I think the brilliant character of the giant Utgard-Loki, with his wry attitude toward that little fellow Thor who “must be bigger than he looks,” is a stand-in for Snorri [Sturluson] himself. They share the same humorous tolerance of the gods. There is very little sense throughout the Edda that these were gods to be feared or worshipped, especially not the childish, naïve, blustering, weak-witted, and fallible Thor who is so easily deluded by Utgard-Loki’s wizardry of words. What god in his right mind would wrestle with a crone named “Old Age”? Or expect his servant-boy to outrun “Thought”?
It also fits with why Snorri wrote the Edda: to teach the 14-year-old king of Norway about Viking poetry. This story has a moral: See how foolish you would look, Snorri is saying to young King Hakon, if you didn’t understand that words can have more than one meaning, or that names can be taken literally? The story of Utgard-loki is, at heart, a story about why poetry matters.
Annotations
The quiet, broken by the muffled chiming of a clock—
Wet rag at edge of driveway, that used to be someone’s good shirt—
The square that fills with a sudden rush of shadows preceding
sunlight or wings—
The dream, returning after forty years, of flying above a linen sea—
The footprints stamped like trails upon the snow
that by evening have dissolved into regret and rain—
Here by the orchid spray is where you sat
looking past the garden gate, wife by your side
and hair not even grey—
In response to Morning Porch and small stone (203).
Twickenham
[I went to Twickenham to sit
I went to Twickenham to think
alone in a closet
I played on my flageolet
till the bell-man came by with his bell
and left my wife and the maid a-washing still.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 16 January 1659/60.
Warm
Some days in that part of the city where I used to live, near the train tracks and the Greek restaurants, when the wind blew you could smell chocolate from the factory. It drove everybody mad, waiting for the train and smelling all that sugar, imagining the nibs poured into our mouths. At the end of the day we came back on the same line, students with backpacks and torn sneakers, immigrants amid small islands of talk. Who in the coach was coming out of the day shift, and might they leave a powdery trace as they exited the doors? Marks brown as cinnamon around the bars they held onto, before melting away into the dark.
In response to small stone (202).
Ten Simple Songs
for Rachel
1.
The long A of your name
had sounded in my ear for years.
I looked for you in leaves
& found you among needles.
I looked for you on foot
& found you among the bees,
golden with the dust
of unseen blooms.
2.
My parachute knapsack
held only paper
& instructions in several languages
for folding origami wings.
I even had to supply
my own shadow
for a welcoming committee.
That’s what it was like
being alone.
3.
While others were playing house
I was playing hermitage.
Trains blew their whistles
by day & by night.
You were in Africa,
waking to the music
of car horns & hornbills.
Had I tuned into the World Service
in the wee hours,
I might’ve heard your stories
about the fall
of that dictator from Malawi
whose last name so resembled my own.
4.
When we first became acquainted,
you were living
next door to that Dorothy
who disappeared into a tornado.
Your own witch was dead
but not by much.
I wrote you a poem because
I don’t believe in spells or prayers;
it was all I had.
5.
In the first photo I saw,
you were frowning & looking down,
unruly hair the color
of petals on a sunflower.
You were barely there.
But through medication
& meditation
you turned
slowly toward the light.
6.
The first time we met in the flesh
you were a flash
of bright laughter
at the end of the table
where we all convened for coffee
in Montreal.
Two years later, in Brooklyn,
you glowed with secret knowledge
& stretched like a cat
in the dog-day heat.
7.
Three years after that, I was
a guest in your London home,
though like a tortoise
I brought my own
sturdy carapace.
Your house buzzed with
so much activity, both
joyful & clamorous, that soon
my shell began to hum.
8.
Now our words & likenesses
fly through fiber-
optic cables under
the Atlantic. They must
pass each other
without knowing it,
deformed as they are
into carrier waves,
broken as they are
into pulses of light—
enough to build an entire
lost continent.
9.
From time to time
there’s a high-
pitched chirping
& you say
it must be from the slime-eels
nibbling on the cable
& tying their unbearably
slick bodies
into knots.
10.
We’ve been meeting in
this disembodied place
the world-wide web
so long, levitating
like Himalayan lamas,
it’s tempting to wonder whether
we even need the ground.
Don’t the Irish say
the road will rise up
to meet us?
Let’s drink to that,
each raising our part
of the universal solution
so our glasses belly
up to our webcams
for the clink,
each blocking our view
of the other’s eyes—a pale
or stout substitute
for those blues.
Legacy
[Having been a dog
I sleep in Greek,
say I believe in
supper, not work.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 15 January 1659/60.
Ghazal, with Piano Bar in Winter
Increase intensity through attention, pressure, weight,
or time, to hear the singing in a higher register—
The same way a threaded button spins faster, looser
or more taut, depending on the varied register
of fingers pulling at the edges. I prefer lower, mellow
notes to shrill, but there is power too in upper registers—
but there must be absolute precision there, no way to flub
the reach by saying, Oh, I was just trying a jazzy register…
In the low-lit bar, patrons sent up slips of paper and requests.
But though the pianist crooned his best, not all could register
the depth of feeling poured into a song: something with a blue moon
or a river, the way you looked the night when I first registered
the tilted axis of the room, banal rush of traffic outside in the rain:
unusual warm night in late winter, that too a kind of register.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Nothing day
~OR~
[Nothing
going to dinner to hear news to his house to my house to the coffee house
going on.]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 14 January 1659/60. Two weeks in, I thought I’d see what this would look like if I used the eraser tool in Photoshop instead of the highlighting tool in Word. I like it better, but it’s more time-consuming to generate, so I might end up sticking with the “blacklighting.”
Seven (very) short stories about drones
5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
Read the whole series on Storify (and be sure to check out the Pro Publica report Cole links to at the end, which is both thorough and non-ideological).
Teju Cole has gotten big on Twitter the right way (in my humble view): using Twitter as a creative medium. His growing follower count is an indication that there’s a real hunger for this kind of thing; I do hope more writers will follow his lead. While I’ve personally grown a little weary of his relentlessly grim small fates, there’s no denying their literary quality and inventiveness. And I do love his occasional Twitter essays (or whatever you want to call the above, which is less polemic but more devastating than its predecessors). A just-published essay, “Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?” by Sam Twyford-Moore cites and quotes from a couple of Cole’s other Twitter essays, in case you missed them.
Swan, sword, swine
[the swan how high
how much the sword
a cunning swine played cards
where I went to hunt]
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 13 January 1659/60