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Poetry

Ach, Emily….

Dickinson, she leaves me confounded. Always. And now this poem, that I have been mulling over for some weeks. What to make of the words below, what do they intend to represent? (You can tell I am still thinking about yesterday’s musings about artists and representation….)

By the Sea

Published 1896 (posthumously)

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion’s Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –

So here is a woman poet, a recluse, who never saw the sea, I am told, writing about her visit. Planning a visit, note, not a walk on the beach, or a look at the water, but an encounter. She left early, thus avoiding being caught by the dark, took the protective dog, sensible precaution if you think this is about a woman out there on her own. She encounters a world just like the one she knows from home, the women at the bottom, the men on top. The mermaids doing what women do so well, looking their sisters over, judging.

The sailors trying to get their hands on you and rope you in – all menacing enough to induce that familiar feeling, being just a little mouse easy to be stepped on in the sand.

A slightly hypnotizing ballad rhythm, interspersed with these long dashes, making you stop and take in what she says.

And then she’s in the water – no man moved her; did she move herself into the waves, slowly going in like so many before her, ready to give up? Or is the ocean approaching, about to drown her, or representing a sexual danger – or enticement – an interpretation frequently offered because of the various items of clothing described in the inevitable rising, items that hint at fetishistic objects? Is the dew drop on a dandelion leaf describing her sense of diminutiveness, fragility, to be devoured by the floods, water returning to water, like dust to dust? Or is it a watery pearl, a metaphor for an altogether different aspect of the female anatomy?

But then she starts to move herself – just like she set out for the visit (remember started in the first line?) she now sets to leave, willing it, with him (the sea took on a personal pronoun) following. Her shoes filled with foam, a precious, pearly gift, or something to weigh her down or a tantalizing allusion to other bodily fluids, she turns her back on the pursuer. He decides to bow out – this time – once she reaches solid ground, anchored in community unfamiliar to his solitary existence.

Death? Desired or inflicted? Sex? Desired or inflicted? A feminist clarion call? I couldn’t care less. The poem whispered something altogether different in my ear in our current situation of unfamiliar danger.

We have a choice.

We can succumb to varying forms and degrees of despair, feeling helpless like little creatures easily crushed. We can give up and step into the devouring vastness of fear, letting it drown us. We can permit the lead of fomenting depression weigh down our shoes. We can allow panic to rise practically to our throats and choke us.

Or we can turn our backs to all that, willing it. There is no guarantee of safety – the sea – be it our fears, sadness or the pathogen itself – might not be willing to bow out the next time. But here and now, we can start to step back from it, both literally and metaphorically, and turn our eyes to the solid town, the community of friends, neighbors and strangers, who can act in solidarity (albeit in physical distance) to get us all through this, if not make us safer. We can focus on increasing support for those in need instead of catastrophizing. We can organize or be part of a movement that will carry the lessons we learn during crisis into a reshaping of our society for the better in the long run.

I know those words are more easily written than enacted. I have days where I barely make it out of bed. But we can alternate – on days where I am low, you can lift me up, and I’ll do the same on other days for you.

We can refuse to be a mouse!

So what happened to the dog – so prominently mentioned in the very first line and disappeared ever since as if protection was but an illusion?

Why, modeling social distancing, of course!

Where’s Milo???

Here is Copland’s music for some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Hang in there, folks!

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Divided Time

This week’s juxtapositions will end with a contrast of time frames. The photographs were taken within a window of 2 hours and mostly through the window of the car, across a space of some 25 miles, driving up the Pacific Coast from Newport, OR to Lincoln City, OR. The weather changed from sun to rain to hail and back multiple times. The color of the water alternated accordingly, sometimes three bands of different color simultaneously, unusually vivid in the cold air.

Today’s poem, on the other hand, spans seemingly all of historical time and the geographical space between Africa and the Caribbean. It looks into the pit of despair and emerges with renewed determination to look forward and resume a rightful place in history, or start history altogether – which is my own goal after yet another week of this interminable flu.

Walcott, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1992 as well as a MacArthur Foundation genius award, died this month two years ago. He taught at various ivy league institutions, dividing his time between Boston, NYC and St. Lucia, the caribbean island where he was born. A lot of his poetry deals with the consequences of colonialism, slavery, and displacement. The work asks questions about memory in the absence of the typical memorial markers found in nation states, and the broken links of tribal narratives that come with forced exodus.

His poem The Sea is History weaves biblical and historical events together in wonderful ways, showing the parallels in lack of established “factual evidence” and yet richness in assumed underlying truths. You can just hear how the colonial interrogators are defied by the persistence of memory, however drowned in the sea, its return to power and will towards a new history, a right to place by the person who answers, representing all those who were subjugated far too long.

The Sea Is History

Derek Walcott

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations – 
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History; 

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs, 
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation – 

jubilation, O jubilation – 
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

*

And as the most effective anti-depressant ever, let’s hear it for caribbean music, dreaming ourselves into the lesser Antilles.

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Finally….

After passing unanimously in the Senate last year, yesterday the house passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act , with 4 House members voting No – Amash (I-MI) Gohmert (R-TX) Massie (R-KY) Yoho (R-FL) –
which makes lynching a hate crime. It only took 120 years!

Let us celebrate with a poem that transcends time.

Antebellum

By Gregory Pardlo

Unfinished, the road turns off the fill
from the gulf coast, tracing the bay, to follow
the inland waterway. I lose it in the gritty
limbo of scrub pine, the once wealth
—infantile again, and lean—of lumber barons,
now vested in the state, now sanctuary for renegades
and shamans, for pot growers and moonshiners,
the upriver and clandestine industries that keep
mostly to themselves.

Misting over a lake-front terraced lawn, evening’s pink
tablet, japanning lawn and lake, magnolia leaf,
ember easing, dips and gives gilt to the veiled
nocturne vanishing in the view: the hint of maison
through the woods faint as features pressed on
an ancient coin. Swart arms of live oaks that hag
their bad backs surreptitiously, drip Spanish moss
like swamp things out of where a pelican taxis limp-
legged across the lake, pratfalls awkward as a drunk
on a bike. The bat above me, like a flung wristwatch

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem, which received the APR/ Honickman Prize in 2007, and Digest, (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” In 2017, Pardlo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is poetry editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University, Camden.

And here is someone we hear too rarely.

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Hand on my Heart

Hand on my heart, this poem followed me into my dreams. Beneath the I-5 underpass near our house lives a homeless person, who does not even own a tent. He sits in piles of garbage, for weeks, months now and we all drive by.

Meditations in an Emergency

by Cameron Awkward-Rich

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

Cameron Awkward-Rich, both a poet and a critic, is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. His poetry has appeared in Narrative, The Baffler, Indiana Review, Verse Daily, The Offing, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships from Cave Canem and The Watering Hole. Cam holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and is Assistant Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Our Place in the Struggle of the World

It is Tuesday morning after the debacle in IOWA. We don’t know the caucus results yet, but the delay and the mistrust after the screw up with the data transmission hurts the potential frontrunners and helps the laggers. Make of that what you will. More frighteningly, it has given rise to tons of conspiracy theories, and adds worry to scenarios where technology is all we have in the election – not the paper trail that is still there to count in IA. Most frighteningly, the voter turnout, by the information we have at this time, was not as high as expected. If that translates into the general election, we have reason to be fearful. Clouds hanging over us.

Sunday morning’s walk at the riverfront took place with the clouds coming in. Or going out, who knows in this crazy weather world anymore.

The mood expressed by the graffiti was dark as well.

Some fearful:

Some angry.

Knowing how I could go home to a dry house, a filled pantry, a privileged life, made me feel ashamed while thinking about the youth or whoever it is who express their rage and fear for us to see, mostly unheard. Watching the homeless shuffle along the Esplanade, trying to keep warm, caused a sense of continued helplessness.

Thinking about how many people I know who feel for those who suffer, but also increasingly express compassion fatigue, when they deal with the detritus or the shootings at night or the dangers of garbage fires. There was a moment there, on that walk, where I just longed for peace. For all. Which is, of course, unobtainable without justice. So we must be allies in the struggle. Thoughts just in time for the beginning of Black History Month as well.

Here is a text poem by Jamaican born Claudia Rankine, echoing the sentiment,

from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

By Claudia Rankine

Mahalia Jackson is a genius. Or Mahalia Jackson has genius. The man I am with is trying to make a distinction. I am uncomfortable with his need to make this distinction because his inquiry begins to approach subtle shades of racism, classism, or sexism. It is hard to know which. Mahalia Jackson never finished the eighth grade, or Mahalia’s genius is based on the collision of her voice with her spirituality. True spirituality is its own force. I am not sure how to respond to all this. I change the subject instead.

We have just seen George Wein’s documentary, Louis Armstrong at Newport, 1971. In the auditorium a room full of strangers listened to Mahalia Jackson sing “Let There Be Peace on Earth” and stood up and gave a standing ovation to a movie screen. Her clarity of vision crosses thirty years to address intimately each of us. It is as if her voice has always been dormant within us, waiting to be awakened, even though “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, (and) through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.”

Perhaps Mahalia, like Paul Celan, has already lived all our lives for us. Perhaps that is the definition of genius. Hegel says, “Each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others.” Mahalia Jackson sings as if it is the last thing she intends to do. And even though the lyrics of the song are, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me,” I am hearing, Let it begin in me.

Let us be uplifted.

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Sound Variations

Let’s start this week on a quiet note. Like really quiet, preparing for silence in space – quiet. Not a random choice of metaphor, either, since I learned that astronauts are sent by NASA to an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota where they practice being in environments where sound does not reverberate.

“An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings.” It turns out that you cannot stand being in one of those chambers for very long – 45 minute has been the longest someone endured before fearing they would go insane. When you hear nothing else, you start hearing the noises that your own body makes, “you become the sound.”

All this came up when, as so often, I randomly ran across a poem that caught my attention.

Anechoic

George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber
for 45 minutes and nearly went mad.
He could hear the blood rushing in
his veins and began to wonder if he was
hallucinating. He had been to a monastery,
an American Indian sweat lodge,
and a nickel mine two kilometers underground.
In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design
eliminates the sound of footsteps.
NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers
to cope with the silence of space.
Without echo, in the quietest place on earth,
what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound
in concert with what you see? The human voice,
the timber when a person says kamsahamnida
or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels.
Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels.
Metallica, front row, possible damage
albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels.
A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble
frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard
for hundreds of miles underwater.
I once walked around inside a whale heart,
which is the size of a small car. The sound
was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out
at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay
about the joyas voladoras and the humming
bird heart, the whale heart, and the human
heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels.
Hearing is the last sense to leave us.
Some say that upon death, our vision,
our taste, our touch, and our smell
might leave us, but some have been
pronounced dead and by all indication
are, but they can hear. In this moment,
when the doctor pronounces the time
or when the handgun pumps once more,
what light arrives? What sounds, the angels?
The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd
control or to combat riots—as too many
humans gathered in one place for a unified
purpose can threaten the state. The state
permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound
can be weaponized or made into art.
It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is
a navigation device and can help determine
if the woman has a second heart inside of her
now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound,
a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body
of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.

by Lee Herrick
from Scar and Flower,
Word Poetry, 2019.

To tell the truth, I was not particularly taken by this poem as a whole. Little things, the list -like quality of researched facts (I mean who knows all those decibel numbers….) or the discussion of hearing being the last sense to go (after he cued in on hearing all along,) and then wondering “which light will arrive,” they irritate me. Or the tale of walking inside a whale’s heart and affixing the sound to the memory of a favorite author’s writing – I was in one of those last summer (they have them as plastic reproductions in all kinds of science museums, and all you hear is the delightful screaming of young visitors around you. Nitpicky, I know. Not granting generous artistic license. Guilty as charged. Perhaps it would help to know more of his work, apparently often preoccupied with hearing, but also quite political. Herrick, of Korean descent, was the poet laureate of Fresno, 4 years ago, teaches at college there. Here is a review.

But one line stuck, and made it worth slogging through all those facts he lines up: Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound.

Think of how sound was used to manipulate you when you were a child. Ok, when I was a child, sent off, sickly still, to boarding school. Being yelled at loudly was pretty upsetting. Worse, though, was when punitive words came out really quietly, almost whispered, ominous as can be.

Sounds could be frightening, the pillow-muffled homesick sobs, my own included, of the new arrivals. Sounds could be disturbing, the penetrating school bell that cut time into slices. Sounds could be shaming – the snickering of the girls behind your back. The tsk tsk of a revered teacher, handing back insufficient work, not even worth a verbal assessment, just those devaluing sounds. The screeching of the coach on the sports field, egging you on to run even faster, until your lungs hurt so badly that you were ready to collapse. Sounds that were missing hurt as well: my childhood background chorus of lowing cows and songbirds, the farmer’s peacock.

Sounds could be healing. A hummed melody of a (forbidden) pop song as a reminder that there was still a world out there beyond the dormitory walls. The clinking of the silverware when 120 places were laid for breakfast, the only edible meal, really, of the day. The sounds of the gentle river waves of the Neckar, when you were allowed twice weekly to leave the walled estate, for an hour’s walk. Or being assigned an empty quiet classroom to practice your cello or piano, day after day escaping the noises of overcrowded, restless adolescent girls. Add the music, however incompetently, scratchily executed, with a blueprint in mind of the beauty of the real thing, and you were ready to tackle the next day. Healing, indeed. (My most played piece during those horrid years was this, (Khatchaturian’s Toccata ) allowing rage to flow into the fingers as well. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you play it slower like the older Russian recordings.)

What counts as healing, though, is in the ear of the beholder. Just a few centuries back the Church accepted only a limited number of intervals assume to please G-d, and that is why Gregorian chants are as they are. And the Church expressly forbade some intervals, including the tri-tone, composed of three adjacent whole tones, because they were thought to be the devil’s interval. Don’t ask me why. Times have, of course, changed.

Wagner used the tri-tone in Tristan and Isolde, to convey forbidden love and longing.

So did Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.

Beautiful. Unsettling. I guess it won’t be a quiet Monday morning after all. But one where I made you forget about sham trials and deadly viruses for at least 10 minutes!

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Reasons for Optimism

Today I offer some insights brazenly stolen from a list found in The Nation, a useful reminder that there are points of hope.

Optimistic we can keep the ball rolling

Good stuff that happened this year:

  • Legal Victories for the Activists Fighting for Families on the Border
  • Continued Progressive Investment in the Work of Stacey Abrams
  • The Supreme Court Saves the Census
Optimistic we’ll find the right role models
  • Louisiana Reelects a Democratic Governor
  • Democrats Take Control in Virginia
  • We Finally Get Closer to Passing the Equal Rights Amendment
  • The 1619 Project (a wide-ranging editorial package including essays, images, and reported stories, and a radical challenge to the idea that “slavery was a long time ago”; it firmly roots the United States’ societal problems and inequalities in its treatment of black people. )
Optimistic we’ll stand our ground
  • The Continuation of the Demographic Revolution
  • Pelosi Retakes the Speaker’s Gavel
  • Trump Is Impeached
Optimistic we can look beyond ourselves

To read details about these hopeful signals, go here.

Optimistic we’ll see beyond black&white

Or just read or listen to Amanda Gorman, who was chosen the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. I’m optimistic: the kids will save us. (And in honor of her being from L.A., today’s photographs were taken there, at The Broad, with an eye on optimism…)

Optimistic we can preserve Little Red Riding Hoods’s resistance

In This Place (An American Lyric)

By Amanda Gorman

— An original poem written for the inaugural reading of Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress.

There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.

There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.

There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.

There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.             

There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.          

How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?

Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.       

Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.

There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.


There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.

Optimistic we can stretch our sense of proportion beyond the electoral college….

Enjoy someone else’s perpetual optimism… I’m signing off for a week’s break. See you in January after I’ve restocked the archives!

Optimistic I’ll catch footage in some unexpected places…
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Christmas Legend

Leave it to me, to serve you up with a snarky poem by Master Brecht on Christmas Day. The way I see it, if you are feeling elated, grateful, happy or content, then you have the leeway to think about those less fortunate than you (and the promises kept or broken by religion.) If you, on the other hand, feel lousy, there’s always downward comparison – your woes (hopefully) pale compared to those of people dying from exposure to cold.

The real topic for today, though, is not poetic musings about poverty, but how to approach getting rid of it. We might as well start with a quote from social reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a contemporary of the French Revolution:

“Charity is the drowning of rights in the cesspit of compassion.”

I read this quote in an essay by Thomas Gebauer who is managing director of the socio-medical human rights aid organization “medico international”. He explains that poverty and social exclusion need to be targeted at their roots, which are often of a political nature, rather than having charity, both private and public, simply treat the symptoms.

You can read the long one yourself, but here is the short version: Alleviating the symptoms of poverty and hardship helps people in the short run. Securing the establishment of social and economic human rights will shift things in the long run, no longer relying on individual charitable aid (which can dry up at whim or be unevenly distributed.) A just and guaranteed distribution of social resources will counteract increasing social inequality, unfair trade relations and the absence of social security services. Access to social resources, social security and a decent standard of living should be put on legal footing, guaranteed by public socio-political institutions. For my German readers, here is an interview with him speaking to the same issue in German.

Something to be thought through. I still believe that the direct act of charity from one human to another, the dollar changing hands while the gaze and smile exchanged between eyes, matters enormously for any one individual, giver AND receiver, a reminder that we share this world.

Yes, I know, complicated musings on Christmas morning. So just sit back and let Bertold Brecht’s poem sink in. And save me a cookie – a charity guaranteed to be appreciated and not undermining world peace….. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Legend

1
On Christmas Eve today
All of us poor people stay
Huddled in this chilly stack
The wind blows in through every crack.
Dear Jesus, come to us, now see
How sorely we have need of thee.

2
Here today we huddle tight
As the darkest heathens might
The snow falls chilly on our skin
The snow is forcing its way in.
Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell:
We were thrown out by Heaven as well.

3
The wine we’re mulling is strong and old
It’s good for keeping out the cold
The wine is hot, the door is shut
Some fat beast’s snuffling round the hut.
Then come in, beast, out of the snow
Beasts too have nowhere warm to go.

4
We’ll toss our coats on to the fire
Then we’ll all be warm as flames leap higher
Then the roof will almost catch alight
We shan’t freeze to death till we’re through the night.
Come in, dear wind, and be our guest
You too have neither home nor rest.

(1923)

Here is a different, more academic translation. I think Brecht himself would have preferred the one above I chose instead, even though I could not find who translated it. Sorry for not being able to acknowledge them.

Photographs today are of budding Helebores (called Christ’s Roses in German) and other tidbits from the winter garden.

Music is the Christmas gift that keeps on giving. I think last year I posted the Harnoncourt version – today it’s Fasolis: one of the happiest, most energetic rendition of Bach’s Oratorio that you can find. It’ll counterbalance thinking about hard stuff……..

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Miracle

Yes, Happy Hanukah and yes, it involved a miracle, although it is a minor Jewish holiday, really, and one that grew out of civil war between factions of Jews, conveniently not too often mentioned.

The miracle of the title refers to a poem, though, by the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her debut collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, she has a new book coming out in 2020, and she currently teaches poetry at Juilliard.

Her small first poetry volume addresses the Israeli Palestinian conflict, by all reports from all perspectives, acknowledging the horrors lived then and now, Jewish and Palestinian; those poems were written a decade or more ago, I wonder how she feels now. Probably longing for a miracle of a different kind. Aren’t we all.

I chose today’s poem because it values connectedness. There are so many people out there suffering more than usual during the Christmas and Hanukah season from loneliness, isolation or simply the winter blues. A good reminder to ramp up efforts to reach out. It makes a difference.

Miracle

By Elana Bell

What else to call the way the bare branches
I’d bought at the neighborhood bodega
came back to life that winter.
I’d carried them home — dry, wrapped
in paper — stuck them in the square vase,
and, as an afterthought, filled it with water.

I don’t know when I noticed the pale
pink shoots sprouting from the submerged
ends: wild, reaching roots, like ginseng, or the hair
on an old woman’s chin. Then tiny green
leaves began to appear at the tips,
curling over themselves with the sheer effort
of growing.

I’d thought they were dead.

And now I recall being in the choke
of a fog I did not have a name for
and didn’t think I’d survive. I could try
to describe it for you now: the nights
I woke with my pulse pounding through,
the heaviness of each breath,
how the effort of being inside my body
felt like burning —

But what I really want to tell you is this:
how, in the parch of that long drought,
the people I loved kept bringing me water.

Water.

Though I turned my back, and did not answer
to my name, though I flung the cup away —

Let me say it plain: I wanted to die.
But something in me, some tiny bulb
still alive under all that rotted wood,
kept drinking, kept right on drinking.

Music today is a mix, dependent on your mood.

For the traditional ones: Gnesin’s Variations on a Jewish Theme

For the pensive ones: Bloch’s Sacred Shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agd4lN35ICwervice

For us anxious ones: the perfect eerie tones of Copeland’s Vitebsk.

You got three nights of Hanukah covered right there! Stay tuned. And now go, get some chocolate gelt for your’s truly….

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From word to image

Earlier this week I wrote about metaphors as a subtle way of manipulating people into supporting or refusing certain actions. Today, for our last bit on language, I want to look at metaphors that appear in poems, directly or indirectly influencing how you appreciate a text – IF you understand the metaphors, that is.

The reason I am interested in this is, in some ways, selfish. I use a lot of metaphors in my own visual art, and am often called on to explain what I mean. I always wonder if the images themselves are not strong enough for appreciation, but need spelling out – and if and how that will alter the way people perceive them. I also worry that all my esoteric bits of knowledge just need a space to play, completely confusing the hell out of an image, never mind the people who view it. (Which reminds me: My calendar for next year, using the metaphor of whaling as a warning of the consequences of ruthless environmental exploitation, can still be ordered. All proceeds ($30) go to Street Roots. It might not arrive in time for the holidays, but definitely in time for January 1st.)

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I am sure, there is a whole literature on metaphoric use in poetry; I have not read it. I realize, however, that for most poems I read, I do NOT get the myriad clues of higher learning or meaning strewn about. It is almost like they are messages for a group of the initiated, who pride themselves of being clever enough to get all the hints. The rest of us can just enjoy the language or a general mood. Here is an example (the link gets you to the original German version. I offer my translation below – the original is in rhyme which I could not capture in English.)

The Game is over

The poem was published in 1956 by Ingeborg Bachmann, a darling of the post-war literary scene, who tragically died in her late 40s when, while smoking and falling asleep in bed, she accidentally set herself on fire. She was the young token female poetess in the German-speaking landscape, coming to early fame with her poetry, even though her 2 prose books were substantively stronger.

So what do I get out of the poem? A sister speaking to her brother, conjuring up childhood games and enchantments, images and memories of times at play. For every positive thing, there is a warning of impending loss or doom. No choice, either, we “have to go to sleep, the game is over -” childhood ends. Glimpses of joy soon turning to a sense of sadness. Fond elicitation of how we all used to play, back there in the 1950s before we had to grow up. A bitter taste in your mouth that dangers abound and magic childhood words will be forgotten.

And what did I miss? Man, about everything of importance. The floating on a raft through the sky bit turns out to be a reference to the Isis and Osiris myth, the ancient narrative of sibling incest and undying love. The tents in the desert, the sand in your hair refer back to both, Bachman’s own figment of a novel, Franza, that deals with secretive sibling love, ending badly in Egypt, and also to Paul Celan’s poetry – he was her lover on and off, with the doomed affair not able to bridge the chasm between her parent’s Nazi past and his parents death in the camps. Never mind his marriage, and his desperation, leading to early suicide.

The petal alighting on her seal? Turns out the seal (Siegel) is a different name for a word describing the female sexual organs of plants – I leave the rest to your imagination, and your attention drawn to the fact that darling brother becomes Darling in the last stanza, with the parents aghast. Don’t have to be a psychoanalyst for that one.

Does this added knowledge enhance your reading of the piece? Or complicate it? Does our lack of the relevant education which would unlock the metaphors mean we’ll never “get” poetry? Is it enough to just look at the “pictures” presented by the metaphors?

Well, someone made pictures out of them (which is where I got to thinking about this poem in the first place and then spending hours as a detective trying to get the bits and pieces of the puzzles from various sources.) Anselm Kiefer created a whole cycle of paintings, dedicated to Bachman, some including snippets from her poems, in our case the lines “your and my age, the age of the world” written next to or on the depicted pyramids. If you had never heard of the poem you would not get the hints in the painting either…..

In the end it comes down to this, I think: if you want to communicate with everyone, use the words and the images that are common good. Enough of them around. If you want to impress the learned set, go right ahead and make it complicated. Leave clues that only the initiated know how to decipher, upon which they feel victorious and in turn judge you to be a precious artist. And now let me go to make a really straightforward montage. How about an apple and a snake?

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Photographs are from THE coolest exhibit of a model train set at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. As a sister without brothers I never had the pleasure of that toy. Then again, the boys I knew were really not allowed to play much with them either – an honor reserved for their fathers…..

Music today is a childhood favorite – Ravel’s fairy tales for children….

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