Category: poetry

Of poets and prophets: Ah!merica by Allen Ginsberg

The latest offering from isolarii, the unique publishing venture that produces small—think palm-sized—“island books” that feature the work of novelists, scientists, artists, theorists, and philosophers and others. But don’t let the small scale fool you, these micro-masterpieces can pack a punch. The latest, their sixteenth title, is Ah!merica by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a meditation on the visionary genius of William Blake, his influence on several contemporary American poets, and his enduring relevance for our times.

The text of Ah!merica is adapted from the legendary, discursive lectures Ginsberg delivered about or inspired by Blake’s life and work at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, between the time he co-founded it in 1974 until his death in 1997. On the Allen Ginsberg Project website, editor Sebastian Clark explained their approach to working with such an extensive collection of original material:

We began with a detailed line edit of the collected lectures to ensure coherence, focusing on making Ginsberg’s speech accessible without losing its distinction, spontaneity, or sincerity. Once the text was refined at the sentence level, we shifted to collating the lectures and arranging them thematically. The organizing principle became Ginsberg’s sustained engagement with Blake, particularly the concept of “double vision”- the ability to see, simultaneously, the material world and its deeper, spiritual, dimensions.

Organized into sections or chapters, each headed by a number in Ginsberg’s own handwriting, the resulting 170 page volume is illuminated with an ample selection of Blake’s prints and completed with one of four dust jackets. It’s a delightful work to hold and behold.

He begins by describing the youthful epiphany he experienced at the age of  twenty while reading Blake one night (while masturbating of course). This visionary experience, embodied in the New York facades he could see outside his window, completely transformed his attitude towards poetry. In Blake’s prophetic books in particular, Ginsberg recognized a voice that still spoke to the challenges he was observing 150 years down the line: “He was struggling with the same emotions we all face but specifically about the destruction of idealism and radicalism of his time.”

For Ginsberg, Blake is a poet who was ever attentive to the ordinary surface reality of the world, to the details that many tend to overlook, while remaining  aware of the profound spiritual currents coursing beneath it. He brings his more contemporary American poetic heroes—William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and Charles Reznikoff—into his lectures to examine the way the ability to truly to see is reflected in their work. He also recognizes within Blake’s poetry, parallels to his own life-long exploration of Buddhist thought and tradition. Further, Ginsberg delights in the playfulness that can be seen in Blake’s singular style and his artwork:

We get a lot of intelligence and humor out of Blake’s illustrations of his ideas, just a much as we get from his prophetic books. We can decipher his mind, visually. How much delicacy he put into each illustration! Just as in the prosody, his punctuation, and eccentric capitalization, there’s tremendous wit in the paintings.

Because this text is adapted from lectures, there is a passion that comes through clearly in what is essentially an extended exploration of what we can learn from Blake about reading and writing poetry. From appreciating the inherent musicality of the form to the necessity to compose without fear. Ginsberg encourages young poets to be willing to break with or ignore the “rules” of composition and be open to the messiness within. “The problem is staying with what you were really thinking, rather than what you believe you’re supposed to be thinking”—that is, resist the temptation to ignore the very unappetizing images that arise in the writing process, for that is where the most interesting and authentic aspects of yourself tend to lie. This leads, ultimately, to a final discussion of the difference between “good” and “great” poetry. It’s no secret what Blake has left us.

Ah!merica by Allen Ginsberg is published by isolarii, a series by Common Era Inc.

The earth was a rose fully opened: Eternidades / Eternities (1916–1917) by Juan Ramón Jiménez

My feeling and the star
were ecstatic in their idyll.

You passed through the garden
and your hand, playing,
paying no attention,
tore off my feeling.

(poem 107, “Flower”)

Winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature, Juan Ramón Jimenez (1881–1958) is widely regarded as one of the most important Spanish language writers of the twentieth century. But, as is often the case, the popularity of his poetry experienced its ebbs and flows over the course of his lifetime, only to be received with renewed enthusiasm in the decades since his death. Born in Moguer, in southwest Spain, he was drawn to poetry at an early age. Before he turned twenty, he was invited to Madrid by leading writers of the Modernismo style and with their support he published his first two books of poetry in 1900 and 1901. But he soon broke away from this group to develop his own distinct aesthetic, one focused on the ideal of beauty. This new approach would ultimately bring him attention and international fame, with his book of prose poetry Platero and I (1914) being translated into at least thirty languages. However, yet another important stylistic shift still lay ahead.

By the time Jiménez made his first trip to the United States in 1916 to marry his American-Spanish fiancée Zenobia Camprubí Aymar, he was already aware of English-language poets and of a new bluntness and astringency in the more recent works by Yeats, but it was the reading of Emily Dickinson that made the strongest impression on him. He would bring this inspiration, and her capacity to convey the experience of an invisible reality in a concise form, home to Spain. Her inspiration is reflected clearly in the work he composed immediately following his journey and in the years that followed. In Diary of a Newlywed Poet—a poetic memoir chronicling his trip to America composed in 1916—Jiménez introduced a new direction and style and the present volume, Eternities, written in 1916 and 1917, and published in 1918, turned on and refined this stylistic shift to focus on the dynamic relationship between the poem and the self, and between the poetic word and the re-creation of the world.

In his thorough introduction to Bitter Oleander Press’ handsome dual language edition of this milestone in Jiménez’s creative evolution, translator and poet A. F. Moritz describes Eternities as “a book that joins—or rather, sees the identity-with-difference of—poetry and Poetry: the making of poetry by the poet, and the presence of Poetry as the inner and greatest reality that is available to everyone and experienced by most.” Notably, in a move from what was known as “pure poetry” to what he would term “naked poetry,” he established a streamlined, yet potentially rich form that would in turn influence the further development of Spanish poetry of the time. In poem 5, “Poetry,” he famously imagines poetry as a woman who comes to him when he is young, but then begins “putting on fashions” to an extent that his initial boyish enthusiasm turns toward hatred and resentment:

. . . But she started to undress.
And I smiled at her.

She stood there in just the shift
of her ancient innocence.
I believed in her again.

And she dropped the shift
and showed herself naked, all . . .
O passion of my life, naked
poetry, mine forever!

This renewed connection to poetry allows the poet to reveal his unveiled self, to speak of the ideas and feelings that are true for himself, knowing that essentially he is speaking to a universal experience of the nature of existence.

Eternidades / Eternities is a sequence of 137 numbered poems, titled or untitled, some several stanzas in length, but many no more than four lines. However, the arrangement of poems appears, at first glance, to be loose, unorganized. But it has its own form. As Moritz puts it:

By the time the first ten poems, say, have been absorbed, a clear if unusual unity emerges that continuously fills itself in. The poems have a radial interconnection rather than a linear, narrative, or logical one. Better said, perhaps, they are constellated. They unite as dispersed points within an area (an orbit or ambit, to use words that Jiménez loved) and with a gradually locatable center of gravity—points that make up a picture and a story.

It is, in the reading, that a natural flow opens, circles, and changes direction as poems complement or contradict one another, even split into two parts separated at some distance across the sequence. Images drawn from nature—dawn, light, trees, flowers, the sky, stars—appear throughout, as do the perennial themes of life, love, death, and the question of time. Moods shift, moving from despair to elation to meditative reflection. A poem that reads:

How I hate the me of yesterday!
How I’m sick and tired of tomorrow
in which I have to hate the me of today!

Oh what a heap of dried up flowers,
this whole life!

(poem 69)

can be followed by one that opens:

I’ll kiss you in the darkness,
without my body touching
your body.

(I’ll run through the shadows,
so that not even the oblivion
of the sky can enter.)

(from poem 70, “World Kiss”)

There is the sense, throughout Eternities, of the poet in conversation with his own insecurities on one level, and with the mysteries of life on another, an echo of existential reality we all can recognize. His curiosity, restlessness, and joy is infectious, and his commitment to the notion of a universality of experience affords the poems in this sequence a startling connection not unlike that which readers often feel with Dickinson.

With meticulous attention to detail, Moritz translated, for this volume, the Nueva y original edición de Eternidades (1916–1917) edited by Professor Emilio Ríos, published in 2007,  including an Appendix consisting of eleven “perfected” versions of poems from the sequence that Professor Ríos appended to his text. He also preserves Jiménez’s distinctive punctuation—exclamation marks, parentheses, and ellipses—features that contribute the intrinsic energy of the poems. The result is an invaluable dual language edition of an important work of Spanish poetry that should readily appeal to a wide audience.

Eternidades / Eternities (1916–1917) by Juan Ramón Jiménez is translated from the Spanish by A. F. Moritz and published by Bitter Oleander Press.

Even in these half-dark times: The World Is Made Up Every Day by Alok Dhanwa

The lights on the bridges
have no end
My nights are full of them
I will remember
the lights
even in the face of death

– from “Theatre”  (1996)

In recent years, Seagull Books has been bringing the work of under appreciated Hindi cult writers to English audiences, via the translations of Saudamini Deo. The latest writer to receive this attention is  Alok Dhanwa whose defiant and socially engaged poetry combines the personal and the political with deep emotional and intellectual intensity. Born in Bihar in 1948, just one year after India’s independence, Dhanwa grew up alongside his country, witness to its many growing pains. Against the backdrop of the rising Maoist, Naxalite and other Communist movements in the late 1960s and the tumultuous 1970s under Indria Ghandi’s leadership, including the twenty-one month Emergency (1975–77) during which constitutional and civil rights were suspended, there was much for a young working-class poet to speak to—and against. Often drawing on rural themes and imagery, his poems addressed, directly and indirectly, the struggles of ordinary people, earning him a popular cult like status in Bihar and neighbouring states of northern India.

Unsurprisingly, relatively little of his poetry was published during these earlier years. His first collection, The World is Made Up Every Day, did not appear in Hindi until 1998 and was, until recently, his only published volume of work. Now his voice can finally be heard in English, through the resounding notes of Deo’s translation. (Brief YouTube videos of Dhanwa reading in Hindi can be found online and offer a taste of his tone and character that can be carried into reading his poems.) And although the particular political context of his poetry—even when the settings are decidedly bucolic—is essential, in her Translator’s Forward, Deo cautions that to read Dhanwa simply as a poet of the past would be a mistake:

Contemporary Indian milieu is far more complex, with its growing shift towards majoritarian politics and authoritarianism. His lines ‘that India no longer exists / the one in which I was born’ hauntingly resonates with the contemporary reader. Or when he writes: ‘Homicide and suicide are made to look alike / in these half-dark times. Do spot the difference, my friend,’ it feels as though he is speaking about present day India. And, perhaps, there is no end to these half-dark times.

One might venture that such a sentiment has a resonance far beyond India these days. As such, in Dhanwa’s poetry, there are many notes that may ring familiar.

There are direct, often angry, even despairing, references to political violence and oppression in some of the poems collected here, and a certain melancholy when the poet considers his country and the men and women he sees, be they gathering in city centres or working on farms. Dhanwa demonstrates a wonderful facility for employing striking imagery from nature and from everyday objects to  address the concerns that trouble him, as a man and as a poet. The poet, in his vision has a critical role, he or she is tasked to speak to both the immediate and the future. Thus, his is not merely an artistic role, it is at once ancient and urgent, yet he takes it on with a measured humility. In “Water” (1997), he begins with his imagined mission:

People, but not just people,
I believed I would teach
even water to inhabit India.

I believed
Water would be simple—
like the East,
like a straw hat,
like candlelight.

In the golden hour,
the other side is barely visible,
leading us to wander
in a country
yet to appear on the map.

But he ends up wondering if all the words we write are wasted, leading to ruin as water follows its own course in spite of us. He asks:

Do the voices of water
remain in the voices of women?
And what of other voices?

In a sad and broken heart
there is only the night of water.
There lies hope, and there lies
the only path back into the world.

Many writers have, over the years, been described as giving voice to the marginalized, but for Dhanwa this is not simply a matter of speaking on the behalf of those who cannot. In his world, those who might be imagined to be on the disadvantaged side of the endless class struggle are not content to stand by quietly. And he is standing with them. He also holds a perspective that extends beyond the joys and the demands of the everyday—it is civilizational in scope. His world view is not static; it is in motion. In one of the longer pieces in this book, “Canvas Shoes” (1979), he begins with a pair of old canvas shoes left by the railway tracks and imagines a life for this worn and humble footwear that entails a long journey that echoes the history of the world:

These canvas shoes
soft and filled with air
as cigarettes and handkerchiefs.
Woven like nests—
against solid things in this world like murder and rape,
these liquid shoes stand
bending with grass and language,
edging closer to salt—
And for the rats, these canvas shoes are like the alphabet—
it’s where they begin to nibble.

Here, simple shoes carry the density of human existence—in the day to day and over  vast swathes of time. By the final verse the journey is complete yet eternal:

Those canvas shoes are now so old
that one might say,
wherever they move, Time doesn’t exist—
even Death would no longer want to wear them.
But poets do wear those shoes
and tread across centuries.

In the end it is the poet who is tasked with continuing the journey and translating it into words. To speak to the indefatigable human will to resist, to survive. Something that Alok Dhanwa is well versed to do.

The World is Made Up Every Day: Selected Poems by Alok Dhanwa is translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo and published by Seagull Books.

The landscapes that shape us, the landscapes we carry with us: Tamil Terrains, Edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran

Raging winds howl to the vakai trees as their pods tremble in fear.
A land cloaked with countless peaks
yet not an ounce of soul.
It was this cold grim path that he,
the ruler of my heart, chose
over lying in my tender embrace.

“What the Heroine Said” – Avvaiyat (translation by Gobiga Nada)

The second in trace press’ translating [x] series, Tamil Terrains, arises from a series of online workshops conducted over six weeks in Autumn of 2022 and Spring of 2023. Editors Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran invited poets and translators from India, Malaysia, Singapore, Ilankai (Sri Lanka), and Canada to explore classical and modern Tamil poetry and enter into conversation about “what it means to translate in anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial ways.” With a history that extends back over two thousand years, Tamil is a language that is deeply entwined with its indigenous landscapes—mountain, forest, field, desert, and coast. But this relationship to land has long been troubled by conflict, colonization, and displacement, so this project also seeks to ask how a connection to these terrains, with its layers and accumulated losses, can be understood in traditional Tamil speaking communities in South and Southeast Asia and throughout the diaspora.

As both Nedra and Geetha, and a number of the participants in the workshops, live in Takaronto (so-called Toronto, Canada), the workshop discussions opened with the question of how diasporic translators “who occupy Indigenous lands as refugee and immigrant settlers, might critically engage with, and contest, ongoing erasures carried out on the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.” This raises a perspective often ignored, or at best simply addressed with rote land acknowledgements, but one that has deeper, and in our present day, significant implications. In recognition, then, of the ways in which translation has been employed to dismiss the cultures and peoples of Turtle Island, this book opens with Tamil translations of work from two Indigenous poets—Mi’kmaw poet shalan joudry and Michi Saagiig and Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. The volume closes with an essay by Thamilini Jothilingam, whose family was forced to flee civil war in Jaffna when she was a small child. She reflects on the two places where she feels most at home—her current home in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and the Vanni region of northern Sri Lanka. Both places carry a legacy of colonial violence.

Another distinctive feature of this project and the collection that emerged from it, is the desire of the facilitators to gather people who identify as Tamil, regardless of individual fluency, thus opening a point of connection and collaboration to those who may have grown up away from their ancestral homelands. As a result, the approach to translation explored in the workshops and reflected in Tamil Terrains is varied and creative. Participants are encouraged to engage in retelling, re-creation, expansion and commentary, especially with ancient and classical poetry and traditional folk songs. Nedra Rodrigo describes the decision to differentiate types of translation for the workshops—Root, Branch, and Driftwood:

Root as a direct translation from the source text; Branch as a translation supported by a bridge translation; and Driftwood as a transcreation that was inspired by the source text or that archived some aspect of the text.

The invaluable nature of this approach is clearly reflected in the work selected for publication.

The original texts are presented Tamil script, with a few exceptions where the original poem was written in English or where the decision made to use transliteration. At times, several translations of a single poem may follow, perhaps by translators from different geographical areas, or employing different approaches. Sometimes a translation or transcreation may also be accompanied by a reflection that allows the translator to express the thoughts, experiences, and emotions guiding their personal approach to the piece. Such insights are particularly interesting and add another layer to the process of translating or re-imagining a poem or song.

Finally, translation is also recognized as an act of resistance, speaking to the dislocation from homelands due colonial actions, war, and migration, and the displacements of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. The poetry selected for the workshops from more recent and contemporary Tamil poets, much of it touched with a measure of darkness and grief, was chosen to encourage exploration of these concerns, understanding that “(r)esistance here does not mean shutting out but opening up to each other, to allow each other the chance to dwell in our imaginations.”

I remember
the Saamiyadi resting after his trance
swatches of vermillion scattered
all over the entrance.
Withered betel leaf, with shrunken veins.
Everyone standing in the dark smoke
yearning for something
enchanted by the words of the Saamiyadi.

I remember
we were no further than an arm’s reach.
Even so
between us the distance widened
like these ones on one street
and those ones on another.

From “Tree with Broken Shade” by S. Bose (translation by Yalini Jothilimgam)

This volume, reflective of the collaborative spirit of the workshops that led to it, offers an opportunity to appreciate the many complex ways Tamil speaking people, and their descendants who may be spread far and wide, can maintain a connection to the landscapes, traditions, and histories of their respective homelands through poetry and other cultural elements such as art and film. Reaching from the Sangam era (300BCE – 300CE) to the present day, the translations, transcreations, and reflections gathered here combine to make reading this book a very dynamic and moving experience.

Tamil Terrains is edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran and published by trace press.

Exercises in poetic alchemy: Ancient Algorithms by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (and friends)

When it comes to the art of literary translation, there are many elements and nuances to which the translator must attend, and in this regard, poetry offers a particularly slippery substrate. If a poem takes on different shapes and meanings every time you come to it as a reader of the same language in which the poet has written, the translator must also be comfortable with a certain openness that will allow others to enter it from the outside. But when a poet celebrates such fluidity in her creative process from its  earliest moments,  what possibilities and potential might that inspire in her translator?  Or might that be translators?

Consider this: poet and translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen has translated the expansive, organic  poetic trilogy of Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen—Third Millennium Heart, Outgoing Vessel, and My Jewel Box (all from Action Books)—a “fairytale of the universe” that explores the body and its internal and external existence, in relation to birth, society, economics, and nature. But their relationship, as poet and translator, rests on, as all translation ideally does, a ground of collaboration and trust.

Consider this: Ursula Andkjær Olsen doesn’t view her poetry as original work, but rather a translation of an idea—an idea of which she is simply the first translator.

But why stop there? For Jensen, Olsen’s thematic and creative approach offered the inspiration for a generative, collaborative project of evolving intentional mistranslations—one that not only involves both poet and translator, but invites other poet translators to engage with the Danish originals (that is, “first” incarnations) and their “second” translations, following their own uniquely rule-defined imaginings to create new, unique poems to which Jensen responds, before returning her new mistranslation back to her collaborator and so on. Ancient Algorithms is the result of this project.

Jenson’s collaborators, or co-conspirators, are Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, Paul Cunningham, Baba Badji, CAConrad, and of course, Olsen herself. Each collaboration takes a slightly different approach, but most begin with a poem selected from Olsen’s trilogy. The original piece is presented, first in Danish, and then in Jensen’s published translation. The collaborating poet translator then sets the rule or process that will guide their mistranslation. Jensen then takes the resulting poem, sets new rules for further mistranslation, and the collaborator responds again. Where Olsen is the collaborator (an act she seems to really delight in), Jensen makes the first mistranslation. With CAConrad, Conrad’s own work with ancient technologies and rituals in poetry inspires the approach. Suffice to say, the individual poetic styles and sensibilities of the poets involved shape the transformations and reincarnations that arise from each collaborative sequence, but throughout it all, echoes of Olsen’s distinctive worldly—and otherworldy—vision can be detected. Each poet translator, an outgoing vessel, carries signals forward. Stop anywhere along the way and you can hear them:

i do not know if
language must be paid for

it is barely audible

the wind’s currents stir my body’s tissues
which the generalized eardrum
located in the vase of my swollen belly
channels into the uterus and         the world
its box, its ear, its mouth
resounds

(from “i am tasting the sun” – Aditi Machado)

Even when the newly birthed poems may weave in yet other languages as in those of multi-lingual Senegalese American poet Baba Badji, they are present, but lead to new universes and perspectives:

lengthen further my femur, tibia & fibula
for life to relive itself in my body,
maa gni mâgg, dinna mâgg, yeena gni mâgg,
in virtuous reliance and gratuitous strength—

superfluous, luksuriøst, and queer. Without machismo
there are no breaks, there are no tears, there is love,
and bodies, in bodies, we might have a base to stand on

towers of Babel dying de plus en plus rouge
castles, târne, du—moi—long graffiti for a beggar’s memo.

(from “Artificial Culture and Nature  Are Not Luxury”)

It is, of course, impossible to trace the complete transition of any one poetic collaboration and the poems that emerge within the restrictions of a few short quotes in a review, but each one is a dynamic, incantatory act of co-creation emitting an energy that is at once mystical and futuristic. But there is more. In the final section of Ancient Algorithms, Jensen and Olsen craft a series of games for poet translators. Even for readers who are themselves neither poets nor translators but are actively engaged with poetry and literature in translation, these activities spark the kinds of ideas that are fun and worthwhile to think about. And then, in closing, Jensen has gathered a collection of “Inspirations & Further Readings.”

Last, but not least, consider this:

When I first read Third-Millennium Heart I was so completely absorbed by its vision and magic I knew that I would not only write about it, but that my response would have to be both poetic and experimental. (Published on Minor Literature[s] in 2018, if interested the PDF can be opened here.) As Olsen’s trilogy evolved, I welcomed Outgoing Vessel and My Jewel Box in turn, and have read the complete set many times. I even had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen on a live Zoom broadcast several years ago. Now that I am learning to read Danish myself, to be able to begin  with a selection of Olsen’s poems in Danish, read through Jensen’s translations, and on into the permutations and re-imaginings that emerge with such a fine group of poet translators is a special treat.

But one that is also recommended for anyone who loves poetry and the art of translation.

Ancient Algorithms by Katrine Øgaard Jensen with Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, Paul Cunningham, Baba Badji, CAConrad is published by Sarabande Books.

Counting, accounting and recounting: The Folded Clock by Gerhard Rühm

two!
one two  –
one two  –  three!
.        two
one two three  –   four
.       two

“a recounting,” the first number poem you encounter in Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock, opens with a lengthy note explaining exactly how the piece should be recited—volume and intensity directed and measured—before erupting across the following five pages as numbers, spelled out, descend, rise, and repeat. Finding the flow and riding it (guided with a few more directives along the way) is not difficult, especially if you allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.

And there are ninety-nine more, each one involving numerical elements in some shape or fashion. Some are sequential, others visual, still others are in verse form. Clever or funny or profound, it is amazing just how far numbers can take you.

Born in Vienna in 1930, Rühm, who recently celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday, is an author, composer and visual artist. His poems reflect all of these interests. He was an early practitioner of concrete poetry and an original member of the influential Wiener Gruppe. His interest in numbers as “the most pared-down and at the same time most universal element of design” goes back to the early 1950s. When he composed his first number poems in 1954 he was unaware of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ own explorations in this area, but he has continued to incorporate numerals and digits into his spoken and visual poetry, expanding the possibilities numbers offer. The Folded Clock, newly released from Twisted Spoon Press in Alexander Booth’s translation, gathers one hundred of these poems in a handsome volume.

Many of Rühm’s poems play with the rhythm and sound of numbers in various sequences and patterns. Others exploit visual qualities and double meanings that arise from the titles and the images or words they are paired with. And a sly humour surfaces throughout, as in “imperfect counting poem”:

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
toes

one’s missing

Or “sixty-nine pairs of lovers” which depicts, inverted on their side, six rows of ten and one row of nine (sixty-nine) 69’s.

But, Rühm is also inclined to employ numbers and words to make thought provoking statements about the world. “time poem”—another piece that begins with a note on recitation—takes on cosmic dimensions starting with:

1 january, 12:am: bang!
2
3
4

And so on, counting down one calendar year, day by day, marking the significant events, from the Big Bang to the first moon landing. Given that fish don’t begin to swim in water until December 19, the final day of the year opens up, first by hours, then half hours, and by 11:30 pm, minutes, until the final minute opens up into seconds to allow human history from the first cave paintings to space exploration to fall int place. (You can read this poem online here.) Elsewhere he allows climate change, odd historical facts, and interesting news stories inspire poetic creations. Ruminations on living also fit well with the measurement of one’s personal relationship to time as in “sense of time”:

a week ago i was still a child
five days ago i  was an adult
four days ago was the time of the “vienna group”
three days ago i was living in berlin
for two days now i’ve been in cologne
everything since the turn of the millennium happened yesterday
since early this morning i haven’t aged at all

The variety of poems in this collection is wide and endlessly entertaining. They range in length from just a few numerals, to pieces that extend for several pages, to sketches and collages. Even if you fear you might be intimidated by avant-garde or experimental poetry (or poetry at all), this is a work that is not only intelligent and entertaining, but that contains many pieces that you could easily find yourself unable to resist reciting aloud.

The Folded Clock: 100 number poems by Gerhard Rühm is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Twisted Spoon Press. (Excerpt and images can be seen at the publisher’s website.)

In this violent solitude: Light, Grass, and Letter in April by Inger Christensen

But do not grieve for me
do not grieve for your lonely
to and fro
My hour has rusted
My poem has left
your beaten track
Do not grieve My young poem
is more deeply kissed by life
Deathly it creeps
over under through me
Poetry is murdered hope.

(from “In the wild loneliness of the mountains” / Light)

Having read most of the poetry of Inger Christensen (1935-2009) that is available in English translation, to return now to her earliest published collections, Light (1962) and Grass (1963) is somewhat like experiencing the formative spirit of a writer who will soon make her mark as an original and experimental literary force. And yet, it is clear in these poems composed in her mid-twenties, that she is already exploring the themes and perspectives that will define her most ambitious—and most popular—poetic works. This is perhaps to be expected because only six years separate the publication of Grass from the release of her monumental 200-plus page book-length cosmic poem Det in 1969 (“It” in English translation, 2006).

The present volume contains her first two collections, along with her fourth, A Letter in April (1979), a collaborative project that followed ten years after Det. Light and Grass being only one year apart, share much in common and reflect the time in which they were written. Yet as translator Susanna Nied (who has translated all of Christensen’s poetry and is thus well acquainted with her oeuvre) says regarding these two books:

Her lifelong themes are already evident: boundaries between self and other, between human beings and the world; our longing and struggle for direct connection beyond boundaries; the roles of language and writing as mediators of that connection; the distances between words and the phenomena that they stand for.

Images drawn from nature, domestic settings, and corporeal existence feature throughout these poems, with a strong sense of the landscape, the seasons, and the musicality of her homeland. Many of the pieces in both volumes tend to be shorter and lighter in form, though the not necessarily in content, but notably, the final poem in Grass, the sequence “Meeting,” is longer , closer to prose poetry, and seems to presage  sections that will later emerge in Det/It.

The unknown is the unknown and gold is gold I’ve heard, one
.      winter the birds froze fast to the ice without the strength
.       to scream, that’s how little we can do for words with words
the books press close to one another and hold themselves up,
.      backs to the living room, our buttoned-up words huddle
.      on the shelf, the queue-culture of centuries, inexorably
.      built up word by word, for who doesn’t know that the
.      word creates order

(from “Meeting: V” / Grass)

The third work collected in this volume, Letter in April, seems quite different in tone, quieter and more intimately focused. It arose as the result of a collaboration with graphic artist Johanne Foss who began with a series charcoal-on-parchment drawings based on Etruscan artworks. Christensen and Foss had known each other for a number of years and both had spent time at an artists’ residence in Italy and explored Etruscan ruins. Taken by Foss’s drawings, Christensen chose some and began writing responses to her images. These responses began as prose pieces, but she ended up discarding them and beginning again in poetry. Their project developed over two years as they worked together during the summer months while their children played. Several themes emerge in this work including parenthood, wonder, nature, and the account of a woman who travels to a foreign country with a child inspired by a trip Christensen took to France with her young son as part of her writing process.

Unpacking our belongings,
some jewelry
a few playthings
paper,
the necessities
arranged within
the world
for a while.
And while you draw,
mapping out
whole continents
between the bed
and the table,
the labyrinth turns,
hanging suspended,
and the thread
that never leads out
is, for a moment,
outside.

(Section I,  º )

However, more than a series of poems and drawings, Letter in April follows a complex yet unassuming structure. Each of the seven sections contains five segments marked by a sequence of small circles in varying order. For example, Section I follows the pattern: º º º º º, º º º º, º, º º, º º º .  Section II begins with º º º , and likewise each section begins with the same marking as the final segment of the one preceding. These markings link poetic segments with shared motifs, allowing  the entire work to either be read straight through, or by following the each pattern individually (i.e. I º, II  º, III  º, IV  º, and so on).  This flexibility reflects Christensen’s musical and mathematical instincts,  which are also apparent in the arrangement of elements of Det/It, but will be given full reign in her wonderful numerically and alphabetically framed poem Alphabet (1981).

Light, Grass, and Letter in April is a rich compilation of poetry that offers insight into Christensen’s development as a poet from the mid-twentieth century inspired modernism of her earliest work, through to a collaboration (unique in her oeuvre) that incorporates visual and dynamic elements. It is essential for those who already know and love her poetry, but can also serve as an introduction for those who have yet to encounter her masterworks.

So here we sit
in this violent solitude,
where bulbs work
underground,
and we wait.
Around noon
when the mountain rain stops,
a bird stands
on a stone.
Around evening
when the heart stands empty,
a woman stands
in the road.

(from IV  º º º º º)

Light, Grass, and Letter in April by Inger Christensen, is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied, with Drawings by Johanne Foss. It is published by New Directions.

That day was a little bit odd: The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka

That day was a little bit odd. After walking down the street
.       I stopped in a movement,
at one particular moment of growing older.
And I sensed it (the moment of growing older) like a scientist
.      over a microscope:
the precise split-second border between the former and the
.       future me.
In that borderline, tangible second, I was nothing; only an echo
of a former self and the germ of the future, the old me.

It lasted for only that one moment. Then the air rustled like
.      golden hay
and into the street a horse came.

(from “A Horse Came Into Our Street”)

Odd is one way to describe the poetry of Slovakian poet Eva Luka—deliciously, devilishly, delightfully odd. Her poems open up strange, shimmering vistas filled with fantastic imagery. Born Eva Lukáčová  in Trnava, Slovakia, in 1965, she studied English and Japanese, first in Slovakia and later in Japan. She began publishing poetry under her given name, first in anthologies and then, in 1999, with her first collection Divosestra (Wildsister).  For her second book, Diabloň (Deviltree), published in 2005, she adopted her nom de plume, along with what would become her practice of selecting a poem from each collection to provide the title for the work to follow. In this way, her poems speak to one another within and across collections which also include Havranjel (Ravenangel, 2011) and Jazver (I-Beast, 2019).

With The Minotaur’s Daughter, translated by James Sutherland-Smith, a selection of poetry drawn from her work to date, is now available in English for the first time. In his Afterword, Sutherland-Smith suggests that Lukáčová  may be one of the last great poets of resistance in Europe, citing her:

resistance to conform artistically and [a] resilience against the potential psychological pressures resulting from the circumstances of her life and times. Eva’s resistance to conform to being categorized within a specific poetic movement—particularly those associated with a single gender—reflects the individual nature of her work, and this artistic independence even challenges gender identity in the personae that inhabit her poems.

A transgressive spirit illuminates her poetry, extending beyond matters of gender, to explore questions of personal freedom, sexuality, and desire within a phantasmagorical landscape featuring eccentric figures, mythical creatures, and fabulous flora and fauna. She creates, with her poems, haunting, often dark, scenes or vignettes that can be as intriguing as they are disarming.

Unlike many similar selections that draw from across a poet’s oeuvre, the fifty-nine poems that comprise The Minotaur’s Daughter are not presented chronologically, or divided according to the individual volumes they come from. Rather, the assortment seems to be loosely thematic, with many of the earlier poems coming from more recent collections, and some of the Japanese inspired work from her first book coming later. And, because she sometimes writes companion pieces that appear one or two volumes apart—for example, “Wildsister,” the title poem from her first book, is later answered with “Wildbrother” in her third—here they are presented together. The impact is more powerful this way. It is also evident that Luka appreciates the poetic storytelling potential of triptychs and series, something that may have developed over time, as Sutherland-Smith seems to think that her upcoming fifth collection may include even more.

One of the most developed sequences in this selection begins with an ekphrastic poem inspired by Leonora Carrington’s painting  Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge. In this piece, the speaker is the artist commissioned to capture the likeness of the wild-haired woman in her odd partridge skirt. He then becomes famous, but is ever haunted by the painting. Four more “Late Mrs Partridge” poems follow, addressing her body, her death, her husband, and finally her wake. Mrs Partridge herself voices all but her husband’s lament from beyond this life, even returning to her own wake, still nursing an internal flame, to drink a toast with the bereaved:

A man sits at the top table, his face,
wrinkled from the tertiary era, with an incalculable expression.
The atmosphere is gloomy, but still audible
is a ubiquitous slurping, gurgling and belching,
as if the whispered stories haven’t had as much power
as unstoppable bodily hunger and thirst.

Leonora Carrington’s eerie, fantastic paintings appear again as the stimulus for five other poems in this translation (not to mention the poet’s own artwork which graces the cover). At times, Luka stands as an observer, as in “And Then They Saw the Minotaur’s Daughter”  where she watches  the “two well-behaved boys—somewhere between childhood and doubt” watching the noble horned woman-creature while spirit-like forms fill the room, Elsewhere she animates and engages directly with the scene, even imagining the central figure outside their fixed setting as in the Mrs Partridge quintet and  “Necromancer,”  a poem after the abstracted, surreal painting of the same name.

The images that dominate Luka’s poetry are drawn from nature—water, flowers, birds, reptiles, and animals—but, as with her human beings, the line between the real and the spiritual is fluid. They inhabit a shifting borderland and there is a pagan, pantheistic sensibility at play. Her animals inspire awe and fear, mythological figures speak, and a woman invites an angelic black bird (Ravenangel) into her bed in a dark sequence of desire, longing, and loss. Hers is a magical world, albeit one that accepts that mystery can be tinged with heaviness and pain. But it is not a relentlessly dark place; rather it exists in a kind of intermediate, and yet, ultimately familiar, space:

It’s incomprehensible, that border of yours
between the feverish night and the healing morning; as if you
.       didn’t recognize
the differences between frenzied hyacinths and tamed hyenas.
.       What you tell me
in the evening, no longer applies in the morning, and vice versa

(from “You and Me When the Cock Crows”)

One might describe the poetry of Eva Luka as akin to richly woven tapestries; the vignettes she crafts are vivid, often disturbing, but they tend to close with a note of promise, that is, with a measure of the resilience that characterizes her work. This quality is evident in The Minotaur’s Daughter. Her striking imagery is well captured in Sutherland-Smith’s translations, while his decision to break with the typical chronological ordering of a “selected poems” collection offers her first English language readers a deeply rewarding introduction to her singular poetic universe.

The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka is translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith and published by Seagull Books.

The words / created their own states of being: “it” by Inger Christensen

It may seem hard to imagine that a single poem (or sequence of poems) extending over 200 pages could become an instant hit upon publication, embraced by critics and the public alike, but that is exactly what happened when Danish poet Inger Christensen released what would become known as her masterwork, it, in 1969. What, you might wonder, does this simple pronoun, “it,” refer to. It might be simpler to ask what “it” does not refer to, for here it is simply the personal pronoun for the impersonal verb “to be”—as in “it is.” Danish, like English, necessitates such a construction, so this epic, moving as it does from the most basic elements, expanding in relation to one another, on into a world formed and named in its process of coming into being, and finally differentiated into individual, experiential existence, is a grand orchestral exploration of the nature of life. But it is also a piece that pulls you into to its rhythms, echoes and images. In Denmark it has become so iconic that sections have been set to music and certain lines from it have entered the daily lexicon.

In her introduction to the 2006 English translation by Susanna Nied, poet Anne Carson views Christensen as a contemporary counterpart of Greek epic poet Hesiod combining elements of his hymn of creation, Theogyny, and his moral guide, Works and Days: “Her det [it] is at once a hymn of praise to reality and a scathing comment on how we make reality what it is. The dazzled and the didactic interfuse in det.” However, the requirement for a personal pronoun for “to be” which does not exist the same way in Greek, means that her cosmogony is also a cosmology—a condition made explicit in the structure and realization of it. In a 1970 article, “In the Beginning was the Flesh” (quoted by Carson but since made available in its entirety in the essay collection The Condition of Secrecy), Christensen talks about some of the thinkers and artists, including linguist Noam Chomsky, whose ideas contributed to the genesis of what she a began to realize would be a creation poem:

Then I started thinking a little about this sentence: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh,” I thought, what if we could think the unthinkable: that flesh could speak, that one cell could signal to another, so that the whole inarticulate world suddenly partook in the following impossible (to human awareness) experience: In the beginning was the flesh, and the flesh was made words . . .

To maintain a hold on the duality of these two paradoxical conditions, she started to write as if she wasn’t there, “as if it (“I”) were just a bit of flesh talking, a bit of protoplasm, acted as if I were just following along, while a language, a world, took shape.” She called this part, the opening of her work, the time before consciousness, PROLOGOS. However, although it first emerges as a pre-sentence entity, the poems that comprise this section follow a strict mathematical formula. Each line consists of 66 characters (in the original Danish) and there is one 66 line poem, two 33-line poems, three 22-line poems, six 11-line poems, eleven 6-line poems and so on until the final set of sixty-six single-line poems. (The translation is unable to preserve the character count of each line, but does keep the number of lines.) Thus, PROLOGOS sets the cosmological grounding for the poem to follow, moving from the most fundamental elements—beginning, of course, with “It. That’s it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes.”—and moving through abstract form and function, slowly evolving over time. Cosmic. Geological. Natural. Communal. And, finally, individual.

It’s come around. Come to stand on its own, confront itself. To disengage from the mass and stand out. It’s engaged in an evolution, shifted its stance, attained eminently engaging expression. Has pursued itself and accidentally found itself. As a natural result. Has come to stand for itself. And can begin by itself. To experiment with sets of freestanding, free-floating expressions. Occasionally with straight-swimming ones. Dreaming. In another world. To imply itself.

(from PROLOGOS)

The main body of the poem, LOGOS, explores the word as creative principle, or, as Christensen puts it: “The place where things are consciously staged, put into action, into relationship.” It contains three sections, STAGE, ACTION, and TEXT which are each further divided into eight subsections of eight poems each (Christensen, as ever, loves mathematical and musical structure). The inspiration for the subsections came from a work titled Præpositioners teori (A Theory of Prepositions) by Viggo Brøndal, an attempt to classify the words languages use to show relationship. She selected:

eight terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctiveness that a state of flux necessarily must produce: symmetry, transitivity, continuity, connectivity, variability, extension, integrity, and universality.

And thus, the stage was set, so to speak.

It is perhaps not surprising that the poems that comprise the first section, STAGE, are more varied in structure and form than those we will see later, order comes with time. Words are at work: “The words / created their own states of being / made a world out of ‘world.’” (STAGE, symmetries, 7), but it not a smooth operation. Here the imagery moves between descriptions of natural processes, and the intentional creation of sets, painted and varnished to “represent” mountains and scenery. A tension exists between what is and the way it can be expressed:

And when it’s said that words fly
(like birds that fill an end-
lessly vanishing space)
it’s probably to conceal the fact
that words are not one
with the world they describe.
Words do not have wings.
And neither do they flower nor will
but they take potential flowers
and set them in a garden
which they then set
in an image of a garden
in an image, etc.
The words stay where they are
while the world vanishes
This is a criticism of the way language is used
Because it’s a criticism of the way things are.

(from STAGE, connectiveness, 1)

When “I” becomes part of the dynamic, the relationship between humans and language becomes more complex, and existential questions begin to arise. This first part also introduces a wide variety of images, motifs, and refrains that will recur throughout the work as a whole, providing a coherency to it when read and experienced (as it is meant to be) as a single long poem.

With ACTION and continuing on through TEXT, Christensen introduces more structure—employing both formal and experimental forms— to the poems within each subsection, adopting a consistent line count, verse pattern and rhyme, if relevant, for at least the majority of the eight poems (Susanna Nied’s award-winning translation preserves form and rhyme whenever possible), thus adding an ever-shifting musicality to the poetry. Thematically, the net she casts is wide, taking in the natural world (deserts, forests, gardens), human awareness (self-identity, hope, despair, sex, death), and community engagement (cities, hospitals, factories). Her vision encompasses the personal and the political, always returning to the power of language, the fundamental quality of the word, creating and mediating the world as we know it, alone and in relation to others:

A society can be so stone-hard
That it fuses into a block
A people can be so stone-hard
That life goes into shock

And the heart is all in shadow
And the heart has almost stopped
Till some begin to build
A city as soft as a body

(ACTION, symmetries, 8)

Throughout the ACTION section, one can see the influence of the 1960s on Christensen’s  worldview and some of the imagery she employs. Of course, the more political and economic currents change, the more they stay the same. Poetry is timeless and this vibrant, life-affirming epic aims to reach beyond the limits of time—as does language—and as such, the third part, TEXT, offers poems that begin to speak to passion and meaning in living and loving. The tone, if not strictly prescriptive, carries positive energies. There are no promises that things will be easy or pain-free, but it is worth trying, even in a world that contains darkness and corruption.

After the fourth morning I seek
the lips’ speechless expression

Again and again I stand completely
still so the wheel goes around and
there’s no cause for panic

What you gave my thought is no-
where, with a body that’s a
gift to the earth

What you gave me is pure rest / restlessness

My passion:  to go further

(TEXT, variabilities, 4)

By the close of this section, the “I”, the speaker, has come to an understanding of her interconnectedness with the world, and all that it contains.

Then, finally, comes the EPILOGOS. Beginning and ending with “That’s it” this piece works its way through the many shades and facets of fear we encounter as embodied beings, to slowly embrace words as the very cells of the body, and ultimately find freedom in letting go:

Erotic attempts
when the body
in its blind
sexual
activity
strives to be invisible
the cells are words
when the body
is lost
in it all
and lost
as it is
persists
survives
surpasses
itself
and its limits
the cells are words

(from EPILOGOS)

This is a work that, the deeper you get into it, benefits from longer, sustained reading sessions (especially if inclined, as I tend to be, to move slowly through a collection of poems). Although any one of the poems in this extended, structured sequence could stand on its own, they speak to one another, repeating and re-imagining phrases and imagery—a quality that tends to mark Christensen’s poetry and prose—so that the reading builds its own exhilarating momentum. it is an experience.

it by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied with an Introduction by Anne Carson and published by New Directions.

Elegy on the wing: Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen

Since reading The Condition of Secrecy, a collection of essays by Danish poet and writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009) In January, I have set out to read one of her works each month until I run out of available volumes. This past month was largely absorbed by working for and worrying about the Canadian Federal election which has just passed, so my reading was scattered at best, and most suited to poetry and short fiction. I am squeezing this brief reflection on this single-poem volume, Butterfly Valley, as National Poetry Month draws to a close. Note that this is a dual-language edition, whereas the US edition from New Directions entitled Butterfly Valley: A Requiem contains this same translation by Susanna Nied, Christensen’s longtime poetry translator, along with three other medium-length poems, but does not include the original Danish. I intend to get that book eventually, however I would suggest that having the original and the translation face-to-face allows a reader to appreciate the complexity of Christensen’s achievement as it is possible to gain a sense of the musicality and rhyme structure present in the Danish, even though it would be unsatisfactory to attempt to reproduce that fully in the English.

“Butterfly Valley” is a fifteen part sequence of sonnets, the first fourteen linked by first and last lines which are then gathered form the final powerful poem. Christensen was a lover of form, structure, and imagery drawn from science and nature. Musicality was also very important. These qualities all come into play with this sequence which features the fourteen lines of the sonnet presented as two quatrains and two tercets with the rhyming pattern: ABAB CDCD EFE GFG (several follow ABBA CDDC in the first two stanzas). The poems are linked by repetition—through the first fourteen sonnets, the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the following one. VI, for example, closes with:

Here gooseberry and blackthorn bushes grow;
whichever words you eat, they make
your life butterfly-easy to recall.

Perhaps I will cocoon myself and stare
at the white Harlequin’s sleights of hand,
delusion for the universe’s fool.

And VII begins:

Delusion for the universe’s fool
is the belief that other worlds exist
that there are gods who bellow and roar
and call us random tosses of the dice

The fifteenth sonnet is composed of all of these repeated first/last lines, in order, with the typical rhyming pattern maintained. Each individual sonnet is thus crafted with an eye (and ear) to the finale.

Within this sequence, a host of colourful butterflies rise and fall through the Brajcino Valley’s noon-hot air. Christensen, who believes that poems are composed of words, first and foremost, employs butterfly-related imagery and the names and colours of different species, directly and metaphorically, along with a mythologically-tinged sensibility. But her themes are the very human, even existential, reflections on life and death, love and loss, art and nature.

When with their image-language, butterflies
can use dishonesty and so survive,
then why should I be any less wise,

if it will soothe my terror of the void
to characterise butterflies as souls
and summer visions of vanished dead. (X)

As ever, Inger Christensen’s poetry is an intricate and articulate celebration of language, meaning and life itself. This slender volume highlights these qualities well.

Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen is translated by Susanna Nied and published in a bilingual edition by Dedalus Press.