Red Letter Poem #217

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #217

 

 

 

 

A Pact

 

 

I make a pact with you, John Berryman.

I have detested you for a long time.

I completely agreed with your mother.

I thought you had no inner resources.

I saw your poems as navel gazing.

I saw you force form on a natural rhyme.

I still can’t believe you were such a child.

I wish I knew nothing of your real life.

I can now see, you had a bad disease.

I come to you now as a grown man.

I am taken by the Shakespeare in you.

I can even hear your Walt Whitman in there.

 

I see the minstrel in your vaudeville show.

I am old enough, now, to make amends.

 

 

 

                                     ––Kevin Gallagher

 

 

 

 

You say from Spring Hill: ‘I am not the same.’––

No more am I: I’m neither: without you I

Am not myself. . .

 

                         ––John Berryman, Berryman’s Sonnets #94

 

 

I, the first-person pronoun: how deceptively simple, when it appears in a poem.  Intimate. . .aloof. . .straightforward. . .confounding––this pronoun each one of us lives inside, hides behind, displays like a flag (but of decidedly mixed allegiance.)  Sometimes I signals the ‘confessional’ approach, an honest appeal to the reader, baring the heart.  In other instances, it projects a conception of the self, an aesthetic calculation we want the world to appreciate––hoping (at least in some cases) we, too, might come to believe it over time.  Kevin Gallagher’s new poem sets out a veritable picket fence of I’s as he attempts to make peace with one of modernity’s great and troubling poets (just as every ink-stained son or daughter must with their literary forebears.)  Of course, reading the piece, we’re left to grapple with a host of voices from a variety of poets, whose intentions likely do not coincide.

 

Let’s begin with some history: if you heard a vague echo in your ear when you first read Kevin’s opening lines, it’s because his piece is an elaborate reworking an older poem: Ezra Pound’s verse by the same name, dating from the beginning of the 20^th century.  Here it is in full:

 

A Pact

 

I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

 

Pound disliked Whitman’s long breathy lines and American matter-of-fact-ness, both in its subject matter and tone.  But he came at last to admire the Good Gray Poet’s authenticity and the liberating force of his imagination which, over time, helped give birth to what we think of as modern poetry.  When Whitman opens his long masterwork “Song of Myself” with this appeal to readers: “I CELEBRATE myself;/ And what I assume you shall assume;/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”, it takes time to realize this is not the “barbaric yawp” of some raging narcissist but the myth-making proclamation of our country’s first truly native (and radically inclusive) poetic voice.  In the diversity of offshoots that grew from Whitman’s roots, Berryman’s couldn’t have been more different: if Whitman wanted to carve out a dramatic distance from our European literary ancestors, Berryman’s brilliant mind wanted to wholly digest that lineage––Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne and (notably in his sonnet sequence) Sir Philip Sydney––and blend them with an unlikely 20^th century sensibility.  Erudite, often opaque, filled with strange inversions of syntax and kaleidoscopic literary references, the 117 poems of Berryman’s Sonnets (not to mention his even more phantasmagorical Dream Songs) both thrill and overwhelm.

 

Now, if you’re familiar with Kevin’s poetry, what likely comes to mind is its blue-collar honesty, its links to Irish history and mythology, its muscular and arresting imagery––all things Pound might applaud but which would certainly give Berryman pause.  And so what we have here is a tidal process across the generations: a kind of give and take, a raising up and breaking down––helping to refresh the language, drive the imagination.  It’s a familiar pattern among young poets: to counter their immediate antecedents and strike out in a new direction, building upon the wreckage of the old.  But then, over time (or so we hope), they’ll find themselves entering into a gradual reevaluation that helps us all to appreciate our literary ancestry, embracing the very traditions from which we’d once fought to free ourselves.  Keep in mind, some of these figures are more persona than person: is Walt Whitman of Brooklyn identical to the monumental I in his poetry?  Is the poet speaking in Berryman’s Sonnets the very same man who hoped those poems might entrance his beloved?  And, for that matter, is Dr. Kevin Gallagher––professor, political economist, and Director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center––the same mind traversing this bare-boned sonnet?  Or the same as the poet and publisher, author of four fine collections (most recently And Yet It Moves from Madhat Press), who I know from captivating readings around Boston?  No easy answer presents itself.  So as I watch him construct that column of I’s in this poem, and wrestle (as every writer must) with what the head and heart each demand upon the page, I can’t help thinking about all the scores of men and women whose creative visions I, too, have battled with, fed upon.  My desire to know them was always, perhaps, a stand-in for the even-more-daunting desire to eventually know myself.

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Spoke 5

Spoke 5

ISBN 978-1-387-9803-8

Boston, MA 2018

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

One of the more fascinating entries in the latest issue of Spoke 5 are the translations of Cuban poet Jorge Olivero Castillo, whose poems are rendered accessible and enjoyable.   There are three translations of one poem, one entitled “Plea”, one titled “Supplication” and a third one called “Supplicant.”  Each translation was done by different writers.

The first, “Pleas,” is translated by P. Scott Cunningham and Oscar Rieveling:

Outside

the rain washing

autumn’s dead leaves

piled on the pavement.

A car trying

to pass in silence down Linnaean Street.

The soft babble of air

hanging in the half-naked trees.

Night’s fists on the glass door

more and more visible.

And me in my apartment

intractable, on my back, determined

to find the word

the poem is asking for

on its knees

It is also translated by Cecilia Weddell in the follows:

Supplication

Outside:

The rain washing

autumn’s dried leaves

piled on the pavement.

A car that attempts

a silent drive down Linnaean Street.

The light murmur of air

spreading through the half-naked trees.

The night’s closed hands on the glass door

more visible every time.

And me in the apartment, unyielding,

flat on my back,

determined to discover the word

begged after by this kneeling

poem.

Daniel Evans Pritchard’s version is again slightly different from the other two:

Outside

piled on the sidewalk

autumn’s withered leaves

are washed by the rain.

A car strains for silence

on its way down Linnaean Street.

The fain murmuring breeze

scatters among half-naked branches.

The collar of night more and more

contracts around the glass.

And I in my apartment

dogged on my knees

begging am determined to extract

from myself the mot juste

Some of the differences are subtle. The first describes autumn’s leaves as “dead” and the second offers that they are “dried” and the third “withered”.  All three versions agree rain washes away the leaves.

Also note in the first translation “A car trying to pass in silence down Linnaean Street.” becomes in the second work, “A car that attempts a silent drive down Linnaean Street.” 

While the third states “A car strains for silence … “. These might be considered slight changes.

                                                                                                          

The Spanish original is “Un automovil que intenta/pasar en silencio por Linnaean Street.”

So the translation which comes closest is Ms. Weddell’s which uses “attempts”  and “silence” both literal takes on “intenta” and “silencio”.

Then we see another difference in the three translations where the first version reads, “The soft babble of air/hanging in the half-naked trees.” The second translator “The light murmur of air/spreading through the half-naked trees.” Finally, ‘The faint murmuring breeze/scatters among half-naked branches.”

Here again the difference is subtle but gives a different meaning  to whether the air was barely moving or was a breeze.

These examples are what makes translations so difficult. Often the reader sees the translator’s poetry, not the original, usually with different meanings.  In the above two versions there are differences, yet the poem remains more or less intact, rather than two considerably different poems. 

Once I did a review of Christian Wiman’s translation of an Osip Mandelstam poem and compared it with a translation of the same poem by W.S. Merwin. For a person who does not read Russian, placed side-by-side they were two completely different poems, albeit they were poems by the translators, and the original was lost forever.

Nonetheless, discovering Jorge Olivero Castillo’s poetry is a genuine pleasure and credit should go to his translators. In fact, Spoke 5 presents fine poetry by Audrey Mardavich, Maggie Dietz, Danielle Legros Georges, Patrick Sylvain, Guy Rotella and others. There are a number of other poets worth reading, as well as George Kalogeris’ commentary on Ben Mazer’s poetry which highlights the poet’s often overlooked talent. 

Danielle Legros Georges was Boston’s second Poet Laureate following the legendary Sam Cornish. In her poem “Bayou” she writes, ‘  “In response to Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence’s painting is:

blue-water-island

slow-moving-stream

red river

slow-moving

trees-as-dark

river-as-blue

dark hanging

dreams

moss-tanning

talking

            trees

breeze silent

            circled

bayou

ground-water

creole

heart-water

talking

            trees

Spoke 5’s more than 300 pages is well worth reading the poetry and commentary on poetics including some 45 pages of letters by Larry Eigner entitled “ Swampscott [MA] to Mexico City: Larry Eigner and El Corno  Letters from Larry Eigner  to El Corno Emplumado (Edited by George Hart).   And finally kudos to Publisher & Editor Kevin Gallagher and Managing Editor Karin van Berkum for putting together this fine publication.

_____________________________

Zvi A. Sesling