Aqua or turquoise is a favourite colour. It always makes me think of the ocean lapping the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the blue-green light of a natural beauty that infiltrates the soul, surpassing all the sadness, confusion and fear in a big city or a small heart.
Words on the Street
Happy Earth Day. Even if the earth is about to pound the east coast of the U.S. and Canada with a winter storm after weeks of unseasonably warm weather. “Global weirding,” here we come!
Instagrim
The first mobile apps were gallows.
The imagineers who discovered the New World
built them everywhere they went.
It wasn’t enough merely to capture souls;
you had to add a glow of piety
& an instant patina of terribly original sin.
For their part, the Indios etched
& painted on the open-source platform
of their alluring skins:
here a bird, there another bird,
a painted-on smile around the lips
or a ladder of tears, tattooed down
the smooth touch-screen
of a still-warm cheek.
Words on the Street
How to teem
When you go outside, bring the inside with you—a book, a magazine, a mobile phone—until the sky becomes the lid on a petri dish.
Let the Rapture play out in reverse: let everything you own ascend to a heaven of pure abstraction, leaving you only your solid bodies and the close proximity in which you find yourselves.
Alternatively, give all you have to the rich, who will know what to do with it so much better than you do.
It’s essential to be as poor as possible.
Surrender your personal space but not your personal agendas. You’re going for chaos, not collective action.
Avoid engagement with the natural world, to the extent that it persists in flaunting its pollen and its noisy card-shuffles of wings.
Pullulate. Flocculate. Agglomerate.
Whenever someone from another world appears among you, searching for proofs of his superiority, be sure to swarm in your best Brownian motion.
Wye Switches
At the back of a cupboard, I found a tightly-sealed plastic container on which I’d written “Spearmint 2001.” Would mint collected and dried more than a decade earlier still taste fresh? It would. I’m drinking mint tea with honey as I write.
If I was hoping for a Proustian madeliene experience, though, it didn’t happen. Mint is mint, regardless of whether it was gathered within (I think) weeks of 9/11. Still, it’s melancholy to sit outside and drink it on a cloudless day and think about all that’s happened since that cloudless morning in early September ten and a half years ago. I remember how lonely and isolated I felt in the weeks that followed, opposing an invasion that almost everyone else, even good liberals, supported. Everything could’ve been so different, maybe.
Just imagine if we’d waited for the Taliban government, then on friendly terms with the U.S. administration, to examine our evidence and extradite Bin Laden, rather than opting for a supposedly therapeutic orgy of violence. Imagine if we’d been allowed to have a real conversation about why we were so hated in the Middle East. Imagine if instead of war, torture and indefinite detentions, we’d opted for peace, forgiveness and support of true grassroots organizations throughout the Middle East — the Arab Spring might’ve come years earlier. Imagine if Americans didn’t insist on clinging to the romantic fantasy that problems can be solved through violence. Imagine if, as a certain book alleged, we could really solve problems by sitting down together and sharing cups of tea.
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A couple of days ago, in the process of linking to Stanley Kunitz, I was reminded that he had been the U.S. poet laureate at the time. That seemed especially hard to believe — that it’s been so many years now, and that he’s been dead since 2006. He lived so long, it seemed impossible that we would ever be without his wise, often prophetic voice.
I have a very clear memory of driving home from somewhere with my hiking friend Lucy in March 2001 and hearing an interview with Kunitz come on the radio. I’m not sure where we walked that day, but I do remember where we were driving at the time: a place called Wye Switches in Duncansville, Pennsylvania. He read two poems, “The Layers” and “Day of Foreboding,” which reads in its entirety:
Great events are about to happen.
I have seen migratory birds
in unprecedented numbers
descend on the coastal plain,
picking the margins clean.
My bones are a family in their tent
huddled over a small fire
waiting for the uncertain signal
to resume the long march.
Unfortunately, NPR’s audio archive for that episode is in Real format, which most people won’t have the software to listen to anymore. But a more recent reading on NPR from 2005, in celebration of Kunitz’ 100th birthday, is even more wonderful. Take a listen to him reading “The Long Boat”:
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.
I think I’ll brew another cup of tea.
Words on the Street
For background, see here.
Words on the Street
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To support the bum who publishes this blog, don’t forget you can purchase Words on the Street t-shirts and other swag as well as a fabulous book of 109 of the best cartoons. Blogger Lucy Kempton recently called it “wonderful,” adding that it “works very well” in the Kindle format.
Currency
Cur.ren.cy is a new online magazine featuring “poetry and prose for hard times,” and I’m pleased and honored that the editors/mortgage-backed securities managers — Messrs. Good, Wisely, and Sharp — have added one of my poems to the mix.
I hardly ever submit anything anymore, since I have this venue with its already established readership, and since most editors won’t consider previously blogged poems. But I’m a sucker for themed anthologies, and I liked the poems at cur.ren.cy so much — I couldn’t resist.
The name and theme of the magazine do make me reflect on how, for English-language poets, living in a society where poetry isn’t highly valued and doesn’t make anyone rich, prizes and publications function as a sort of scrip, redeemable for other opportunities from the PoBiz company store (readings, residencies, teaching positions, etc.). Self-publication on the web, e.g. on a blog like this, might be akin to issuing one’s own currency. But one can’t become too preoccuppied with status or social currency if one is to focus on posting new work that is not mere criticism or commentary, since “what is completely new or unique has no, or unknown, social currency.” One can, however, contribute to a gift economy in which original content, links, reviews and supportive comments are freely given with an eye to sharing poetic insights and increasing the net supply of aesthetic pleasure. I guess that’s what I aspire to here.
High Treason by José Emilio Pacheco
I don’t love my country. Her abstract glory
eludes me.
But (this may sound bad) I would give my life
for ten of her places, for certain people,
ports, pine forests, fortresses,
for a ruined city, gray and monstrous,
for several of her historical figures,
for mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Alta traición
No amo mi Patria. Su fulgor abstracto
es inasible.
Pero (aunque suene mal) daría la vida
por diez lugares suyos, cierta gente,
puertos, bosques de pinos, fortalezas,
una ciudad deshecha, gris, monstruosa,
varias figuras de su historia,
montañas
(y tres o cuatro ríos).
* * *
José Emilio Pacheco is one of Mexico’s leading contemporary poets. I had posted the Spanish original of this poem, along with somebody else’s translation, to Facebook back in 2009. I forgot all about it until I switched to Facebook’s new Timeline view a couple days ago, which for the first time gave me access to older posts and updates there. After re-acquainting myself with the poem and the substantive comments it elicited from Alison Kent, Miguel Arboleda and Ray Templeton, I decided to post this new translation — in part because I’m fascinated by what the process of translation does to a poem like this.
Already on Facebook there was disagreement over how best to translate “una ciudad deshecha, gris, monstruosa.” The English translation I’d posted put it as “a run-down city, gray, grotesque,” but Alison objected that, in the poet’s native Mexico, this most likely referred to a pre-Columbian ruin. Ray, by contrast, felt it might equally apply to a run-down industrial city in his native U.K. To me, as a country dweller, most cities seem gray, monstrous and dilapidated, though I’m not sure I’d give my life for any of them. At any rate, the point is that our reception of the poem depends very much on whether we read it as a specifically Mexican poem or a more general statement about love of country.
And even the general proposition will strike people differently depending on where they’re from. Here in the U.S., where it’s quite common for ordinary citizens to display the national flag year-round, saying that you don’t love your country is guaranteed to shock and dismay people from across the political spectrum, with the exception of segments of the far left. Even strongly libertarian types will say things like, “I love my country, but I hate my government.” (It’s nearly always O.K. to express contempt for the government here, despite the reverence paid to the Constitution, which famously equates the government with the people.) In many other countries, I gather, displays of the national flag by private citizens are extremely rare.
To me, love of an abstraction is a dangerous thing, and I react to it with I think much the same loathing which the ancient Hebrews reserved for idol-worship. A worshipped fatherland demands blood sacrifice and gives little in return but the sort of “protection” one purchases from gangsters at gunpoint. I find it telling that the kind of super-patriots who treat any questioning of the war machine or the surveillance state as tantamount to treason all too often do not hesitate to condone the despoiling of their country’s land, air and water. “Drill, baby, drill!” they chant at political rallies, and without irony advocate the construction of a massive pipeline across the country’s midsection, to bring Canadian tar sands to Texan refineries, as necessary to reduce our dependence on “foreign oil.” Here in Pennsylvania, we’re in the early stages of a hydrofracturing shale-gas boom that threatens to poison groundwater across the state and destroy some of our last remaining wild places, but those who object on environmental grounds are derided as effeminate tree-huggers at best and anti-American troublemakers at worst. I could go on. But the point is that in this case, as in so many others, destruction of the actual, literal country is licensed by lip-service to the abstract Country.
Translating Pacheco’s poem into English, I recall that there are in fact people who put their lives on the line for mountains and pine forests: the brave souls who chain themselves to cranes at mountaintop removal sites or sit in old-growth trees threatened by clearcutting. This makes me think of the Occupy movement, and then the far longer struggle of those whose country — or countries — my ancestors came to occupy. And having lived in one place for most of the past 40 years myself, I can tell you that becoming attached to any one mountain, river or forest is nearly always a recipe for heartbreak, as you witness the cumulative effects of ecological degradation. No doubt the residents of cities like Detroit or New Orleans feel much the same kind of helpless sorrow these days. The life of a drifter — that quintessential American individualist — becomes more attractive with each passing year.