed as a mouth, large and accurate,

not given to long phrases, but to express

persuasively what is right. The forehead without guile

and favoring the shadows of quiet downward gazing.

This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;

never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,

held together for an enduring fulfillment,

yet so as if for times to come, out of these scattered things,

something serious and lasting were being planned.

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Self-Portrait, 1969 (EG note, age 30)

BY FRANK BIDART

He's still young—; thirty, but looks younger—

or does he? . . . In the eyes and cheeks, tonight,

turning in the mirror, he saw his mother,—

puffy; angry; bewildered . . . Many nights

now, when he stares there, he gets angry:—

something unfulfilled there, something dead

to what he once thought he surely could be—

Now, just the glamour of habits . . .

                                                                 Once, instead,

he thought insight would remake him, he'd reach

—what? The thrill, the exhilaration

unravelling disaster, that seemed to teach

necessary knowledge . . . became just jargon.

Sick of being decent, he craves another

crash. What reaches him except disaster?

Frank Bidart, "Self-Portrait, 1969" from In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-1990. Copyright © 1997 by Frank Bidart. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.

The Next Meeting

Other Jabber