Sunday, January 15, 2012
Building the Barricade
This past fall I read Building the Barricade by Anna Swir, book of poems translated from Polish by Piotr Florczyk (Calypso Editions, 2011; the book includes the original Polish poems in addition to the translations). Anna Swir (or Swirszczynska), who lived 1909-1984, took part in the anti-Nazi resistance in Poland during the Second World War; she was in Warsaw during the uprising by the underground in August 1944, and she volunteered as a nurse at an improvised field hospital. Most of the poems in Building the Barricade are from those experiences.
The poems in Building the Barricade (which which all of the quoted passages here are taken) are stark, spare, terse as military dispatches. Swir wrote the poems many years after the experiences from which they were written (the book was first published in Poland in 1974), though the poems still convey the hardened immediacy of the days and hours and moments Swir was writing about. The poems are absolutely free of ornament; they waste no time telling what they have to tell.
From the poem "Conversation through the Door," in which the speaker in the poem shows up at an apartment (during the street fighting throughout the city) to tell parents that their son, a soldier in the Resistance, is dying:
He opens the door,
doesn't unhook the chain.
Behind him his wife
trembles.
I say, your son asks for his mother
to come.
He says: his mother won't come.
Behind him his wife
trembles.
I say: the doctor let him
have wine.
He says: please wait.
He hands me a bottle through the door,
locks the door,
locks with the second key.
Behind the door
the wife begins to scream
as if she were in labor.
The 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place as the army of the Soviet Union was approaching Warsaw from the east, and the German army was retreating toward the west. Tens of thousands of residents of Warsaw died either during the fighting or from mass murder atrocities committed by the German Nazi military. At least 200,000 residents of Warsaw were forcibly evacuated by the German army as the army retreated, and were sent to forced labor camps, or to concentration camps to die. At least 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed during the war. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place in a city in flames.
Why am I so afraid
running down
this burning street.
There's no one here
except flames roaring skyhigh;
and that bang was not a bomb
only three floors collapsing.
Naked they dance, liberated,
waving their hands
from the window caves.
What a sin to spy
on naked flames,
what a sin to eavesdrop
on breathing fire.
(From the poem "I'm Afraid of Fire".)
Many of the poems seem, on the surface, to be simple reports of randomly observed incidents. In their very simplicity they reveal large stories that have repeated themselves throughout the city gripped in bloody battle, in which life becomes reduced to the barest extremes. In the poem "He Got Lucky," Swir writes about a man carrying some books; in an almost offhand act of harassment, a German soldier grabs the man's books and throws them down in the mud.
The old man picks up the books,
the soldier hits him in the face.
The old man falls,
the soldier kicks him and walks away.
The old man
lies in mud and blood.
Underneath, he feels
books.
Not all of the poems in Building the Barricade are bleak or hardened; in a few of the poems, Swir reaches beyond the evident despair and finds signs of life. Here and there a kind of raw lyricism emerges, a glow of warmth and an intimation of happiness, the possibility of a future. From the poem "First Madrigal," in which she writes of spending a night with a lover:
It was rich
like a coronation ceremony.
It was fleshy
like the stomach of a woman in labor
and spiritual
like a number.
It was only a moment of life,
though it wanted to be a conclusion.
By dying
it wanted to understand the mystery of the world.
That night of love
had ambitions.
I've written about Anna Swir's poetry previously in this blog, here. Every time I read her poems, I'm amazed by the power and and range she's able to find, in poems that seem to be almost impossibly pared down to the bone. Out of a century of fire and ashes, out of a nightmare of piled bodies and incinerated cities, Anna Swir's poems offer answers to impossible questions.
As a girl
I climbed from the attic window
onto the roof
in order to jump.
As a woman
I had lice.
They cracked
when I ironed my sweater.
I waited an hour
before a firing squad.
I went hungry
for six years.
Then, when I gave birth to a child,
they cut me open
without anesthesia.
Then I was killed
by lightning three times,
and I had to be resurrected three times
without anybody's help.
Now I am resting
after three resurrections.
The poems in Building the Barricade (which which all of the quoted passages here are taken) are stark, spare, terse as military dispatches. Swir wrote the poems many years after the experiences from which they were written (the book was first published in Poland in 1974), though the poems still convey the hardened immediacy of the days and hours and moments Swir was writing about. The poems are absolutely free of ornament; they waste no time telling what they have to tell.
From the poem "Conversation through the Door," in which the speaker in the poem shows up at an apartment (during the street fighting throughout the city) to tell parents that their son, a soldier in the Resistance, is dying:
He opens the door,
doesn't unhook the chain.
Behind him his wife
trembles.
I say, your son asks for his mother
to come.
He says: his mother won't come.
Behind him his wife
trembles.
I say: the doctor let him
have wine.
He says: please wait.
He hands me a bottle through the door,
locks the door,
locks with the second key.
Behind the door
the wife begins to scream
as if she were in labor.
The 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place as the army of the Soviet Union was approaching Warsaw from the east, and the German army was retreating toward the west. Tens of thousands of residents of Warsaw died either during the fighting or from mass murder atrocities committed by the German Nazi military. At least 200,000 residents of Warsaw were forcibly evacuated by the German army as the army retreated, and were sent to forced labor camps, or to concentration camps to die. At least 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed during the war. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place in a city in flames.
Why am I so afraid
running down
this burning street.
There's no one here
except flames roaring skyhigh;
and that bang was not a bomb
only three floors collapsing.
Naked they dance, liberated,
waving their hands
from the window caves.
What a sin to spy
on naked flames,
what a sin to eavesdrop
on breathing fire.
(From the poem "I'm Afraid of Fire".)
Many of the poems seem, on the surface, to be simple reports of randomly observed incidents. In their very simplicity they reveal large stories that have repeated themselves throughout the city gripped in bloody battle, in which life becomes reduced to the barest extremes. In the poem "He Got Lucky," Swir writes about a man carrying some books; in an almost offhand act of harassment, a German soldier grabs the man's books and throws them down in the mud.
The old man picks up the books,
the soldier hits him in the face.
The old man falls,
the soldier kicks him and walks away.
The old man
lies in mud and blood.
Underneath, he feels
books.
Not all of the poems in Building the Barricade are bleak or hardened; in a few of the poems, Swir reaches beyond the evident despair and finds signs of life. Here and there a kind of raw lyricism emerges, a glow of warmth and an intimation of happiness, the possibility of a future. From the poem "First Madrigal," in which she writes of spending a night with a lover:
It was rich
like a coronation ceremony.
It was fleshy
like the stomach of a woman in labor
and spiritual
like a number.
It was only a moment of life,
though it wanted to be a conclusion.
By dying
it wanted to understand the mystery of the world.
That night of love
had ambitions.
I've written about Anna Swir's poetry previously in this blog, here. Every time I read her poems, I'm amazed by the power and and range she's able to find, in poems that seem to be almost impossibly pared down to the bone. Out of a century of fire and ashes, out of a nightmare of piled bodies and incinerated cities, Anna Swir's poems offer answers to impossible questions.
As a girl
I climbed from the attic window
onto the roof
in order to jump.
As a woman
I had lice.
They cracked
when I ironed my sweater.
I waited an hour
before a firing squad.
I went hungry
for six years.
Then, when I gave birth to a child,
they cut me open
without anesthesia.
Then I was killed
by lightning three times,
and I had to be resurrected three times
without anybody's help.
Now I am resting
after three resurrections.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The whisper of tiny-winged solitude
I've just recently read All Graced in Green, a book of poems by Scott King, published this year by Thistlewords Press, an imprint of Red Dragonfly Press. (Scott King is the publisher of Red Dragonfly Press; he has used the imprint Thistlewords Press to publish a few books of his own work.) This is the largest and most varied collection of Scott's poems that I've seen: richly layered poems of nature and the life of the earth, poems of quiet warmth and friendship and intimacy with the people in his life.
I first met Scott in the early 1990's, and we've become friends in the years since. (By way of disclosure, Red Dragonfly Press has published three of my books of poems, and will be publishing another of mine in the near future.) I took great pleasure in reading All Graced in Green. If you're not familiar with Scott King's poetry, this book makes a good introduction to his work.
One of the qualities that I found running through many of the poems is a quiet patience, a careful listening, in observing the details of the living world. In addition to writing poetry and publishing it (by handset letterpress printing as well as computer typesetting), Scott has also studied environmental sciences, and has spent time doing scientific fieldwork, particularly around lakes and wetlands and other freshwater places. The steady attention that this scientific work requires makes itself evident in his poems.
Among the poems in the book are several series of related poems. Here's an excerpt from the poem "Lunar Eclipse," dated "Sayner, Wisconson, August 16, 1989," from a series of poems titled "Twelve Poems for Trout Lake Station":
Here knowledge began to make sense --
it was not the theory of a frog we held in our hands.
Unpredictable events occurred daily. We
witnessed the deadly wink of the sundew,
its sticky eyelashes decorating fallen logs;
touched the tiny chemist scales of the twinflower
peacefully balancing thought and body
in pine woods penumbra, the almost shadow. [...]
[...] The moon dawned before us.
We tested our intuition against a theory of roadmaps,
finding our way to a fish dinner and a beer.
Gradually it changed, casting unearthly colors
onto the sides of buildings, onto the hoods of cars.
The moon entered the earth's shadow and changed,
like a lens being changed on a microscope.
We stood in the parking lot and looked up,
elated by our shadows, by the magnificent
umbra nibbling at the edge of the moon.
We brightened as our faces dimmed,
beer in hand, carefree of careers.
"...it was not the theory of a frog we held in our hands." I'd like to post that line, at least, on the wall in the departmental office of every MFA creative writing program in the United States, and would encourage every student to spend some time thinking about its implications for writing poems. It would be a bad idea for every member of Congress and every state legislator to spend some time thinking on it as well.
Another series of poems in the book is titled "Physiologus," and is made up of poems that describe and explore various plant and animal (mostly insect) species. Here again the detailed observation, not straining, finding the poetry that life can sometimes make of itself without exhaustive effort. From the poem "Northern Paper Wasp" (a species with the scientific name Polistes fuscatus):
Now comes the release
of a mid-winter thaw,
then, more surprising still,
a Co-op of wasps found
scattered on a sidewalk
like a handful of small caliber
rifle bullets. They are hibernating
northern paper wasps
knocked down from the roofline
by birds or a collapse of roof-ice,
the pale sun on red brick
not nearly enough to wake them.
I pick one up gently,
carefully hold it in my fingertips.
This warm-blooded grip stirs
the sleeping queen
to stretch out a yellow leg
as though it were spring.
Back home, I take up the book,
flip forward through unread pages --
sure enough -- the wasp
is waiting there as well,
the name and pronunciation:
po-LIST-eez fuss-CATE-us.
I say it over and over --
the Greek meaning
founder of a city, the Latin
black, for its smoke-colored wings.
One of the things I find Scott King's poems leading me to is the knowledge, a gentle (and urgent) reminder, that we human beings are, after all, creatures on this earth among all other creatures. We are not separate from this place. This has profound implications for us in our relations with each other. A wound to the earth is a wound to all of the life on the earth, including ourselves. I'm not dogmatically against any kind of technology; even the first fire built by a human being, in the most ancient times, had an impact on the environment. But we've gone far beyond that first fire, and we need to think consciously about the decisions we make, and the consequences they'll; we need to pay attention to the footprints we leave.
Like bells, these stones ring.
Rock outcroppings warm our bare feet.
In our hands we weigh
plain, dry stones, blue-gray.
They are worn down, dull
discs fallen from the spine
of an upright age.
Here is gooseberry and yellow tansy,
its aroma strong as railroad ties,
creeping bell flower
a blue sword in the stone.
Adapting to strange needs,
I wonder if it was your wish for me
to fashion an odd vision into words,
as it was mine to lead you here,
this love of waves breaking at my feet?
Our fingers, stained red, touch,
not blood, but a communion
of kisses and laughter,
the red the color of a cabin set deep
in dusky woods, intimate,
windows lit with mystery.
(From the poem "Brighton Beach -- July 29, 2001," in a poem sequence titled "Lake Superior Journal.")
Some of the poems in All Graced in Green touch more explicitly on the world of human action, offering quiet commentaries on the political and economic events that surround us and how they touch us. From the poem "McGrath, Ritsos -- Autumn, 1990" (written in remembrance of Communist poets Thomas McGrath and Yannis Ritsos):
After they departed, we saw starlight
for what it had always been
and marveled at each silken fiber,
like seed dispersed in the dark night.
Ritsos in a black boat
followed the moon across the Aegean,
while the sound of statues limping
through the hollow night was heard
In the neighborhoods of Greece.
McGrath stepped out a door
leaving footprints in the snow
as he followed the Red River north. [...]
[...] Red banners bleed in the blue sky.
The words thalassa and ouranos
take on a tinge of purple
like the color of the Scots thistle
picked to adorn a worker's table,
a reminder of hard times lived through,
the sugar ants rummaging
the sticky blooms into seed.
The Red River mentioned in the poem is the river the forms the border between North Dakota and Minnesota; it's one of a small number of rivers in the world that flows to the north. The lines in the last stanza about the Scots thistle are a reference to the long poem "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" by Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid.
Among the poems in All Graced in Green is an excerpt from "Wynnere and Wastoure," a fourteenth-century alliterative Middle English poem by an unknown author; three passages from the poem are rendered into more or less modern English by Scott King. The original poem (or at any rate the surviving text of it) is divided into several sections, or "fitts" (as they're called in the old text). Here are some lines from Scott's rendering of "Wastoure's Feast, from Fitt the Second":
And then a third course I count beyond reason --
I who want no more than Martinmass meats myself
cooked with simple herbs, I who do without wild fowl
(but for the one hen the house was owed) --
but he, he must have birds all sorts braised upon a spit
barnacle geese, bitterns, long-billed snipe;
larks and linnets, ladled with sugary glaze,
woodcock and woodpecker simmering and hot,
teal, titmice, terns to take what they like,
rabbit stews, sweet custards
decadent meat pies, pastries aplenty,
diced meat with almond milk to stuff their stomachs
that cost more than a mark for every two men --
a cost that must surely sting and stab at the guts.
Resounding so loudly, your trumpets anger me,
all the men in the streets must hear that blaring:
and then say to themselves, as they ride off together,
even Heaven's king's of no help to you.
Thus you are scorned. Thus you are disgraced.
You who fritter away on a feast a ransom of silver.
As once I heard off a herdsman's tongue:
"Better many a meal, than one merrry night."
In the economic firestorm of these years, in the thump and rattle of foreign policy that grows out of the barrel of a gun (or the software of a drone aircraft), amid the blaring of the trumpets of imperial conquest, and the rampant excesses of financial schemers (who "fritter away on a feast a ransom of silver) -- can there be any question of the relevance of the above lines, even coming to us from several hundred years ago and across the sea?
(I found online a Middle English text of the poem, with a side-by-side glossary of the more difficult or unfamiliar words, here. I don't have sufficient knowledge of Middle English literature to comment on the accuracy of the text at the above link; the webpage appears to be part of a college or university library, though a link to a main menu page gave a "page not found" error mesage. But the above link to the specific webpage works, at least at the time of writing this; including the link here for anyone who's curious. I found other information about the original poem by Googling the phrase "wynnere and wastoure" with quote marks included.)
These are poems that can help to remind us of the limits of ambition, that there are other (and more useful) ethical values than seeking after the most recent version of the latest iGadget, that there are languages older than the ones that will fit in the space of a text message or a twitter. (Birds have in fact been twittering for some time, and they don't appear to feel the need to limit themselves to 140 syllables or whatever the current count is.) Some things that are worth saying take time to say, and in All Graced in Green Scott King has taken the time to say some of them. We should take time to listen.
I'll finish here with some lines from the poem "Belle Creek":
After a day's labor, thoughts
still spool in the short term
memory of the hours I stood working.
I hurry to shuck shoes
and hitch hip boots, fit
the full length of the fly rod
and wade the long grass and yellow clover
to the edge of Belle Creek.
I know there may be no worse
trout stream in the state.
But sometimes there's hope
in neglect. And I'm here
and nowhere else.
As I wade upstream, the carp
get smaller, more trout-like.
Silted, slow, the stockyards and fields
burden these waters.
Chasing rumors of rumors of fish,
I'll settle for the whisper
of tiny-winged solitude
and the midges building clouds
over sweet grass.
Among his various other projects, Scott King has for some time been translating poems by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. Some of his translations are posted in his blog website HINTS: The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos. Other of Scott's published books are listed in the Red Dragonfly Press website, here. One I've read and found fascinating is Rice County Odonata Journal, in which he gives an unhurried account of an ongoing project to find and identify species of dragonflies and related insects in Minnesota. ("Odonata" is a scientific classification that includes dragonflies, damselflies, and the like.)
The main page for Red Dragonfly Press is here.
I first met Scott in the early 1990's, and we've become friends in the years since. (By way of disclosure, Red Dragonfly Press has published three of my books of poems, and will be publishing another of mine in the near future.) I took great pleasure in reading All Graced in Green. If you're not familiar with Scott King's poetry, this book makes a good introduction to his work.
One of the qualities that I found running through many of the poems is a quiet patience, a careful listening, in observing the details of the living world. In addition to writing poetry and publishing it (by handset letterpress printing as well as computer typesetting), Scott has also studied environmental sciences, and has spent time doing scientific fieldwork, particularly around lakes and wetlands and other freshwater places. The steady attention that this scientific work requires makes itself evident in his poems.
Among the poems in the book are several series of related poems. Here's an excerpt from the poem "Lunar Eclipse," dated "Sayner, Wisconson, August 16, 1989," from a series of poems titled "Twelve Poems for Trout Lake Station":
Here knowledge began to make sense --
it was not the theory of a frog we held in our hands.
Unpredictable events occurred daily. We
witnessed the deadly wink of the sundew,
its sticky eyelashes decorating fallen logs;
touched the tiny chemist scales of the twinflower
peacefully balancing thought and body
in pine woods penumbra, the almost shadow. [...]
[...] The moon dawned before us.
We tested our intuition against a theory of roadmaps,
finding our way to a fish dinner and a beer.
Gradually it changed, casting unearthly colors
onto the sides of buildings, onto the hoods of cars.
The moon entered the earth's shadow and changed,
like a lens being changed on a microscope.
We stood in the parking lot and looked up,
elated by our shadows, by the magnificent
umbra nibbling at the edge of the moon.
We brightened as our faces dimmed,
beer in hand, carefree of careers.
"...it was not the theory of a frog we held in our hands." I'd like to post that line, at least, on the wall in the departmental office of every MFA creative writing program in the United States, and would encourage every student to spend some time thinking about its implications for writing poems. It would be a bad idea for every member of Congress and every state legislator to spend some time thinking on it as well.
Another series of poems in the book is titled "Physiologus," and is made up of poems that describe and explore various plant and animal (mostly insect) species. Here again the detailed observation, not straining, finding the poetry that life can sometimes make of itself without exhaustive effort. From the poem "Northern Paper Wasp" (a species with the scientific name Polistes fuscatus):
Now comes the release
of a mid-winter thaw,
then, more surprising still,
a Co-op of wasps found
scattered on a sidewalk
like a handful of small caliber
rifle bullets. They are hibernating
northern paper wasps
knocked down from the roofline
by birds or a collapse of roof-ice,
the pale sun on red brick
not nearly enough to wake them.
I pick one up gently,
carefully hold it in my fingertips.
This warm-blooded grip stirs
the sleeping queen
to stretch out a yellow leg
as though it were spring.
Back home, I take up the book,
flip forward through unread pages --
sure enough -- the wasp
is waiting there as well,
the name and pronunciation:
po-LIST-eez fuss-CATE-us.
I say it over and over --
the Greek meaning
founder of a city, the Latin
black, for its smoke-colored wings.
One of the things I find Scott King's poems leading me to is the knowledge, a gentle (and urgent) reminder, that we human beings are, after all, creatures on this earth among all other creatures. We are not separate from this place. This has profound implications for us in our relations with each other. A wound to the earth is a wound to all of the life on the earth, including ourselves. I'm not dogmatically against any kind of technology; even the first fire built by a human being, in the most ancient times, had an impact on the environment. But we've gone far beyond that first fire, and we need to think consciously about the decisions we make, and the consequences they'll; we need to pay attention to the footprints we leave.
Like bells, these stones ring.
Rock outcroppings warm our bare feet.
In our hands we weigh
plain, dry stones, blue-gray.
They are worn down, dull
discs fallen from the spine
of an upright age.
Here is gooseberry and yellow tansy,
its aroma strong as railroad ties,
creeping bell flower
a blue sword in the stone.
Adapting to strange needs,
I wonder if it was your wish for me
to fashion an odd vision into words,
as it was mine to lead you here,
this love of waves breaking at my feet?
Our fingers, stained red, touch,
not blood, but a communion
of kisses and laughter,
the red the color of a cabin set deep
in dusky woods, intimate,
windows lit with mystery.
(From the poem "Brighton Beach -- July 29, 2001," in a poem sequence titled "Lake Superior Journal.")
Some of the poems in All Graced in Green touch more explicitly on the world of human action, offering quiet commentaries on the political and economic events that surround us and how they touch us. From the poem "McGrath, Ritsos -- Autumn, 1990" (written in remembrance of Communist poets Thomas McGrath and Yannis Ritsos):
After they departed, we saw starlight
for what it had always been
and marveled at each silken fiber,
like seed dispersed in the dark night.
Ritsos in a black boat
followed the moon across the Aegean,
while the sound of statues limping
through the hollow night was heard
In the neighborhoods of Greece.
McGrath stepped out a door
leaving footprints in the snow
as he followed the Red River north. [...]
[...] Red banners bleed in the blue sky.
The words thalassa and ouranos
take on a tinge of purple
like the color of the Scots thistle
picked to adorn a worker's table,
a reminder of hard times lived through,
the sugar ants rummaging
the sticky blooms into seed.
The Red River mentioned in the poem is the river the forms the border between North Dakota and Minnesota; it's one of a small number of rivers in the world that flows to the north. The lines in the last stanza about the Scots thistle are a reference to the long poem "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" by Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid.
Among the poems in All Graced in Green is an excerpt from "Wynnere and Wastoure," a fourteenth-century alliterative Middle English poem by an unknown author; three passages from the poem are rendered into more or less modern English by Scott King. The original poem (or at any rate the surviving text of it) is divided into several sections, or "fitts" (as they're called in the old text). Here are some lines from Scott's rendering of "Wastoure's Feast, from Fitt the Second":
And then a third course I count beyond reason --
I who want no more than Martinmass meats myself
cooked with simple herbs, I who do without wild fowl
(but for the one hen the house was owed) --
but he, he must have birds all sorts braised upon a spit
barnacle geese, bitterns, long-billed snipe;
larks and linnets, ladled with sugary glaze,
woodcock and woodpecker simmering and hot,
teal, titmice, terns to take what they like,
rabbit stews, sweet custards
decadent meat pies, pastries aplenty,
diced meat with almond milk to stuff their stomachs
that cost more than a mark for every two men --
a cost that must surely sting and stab at the guts.
Resounding so loudly, your trumpets anger me,
all the men in the streets must hear that blaring:
and then say to themselves, as they ride off together,
even Heaven's king's of no help to you.
Thus you are scorned. Thus you are disgraced.
You who fritter away on a feast a ransom of silver.
As once I heard off a herdsman's tongue:
"Better many a meal, than one merrry night."
In the economic firestorm of these years, in the thump and rattle of foreign policy that grows out of the barrel of a gun (or the software of a drone aircraft), amid the blaring of the trumpets of imperial conquest, and the rampant excesses of financial schemers (who "fritter away on a feast a ransom of silver) -- can there be any question of the relevance of the above lines, even coming to us from several hundred years ago and across the sea?
(I found online a Middle English text of the poem, with a side-by-side glossary of the more difficult or unfamiliar words, here. I don't have sufficient knowledge of Middle English literature to comment on the accuracy of the text at the above link; the webpage appears to be part of a college or university library, though a link to a main menu page gave a "page not found" error mesage. But the above link to the specific webpage works, at least at the time of writing this; including the link here for anyone who's curious. I found other information about the original poem by Googling the phrase "wynnere and wastoure" with quote marks included.)
These are poems that can help to remind us of the limits of ambition, that there are other (and more useful) ethical values than seeking after the most recent version of the latest iGadget, that there are languages older than the ones that will fit in the space of a text message or a twitter. (Birds have in fact been twittering for some time, and they don't appear to feel the need to limit themselves to 140 syllables or whatever the current count is.) Some things that are worth saying take time to say, and in All Graced in Green Scott King has taken the time to say some of them. We should take time to listen.
I'll finish here with some lines from the poem "Belle Creek":
After a day's labor, thoughts
still spool in the short term
memory of the hours I stood working.
I hurry to shuck shoes
and hitch hip boots, fit
the full length of the fly rod
and wade the long grass and yellow clover
to the edge of Belle Creek.
I know there may be no worse
trout stream in the state.
But sometimes there's hope
in neglect. And I'm here
and nowhere else.
As I wade upstream, the carp
get smaller, more trout-like.
Silted, slow, the stockyards and fields
burden these waters.
Chasing rumors of rumors of fish,
I'll settle for the whisper
of tiny-winged solitude
and the midges building clouds
over sweet grass.
Among his various other projects, Scott King has for some time been translating poems by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. Some of his translations are posted in his blog website HINTS: The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos. Other of Scott's published books are listed in the Red Dragonfly Press website, here. One I've read and found fascinating is Rice County Odonata Journal, in which he gives an unhurried account of an ongoing project to find and identify species of dragonflies and related insects in Minnesota. ("Odonata" is a scientific classification that includes dragonflies, damselflies, and the like.)
The main page for Red Dragonfly Press is here.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Caput Nili
One evening last June I read Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for Oranges by Lisa Gill (West End Press, 2011), a book-length series of poems, mingled with prose interludes, and with artwork by Kris Mills. The book is, more or less, an account by Gill of her attempt to find a medical diagnosis for whatever was causing her difficulty walking, and of her long and varied journey along the way through the infernal underworld of medical clinics and hospitals, and psychiatric treatment for bipolar disorder and whatever else doctors thought she might have.
Throughout the book the poems and prose mingle jittery desperation, quick humor, a quiet sense of self, and a keen perception of the leaky cracks that are everywhere in the implacable walls of modern bureaucracy. Gill repeats phrases and ideas from one poem to another, circling back through the same moments to reach for multiple perspectives. The poems move along like electrical current, not pausing to rest. The book kept pulling me along with it -- I read it in one sitting, something I've rarely done with any book.
The book is organized into four overall sections, and the individual poems in each section are numbered in sequence, without titles. The first poem (numbered 1:1) begins:
In 2003 I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.
I went to the ER and told them
my legs had been numb for five weeks.
They told me to eat mandarin oranges.
They told me to eat mandarin oranges
and then shrugged, as if legs didn't matter.
So I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.
Self-preservation is instinct.
And from the next poem (numbered 1:2):
You want to know where the shotgun came from?
It came from my knee--
this was a weapon birthed from patella and ligament,
hard-hitting myth born the day I decided
I would not leave a man's hands wrapped around my windpipe.
It took years to get around to defending myself,
it took less than a minute without oxygen
as if my head had been forced underwater in the River Styx
fish swimming by
a baptism into adrenaline
fast riddle of flesh
this time the answer was a leg.
In a note at the front of the book, Lisa Gill explains that the title, Caput Nili, is Latin for "head [i.e. the source] of the Nile." According to Gill, after the source of the Nile River was "discovered" by a European explorer in the mid-1800's, the phrase "caput Nili" came to refer more broadly to any sort of significant discovery. Caput Nili is, in part, about Gill's search for the injuries or traumas in her early life that may lie at the source of any or all of the illnesses or conditions affecting her body and psyche.
At some point as she was writing Caput Nili, Gill worked with several other women to create a one-woman performance piece from the work-in-progress. Much of the writing, especially of the poems, has the feel and movement of speech and performance. The writing is at times deeply personal and vulnerable, but it the voice that is speaking never retreats into isolation. The author is speaking to human beings, face to face. She means to tell us something we need to hear.
From the poem numbered 1:6:
I get tired of the onslaught.
One man threw a blanket over my head.
If he hadn't been shoving a knee into my crotch
and his tongue into my mouth, I would have gone to sleep.
It's so old, the harassment.
When I have insomnia, I can't count how many times
I've been followed or stalked or felt up or groped
or slapped or flashed or propositioned or catcalled
or had a gun pulled on me... no, I can count that.
Once.
Once a man pulled out a pistol
and began gesticulating at me.
I knew him and although I wasn't entirely sure
what he had in his hands, it looked like a .22 caliber
bluff.
He wanted to sleep with me.
The prose sections of Caput Nili are difficult to quote in brief passages -- much of the power throughout the book, both the poems and the prose, grows from the cumulative effect of repetition and revisiting, a kind of double and triple exposure sensation. The prose sections serve to flesh out the background of the poems and Gill's life in general. I'll quote a brief passage from the first prose section, titled "Say So":
The first seizure drug was like my third serious relationship.
It nearly killed me.
Things started off innocuously enough. The doctor said, "This pill will make it so you don't smell the images on TV anymore." Or that's what I heard. My sensory life was a bit out of whack. I had visual and auditory hallucinations and was plagued with smells that no one else could perceive. And I was suicidal.
I thought that pill would cure me.
Instead, after only a month, when I took a routine follow-up blood test, the result was that I got called into the neuro's office. He said, word for gregarious word, "Your body has quit producing white blood cells. You might die."
Ten years later, I asked my shrink for my chart. When I got it, that adverse reaction was summed up in one line: "Patient experienced Leukipenia on Tegretol."
It didn't say what I'd have said: The drug the patient was taking so she wouldn't off herself nearly killed her, the irony of which thrust her into such a profound despair that she didn't eat for two weeks, though she went ahead and took her iron pills on an empty stomach, because the blood test had also shown that she had become anemic, and she still, stubbornly, wanted to believe that pills would make things better.
Now I'd say my bone marrow was depressed, literally.
Much of the artwork by Kris Mills plays with classic works of art: a cubist Picasso woman eating from a can of mandarin oranges; an old-style pistol with a caption,"Ceci n'est pas une fusil"; the woman from Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," pulling herself by her hands across a flat surface marked into a grid of squares; an image (after a painting by Ingres) of a woman holding a shotgun up over her shoulder like a water jar. Lisa Gill also includes in the book a couple of MRI images of her own brain.
From the poem numbered 2:4:
Five weeks. My legs had been numb for
five weeks when I went to the ER.
I'd already been to my primary.
She took X-rays.
They were clean as something else going on
so she gave me a referral to a neurologist.
I called every neurologist in the phone book
trying to get an appointment.
I knew: crossing my kitchen
shouldn't feel like crossing the Rubicon
and I'd fallen
for the idea that someone might help me
this time. I knew:
I wasn't crazy.
The numbness was more stable
than anything in my life.
Caput Nili tells a remarkable odyssey, a hard and persistent struggle, a story and struggle that repeat, in countless variations, in the real lives of the billions of us who awaken and live in the world. The story Lisa Gill tells is a warning and a celebration; it is an offering to the bare bones of light.
From the poem numbered 3:12:
Six months later, when I'd recovered feeling
in my legs, I met with a new neurologist.
She hit me with a hammer.
Repeatedly.
One leg flew into the sky, the other did nothing.
Bipolar reflexes.
Neither response was normal.
She struck a tuning fork and put it to my shin.
I was supposed to say when I couldn't feel it.
Instead my whole body started trembling.
She raised her eyebrows
so I told her about the time a sitar concert
had made me hear laughter
every time I bent my neck down.
I told her I'd learned to keep my head up.
Without hesitating,
she slapped my MRI's onto the light screen.
I didn't know what I was looking at.
I didn't know anything but I could see polka dots.
I trembled again. [...]
[...] Then she flipped some more
stopped, pursed her lips, and said,
"Your corpus callosum is thinner than I'd like to see."
And she showed me the arc,
the strip of brain that connects the two hemispheres,
the strip of brain that should have been plump.
"So what does that mean?"
"That means you'll have trouble with memory."
"What kind of memory," I said, trying to be calm.
"Long term of short?"
"All memory."
Several places in Caput Nili, Gill includes short quotations from various writers: Sigmund Freud, Margaret Sanger, John Hanning Speke. One quotation, by Martin H. Teicher, particularly struck me, in the context of all that Gill tells about in her book. Here is the quoted passage by Teicher as given in Caput Nili; Gill notes that the quotation is from Teicher's article "Scars That Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse," which appeared in Scientific American in 2002 (Gill's citation doesn't note which month):
"...Research reveals a strong link between physical, sexual, and emotional mistreatment of children and the development of psychiatric problems. But in the early 1990s researchers thought of the damage as basically a software problem amenable to reprogramming via therapy or simply erasable through the exhortation, Get over it.
[However] such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development. ...We see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once these key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back."
Caput Nili is, partly, about the long journey toward recovery from trauma; it is also about the ongoing effort to survive and grow in a world that continues to create trauma on an ever greater horrific scale. The book presents no neat conclusions or simplistic answers; it asks essential questions, and shines light on them in the darkest places.
From a poem near the end of the book (numbered 4:12):
So yes, I wish I'd pressed charges.
I wish I'd reported the malpractice.
I wish I'd done anything
to stop any of the people who hurt me
from hurting one more woman,
so I am doing what I can do now:
I am sicking my skinny corpus callosum on the world.
Because what's horrific is not what happened to me,
it's that i'm not alone. [...]
[...] And I was not in the wrong place at the wrong time:
This is the wrong culture at the wrong time.
Poet Lisa Gill has written the right book at the right time.
Throughout the book the poems and prose mingle jittery desperation, quick humor, a quiet sense of self, and a keen perception of the leaky cracks that are everywhere in the implacable walls of modern bureaucracy. Gill repeats phrases and ideas from one poem to another, circling back through the same moments to reach for multiple perspectives. The poems move along like electrical current, not pausing to rest. The book kept pulling me along with it -- I read it in one sitting, something I've rarely done with any book.
The book is organized into four overall sections, and the individual poems in each section are numbered in sequence, without titles. The first poem (numbered 1:1) begins:
In 2003 I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.
I went to the ER and told them
my legs had been numb for five weeks.
They told me to eat mandarin oranges.
They told me to eat mandarin oranges
and then shrugged, as if legs didn't matter.
So I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.
Self-preservation is instinct.
And from the next poem (numbered 1:2):
You want to know where the shotgun came from?
It came from my knee--
this was a weapon birthed from patella and ligament,
hard-hitting myth born the day I decided
I would not leave a man's hands wrapped around my windpipe.
It took years to get around to defending myself,
it took less than a minute without oxygen
as if my head had been forced underwater in the River Styx
fish swimming by
a baptism into adrenaline
fast riddle of flesh
this time the answer was a leg.
In a note at the front of the book, Lisa Gill explains that the title, Caput Nili, is Latin for "head [i.e. the source] of the Nile." According to Gill, after the source of the Nile River was "discovered" by a European explorer in the mid-1800's, the phrase "caput Nili" came to refer more broadly to any sort of significant discovery. Caput Nili is, in part, about Gill's search for the injuries or traumas in her early life that may lie at the source of any or all of the illnesses or conditions affecting her body and psyche.
At some point as she was writing Caput Nili, Gill worked with several other women to create a one-woman performance piece from the work-in-progress. Much of the writing, especially of the poems, has the feel and movement of speech and performance. The writing is at times deeply personal and vulnerable, but it the voice that is speaking never retreats into isolation. The author is speaking to human beings, face to face. She means to tell us something we need to hear.
From the poem numbered 1:6:
I get tired of the onslaught.
One man threw a blanket over my head.
If he hadn't been shoving a knee into my crotch
and his tongue into my mouth, I would have gone to sleep.
It's so old, the harassment.
When I have insomnia, I can't count how many times
I've been followed or stalked or felt up or groped
or slapped or flashed or propositioned or catcalled
or had a gun pulled on me... no, I can count that.
Once.
Once a man pulled out a pistol
and began gesticulating at me.
I knew him and although I wasn't entirely sure
what he had in his hands, it looked like a .22 caliber
bluff.
He wanted to sleep with me.
The prose sections of Caput Nili are difficult to quote in brief passages -- much of the power throughout the book, both the poems and the prose, grows from the cumulative effect of repetition and revisiting, a kind of double and triple exposure sensation. The prose sections serve to flesh out the background of the poems and Gill's life in general. I'll quote a brief passage from the first prose section, titled "Say So":
The first seizure drug was like my third serious relationship.
It nearly killed me.
Things started off innocuously enough. The doctor said, "This pill will make it so you don't smell the images on TV anymore." Or that's what I heard. My sensory life was a bit out of whack. I had visual and auditory hallucinations and was plagued with smells that no one else could perceive. And I was suicidal.
I thought that pill would cure me.
Instead, after only a month, when I took a routine follow-up blood test, the result was that I got called into the neuro's office. He said, word for gregarious word, "Your body has quit producing white blood cells. You might die."
Ten years later, I asked my shrink for my chart. When I got it, that adverse reaction was summed up in one line: "Patient experienced Leukipenia on Tegretol."
It didn't say what I'd have said: The drug the patient was taking so she wouldn't off herself nearly killed her, the irony of which thrust her into such a profound despair that she didn't eat for two weeks, though she went ahead and took her iron pills on an empty stomach, because the blood test had also shown that she had become anemic, and she still, stubbornly, wanted to believe that pills would make things better.
Now I'd say my bone marrow was depressed, literally.
Much of the artwork by Kris Mills plays with classic works of art: a cubist Picasso woman eating from a can of mandarin oranges; an old-style pistol with a caption,"Ceci n'est pas une fusil"; the woman from Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," pulling herself by her hands across a flat surface marked into a grid of squares; an image (after a painting by Ingres) of a woman holding a shotgun up over her shoulder like a water jar. Lisa Gill also includes in the book a couple of MRI images of her own brain.
From the poem numbered 2:4:
Five weeks. My legs had been numb for
five weeks when I went to the ER.
I'd already been to my primary.
She took X-rays.
They were clean as something else going on
so she gave me a referral to a neurologist.
I called every neurologist in the phone book
trying to get an appointment.
I knew: crossing my kitchen
shouldn't feel like crossing the Rubicon
and I'd fallen
for the idea that someone might help me
this time. I knew:
I wasn't crazy.
The numbness was more stable
than anything in my life.
Caput Nili tells a remarkable odyssey, a hard and persistent struggle, a story and struggle that repeat, in countless variations, in the real lives of the billions of us who awaken and live in the world. The story Lisa Gill tells is a warning and a celebration; it is an offering to the bare bones of light.
From the poem numbered 3:12:
Six months later, when I'd recovered feeling
in my legs, I met with a new neurologist.
She hit me with a hammer.
Repeatedly.
One leg flew into the sky, the other did nothing.
Bipolar reflexes.
Neither response was normal.
She struck a tuning fork and put it to my shin.
I was supposed to say when I couldn't feel it.
Instead my whole body started trembling.
She raised her eyebrows
so I told her about the time a sitar concert
had made me hear laughter
every time I bent my neck down.
I told her I'd learned to keep my head up.
Without hesitating,
she slapped my MRI's onto the light screen.
I didn't know what I was looking at.
I didn't know anything but I could see polka dots.
I trembled again. [...]
[...] Then she flipped some more
stopped, pursed her lips, and said,
"Your corpus callosum is thinner than I'd like to see."
And she showed me the arc,
the strip of brain that connects the two hemispheres,
the strip of brain that should have been plump.
"So what does that mean?"
"That means you'll have trouble with memory."
"What kind of memory," I said, trying to be calm.
"Long term of short?"
"All memory."
Several places in Caput Nili, Gill includes short quotations from various writers: Sigmund Freud, Margaret Sanger, John Hanning Speke. One quotation, by Martin H. Teicher, particularly struck me, in the context of all that Gill tells about in her book. Here is the quoted passage by Teicher as given in Caput Nili; Gill notes that the quotation is from Teicher's article "Scars That Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse," which appeared in Scientific American in 2002 (Gill's citation doesn't note which month):
"...Research reveals a strong link between physical, sexual, and emotional mistreatment of children and the development of psychiatric problems. But in the early 1990s researchers thought of the damage as basically a software problem amenable to reprogramming via therapy or simply erasable through the exhortation, Get over it.
[However] such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development. ...We see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once these key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back."
Caput Nili is, partly, about the long journey toward recovery from trauma; it is also about the ongoing effort to survive and grow in a world that continues to create trauma on an ever greater horrific scale. The book presents no neat conclusions or simplistic answers; it asks essential questions, and shines light on them in the darkest places.
From a poem near the end of the book (numbered 4:12):
So yes, I wish I'd pressed charges.
I wish I'd reported the malpractice.
I wish I'd done anything
to stop any of the people who hurt me
from hurting one more woman,
so I am doing what I can do now:
I am sicking my skinny corpus callosum on the world.
Because what's horrific is not what happened to me,
it's that i'm not alone. [...]
[...] And I was not in the wrong place at the wrong time:
This is the wrong culture at the wrong time.
Poet Lisa Gill has written the right book at the right time.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Dale Jacobson memoir of Tom McGrath
Poet friend Dale Jacobson has written a wonderful personal memoir of his long friendship with poet Tom McGrath. I've spent the past three evening reading it, entirely engrossed.
In addition to telling much of his and Tom's long and close knowing of each other -- Tom's kindness and generosity with those around him was renowned -- Dale also gives attention to the nature of poetry; the essential interwoven connections of poetry and politics; the bankruptcy of poetry and politics that frequently occurs in a hundred ways once they have been absorbed and corrupted by the literary-industrial-academic complex; questions about the nature of life and death and the universe; and various other things. And Dale gives a tender and moving account of the last year of Tom's life as his health declined.
Dale Jacobson's memoir of Thomas McGrath is posted in its entirety in Dale's blog, here.
I've written previously here (in this blog you're reading now) about the poetry of Thomas McGrath and the poetry of Dale Jacobson; see the two links at the top of this post, above.
In addition to telling much of his and Tom's long and close knowing of each other -- Tom's kindness and generosity with those around him was renowned -- Dale also gives attention to the nature of poetry; the essential interwoven connections of poetry and politics; the bankruptcy of poetry and politics that frequently occurs in a hundred ways once they have been absorbed and corrupted by the literary-industrial-academic complex; questions about the nature of life and death and the universe; and various other things. And Dale gives a tender and moving account of the last year of Tom's life as his health declined.
Dale Jacobson's memoir of Thomas McGrath is posted in its entirety in Dale's blog, here.
I've written previously here (in this blog you're reading now) about the poetry of Thomas McGrath and the poetry of Dale Jacobson; see the two links at the top of this post, above.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
The sound says that freedom exists
Poet Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this year. Generally I don't give a great deal of attention to who the Nobel or other such awards are given to -- such prizes and prestige seem far from the details and routines of my life and the lives of people I know. I was interested to hear the news about Tranströmer, however. His poetry has been deeply important to me since I first read him, in translation, more than 35 years ago.
I first read Transtromer's poems in the book Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, a selection of three Swedish poets -- Harry Martinson (himself also a Nobel laureate), Gunnar Ekelöf, and Tomas Tranströmer -- chosen and translated by Robert Bly, published 1975 by Beacon Press; the book includes the original Swedish of the poems. I liked the work of all three of the poets; I found myself immediately drawn to Tranströmer's poems in particular.
I find in Tranströmer's poems a quiet introspective quality, whether the ostensible subject matter of the poems is things and events in the exterior world or entirely the happenings of inner life. Tranströmer worked for many years as a psychologist, and the nature of such work makes a steady background presence in his poems, and sometimes emerges more explicitly. His poems are the poems of someone who spends much time listening to the collective psyche, and asking questions about what it means to be a human being in the modern world.
From the poem "Track" ("Spår"), in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness (from which the quoted passages here are taken, unless otherwise noted):
2 a.m.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.
I live in a place (Minneapolis) known for cold winters; at the time of winter solstice here, the nights last about 15 and a half hours. Sweden, where Tranströmer has lived all his life, has a climate similar, if not identical, and is further north, and the winter nights are longer. Certainly I felt an affinity for the daily world that shows up in Tranströmer's poems when I first read his work. Minnesota and the surrounding region also has had a large history of immigration from the Scandinavian countries, and echoes persist here of the cultures of that part of the world. It was early spring when I first read Tranströmer's poems, and it continually struck me how the cool damp earth smell of the spring nights seemed to drift up from his poems as I read them.
There are stark winter days when the sea has links
to the mountain areas, hunched over in feathery grayness,
blue for a moment, then the waves for hours are like pale
lynxes, trying to get a grip on the gravelly shore. [...]
[...] (In the Far North the real lynx walks, with sharpened claws
and dream eyes. In the Far North where the day
lives in a pit night and day.
There the sole survivor sits by the furnace
of the Northern Lights, and listens to the music
coming from the men frozen to death.)
(From the poem "Sailor's Tale," "Skepparhistoria" in the original Swedish.)
Tranströmer's poems are not, for the most part, politically explicit in their content or subject matter, at least the the usual sense. But the realities of the world we live in are never far away, and the poems do move with evident conscience, even when the subject matter isn't obviously political in nature. I think, for instance, of some lines from his poem "Allegro" (the title is the same in Swedish):
I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is green, lively and still.
The sound says that freedom exists
and that someone does not pay tax to Caesar.
(The translation of the above lines is based on Robert Bly's translation, however I've changed the word order in a couple of the lines to something that seems to me closer to the original Swedish.)
Or, similarly, these lines from the poem "The Scattered Congregation" ("Den Skingrade Församlingen"):
1.
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
2.
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.
3.
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.
The poem of Tranströmer's that spoke to me the most powerfully when I first read it was "After Someone's Death" ("Efter Någons Död"). The lines that follow here are more or less a hybrid of Bly's translation and a translation by Mary Hagen, a friend of many years who studied Swedish at the University of Minnesota. According to Robert Bly (in his comments in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness), Tranströmer wrote the poem after an uncle of his had died; it was also around the time of the assassination of John Kennedy, and (according to Bly) the two deaths became mingled as Tranströmer wrote the poem.
"One time there was a shock," writes Tranströmer, "that left after it a long, pale, shimmering comet's tail." He speaks in the poem of skiing slowly in winter sun, "through brush where a few leaves hang on."
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold.
It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
Tomas Tranströmer's first book of poems, 17 Poems, was published in 1954. His first three books, published over a period of eight years, contained a total of 52 poems. "With many English and American poets," writes Robert Bly, "this is considered to be about six months' work. [...] The first seventeen poems were enough for him to be recognized by many critics as the finest poet of his generation." Tranströmer has continued to publish books of poems every few years; his books have tended to be small (not a large number of poems) by the typical standards of the publishing business in the United States.
I appreciated this approach when I first read Tranströmer; my own books of poems (the ones I've published so far, and most of the other completed manuscripts and works in progress) have mostly been of the length commonly called "chapbooks." I tend to avoid the term when I talk about books. My feeling is that a book of poems is full-length when it has enough poems in it.
Although I generally like Robert Bly's translations of Tranströmer, Bly seems to me now and then to stray a little further from the originals than I would prefer. For instance, in one of the passages quoted above, Tranströmer says (about leaves hanging on bushes in winter) "They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories./ The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold." Bly translates the second line simply as "Names swallowed by the cold." This turns the specific literal description of Tranströmer's original into a somewhat larger metaphorical statement. It's a subtle difference, though I might not have made the choice Bly made there. I've come across a few other such examples in Bly's translations.
There are other translations of Tranströmer I've liked; I think in particular of Baltics (Swedish title Östersjöar) translated a number of years ago by Samuel Charters, published 1975 by Oyez Publications (and which I don't have in front of me at the moment). I also somewhat like the translations by May Swenson and Leif Sjöberg in the selection Windows & Stones (1972, U. of Pittsburgh Press), though at times they seem a bit timid to me. I have a similar feeling about the numerous translations that have been done by Robin Fulton.
Over time Transtromer's poems seem to me to have taken on a gradually greater transparent quality. Or maybe it's the world (both inner and outer world) he writes about in his poems that has become steadily more transparent. He writes about an apparently ordinary moment or scene, looking out a window, walking across a street, a bit of conversation, a painting or a piece of music, and I find a consistent sense that there is some large piece of closely related business going on below, deep within the earth, sometimes as a soft echo, and sometimes surfacing in great clarity.
From the poem "After a Long Dry Spell" (in the book The Half-Finished Heaven, another selection translated by Robert Bly, published 2001 by Graywolf Press; the book gives only the English translations, not the original Swedish):
Circles swam on the fjord's surface
and that is the only surface there is right now --
the rest is height and depth
to rise and to sink.
Two pine trunks
shoot up and continue in long hollow signal-drums.
Cities and the sun gone off.
In the high grass there is thunder.
It's all right to telephone the island that is a mirage.
It's all right to hear the gray voice.
To thunder iron ore is honey.
It's all right to live by your own code.
And this, from the poem "Street Crossing" (also in the selection The Half-Finished Heaven):
The street's massive life swirls around me;
it remembers nothing and desires nothing.
Far under the traffic, deep in the earth,
the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.
It seems to me that the street can see me.
Its eyesight is so poor the sun itself
is a gray ball of yarn in black space.
But for a second I am lit. It sees me.
Some additional biographical information about Tomas Tranströmer, and a fuller list of his works published in Swedish and in translation, is in the website of the Svenska Akademien, here. The webpage at this link is in English.
My thanks also to blogger Thekla, who has published several insightful blogposts about Tranströmer this month in her blog Chamber of Secrets. The above link is to the main page of her blog; the blogposts about Tranströmer are dated October 18, October 17, October 16, and October 6, 2011.
I first read Transtromer's poems in the book Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, a selection of three Swedish poets -- Harry Martinson (himself also a Nobel laureate), Gunnar Ekelöf, and Tomas Tranströmer -- chosen and translated by Robert Bly, published 1975 by Beacon Press; the book includes the original Swedish of the poems. I liked the work of all three of the poets; I found myself immediately drawn to Tranströmer's poems in particular.
I find in Tranströmer's poems a quiet introspective quality, whether the ostensible subject matter of the poems is things and events in the exterior world or entirely the happenings of inner life. Tranströmer worked for many years as a psychologist, and the nature of such work makes a steady background presence in his poems, and sometimes emerges more explicitly. His poems are the poems of someone who spends much time listening to the collective psyche, and asking questions about what it means to be a human being in the modern world.
From the poem "Track" ("Spår"), in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness (from which the quoted passages here are taken, unless otherwise noted):
2 a.m.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.
I live in a place (Minneapolis) known for cold winters; at the time of winter solstice here, the nights last about 15 and a half hours. Sweden, where Tranströmer has lived all his life, has a climate similar, if not identical, and is further north, and the winter nights are longer. Certainly I felt an affinity for the daily world that shows up in Tranströmer's poems when I first read his work. Minnesota and the surrounding region also has had a large history of immigration from the Scandinavian countries, and echoes persist here of the cultures of that part of the world. It was early spring when I first read Tranströmer's poems, and it continually struck me how the cool damp earth smell of the spring nights seemed to drift up from his poems as I read them.
There are stark winter days when the sea has links
to the mountain areas, hunched over in feathery grayness,
blue for a moment, then the waves for hours are like pale
lynxes, trying to get a grip on the gravelly shore. [...]
[...] (In the Far North the real lynx walks, with sharpened claws
and dream eyes. In the Far North where the day
lives in a pit night and day.
There the sole survivor sits by the furnace
of the Northern Lights, and listens to the music
coming from the men frozen to death.)
(From the poem "Sailor's Tale," "Skepparhistoria" in the original Swedish.)
Tranströmer's poems are not, for the most part, politically explicit in their content or subject matter, at least the the usual sense. But the realities of the world we live in are never far away, and the poems do move with evident conscience, even when the subject matter isn't obviously political in nature. I think, for instance, of some lines from his poem "Allegro" (the title is the same in Swedish):
I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is green, lively and still.
The sound says that freedom exists
and that someone does not pay tax to Caesar.
(The translation of the above lines is based on Robert Bly's translation, however I've changed the word order in a couple of the lines to something that seems to me closer to the original Swedish.)
Or, similarly, these lines from the poem "The Scattered Congregation" ("Den Skingrade Församlingen"):
1.
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
2.
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.
3.
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.
The poem of Tranströmer's that spoke to me the most powerfully when I first read it was "After Someone's Death" ("Efter Någons Död"). The lines that follow here are more or less a hybrid of Bly's translation and a translation by Mary Hagen, a friend of many years who studied Swedish at the University of Minnesota. According to Robert Bly (in his comments in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness), Tranströmer wrote the poem after an uncle of his had died; it was also around the time of the assassination of John Kennedy, and (according to Bly) the two deaths became mingled as Tranströmer wrote the poem.
"One time there was a shock," writes Tranströmer, "that left after it a long, pale, shimmering comet's tail." He speaks in the poem of skiing slowly in winter sun, "through brush where a few leaves hang on."
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold.
It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
Tomas Tranströmer's first book of poems, 17 Poems, was published in 1954. His first three books, published over a period of eight years, contained a total of 52 poems. "With many English and American poets," writes Robert Bly, "this is considered to be about six months' work. [...] The first seventeen poems were enough for him to be recognized by many critics as the finest poet of his generation." Tranströmer has continued to publish books of poems every few years; his books have tended to be small (not a large number of poems) by the typical standards of the publishing business in the United States.
I appreciated this approach when I first read Tranströmer; my own books of poems (the ones I've published so far, and most of the other completed manuscripts and works in progress) have mostly been of the length commonly called "chapbooks." I tend to avoid the term when I talk about books. My feeling is that a book of poems is full-length when it has enough poems in it.
Although I generally like Robert Bly's translations of Tranströmer, Bly seems to me now and then to stray a little further from the originals than I would prefer. For instance, in one of the passages quoted above, Tranströmer says (about leaves hanging on bushes in winter) "They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories./ The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold." Bly translates the second line simply as "Names swallowed by the cold." This turns the specific literal description of Tranströmer's original into a somewhat larger metaphorical statement. It's a subtle difference, though I might not have made the choice Bly made there. I've come across a few other such examples in Bly's translations.
There are other translations of Tranströmer I've liked; I think in particular of Baltics (Swedish title Östersjöar) translated a number of years ago by Samuel Charters, published 1975 by Oyez Publications (and which I don't have in front of me at the moment). I also somewhat like the translations by May Swenson and Leif Sjöberg in the selection Windows & Stones (1972, U. of Pittsburgh Press), though at times they seem a bit timid to me. I have a similar feeling about the numerous translations that have been done by Robin Fulton.
Over time Transtromer's poems seem to me to have taken on a gradually greater transparent quality. Or maybe it's the world (both inner and outer world) he writes about in his poems that has become steadily more transparent. He writes about an apparently ordinary moment or scene, looking out a window, walking across a street, a bit of conversation, a painting or a piece of music, and I find a consistent sense that there is some large piece of closely related business going on below, deep within the earth, sometimes as a soft echo, and sometimes surfacing in great clarity.
From the poem "After a Long Dry Spell" (in the book The Half-Finished Heaven, another selection translated by Robert Bly, published 2001 by Graywolf Press; the book gives only the English translations, not the original Swedish):
Circles swam on the fjord's surface
and that is the only surface there is right now --
the rest is height and depth
to rise and to sink.
Two pine trunks
shoot up and continue in long hollow signal-drums.
Cities and the sun gone off.
In the high grass there is thunder.
It's all right to telephone the island that is a mirage.
It's all right to hear the gray voice.
To thunder iron ore is honey.
It's all right to live by your own code.
And this, from the poem "Street Crossing" (also in the selection The Half-Finished Heaven):
The street's massive life swirls around me;
it remembers nothing and desires nothing.
Far under the traffic, deep in the earth,
the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.
It seems to me that the street can see me.
Its eyesight is so poor the sun itself
is a gray ball of yarn in black space.
But for a second I am lit. It sees me.
Some additional biographical information about Tomas Tranströmer, and a fuller list of his works published in Swedish and in translation, is in the website of the Svenska Akademien, here. The webpage at this link is in English.
My thanks also to blogger Thekla, who has published several insightful blogposts about Tranströmer this month in her blog Chamber of Secrets. The above link is to the main page of her blog; the blogposts about Tranströmer are dated October 18, October 17, October 16, and October 6, 2011.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Chile 1973: another 9/11
On September 11, 1973, the military of the United States took part in a terrorist action that resulted in the armed overthrow of the elected government of Chile. The military government headed by Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile with the aid of the U.S. government, and during the next decades the Pinochet regime murdered and disappeared untold thousands of people who were opposed to the regime or whom the Pinochet government found inconvenient for one reason or another.
In the website of the radio show "Democracy Now!," host Amy Goodman and co-host Juan Gonzalez interview Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, who was in Santiago, Chile, on the day of the military coup; Dorfman at the time was a cultural adviser to Chilean president Salvador Allende. Allende died during the bombing of the presidential residence by planes supplied by the U.S. military. In the interview, Dorfman -- who spent part of his childhood in New York -- reflects on the events of September 11, 1973 in Chile, and also on the events of September 11, 2001, when he was in the United States, and the long aftermath of both.
The interview with Ariel Dorfman is here.
The Democracy Now! segment continues with a discussion of some of the other significant historical events that have also taken place on September 11 in various years in India, Guatemala, and at Attica prison in upstate New York. The additional discussion is here.
*
The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died during the days following the coup in September 1973 -- he had been seriously ill with a brain tumor, and his death, at the very least, was hurried along by intentional medical neglect after the military government took power.
In the website of the Paris Review is a long interview with Neruda by Rita Guibert, from 1971. Neruda talks about all aspects of his life and work, his politics, the historical and political events in which he had taken part during his life (in particular the Civil War in Spain during the 1930's, and the presidential election campaign in Chile at the time which result in the election of Salvador Allende, whom Neruda supported); and much else.
The interview with Neruda is here.
I originally read the interview with Pablo Neruda many years ago (sometime in the mid-1970's) in the book Seven Voices, which gathers interviews Rita Guibert did with seven Latin American writers. The book appears to be out of print at present, though it may be out there if you go searching the used book websites, or ask your local used book store to do a book search.
Two other works I can recommend, also long out of print as far as I know, are Chilean Writers in Exile, edited by Fernando AlegrÃa (published 1982 by The Crossing Press), a collection of stories and short novels by Chilean writers dealing with the 1973 coup and afterwards; and For Neruda, For Chile edited by Walter Lowenfels (published 1975 by Beacon Press), an anthology of poems written in tribute to Neruda and in response to the coup in Chile, by poets from several dozen countries around world.
And one other I really like is Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, published in English translation in 2010 by New York Review of Books. The book is an account (non-fiction, not a novel) of the experiences of Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, who in 1982 entered Chile after living abroad in exile for several years, and spent two months secretly making a documentary film about the political coup and about political and economic conditions in Chile under the Pinochet regime. Márquez wrote the book after extensively interviewing Littin about his experience making the film. The publisher's webpage for the book is here.
*
On September 11, 2001, I was at work in the morning when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Sometime by mid-morning (around 10:00 or 10:30 Central time), our employer closed the office for the day -- office buildings in cities all over the United States were closing for the day -- and we left and went home.
I didn't go home immediately. I work in downtown Minneapolis. I walked a couple of blocks to the building of the local CBS T.V. station here. The station had a large T.V. in their window at street level, and a small crowd had gathered and was watching. I stopped and watched the news for a little while. It was there that I saw the video of one of the planes flying into one of the buildings. I remember one of the T.V. announcers (maybe Dan Rather) explaining, as the video played, that "this is actual video, not an animation." This comment struck me at the moment -- and again often in the days that followed -- as an interesting (and probably unintended) commentary on the nature of "news" reporting, what it has become in these years.
As I stood watching the T.V. news reports, a couple of dozen other people gathered around also watching, coming and going, I was suddenly reminded of all of those bad science fiction movies in the 1950's where Earth is being attacked by flying saucers.
Eventually I became aware that downtown was emptying of people, and I hopped on a bus and went home. After a little while I headed to a family member's house and hung out there for much of the day, checking out the news on various cable channels. As I sat and watched through the day, I began having the odd sensation that much in the news reports was becoming too scripted -- the way announcers kept saying "everything has changed, everything is different now." This has become an old long story in the years since. I could go on at length about this, but for the moment I'll just say (what should be obvious) that I've found it's a good idea not to take anything in a corporate new story as an established fact without checking into it further. What I heard that day in the news reports from CNN, NBC, CBS, etc., was the faint but unmistakeable beating of the drums of war.
*
A couple of other links to offer, also related to some or all of the above:
An interview with poet MartÃn Espada, in the website of the organization Solidarity, which describes itself as a "socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization." They've titled the interview "On 9/11 and the Politics of Language." (I can also highly recommend Espada's book of poems The Republic of Poetry published in 2006; I've written about Espada's book in this blog, here.) * The interview with Espada is here. (Thanks to poet Philip Metres in whose blog Behind the Lines I found the link to the interview.)
And, a talk given by writer in Arundhati Roy in September 2002, titled "Come September," in which she reflects on the events of the previous year, and more generally on the economic and political role of the United States in the world, and on various movements to resist the trends of corporate globalization. A transcript of her talk is here. (The page will come up as a pdf in the web browser.) * When I Googled for this item, I also saw some links to YouTube video of Roy's talk, though I haven't checked any of them.
*
The next day, September 12, 2011, poet Adrienne Rich was scheduled to read at the University of Minnesota. During the day I called the phone number listed for info about the reading, and reached a recording at the university English department office, informing callers (as had already been announced in the news) that all classes at the university had been cancelled for the day. The recording then said that the Adrienne Rich reading would go on as scheduled.
I went to the reading that night. It was the Ted Mann Concert Hall, a modern building on the West Bank campus (across the Mississippi River from the main campus on the east side). The building is well-designed for such events, with good accoustics and a good view of the stages in front. The reading was free, and a large crowd showed up, the place was packed.
As things got started, the person who was introducing Adrienne Rich explained that Rich had been in Kansas City the day before (the 11th) when all flights were grounded. So she hired a driver, and they drove for 13 hours through the night so she could make it to Minneapolis for the reading on the 12th.
Rich came out and read. The room was absolutely charged with the air of the events that had taken place the day before. She started by talking a little about this. Then she read poems. I don't remember, now, most of what she read -- I do remember that she read her long poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World" from the book of the same name, among others. What I remember from that evening is that there, in that room, were gathered several hundred of us who wanted something other than the fanatical saber rattling that had been blaring out from corporate news media and government press conferences during the previous 24 hours.
She read for probably 45 minutes. Copies of her book Fox (just published at the time) were on a table in the lobby. I hung around for a little bit afterwards, talked with a couple of friends. I headed out into the mild fall night and caught a bus home.
Every year since 2001, when September comes it's become commonplace for news media people to ask whoever they're talking to "Where were you on September 11?"
When I think about that question, more often than not I remember, instead, being at Adrienne Rich's poetry reading on the evening of September 12. "Only these friends hold joyous here," wrote Robert Duncan, "where the world like great Sodom lies under fear." (The poem by Duncan is "This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom" in his book The Opening of the Field.)
Remembering back to that night, September 12, 2001, I can't think of anything else I would rather have been doing, or anywhere else I would rather have been.
In the website of the radio show "Democracy Now!," host Amy Goodman and co-host Juan Gonzalez interview Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, who was in Santiago, Chile, on the day of the military coup; Dorfman at the time was a cultural adviser to Chilean president Salvador Allende. Allende died during the bombing of the presidential residence by planes supplied by the U.S. military. In the interview, Dorfman -- who spent part of his childhood in New York -- reflects on the events of September 11, 1973 in Chile, and also on the events of September 11, 2001, when he was in the United States, and the long aftermath of both.
The interview with Ariel Dorfman is here.
The Democracy Now! segment continues with a discussion of some of the other significant historical events that have also taken place on September 11 in various years in India, Guatemala, and at Attica prison in upstate New York. The additional discussion is here.
*
The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died during the days following the coup in September 1973 -- he had been seriously ill with a brain tumor, and his death, at the very least, was hurried along by intentional medical neglect after the military government took power.
In the website of the Paris Review is a long interview with Neruda by Rita Guibert, from 1971. Neruda talks about all aspects of his life and work, his politics, the historical and political events in which he had taken part during his life (in particular the Civil War in Spain during the 1930's, and the presidential election campaign in Chile at the time which result in the election of Salvador Allende, whom Neruda supported); and much else.
The interview with Neruda is here.
I originally read the interview with Pablo Neruda many years ago (sometime in the mid-1970's) in the book Seven Voices, which gathers interviews Rita Guibert did with seven Latin American writers. The book appears to be out of print at present, though it may be out there if you go searching the used book websites, or ask your local used book store to do a book search.
Two other works I can recommend, also long out of print as far as I know, are Chilean Writers in Exile, edited by Fernando AlegrÃa (published 1982 by The Crossing Press), a collection of stories and short novels by Chilean writers dealing with the 1973 coup and afterwards; and For Neruda, For Chile edited by Walter Lowenfels (published 1975 by Beacon Press), an anthology of poems written in tribute to Neruda and in response to the coup in Chile, by poets from several dozen countries around world.
And one other I really like is Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, published in English translation in 2010 by New York Review of Books. The book is an account (non-fiction, not a novel) of the experiences of Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, who in 1982 entered Chile after living abroad in exile for several years, and spent two months secretly making a documentary film about the political coup and about political and economic conditions in Chile under the Pinochet regime. Márquez wrote the book after extensively interviewing Littin about his experience making the film. The publisher's webpage for the book is here.
*
On September 11, 2001, I was at work in the morning when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Sometime by mid-morning (around 10:00 or 10:30 Central time), our employer closed the office for the day -- office buildings in cities all over the United States were closing for the day -- and we left and went home.
I didn't go home immediately. I work in downtown Minneapolis. I walked a couple of blocks to the building of the local CBS T.V. station here. The station had a large T.V. in their window at street level, and a small crowd had gathered and was watching. I stopped and watched the news for a little while. It was there that I saw the video of one of the planes flying into one of the buildings. I remember one of the T.V. announcers (maybe Dan Rather) explaining, as the video played, that "this is actual video, not an animation." This comment struck me at the moment -- and again often in the days that followed -- as an interesting (and probably unintended) commentary on the nature of "news" reporting, what it has become in these years.
As I stood watching the T.V. news reports, a couple of dozen other people gathered around also watching, coming and going, I was suddenly reminded of all of those bad science fiction movies in the 1950's where Earth is being attacked by flying saucers.
Eventually I became aware that downtown was emptying of people, and I hopped on a bus and went home. After a little while I headed to a family member's house and hung out there for much of the day, checking out the news on various cable channels. As I sat and watched through the day, I began having the odd sensation that much in the news reports was becoming too scripted -- the way announcers kept saying "everything has changed, everything is different now." This has become an old long story in the years since. I could go on at length about this, but for the moment I'll just say (what should be obvious) that I've found it's a good idea not to take anything in a corporate new story as an established fact without checking into it further. What I heard that day in the news reports from CNN, NBC, CBS, etc., was the faint but unmistakeable beating of the drums of war.
*
A couple of other links to offer, also related to some or all of the above:
An interview with poet MartÃn Espada, in the website of the organization Solidarity, which describes itself as a "socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization." They've titled the interview "On 9/11 and the Politics of Language." (I can also highly recommend Espada's book of poems The Republic of Poetry published in 2006; I've written about Espada's book in this blog, here.) * The interview with Espada is here. (Thanks to poet Philip Metres in whose blog Behind the Lines I found the link to the interview.)
And, a talk given by writer in Arundhati Roy in September 2002, titled "Come September," in which she reflects on the events of the previous year, and more generally on the economic and political role of the United States in the world, and on various movements to resist the trends of corporate globalization. A transcript of her talk is here. (The page will come up as a pdf in the web browser.) * When I Googled for this item, I also saw some links to YouTube video of Roy's talk, though I haven't checked any of them.
*
The next day, September 12, 2011, poet Adrienne Rich was scheduled to read at the University of Minnesota. During the day I called the phone number listed for info about the reading, and reached a recording at the university English department office, informing callers (as had already been announced in the news) that all classes at the university had been cancelled for the day. The recording then said that the Adrienne Rich reading would go on as scheduled.
I went to the reading that night. It was the Ted Mann Concert Hall, a modern building on the West Bank campus (across the Mississippi River from the main campus on the east side). The building is well-designed for such events, with good accoustics and a good view of the stages in front. The reading was free, and a large crowd showed up, the place was packed.
As things got started, the person who was introducing Adrienne Rich explained that Rich had been in Kansas City the day before (the 11th) when all flights were grounded. So she hired a driver, and they drove for 13 hours through the night so she could make it to Minneapolis for the reading on the 12th.
Rich came out and read. The room was absolutely charged with the air of the events that had taken place the day before. She started by talking a little about this. Then she read poems. I don't remember, now, most of what she read -- I do remember that she read her long poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World" from the book of the same name, among others. What I remember from that evening is that there, in that room, were gathered several hundred of us who wanted something other than the fanatical saber rattling that had been blaring out from corporate news media and government press conferences during the previous 24 hours.
She read for probably 45 minutes. Copies of her book Fox (just published at the time) were on a table in the lobby. I hung around for a little bit afterwards, talked with a couple of friends. I headed out into the mild fall night and caught a bus home.
Every year since 2001, when September comes it's become commonplace for news media people to ask whoever they're talking to "Where were you on September 11?"
When I think about that question, more often than not I remember, instead, being at Adrienne Rich's poetry reading on the evening of September 12. "Only these friends hold joyous here," wrote Robert Duncan, "where the world like great Sodom lies under fear." (The poem by Duncan is "This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom" in his book The Opening of the Field.)
Remembering back to that night, September 12, 2001, I can't think of anything else I would rather have been doing, or anywhere else I would rather have been.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
John Howard Griffin
A postscript to the Albuquerque Cultural Conference --
At the Albuquerque airport on the way back to Minneapolis, I ran into Bryce Milligan and we talked for a few minutes. As noted in the previous blogpost about the conference (at the above link), Bryce is the publisher of Wings Press. (See additional links below.)
Bryce mentioned that Wings Press is publishing a 50th anniversary edition of the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin.
If you're not familiar with the book, I definitely recommend it. I read it long ago, for a high school English class. The book is Griffin's real-life account of his experience in 1959 of having his Caucasian skin darkened (through medications and sun-lamp treatments), shaving his head, and then living the next several weeks as -- to all appearances -- an African-American man, traveling through the southern United States. He did this in coordination with Sepia magazine, which published Griffin's reports of his experiences in 1960; Griffin expanded the articles into the book Black Like Me, which was published in 1961.
The publication of Griffin's articles, and the book that followed, caused shock and awakening for many white Americans at the time, presenting the stark picture of Griffin's daily encounters with every manner of racism, including, at times, real danger to his life. Griffin was already an experienced and published writer at the time he wrote Black Like Me, and he reflects on his experiences with insight and sensitivity.
The Wings Press webpage for the book is here. According to the webpage, the official publication date for the new edition is October 1, 2011. The page includes short excerpts from reviews in many publications, and a full review of the book from the Washington Post in 2007.
Wings Press has also published several of John Howard Griffin's other books. The Wings Press webpage for Griffin is here.
The main page for Wings Press is here.
At the Albuquerque airport on the way back to Minneapolis, I ran into Bryce Milligan and we talked for a few minutes. As noted in the previous blogpost about the conference (at the above link), Bryce is the publisher of Wings Press. (See additional links below.)
Bryce mentioned that Wings Press is publishing a 50th anniversary edition of the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin.
If you're not familiar with the book, I definitely recommend it. I read it long ago, for a high school English class. The book is Griffin's real-life account of his experience in 1959 of having his Caucasian skin darkened (through medications and sun-lamp treatments), shaving his head, and then living the next several weeks as -- to all appearances -- an African-American man, traveling through the southern United States. He did this in coordination with Sepia magazine, which published Griffin's reports of his experiences in 1960; Griffin expanded the articles into the book Black Like Me, which was published in 1961.
The publication of Griffin's articles, and the book that followed, caused shock and awakening for many white Americans at the time, presenting the stark picture of Griffin's daily encounters with every manner of racism, including, at times, real danger to his life. Griffin was already an experienced and published writer at the time he wrote Black Like Me, and he reflects on his experiences with insight and sensitivity.
The Wings Press webpage for the book is here. According to the webpage, the official publication date for the new edition is October 1, 2011. The page includes short excerpts from reviews in many publications, and a full review of the book from the Washington Post in 2007.
Wings Press has also published several of John Howard Griffin's other books. The Wings Press webpage for Griffin is here.
The main page for Wings Press is here.
