The Silent Pendulum and Full Circle in Broken Identities, the new novella by Denis Emorine

 The Silent Pendulum and Full Circle in Broken Identities, the new novella by Denis Emorine

article by Michael Todd Steffen

Denis Emorine’s moving fidelity to his creative inspiration pulses at the heart of his new novella, Broken Identities (JEF Books, Arlington Heights, IL, ISBN 979-8284824-05-4). The book unfolds a sequel, a further denouement and conclusion to the public emergence of a writer begun in the 2017 novella Death at Half-Mast, where Emorine traces origins of “broken identities,” foremost that of his fictional subject, Dominic Valarcher and his integral duality as a human being and his vocation as “the writer,” the alternative appellation chiming like a formal constraint throughout the two narratives.

Laetitia, Dominic Valarcher’s wife, reappears here with her fairy-esque character as muse, metaphorically represented playing private recitations for her husband at a piano topless, with her breasts exposed to him. The trope has flown my imagination to the cinema and the possibility of a movie perhaps with the title “The Naked Pianist.” While arousing erotic tensions, the portrayal of Laetitia at the piano remains in a sensual rather than graphic character. In scenes beyond her home with Valarcher and her piano stool, we are also made to understand her true beauty, not just to Dominic, yet also her devotional character to him. She is his, his alone, strictly immune to other hungry suitors. This is essential in delineating Valarcher’s deep sympathies for his wife as well as the excruciating extent of his dilemma in carrying his work, as it must be, fully to the public. The depth of Valarcher’s sympathies has been noted also for its nominal ambiguity by Cristina Deptula, in the revelation of the writer’s name, Dominic, for its more frequent feminine form, Dominique. (synchchaos.com/2019/08)

As the narrative is inevitably determined, the figure of inspiration is left to sink and fade at moments throughout the two stories with the realization of Valarcher’s worldly success in publications and in presentations of his writing, public readings, notably with the emergence of a young Hungarian Literature researcher, Nóra. The young student’s coming to life in the writer’s presence and in his stirring desire makes an elastic and revisited topos. Emorine follows his subject as the writer oscillates. This goes like a pendulum, back and forth beside the piano of his exposed musician, between devotion to the original inspiration and its release in an expression of love toward the very work’s appreciation. There we meet, again, the figure of the young Hungarian student Nóra, the fresh clay of consciousness awakening under the intelligence conveyed by the author.

This ontological movement of Emorine’s fiction, between numinous, mnemonic origin and its naïve, “lively” and irresistible recipience, intersects with our civilization’s deepest foundations and iconography, in new seminal terms and oppositions, the politics of East vs. West, in reminiscence and therapy between parent and child, and between the authentication of art through its intimate inspiration in contrast to its marketing epiphany in the rival world of publishers and university appointments.

Without giving away their charm and details, let it be noted this second story’s beginning, with a partial disappearance of the writer at the end of his wits, comes full circle with the story’s astonishing but convincing conclusion. A worthy read, for its charms, curiosity, resonance and much needed reminder (of the ever-vigilant light in darkness) under the flickering lamps of our busy desks.

The Daylong Muse in Ron Padgett’s new book of poems Pink Dust

 

A H a n d p i c k e d P o e m

by Michael Todd Steffen

From his new book of poems, Pink Dust, in a section with the title “Geezer,” Ron Padgett writes,

It’s something of a relief

to fritter away a few hours

doing not much of anything

other than walking around

and looking at things

that aren’t in any way remarkable,

and to know

that, of the diminishing hours

left in your life,

you are frittering some away,

something you can’t remember

ever doing before,

relaxing into nothing in particular.

Like many of the “poems” in the book, this little meditation appears without a title. There are section headings throughout the book, announcing sequences. Pink Dust may be one long book-length poem with sections. It’s unannounced, another sign of blurring sequential and temporal definitions, a privileged work and view of a work and works for a laureate poet.

The poem appears on page 38 of the new book: 3 the mathematical whole number representing a circle; 8 the figure of the circuit of eternity: more, there’s more, onward, endless, like the meditation that feeds poetry, a discipline of attention where the unremarkable often comes into focus as remarkable. And, in this poem by Padgett, where the subject is frittering, “relaxing into nothing in particular,” where the (un)act of (no)concentration—“looking at things / that aren’t in any way remarkable”—becomes remarkable, catches our notice, tells me, in fact, how prone my mind is to busy-ness, how addicted I am to being intellectually proactive, even spurred onto it the more by the hum and light constantly in my back pocket or in the palm of my hand. Not only is it ruining my eyesight and posture (bent neck), it’s the source of a great deal of tension in my head, as in the belly after you’ve eaten too much. Sleep specialists tell us it’s a major source of widespread insomnia in our times.

When we’re ever looking at something made to be looked at, we omit silence, meditation, wandering, reflection. The gifts of frittering. We become an answer machine.

Like that, Padgett has, accidently or not, hit upon a general malaise of the times by merely setting out to confront a particular anxiety in his own life, in its “diminishing hours,” more and more discovering how open-ended writing is in the far field (Roethke) – more, onward – which

leads simultaneously to a sense of the futility, the endlessness of it. What’s interesting is how frittering becomes a rebellion against that urgent sense of economizing these last precious moments. It is a poignant microcosmic moment, for a poet who has walked with John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch on the traces of high modernism and its sources in surrealism and dada, back to their seminal rejections, in the early 20th century, of the hyper stress brought to daily life by mechanical engineering and productivity-oriented Nationalism and Fascism—with their efforts to be rid of the unproductive, undesirable elements, doing what humans do most, and especially intellectuals, hanging around, having conversations, just being here.

In 2018, the Poetry Society of America awarded Padgett the Frost Medal, for a distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A busy intellectual lifetime, reaching further back than its first appearance in an avant-garde literary journal, The White Dove Review, in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Between then and now, a staggering output of publications in prose and poetry (over 20 volumes now)—and awards, including an L.A. Times Book Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and the Chancellorship of the Academy of American Poetry from 2008 to 2015— attest to the kind of restless, prolific literary life, the vigilant, upkeeping mind that could make a significant statement about the virtue of a couple hours of frittering.

Good poems don’t leave us silent. But they do much more than simply add to the chatter in our minds. The right words, mots justes, become a vehicle to remind us we’re consuming perhaps an awful lot of language; straining at its limits and ripe silences for genuine expression and meaning; expending, per-minute per-day, an awful lot of concentration. It’s good for us to zone out, back off, take a walk. Breathe, as the cognitive behavioral therapists remind us. Who of us, stepping out onto a crosswalk, isn’t potentially in a twilight zone? It’s something beyond the secular sense of things, in our sense however dim that might be of eternity. We’re all, on one level, in the same boat, aged 17, 26, 35, 52, 81 or 90. Life is mortal, we each feel its urgency, pine in its slags.

Anne Waldman nails the general feeling Padgett’s late writing, “masterful for its panoramic humanity and mind-stopping verbal wit, its breathtaking power and beauty. We want to stay with the person in these poems all day long.”

Pink Dust

poems by Ron Padgett

ISBN: 9781681379081

New York Review Books / Poetry, 2025

is available for $16

through The Grolier Poetry Bookshop

www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org

or from New York Review Books

207 E 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016

www.nyrb.co

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

 

A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

Who the heck is Ralph Branca? Well, as baseball fans (and there are poets among this group) may know, Branca was a not bad, not bad at all pitcher in the Major Leagues between 1944 and 1956, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and finally with the New York Yankees. The specific moment of Branca’s career that still registers with us is that he gave up the game-winning homerun to Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants in a 1951 playoff game, and that hit became known as The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, and also as The Shot Heard Around the World

The poem is not merely about defeat and failure, it’s about widely-witnessed and soul-crushing defeat and failure.

After he gave up the most famous homerun ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping, face down.

The poem appears in Pinsky’s most recent collection Proverbs of Limbo, published last June (2024) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

It is a poem typically rife with subjects for discussion. I just wanted to make this one note about the stunning topical variety of the poem and how its immediate appearance of random organization, which keeps us on the edge of our seats as we read, still maintains our trust with its rhythmical consistency. Life is crazy, we need something to hang onto. Kids prepare to confront crazy love and mortality with poetry:

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Similarly the poem ‘Branca’ conjures life’s falls, with a dazzling variety of facts about Ralph Branca, importantly as to his identity as a human being associated with so much more than that moment of failure which has been etched in history, or baseball lore. The poet will also take the opportunity to make statements about himself in the ramble of his data:

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

Why these two pieces of information are joined in the same couplet? Seemingly for no reason at all, and there’s a great indulgence these days of being unburdened by reason or coherence. However, the two do go quite profoundly together, as they each evoke origin of the man, his father of the biological Ralph Branca, Robert Pinsky as another, different source of Ralph Branca in the poem itself which will extend and expand on the pitcher’s living repute as a man, in details, much more than just the notorious baseball pitcher, otherwise diminished to a needle of failure in the haystack of historical addenda.

When we read through the poem, we notice an end-line or “heroic” based versification, with the little hiccup, in most of the lines, of a dactyl or anapest (however you score it)—

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

Speaking is the punchline of a Jewish joke.

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn has its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers…

That versification holds the very remote and difficult associations between the two lines of each couplet stable, so to speak, and keeps us going along with it even as we’re wondering, perhaps squirming, about the sense of the organization or logic of the poem, however our nature to just swallow language. Again, as poets and readers of poetry, it can be a gimme to revel in madness. But if folks are going to start talking about the poem, that is if the poem is to stand a chance to stay with us, in memory, as Branca himself somewhat obscurely has, we need to find sense in it. The editors of The New Yorker found sense enough to publish it in March 2017.

The music or prosody of the Greek-ish lines begins to work on us subconsciously as a sort of coherence. When we look closer, associations emerge: unlucky number 13 and the (mortal) laugh in a joke; a Roman colloquialism and a town’s daily journal both vehicles of hearsay or facts; late in life “At eighty-five” balanced with early career “He was twenty-one”…

The poem will be the challenge and subject of this week’s poetry discussion forum Let’s Talk About a Poem hosted by Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz via Zoom, on Saturday April 12 at 11a.m. Robert Pinsky will be “there” to read ‘Branca’ and take part in the discussion. For more information and a link to join, contact Marita Coombs at maldencirc@gmail.com.

For a Readerly Companion On the Other Side of Goodbye, the new book by g emil reutter

 

For a Readerly Companion On the Other Side of Goodbye, the new book by g emil reutter

article by Michael Todd Steffen

We’ve learned to appreciate hybrid writing for itself, for the wide palette and integration that makes today’s poetry uniquely liberal and balanced, striking and robust. But it’s good also sometimes to recognize definitions in a progression, as g emil reutter dispatches them to us in the three parts of his new book On the Other Side of Goodbye, from POEMS to FLASH to STORIES. One’s different sense of genre joins the conversation.

The reutter poem is often suburban/pastoral observation of atmosphere, weather, times of day, neighborhood wilderness, flora with its names, and elements of contrast that reflect the liminal location between nature and humanity. An Adam-and-Eve-esque conjugality haunts the garden-kempt woodland sylphs of songbirds and squirrels. In the poems, the poet’s “other” or addressee can assume an airy, echo-like or mirroring presence,

She floats in a torrent

of words, sips coffee

tattoos the words onto

a piece of marble…(page 15)

Ink, writing: tattooing the dead (a piece of marble). His lexical curiosity is highlighted in the poem “Adularescence,” bringing us with that novelty orthoclase and albite. With the wonder more than an actual question to be answered: What is writing?

While at yet another boundary, technology marks the notably greyed, more menacing big foot print of the industrial landscape, in its jarring testimony that our progress has not brought about betterment, or as the title of one poem states, “Not over the Rainbow”:

Dorothy not here

loud crunching of carrots, rabbit not

here. Jersey across water, interstate ribbons

through. Town of refinery tanks. Amazon rises

from steel dust, under bridges over roads… (page 17)

reutter’s muse is more complicit with the envoys of nature, as with the Cardinal who sings to her in the flash piece “Performance.” He, the outlier, the poet. His vision and liberties push definitions for the medium. The reutter piece of flash is suspended atmospheric writing, like the poem with an eye for suburban wildlife and fauna.

The STORIES in the collection offer, in reutter’s concept of genre, the human world, of a narrative of clear progression concealing a secret to be revealed, a surprise birthday party, the odd bric-a-brac collected by a weekend browser of flea markets, and the very personal item that his rummaging turns up. Grammatically striking and definitive between genres, the STORIES in prose accommodate their nouns with articles (“the”, “a”, “an”) which are habitually omitted in the poems, perhaps for the sake of compression, imparting a brisk catch-as-you-can manner to the poetry.

On the Other Side of Goodbye has been praised for bringing us “exquisite chronicles of journeys through local landscapes, down main streets, and on occasion, to destinations a train trip away.” Gloria Mindock has noted the book’s display of deft and detailed “descriptions…so immersive, it feels as if you’re inside his writing. He captures real life and its characters with remarkable skill.”

g emil reutter is the generous and eclectic partner editor of the admirable North of Oxford webzine and press. He is the author of eight books of hybrid and story collections, eight books of poems and four poetry chapbooks.

His greeting to us On the Other Side of Goodbye is full of across-the-fence neighborly observations and I wouldn’t so much say “small” as right-sized talk with that best of conversationalists, an alert and responsive sensibility. It’s a good companionable read for days at a time for every season.

On the Other Side of Goodbye

ISBN 13-979-8300959593

By g emil reutter

Published by Alien Buddha Press, 2025

Amply Speaking Silences in Robert Pinsky’s Proverbs of Limbo

 

Amply Speaking Silences in Robert Pinsky’s Proverbs of Limbo

by Michael Todd Steffen

Exorbitant rents and constant overwhelming congestion of their city’s spaces due to mass tourism have become too much for the residents of Barcelona. This has been somewhat in the world news over the past year or so. Locals there have been waving signs—Tourists go home!—and even aiming at them with water pistols and spraying them.

From his new collection Proverbs of Limbo, Robert Pinksy’s cursory poem “In Barcelona” draws resonance from the story, if we have caught the particular item in the floods of information we’re awash in these days. Though no specific reference to the dilemma of Barcelona’s residents appears in the poem’s mere six lines:

Are you Italian? Ignacio asked me. Thank you

I said in Spanish, I am a Jew of New Jersey.

And I, a Jew of Venezuela, he answered.

As Ellen said, If he was improvising

So much the better. The art of conversation:

Projecting in turns onto the screen of being.

Poetry gets a lot out of the generosity of terms in language. Ellen’s word here, “improvising,” is a polite way of saying that Ignacio is lying. But it’s a kindly kind of lie in that its purpose is not to deceive but to associate. Why Ignacio brings up the question of the nationality to begin with—Are you Italian?—will be supported by the conversation’s taking place in Barcelona. It’s a likely question tourists ask when meeting other tourists. These days it’s a question tourists in Barcelona might ask with some uneasiness, reading the locals’ signs telling them to go home, getting sprayed with water pistols. Ignacio’s “art of conversation”—congeniality, rather than attitude—

is to associate himself ethnically in spite of national differences. You wouldn’t want to be a lone tourist in a mob of residents against tourism.

The tourists under threat in Barcelona could pose an artful representation of any of the scores and scores of people worldwide these days who could say they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. The terms “homeless people,” “refugees,” “asylum seekers” are not only terms of reputation but newsy words, depending on a point of view, dehumanizing—or super-humanizing them like Odysseus, that wanderer of wanderers.

The Jew from New Jersey, the American who speaks colloquial Spanish—wouldn’t he be a resident from a land of massive immigration by Spanish speakers today? Pinsky’s poems are interesting for their suggestive amplitude, balance, as well as for their silences. In this instance, a good deal of balance comes from a silence or omission, like a heteromorphic kinetic statue.

Talking around the big splashes of world events, suggestively omitting, euphemizing, naming entities by their parts, calling the king “the crown,” money “coin,” poetry exercises an art to conversation, as it reminds us there’s other stuff people are interested in. At the critical moment when Icarus’s wings are making a small, far-away splash in the sea, nearer to the painter and larger, sheep are grazing and a plowman is plowing his spring field. W.H. Auden meditating on Breughel memorably noted, suffering takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…

Children…skating

On a pond at the edge of a wood…

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree…

You could glance over the six lines of “In Barcelona.” You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder. You might well be reading this commentary on the poem and rolling your eyes. Mike’s reading too much into it. And you wouldn’t be wrong, by the evidence Pinsky has left in the text itself. And the poem wouldn’t be less interesting. It might be even more curious now, more enigmatic.

Are you Italian? Ignacio asked me. Thank you

I said in Spanish, I am a Jew of New Jersey.

And I, a Jew of Venezuela, he answered.

As Ellen said, If he was improvising

So much the better. The art of conversation:

Projecting in turns onto the screen of being.

Our being, blank as a screen, with our choice of projections to cast on them, depending on what we choose to say or are impelled to say about ourselves. “And I, a Jew of Venezuela.” We are as passing as movie theatres, the identities we take upon ourselves as fleeting as the movies we love to watch.

“I mutter flakes of meaning. Foofarraw, / Shmagegeh. Blah-blah-blah,” the poet admits in another of the collection’s poems, “Talking,” which makes interesting observations on how spoken language has meanings other than signification:

The baby rehearses melodies of speech,

The tunes of chat, of menace…

The poetry is timely and also extraordinary—in its solemn, quiet insistence on what is ordinary in us, with our doggy life, in incompleteness, wanting originality, common, yet irrevocably unfounded. His “flakes of meaning. Foofarraw, / Shmagegeh” echo “The Foundling Tokens” of his haunting 2016 collection At the Foundling Hospital:

Bit of lace or a pewter brooch,

Identifying coin, button

Or bangle, or crushed thimble…

Fragment of a tune or rhyme or name

Mumbled from memory. Incised

Into a bar of soap or even scraped

Into the very death-compound dirt

Or hut dirt or chalked onto pavement…

I’ll never forget where I was in mid-June this summer when Proverbs of Limbo came out. Mentally, at least, I was with many other news watchers on the International Space Station where American astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were stranded, in limbo, as it were—they’re still up there for another couple of months as I write this—after the Boeing Starliner, their maiden ship, was deemed unsafe to return them. Though the poems in Proverbs of Limbo are hardly about space and astronauts, world events had center-staged, at least for a few days, while the news was still new enough and the book hot off the press, a looming figure, in the two stranded astronauts, of what the poet had chosen for a telling name—Limbo—to describe things in 2024. Being relevant has kept Pinsky’s poetry in front of us. In this new book he demonstrates a philosophy in the art, like a key idea from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who is referenced in the collection, that “Philosophy” in a rarer sense can summons wisdom of love.

When the book came out in June there were internal urgings for me to write about the new poems, though why I waited—in limbo myself—till the end of November? Maybe subconsciously I wanted the election with its fervor of national suspense to touch down. Unlike news journals that are also supposed to announce the times, poetry is supposed to stand in the wake of things and still clap its hands. Maybe the book came out in time to situate itself more fully and be settled in for this time, before the transition of powers, where things seem yet evermore unresolved, at the mere threshold of a very scary place. Limbo. It’s not quite Hell, but it’s a far cry from better places, even from Purgatory.

The book’s title prompted me to think beyond the colloquial sense of Limbo—“up in the air,” “unresolved”—to Dante’s depiction of this last sort of locus amoenus before entering the bad place, the serene land of sighs housing the scribes, poets, philosophers and the good elders, like Virgil the pilgrim’s guide, who had the misfortune of being born before Christ, their only condemnation. Dante hails a current phenomenon, the countless groups of dispossessed people we see fleeing wars, cartels, unyielding farmland, trying to migrate to Europe and North America. Even if we find Dante’s theological explanation for their plight obscure. Or if we think about Dante at all. Pinsky’s readers would be likely to.

Back in June I discussed the appearance of the new book with Lloyd Schwartz, noting the echo in Robert’s title of one of Lloyd’s own memorable poems from his 2000 collection Cairo Traffic. Schwartz’s poem, “Proverbs from Purgatory,” appropriately for the moment opens—

It was déjà vu all over again.

I know this town like the back of my head.

People who live in glass houses are worth two in the bush.

One hand scratches the other.

A friend in need is worth two in the bush…

[Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems by Lloyd Schwartz, The University of Chicago Press, 2021, page 107.]

Resolving a lingering in the air as to the likenesses of the titles, Lloyd gracefully conceded both his and Robert’s titles are references to William Blake’s famous passage of Proverbs from Hell, from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

Drive your cart and your plow over the house of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity…

So the title of Pinsky’s book cocks an ear back at this passage from Blake: conventional wisdom demonized, turned on its head; turned sinister.

Ironies begetting sarcasm begetting satire soon wear thin to the American sensibility. We too demand more matter, less art. Yet there’s a quiet art in choice and arrangement for the historical ironies of the poet’s deliberations. The poem “Forgiveness” juggles two seemingly unrelated 20th-century cultural icons—the Cantos poet Ezra Pound and the popular jazz singer Keely Smith, announcing Pinsky’s topic:

The mind skitters, its one rudder

Being its own voice. The great Fascist

Poet taught me free verse.

Trying to concentrate on “The forgiving

Of an unforgivable crime” in a lecture

By Emmanuel Levinas, I drift into

Keely Smith being Cherokee…

Meaning gnaws at the silent meat on the bone: the associative leaps that bridge these two strophes, under the title “Forgiveness”—“Fascist” and “concentrate”; “rudder” and “keel” sounded out in “Keely Smith.” And that the jazz singer is “Cherokee” immediately turns our ready pointing finger for a “Fascist / poet”—line breaks are significant in poems—back on us, the reader—if the reader is a 21st-century American intruder on native American soil, likely any of us, centered and thriving on the fallacy (ad hominem) that the value of an artist’s work has everything to do with who you are—politically, racially, sexually—and less and less to do with the demonstrable virtues of word choice, manner, style, rhythm, cadence, scansion, melody, esprit (a more silent quality) that bring creative integrity, joy (or danger), beauty—curiosity, interest—into the picture. (Glass as a structural material can assume every subtle shape and luminous color. It’s the stones thrown from them and back at them that imperil the edifices.)

A little more plainly the opening two units of the poem announce “free form”—“vers libre” and jazz, Pinsky a devotee and able practitioner of both—as the main topic here. The art of conversation invites a likely reader’s attention for current slants in political debates and headlines. But the poet interests us with technicalities, betraying a purer preoccupation with the art of poetry:

“quantity

Reasserting itself after years

Of starvation.” Reading that, I

Got the idea—just like in music,

Longer is different from higher.

Like with long “ee”s,

And it was called “quantity”—

I could hear it. The third syllable

Longer, the first one stressed by pitch:

Bitterness. Cherokee. Popinjay…

The zoom back away from topical politics—“Fascist / poet”—to some shoptalk about prosody, elements of tone, cadence, the poem’s materials and assemblage, relieves the possible political animosity of Ezra Pound’s appearance here, expanding the notion of the poet as a maker of song, perhaps first and foremost, above the weather of his times, his duty to record.

For in this poem about a jazz singer, a 20th-century French-Jewish philosopher, a Modernist poet and more specifically that poet’s attention to prosody and his translation of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po in “Exile’s Letter”—Pinsky is artfully conjuring (as he also avoids directly addressing) some terribly present subjects: Fascism, in general, its groping emergence in the result of our recent election as well as its side in current conflicts, in Sudan and Ukraine. The Israeli question now seriously problematic in Gaza, on hold for now but alarmingly spread throughout the Middle East. The less obvious yet likely the most sinister aspect of the machines of war and their bottomless proliferation and profit by these current conflicts without an end game is a topic that arises with the U.S.’s providing arms for a genocide in the making. Not to mention—and nobody does!—the blatant detriment advanced active far-ranging ballistics are causing the environment in our time of desperate talk about the need to upgrade camping heaters and curtail global warming.

Lest anybody unfairly get off the hook here, “Forgiveness” has included a jazz singer whose Cherokee identity indicts the whole of modern American culture. Only, like Prufrock, that is not what Pinsky meant:

I don’t pretend I was thinking

About the Trail of Tears or any other

Unforgivable crime. I was thinking

About how well she imitates

Louis Prima’s pelvis-forward walk, mocking

The magic of it while singing like

An angel in a prom dress, and how

Great it would be to write something

That funny and impassioned.

An acknowledged good of poems and art in general, making and appreciating them, is the therapeutic element of finding a way to grasp, get a different look at, get hold of a seemingly insurmountable dilemma, with an expression. Naming a pain or illness is the first step to its cure. The poem comes to a kind of climax here, “how Great it would be to write something That funny and impassioned.” The writer’s enactment of that assay and desire, the poem at hand itself! If I am wholly unable to do anything against this current unraveling of my world, I can pull Youtube up on my phone and watch Keely Smith dancing with (and in loving mimicry of) Louis Prima, as they sing—I’ve got you under my skin…So deep in my heart, you’re really a part of me…The very title, “Under my Skin,” reminds us of the inextricable bond, the pain and difficulty of love with another, but also the inseparable union we thrive by, if merely to survive, to be reminded we survive. That intimate union that relies absolutely on forgiveness: be unrelenting with me and you ruin yourself.

It’s neat how Pinsky composes an allusive Pound-style poem as he writes about Pound, an elder in the art who has profoundly inspired him. But Pound is at the same time much maligned by the agents of a current political correctness trying to arbitrate survival in the Pantheon. The range, accuracy and intelligence of Pinsky’s materials here would make the consumers of ideas and objets balk. The same was true for contemporary readers of Pound, who didn’t have cell phones, just much hoed and weeded memory in the works—in the possession of culture. It’s also neat how Pinsky’s formal ventures with the poem have brought up, in practice of the curious as well as in idea, a usefulness to the gadgets constantly in our hands that so define our time. That’s another star on the poet’s homework, he has anticipated the deep habits of our gestures and challenged the reader with widget errands to be informed and broadened as well as entertained.

Of course, we have known the cleansing and curative powers of forgiveness for forever and a day by now. Don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life. It is at the heart of the books of wisdom worldwide, even of The Iliad (which “yacks” to Pinsky) with its denouement between Priam and Achilles for Hector’s corpse. Absolution from blame as well as from guilt is as essential to our spiritual and psychological health as citrus fruit was in the day to sailors as an antidote to scurvy. On the first page of Poems of Limbo, the poet announces with the “begats” of the Biblical genealogies the problematic “Underground river of passion and retrenchment.” Of course, any notion that can be introduced by “Of course” cracks a whip at the dead horse of bygone ideas and their language.

In the stirred and stirring poem, the lecture by Emmanuel Levinas on “The forgiving Of an unforgivable crime” brings historical definition—the Holocaust of World War II—to the timeless dilemma. It merely suggests a victimized people in the spotlight of current history, to get more specific, since October of last year, where tables between victim and aggressor havebeen direly tottering, in a surreally downhill sense of the Justice of an eye, arm and a leg for an eye. Once caught in the cycle of wrong begetting wrong begetting yet more wrong, reason it out however you want to. Cause brings no end to the daily destruction. The jury in observation, unnamed but conjured (as Henry Adams and the advent of modern technological powers superseding the old-world cathedral), in a very Pound-like nut to crack open—

The airy dynamo of song

Animates the shadows

is as instantly put into question as its vapor appears:

White soldiers

Took away the Arapahos’ horses.

And the particular open wound in Gaza “skitters” toward a more generalized Spiritus Mundi of animosity in the following lines, where again history turns the tables on a perceived victim:

In old Ukraine, the Nationalists first

Mutilated some Jews, then made them

Dance and sing naked before

Killing them, as a way of showing

What they’d like to do to the Poles,

Or was it the invading Germans. Is the point

Humiliation beyond forgiveness?

We are only a little more patient with history, being a nostalgic people, than with irony. If the poet gets documentary, the times are relentless in the production of facts. To the point nonsense becomes an antidote to the implacable aspect of the sense of things:

Even poor John Keats, in his letters,

Enjoys a little minor Jew baiting.

Who do I think I am to forgive him?

After all, I am him. He too was the child

Of a New Jersey optician and please do me

A favor, don’t tell me No he wasn’t.

Of the 33 poems in the collection, nearly half of the titles concern names or place names: Poem of Names, Branca, At Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Place Name Echoes, Geronimo, In Barcelona, La Cucaracha, Lenny Bruce, What Kind of Name is That, Leo Gorcey, Proverbs of Limbo, At the Sangoma.

“What Kind of Name is That” opens:

Nice people like us will rank the one same folder

Differently if the name is “Michael Carruthers”

Than if we’re told it comes from “Tashawna Johnson,”

Tilted by syllables in what the experts call

Unconscious bias, betraying how much more

We learn to swallow than we ever know.

Poetry’s more sacred duty—unlike its frequent occasional scratching—is to seek out the most tender, sorest blisters in a people’s psyche and puncture them, easing their severity. For contemporary America, racial and ethnic profiling are at the top of the shipping list. If we come away from Pinsky’s poetry confused, as soft and round stepping as he can be, as in “In Barcelona,” it’s in fact a confusion at how boldly he also confronts and addresses the stones of names in the air. Especially for one who has invested so much of his life and effort so admirably in the disciplined practice and promotion of poetry, of “Foofarraw, / Shmagegeh. Blah-blah-blah…”

Proverbs of Limbo by Robert Pinsky

ISBN 9780374611958

is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

120 Broadway, New York 1027

Remembering David Ferry

Remembering David Ferry




By Michael Todd Steffen




The Boston area has lost a great voice and friend in poetry. At the age of 99, David Ferry passed on Sunday, November 5th. As a remembrance, I wanted to share my introduction to David’s reading at the Hastings Room on November 4, 2015. As I’ve recalled elsewhere, that evening while David read, a cellist was practicing Bach in a nearby room at First Church, where we do the readings. The sonorous draws of the bow across the cello seemed so appropriate for David’s reading, the beauty and classical air of the music sweeping softly behind his voice. I know many will be remembering David with gratitude for the generosity he showed in his encouragement, in his classes at Suffolk with George Kalogeris, as well as reading our manuscripts. I know I feel a great loss, but as great a gratitude.







In his Introduction to a presentation of 10 of David Ferry’s poems, in honor of awarding the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in the July/August 2011 edition of Poetry, Christian Wiman wrote,





One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise…without any preconceived notions of what we wanted [poems and people] to be.





Wiman’s “capacity for surprise” could also be seen as the enthusiasm in David for people and for poetry. I am surely not alone to have witnessed this quality in him, above all as an animated reader of poetry. And of the many, many comments come across as to what poetry is, and what makes a good poet, one of the most convincing is that a good poet is a good reader of poetry. Richard Poirier was one of a few scholars to mention this about Shakespeare, that he was such a good reader of poetry. I say this with no intention of clobbering David by comparing him to that summer’s day.

“My subject is pleasure,” David wrote in an essay about the difficulty of getting translation right.





My subject is pleasure, the pleasure of hearing somebody else’s voice and the play-acting pleasure of pretending for awhile…that you’re in on how the wonderful thing happened.





David’s discussion in the essay leads him to reflections on the subtleties of courtly love and the good of a beautiful woman’s disdain during the French Renaissance, and even farther back to how a word Virgil used for “mask” (ocilla) eluded his every attempt to get a compressed, accurate and ringing translation of the passage in the Eclogues. His subject, if frustration at the inevitabilities of mistranslation, is pleasure, the pleasure at discovering these deeper nuances and ironies possible in the target or original text. It is profoundly and so admirably a reader’s pleasure.





More and more in the last 16 years David has been appreciated for his original poetry, in the year 2000 winning the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress for his book Of No Country I Know published the previous year. In 2012 for his book Bewilderment David was awarded the National Book Award.

It’s not my intention this evening to shift the nation’s attention back to David as a translator. Yet his work as a translator has continued to thrive, and all along as the contents of his books have suggested, he has maintained both roles as poet and translator throughout his writing career. He has published translations of Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, and I believe he has recently completed a translation of The Aeneid. (Any publication date projected for that yet?)

In 1992 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published David’s A New Rendering in English Verse of Gilgamesh, which is not so much a work of translation in the sense that his Horace and Virgil are. William L. Moran described David Ferry’s Gilgamesh as “a highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation” of previous linear translations and freer adaptations. While the story of Gilgamesh has been so essential as to have survived for 4700 years, dating back to some of the oldest writings in the Bible, no modern English version was able to win over much critical conviction until David’s version. The work boosted him to national acclaim. It was through this book that I first encountered David’s name in 1994, when I was back in the States from France where I was living and teaching, and myself trying to translate the poems of Pierre de Ronsard, the great French Renaissance poet.

I remember the year was 1994, because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy and my attention was being preoccupied by the Bayeux Tapestry and Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer. Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros published in 1990 was getting a lot of attention at the time. So David’s Gilgamesh struck me as wonderfully appropriate to all that was in the air culturally and historically bridging past to present. Memory traditionally is such a key concept to poetry. Auden said poetry is “memorable speech.” The Greeks made Memory a goddess, Mnemosyne, and she was the mother of the 9 muses who principally inspire poets and the arts. David’s undergraduate studies at Amherst, in fact, were interrupted by service in World War II, and to have Gilgamesh published in the 50-year mark of that war must have meant and must mean something to him. Two other students at Amherst who would become well known for their poetry, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur, endured similar interruptions to their careers for the same cause.

It’s a big deal to have a poet of David Ferry’s depth in the art and renown read for our series. In April this past spring we celebrated the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a magnificent reading by Lloyd Schwartz of that poem and of selections from Browning, Swinburne and Baudelaire, who had influenced Eliot. This is how it feels for me this evening. David has been a friend and supporter of my work, as he has been for many in the community. So it’s also with a great sense of personal appreciation that I stand here this evening to welcome him.

A reading of Seamus Heaney's Station Island Thursday October 26

 

A reading of

Seamus Heaney's

Station Island     

Thursday

October 26

7 pm
in the main Cambridge Library L e c t u r e H a l l

adapted for presentation by Michael Todd Steffen

with readers Meg Tyler

Aidan Rooney & Daniel Tobin

The Hastings Room Reading Series: Celebrating a Decade in Memory of Seamus Heaney Oct 26, 2023

 



The Hastings Room Reading Series

Celebrating a Decade in Memory of Seamus Heaney with a reading of Station Island at the Cambridge Public Library Thursday, Oct 26, 7pm

with guest readers Meg Tyler, Aidan Rooney and Daniel Tobin


article by Michael Todd Steffen


A year before Heaney died, Colm Toibin noted, with a novelist’s close perception, the way the poet appeared after reading in Kilkenny. The command he had exercised on stage, Toibin observed, gave way to a thoughtful, restrained, slightly watchful manner…A portrait painted around the same time, now hanging in the Athenaeum Club in London, shows the same watchfulness, as well as a certain physical exhaustion. ‘It’s more like me than I am’, Heaney remarked… He died on his way into the operating theatre on the morning of Friday 30 August (2013).

His last message to his wife was a Latin injunction: noli timere—‘don’t be afraid’. It was as if he were underlining the conclusion of his memorable Oxford lecture on poetic approaches to death, where he had invoked Yeats’s resolute affirmation of ‘the spiritual intellect’s great work’ as he faced into the void. Noli timere became Heaney’s final resolution, the achieved fullness of his life, what so many obituarists celebrated in 2013. It was also reflected in the extraordinary outburst of national grief in Ireland—and, indeed, elsewhere, but especially in Ireland. At the All-Ireland Gaelic football semi-final in Croke Park, a crowd of eighty thousand people stood and applauded for two minutes in homage. His unforgettable funeral in Dublin, where Paul Muldoon delivered a heartbroken and heartbreaking eulogy, was a genuinely national occasion. The sense of a great tree falling, leaving a sense of silence and emptiness behind, was palpable.




~R.F. Foster, On Seamus Heaney, 2020.







For this year’s special 10th annual Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading, a presentation of the poet’s long poem Station Island will be given at the Cambridge Public Library (on Broadway) in the Lecture Hall. The reading will take place on Thursday, October 26th at 7pm. This event, highlighting readers Daniel Tobin, Meg Tyler and Aidan Rooney, is a segment of The Hastings Room Reading Series.




Station Island is the eponymous long poem of Heaney’s sixth collection of poetry. The book was published by Faber & Faber in the UK in 1984, and in America by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 1985. The title is taken from another name for Saint Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg in County Donegal, a site of Christian Pilgrimage for many centuries. During his undergraduate years at Queens University Belfast, Heaney went on the pilgrimage several times. In choosing the pilgrimage site for his poem, Heaney has assumed and given us a precise physical location for the otherworldly communion and revelation of his poetic inspiration.

In a telling interview, Heaney describes one driving force behind his writing of the long poem:




I needed to butt my way through a blockage, a pile-up of hampering stuff, everything that had gathered up inside me because of the way I was both in and out of the Northern Ireland situation.




Typical of the Irish Nobel laureate: the wide-ranging use of this little-assuming word “butt,” denoting the defensive tactic of a goat, the hand-piece of a gun, backward movement, and personal exposure and risk, even embarrassment, so significantly to tell us about the difficulty and necessity of writing the poem. And so doing, he had healed and relieved a huge distress, in Heaney’s rendering of the passage in Beowulf, when the son of Shield Sheafson has accomplished the task of dismembering Grendel’s arm, slaying the monster.




But “I wasn’t actively involved,” Heaney said, referring to The Troubles, the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, from 1968 to 1998 between Protestant Unionists and Catholic nationalists. “Yet,” stated Heaney, “I felt dragged upon and put upon by it.”




While the name (Saint Patrick’s) Purgatory itself makes an easily identifiable connection between Station Island and the title of the mid-section of Dante’s trilogy, we can hardly ignore the history of Heaney’s life with its background of civil strife, held up to 14th-century central Italy and the war between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, which occasioned so much passion and literal material for Dante’s Divine Comedy.




Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg is where, tradition has it, Christ showed Saint Patrick a cave reputed to be an entrance to Purgatory. It is mentioned in texts from as early as 1185 and shown on maps across Europe as early as the 15th century. It is the only Irish site designated on Martin Behaim’s world map of 1492.




The poem begins with an aural or hearing sensation, the ringing of an altar bell, announcing both the religious affiliation of the poem, and the primacy of the sense of hearing to the visionary work. From the element of audition, the pass from music, and especially Celtic music, to Heaney’s poetry is a bridge easily crossed for anybody familiar with the Irish lyrical master.




Music singularly touches us in its consensual reach, in a communal way. Nonverbal, it rings in the spirit nearly unmediated by the optative desires, doubts, wishes and coercions of verbal language, a potential sum of ambiguities and contradictions often even in the most honest of us which amounts to the shrug of what the French mythographer Rolland Barthes determined as the zero degree of language, which constitutes, celebrates and grieves our being, beyond the divisive terminologies of politics, religion or competition, right and wrong, redeemed or saved, winner or loser.




Heaney is certainly, in this case, no exception to the rule that poetry more than just evolves from, but continuously remembers and welcomes the spiritual germaneness of music into its marginally inscribed spaces.




In an interview with Heaney, fellow poet Steven Ratiner mentions “the acoustic qualities” within Heaney’s verse. He says, “I think there are few poets writing in English today who have as pronounced a musical charge to their poetry as you do.” Heaney’s reply: “Verse is a physical phenomenon…If it doesn’t have a melody or a rhythm or meter—some kind of physical emanation—it just becomes a set of semantic signals on the page.” Very modestly the leading Irish voice of the turn of the century goes on in all humility to admit, “My sense of poetry is based, as most people’s is, on reading the traditional canon.”




The peculiar palpable thinginess accompanied by warm vernacular inflections, the elements of music in Heaney’s poems, are in fact scored to traditional verse scansion.




His preference for iambic pentameter places Heaney convincingly in the company of his father poets in English, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to his immediate sire in Yeats. In the first poem of his collection, “Digging,” we hear the metrical discipline in his own rural diction and vocabulary:




The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft…

To scatter new potatoes that we picked.




Another early poem, “Personal Helicon,” dedicated to Michael Longley, celebrates the poet’s childhood love of water wells and the slop and mess and danger of a kid’s fun in these wellsprings. Reminiscent of a well-known passage by the Apostle Paul in Corinthians about toys and the time of childhood, the poet concludes:




Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.







Heaney also brings surprise to our ears’ desire for variation in harmony with Emily-like or Yeatsian off rhymes, like “ditch” and “mulch”, and “aquarium” and “bottom”.




Even more, as we read the poems and become accustomed to Heaney’s odd turns of mind, his unique combination of irony and warmth, we are also often delighted by utterances of out-and-out honesty from his usual hedgerow of discretion and metaphor, and statements of reversals and paradox, as the ones we find in a latter poem from The Haw Lantern, “Hailstones,” where we are told about




the melt of the real thing

smarting into its absence




and this poet’s conclusion with its sting of the evanescence of all things, even of his dearest vocational labors upon their epiphany:




Nipple and hive, bite-lumps,

small acorns of the almost pleasurable

intimated and disallowed




when the shower ended

and everything said wait.

For what? For forty years




to say there, there you had

the truest foretaste of your aftermath—

in that dilation




when the light opened in silence

and a car with wipers going still

laid perfect tracks in the slush.







From the physical emanation of sound, the notion of pilgrimage at a holy site produces a different, deep, far-reaching resonance for Heaney’s undertaking in Station Island, along the same paths, above mentioned, of Dante’s spiritual journey in The Divine Comedy. Dante’s major source of inspiration we know is Virgil’s Aeneid with that poem’s depictions of Avernus and the world of the dead in Book VI, which Heaney translated, through the founding of Christianity and the canonization of its saints and Christian doctrine in the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s subjects in The Canterbury Tales are on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Thomas Beckett That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. So when Heaney joins the procession of penitents in the first section of Station Island,




As I drew behind them

I was a fasted pilgrim…




the word “pilgrim” here carries back to those prime master inspirations, including Chaucer—

and beyond, associating him historically to the New World and its discoverers and settlers with their self-description as “pilgrims,” to God’s new world, in America, specifically around Harvard where the Irish poet spent an appreciable span of his teaching career.




Chaucer’s characters, typically the Wife of Bath, again and again assert and affirm human folly, appetite, flesh, lucre and worldly power as viable sources of humor and “spirit” on their holy pilgrimage. Those visited in Station Island will also surprise Heaney, as he perhaps surprises himself, with subversive suggestions and observations, no less Heaney’s legendary guide Sweeney in the opening section of the poem, admonishing the seeker to “Stay clear of all processions!” Heaney identifies Sweeney as “an old Sabbath breaker” and Sweeney right back at him—




Damn all you know.

I was your mystery man

and am again this morning…




As if to say, to make any genuine spiritual breakthrough or recovery, and gain needed and substantial insight, our very foundations, spiritual, holy or religious as they may be, must be shaken. We must somehow be stripped of every certainty, any dogma, giving rise to presumption and overconfidence. We must be broken down to be restored to authenticity. (Readers of Heaney will note this layered caution to assert too much confidence everywhere in his poetry.)




He’s aware that time and history continue to move forward, that even Christianity, in its conception as establishment is prone to age, perhaps gasping short of the progress of our times. When Heaney encounters the 19th-century activist (the typologically “aggravated man”) and author William Carleton in Section II of the poem, and announces, “I’m on the road there now to do my visit”—Carleton’s reply rings at once revelatory and sacrilegious:




‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’




The utterance nearly sidesteps blasphemy by straining on its own tension: How will the over-turner and redeemer, Jesus Christ, the “holy” one, himself endure the necessary overturning (except that he is portrayed in that very dilemma, abandoned, a crucified divinity…)—? For the Changer, the question “does nothing change?” strikes at once in earnest and rhetorically. For things, especially in Carleton’s sense as a political reformer, must change. Any established, aging institution can only confirm everything that stands in the old order with its inevitable corruption. If or where Christianity does not concede to and allow this paradox, it determines the end of its own viability. It must aspire to the pliability of contradiction and paradox. Where rigidity and severity set in, poof.




The exchange between Carleton and Heaney makes for one of the most vivid and poignant moments of the poem, as Heaney replies in kind, decrying the tribal drums and weaponry paraded by the Unionists around their local neighborhoods, ever in sight of the ordinary motions and stability of family and civilized life:




‘I come from County Derry,

born in earshot of an Hibernian hall




in collarettes and sashes fringed with green.

Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first

and not that harp of unforgiving iron




the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote

I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,

flax-pullings, dances, summer crossroads chat




and the shaky local voice of education.

All that. And always, Orange drums.

And neighbors on the roads at night with guns.’




Carleton’s reply here is as memorably rhetorical and charged, leading him to an uncanny homely parable shifting into far-off, panoramic vision, with what proves very prophetic for a 1985 poem, spoken by a late 1800s ghost, in the language of global socio-environmental awareness:




‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,

‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

Remember everything and keep your head.




The alders in the hedge, mushrooms,

dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,

the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open




in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,

old jampots in a drain clogged with mud…’

But now Carleton was interrupting:




‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring

or maggots sown in wounds—

another life that cleans our element.




We are earthworms of the earth, and all that

has gone through us is what will be our trace.’





The poetry in Station Island, often astonishingly, involves the plain daring of honesty, Heaney facing up to Heaney, yet also standing his ground to face up to significant others, ghosts, from his life and the past in Ireland, including the nation’s woodsy spirit embodied in Sweeney. In the procession of visits also are: a young vocational priest to foreign missions, a victim of the sectarian violence, and James Joyce, among others.




One distinction the pilgrim Heaney makes is how the poet manages to speak his mind to these others, who might simply have presided over him as superior in some way. Standing up to them: Heaney defends his secular humanity vs. Sweeney’s entrenched ecstatic bewilderment. The poet defends his civility vs. the unforgiving “harp” of the political radicals. As penitent guided in this spiritual/religious ritual, he becomes notably and uncomfortably direct with the spirit of a young priest he knew, encountering the cleric during the formal pronouncement of the renunciation against sin. Heaney must break off this renunciation, significantly, as he himself will shift into a sort of devil’s advocate in his affront to the presumed authority of the priest’s order:




I had broken off from the renunciation




while he was speaking, to clear the way

for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’




I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.

I could only see you on a bicycle,




a clerical student home for the summer

doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbors.

Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.




Something in them would be ratified

when they saw you at the door in your black suit,

arriving like some sort of holy mascot.




You gave too much relief, you raised a siege

the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes

hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’




If poetry ultimately stands in as the individual’s version, a subjective triumph in so many cases, with Heaney the case cannot be presumed so easily. As well as including his boldness to contradict the authorities conjured in the drama of his psyche, Heaney allows them the same probable response to double back on him and put him in his place:




‘And you,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here

but the same thing? What possessed you?

I at least was young and unaware




that what I thought was chosen was convention.

But all this you were clear of you walked into

over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn…




A feeling of authenticity, fair play, enters the discourse. The ghost of the priest concludes that even Heaney’s perhaps less restrictive and proscribed discipline, poetry, inevitably leads to repetition and a certain formality, or ritual, and that either way, the poet and priest at day’s end have been in their chosen vocations doing of essence the same thing in their meaningful exchanges – visiting – with others, offering language to reconcile the burdened. The artistry we note Heaney for is here very striking with the rendering not only of the apparition, but the palpable absence left in its wake:




‘What are you doing, going through these motions?

Unless…Unless…’ Again he was short of breath

and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.




‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’

Suddenly where he stood was bare as the roads

we both had grown up beside, where a sick man




had taken his last look one drizzly evening

when steam rose like the first breath of spring,

behind him, on his circuits, visiting.










A passage from section VIII in the midst of a succession of apparitions passing him, finds a cousin, Colum, shot in the violence, who stops Heaney:




‘The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red

in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,’

he said quietly. ‘Now do you remember?

You were there with poets when you got the word

and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood

was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.

They showed more agitation at the news

than you did.’

‘But they were getting crisis

first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on

live sectarian assassination.

I was dumb, encountering what was destined.’

And so I pleaded with my second cousin…




This passage is not included in the reading script for our Hastings Room presentation on October 26. The thematic ground of Heaney’s in-the-middle stance is voiced more decisively and memorably in Heaney’s apology in Section IX to the murdered shop-keeper:




Forgive the way I have lived indifferent—

forgive my timid circumspect involvement…

The omissions of my edited reading script are in no way to criticize Heaney’s material, but to respect the flow of our presentation. Where a reader’s-only script can excavate in repetition and more subtle gradations of a feeling, like guilt, these variations risk coming off as redundant in the less intimate venue of a public presentation.




On the other hand, I have inserted two poems completely alien to Station Island. The poem “Canopy” from the book Human Chain has been inserted into the “school” Section V of the presentation. That beautiful lyric evokes Harvard Yard and adds some local flavor. And I’ve used the poem “From the Republic of Conscience” from The Haw Lantern as an epilogue, to widen the sense of Heaney’s visiting source from the religious to our ordinary social world.




About our readers:


Aidan Rooney is a native of Monaghan, Ireland and a resident in the U.S. since 1987. He lives in Hingham, Massachusetts, and teaches at Thayer Academy. He was awarded the Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Poet in 1997 and the Daniel Varoujan Award from the New England Poetry Club in 2012. His collections, Day Release (2000) and Tightrope (2007) were brought out in Ireland by The Gallery Press. His most recent book Go There was released by MadHat in 2020. Rachel Hadas has noted “the mercurial variety of this collection,” and how it “is unified and grounded by Rooney’s unerring feel for the power of poetry to capture and distill our restless lives, line by rich and compact line.” Rooney’s poems and translations from French and Haitian have appeared in AGNI, Cream City Review, The Shop, Mudlark, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Ireland Review.




Meg Tyler is an associate professor of humanities at Boston University. Teaching and research interests include ethical philosophy, Irish studies, lyric poetry, creative writing, poetry in translation and the intersection of art and literature. She directs a poetry series and chairs the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture. Her book, A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, was published by Routledge in their series, Major Literary Authors. Her poetry chapbook, Poor Earth, came out from Finishing Line Press in 2014. Her poems and prose have appeared in Agni, Literary Imagination, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Irish Review and other journals. A chapter on Heaney’s last two volumes recently appeared in “The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame University Press, 2016).




Daniel Tobin was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish American parents, and his writing explores Irish ancestry and Irish American heritage. He is the author of a collection of essays on Irish American poets and poetry, Awake in America (2011), as well as Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999).



Tobin’s 9th book of poetry, The Mansions, is a trilogy of poems collected in one volume, comprising "From Nothing," "This Broken Symmetry," and "At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin." The entire design has been in the works for fourteen years and will see the light of day this autumn from Four Way Books.




Praised for their formal control and narrative adeptness, Tobin’s other poetry collections include Where the World Is Made (1999), Double Life (2004), The Narrows (2005), Second Things (2008), Belated Heavens (2010), The Net (2014), and From Nothing (2016).
His numerous honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize. Tobin teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

Kingdom to Refuge: Animals in a World of Poetry

 





Kingdom to Refuge: Animals in a World of Poetry


essay by Michael Todd Steffen

First thing on my coffee phone browse this morning, Google Play offers scrolls-full of books and calendars featuring poems about animals. (Last night before bed I had been searching emily dickinson’s riddle poem about a snake—“A narrow fellow in the grass/Occasionally rides…”) Now a horned, spotty ruminant stretches from my book case: Roy Fuller’s Selected Poems, wanting to revisit his “Giraffes,” shoulder-above in my mind’s browser under the entry animal poems.





Reading back through it reminds me of the curious power of my favorite poetry dealing with animals: It is not how these encounters welcome me as a human into a cuddly reflection of myself, but how they stand off, as other, and so reveal themselves in their territories. Fuller’s poem precisely begins by flipping the observer/observed dynamic around. The aloft animals are watching him first:





I think before they saw me the giraffes


Were watching me. Over the golden grass


The bush and ragged open tree of thorn,


From a grotesque height, under their lightish horns,


Their eyes fixed on mine as I approached them…





Fuller’s meditation also importantly brings home how animals already are poetry. They embody already that strange familiarity we share with our domestic companions and wilderness fauna, that dear otherness, tangential connectivity, uncanny communication, weird language. All at once I was thinking of Marianne Moore’s “The Pangolin” and Derek Walcott’s “The Pangolin.” I thought of Rita Dove’s “Canary”—two birds in one thought! I thought of Galway Kinell’s bear, Philip Larkin’s hedgehog, Coleridge’s albatross, Plath’s “starfish that can grow back its arms” and her thundering horse Ariel.





Small wonder poets make so much use of creatures. Look through a favorite poet’s collection, they are likely to include as many titles about animals as about love and loss. Even a fierce contrarian, who insists on avoiding commonplaces, the edgiest, will not resist creation’s providence. When one is boldly importuned by alterity, knack to stand us in our tracks, as Lowell’s skunk in the famous poem, this can work to open us again to another of our ponderous potentials, for being wretched. (Or like the Emperor we go rawly about thinking ourselves in fabulous garb.) Images and statements of a world in alienation and dilapidation precede the epiphany of Lowell’s bewildered standoff:





…the eyesores facing her shore…


the season’s ill…


A red fox stain covers Blue Hill…


where the graveyard shelves on the hill.


My mind’s not right…


I hear


my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,


as if my hand were at its throat;


I myself am hell;


nobody’s here—





only skunks, that search


in the moonlight for a bite to eat.


They march on their soles up Main Street:


white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire


under the chalk-dry and spar spire


of the Trinitarian Church…





a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail


She jabs her wedge-head in a cup


of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,


and will not scare.





In poems, which are nominally “made” things, creatures appear as correlatives, witnessing what is—both in their creaturely being, and suggesting the more subtly present, less definite elements about us influencing our lives. Mary Oliver’s subjects in her poem “Crows” thus absorb and refract her observations of a solicitous world with its mascots:





each one loud and hungry,


crossing a field, or sitting


above the traffic, or dropping





to the lawn of some temple to sun itself


or walk about on strong legs,


like a landlord. I think


they don’t envy anyone or anything—





not the tiger, not the emperor,


not even the philosopher.


Why should they?


The wind is their friend, the least tree is home.





Nor is melody, they have discovered, necessary.


Nor have they delicate palates…





I’ve found Oliver’s penetrating lines in my print version of Sept 4, 2023’s The New Yorker, sitting on a bus wondering if the person scrolling on their phone in the seat across from me is reading the online version. Me with the tactile text, I don’t have to scroll past other script to “flip through” the entity of my edition. As with a book of poems, I can jump ahead, go back—enact a little liberty from the constraints of an imposed order this way. I find a REPORTER AT LARGE article by David Grann, the author of Flowers of the Killer Moon, its film version soon to be out in theaters. Grann’s article here is called “The Squid Hunter.”





Back toward the front of the magazine I find a June 12, 1948 article by Vladimir Nabokov on “Butterflies.” Back the other way a good bound, Edmund Wilson’s September 7, 1946 piece on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Confirming I’m onto something, I now concede to checking the Table of Contents, on page 1. At the top I find this is AN ARCHIVAL ISSUE on ANIMALS.





It’s a brow-raising gesture by The New Yorker we these days are attuned to the planet’s creatures perhaps with a little more sympathy than we have been.





Our cats and dogs (like poems) serve purpose, to be fussed and bothered over and over reminding us the universe is in love with us and, now and then, to communicate some warning to us about danger on their radar, their extraordinarily attuned senses that are extrasensory to us. In this way and in many others, animals importantly remind us of our limits and shortcomings, our need to stand with rather than on top of creation. Long before Einstein the world has been relative, the ant with its might, the moose with its delicate step and long ears twitching.





Still, after our young romance with nature conservation in the 1970s, with the official gestures of The Endangered Species Act, The Clean Air and Clean Water acts, in the hay day of Jacques Cousteau and then Green Peace, there came thudding along sundry movements with their solicitations, reminding us, annoying us, and with their great numbers perhaps giving us a false sense of security, that the problems of a poisoned planet and disappearing species were well in hand, or should be with all this attention. But that hasn’t been the case. The Emperor continues parading himself around.





As ubiquitous fundraising mechanisms have even made us weary and wary of causes not immediately within our reach, the news of planet Earth at large, our home, our garden, not least with climate change and its encompassing implications, is coming home to us all and has in fact telescoped from disconcerting to nightmarish.





The world of the poem, the poem of the world. James Merrill liked the revelations summonsed by flipping those terms around. The sleight of hand goes to the heart of animal poems. For ages, from Noah right up to Ogden Nash, our animals domestic and wild have been drawn on, to illustrate things in human nature, like industry vs. negligence and beauty, our claws, our wings.





Nobody in the 17th century was worried about the drama of life’s survival on the stage of the world. The versed fables of Jean de la Fontaine were certainly deciphered through wolf and lamb for our hunger and aggression vs. our innocence. Still, reading him, one could not help but fall into compassion for bullfrogs who puffed to be bulls, short-jumping foxes eschewing the trellis’s unattainable grapes for sour. When, realistically, the natural world appears abundant with no end in sight, we can accommodate it to the whims allowed by our “nature”.





When we are being convinced otherwise, as to the depletion of our habitat and resources, that works into our poetry to keep us, unlike the Emperor, or the boy who cried Wolf, in touch, honest, with a vision of likely outcomes rather than craning fantasies. In her well-known poem “Morning on the Island” Carolyn Forché, respected also as a humanitarian and environmentalist, sketches a world that strikes us with a solemnness about the future we’re heading for:





The lights across the water are the waking city.


The water shimmers with imaginary fish.


Not far from here lie the bones of conifers


washed from the sea and piled by wind.


Some mornings I walk upon them,


bone to bone, as far as the lighthouse.


A strange beetle has eaten most of the trees. 


It may have come here on the ships playing


music in the harbor, or it was always here, a winged


jewel, but in the past was kept still by the cold


of a winter that no longer comes.





The “imaginary fish” that make the water shimmer announce the subjective, wishful part of our brains that want to see the plentiful wellbeing of the world. But a few other details the poem renders up, “the bones of conifers” destroyed by the invasive musical beetle, or indigenous beetle that “was kept still by the cold/of a winter that no longer comes” strike home, ringing true to some looming facts of the condition of our world, a world of chimerical projections with data sheets for corroboration.





In essence, Forché presents us with our wishfulness vs. where we are more likely heading. And in the devastated habitat, the image of a sentient life at the porch step of farewell, in the form of a lone survivor and the last of its species:





There is an owl living in the firs behind us, but he is white,


meant to be mistaken for snow burdening a bough. 


They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night


listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.





Forché rhymes this closing stanza, further admitting the poetry of the poem, the arrangement of details in the vision. What to believe? The choice will be ours, until the objective world undergoes so radical a change as to remove our compass of choices. (A glimpse of this has recently befallen Morocco and Libya.) Importantly, the poet has given us a glimpse at worse-scenario disappearance, an unwanted and therefore difficult vision. It’s what sets us “knowing ones” apart, having so many models of possible outcomes, best and worst, stored in our minds, because we have so many scenarios, so much fiction, so much poetry in mind to consider all the time. And a lot of consideration can figure into the simplest gesture, whether to buy another plastic bottle of water or fill a reusable thermos.





This curiously distinctive feature of choices pulses at the heart of one of my favorite animal poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” Based perhaps on little more than a saying, “a whale of a story,” “the one that got away,” Bishop elaborates deftly drawing her subject in fine detail and suggestive comparison:





Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.





The repetition of “wallpaper” makes something of a Jonah captive of the observer, as from the inside of her kitchen. Particulars from the water world, the barnacles, sea-lice and green weed are woven in to make the occasion vivid and convincing. The line of anecdote, “tremendous” as this fish is said to be, comes to the honesty of hanging





a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely.





Of particular focus is Bishop’s relaying the mutual regard between artist and subject/inspiration:





I looked into his eyes


which were far larger than mine


but shallower and yellowed,


the irises backed and packed


with tarnished tinfoil


seen through the lenses


of old scratched isinglass.


They shifted a little


but not to return my stare.




That slight shift of its eyes, along with its fanning gills “breathing in/the terrible oxygen” make important inclusions to contradict what much else of the poem might be suggesting about Bishop’s catch here, of something dead. The emotional diapason of the poem volleys from extremes to a kind of normal perspective, between excitement and disappointment, the fantastic and the ordinary, with growing focus mostly only to see what is there, perhaps with a little distant admiration, and the realization, seeing the hooks of others lodged into the fish’s mouth, that she is far from unique in the homing of this trophy. The great altruistic choice of Bishop’s is undeniable, when we come back around to the necessity of the fish’s having got away. It is also with a wink of some humor and chagrin, letting her wondrous catch off the hook.






Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems and articles have appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Taos Journal, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and North of Oxford. Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.

Roland Pearsall: Davis Square’s Cross-Generation rocker

 

article by Off the Shelf Correspondent Michael Todd Steffen

I took a chance and interrupted solo guitarist/singer Roland Pearsall between two songs while he was performing in Davis Square a couple of weeks ago. I had to muster up my courage. Pearsall sings in an untiring booming baritone, playing covers of James Brown, Gnarls Barkley, The Genies and Frankie Ford – from long ago. I was apprehensive of the sizeable and “mythic” persona of his talent, singular minded repertoire and the years of tradition resonant in his guitar and voice. Like I was approaching one in the brotherhood of Bruce Springsteen or Chris Isaak.

Yet I found Roland to be mild mannered, somewhat bashful, and personally respectful and appreciative of the opportunity to talk about his music.

MS How long have you been playing in Davis Square?

RP I started playing Davis Square, at least a few shows, in 2013. So a decade now. In 2015 I started using an electric guitar out there as opposed to an acoustic one.

MS This was your Newport Festival moment?

RP Laughs…

MS And you’re pretty much a solo artist?

RP I mostly play solo because of the ease of the setup. You really are your own boss and can come and go as you please. I know other musicians and do occasional full band shows, but I like being self-contained. My two albums – I’m working on my second one now – have full band instrumentation. In addition to guitar, I play drums, bass, keyboards and harmonica, so I can fill out the sound as needed.

MS I’ve caught myself standing here especially listening to you sing ‘Good Good Lovin’ or ‘Who’s that Knockin’. I’ll even miss one of my buses sometimes to wait out another set. One thing, it’s just plain good. The summer Lebowskis and young professionals alike around here suspend their usual chatter with one another to listen to your music. I see little children dancing to your songs with their parents.

RP Yea, well, I listen to everything, classic rock, blues, soul, R&B, oldies, country, folk, 60’s British invasion, rockabilly…I enjoy a lot of 90’s and 2000’s rock. I’ve even had rappers come up and freestyle with me providing the musical backing, so I appreciate that as well. When you’ve been singing a long time, you develop your own style, and at this point, regardless of what genre the song is in, I fit it to me.

It’s distinct in its choice of older music. I often find myself thinking, This is the music my parents were listening to when they got together first back in the late 50s and early 60s. To many other listeners, that would mean the music of their grandparents. How did you get into the older music?

 My parents helped this along for sure. Music played constantly in our house growing up – the Beatles, the Doors, oldies radio, stuff like that. In fact, I remember hearing Jim Morrison sing “Light my Fire” when I was still just a little kid and asking myself, “Hmm, a person has a fire to be lit?”

MS Were your parents musicians?

My father sang at parties and always got a good response. I was too shy for the longest time. Then I started doing it. Another inspiration was when my grandmother took us to see Chuck Berry when I was a teen. It was a great show. Berry confidently held the crowd and I felt like I intuitively understood what he was doing. This set me on the path of discovery, figuring out what songs to do when, and what to say, to hold the audience’s attention and generate good vibes with them.

MS But there’s a lot of reflection and know-how to the music too.

RP I do a lot of research on my own. One of my greatest joys is to unearth obscure music that deserves more attention than it got when it came out. Once I get into something, I get into it all the way and want to learn everything I can a about it. Music is no exception.

*******Catch Roland Pearsall live one afternoon or early evening in Davis Square, playing his American Standard Stratocaster – “the perfect street axe” – through his eponymous Roland Cube Street amp, with a separate channel for vocals. You’ll be telling yourself, This is the real thing. That’s how you’ll know him, with genuinely inviting entertainment for four generations, you, your kids, parents and grandparents – wherever “you” are in that lineup. You can also enjoy his music on https://m.youtube.com/@RolandPearsall.