Beginning again . . .

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Variations on a Blue Guitar

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

In C

A music broke out

and walked in the swirling snow

with long steps.

Everything on the way towards the note C.

A trembling compass directed at C.

One hour higher than the torments.

It was easy!

Behind turned-up collars everyone was smiling.

—from Tomas Tranströmer’s C Major

A salutary thing it is, to throw out the rule book and start anew.  Terry Riley did it with the piece In C.  In going back to C, Terry Riley delivered classical music from the clutches of the unlistenable.  Had it not been for him, we might still be offered up, more often than not, music that isn't music, but math equations, unadorned.

In the Way One Poem Leads to Another

“As it happens,” poet Roger Mitchell wrote to a group of friends and colleagues, “I lived for a year almost 50 years ago in Szymborska's home town. Never met her, but that didn't keep me from writing the attached.”

Wisława Szymborska and Horst Beckmann’s Hat

—for Friko 

In yet another alarming gap in my cultural education, I’d not heard of Wisława Szymborska until Friko’s Poetry and Pictures introduced a poem of hers to me. The poem was The Joy of Writing, and its first line, as translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz, is this:  “Where is a written deer running through a written forest?”

Subway to Estonia

And then Estonia was conquered . . . .
It seemed that all the dreams were broken.

—Taimi Lepasaar

In her poem Public Transportation, Elaine Sexton reminds us that what we see on the surface may not be what is:

. . . The driver does not have
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his metal
lunchbox.  He has caviar left over from New Year's
and a love note from his mistress, whom he just left
on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street.

On public transportation, anything is possible—the whole gamut from disturbance to delight.

Soonest Mended

—for Mark Kerstetter, who introduced me to this poem

Ashbery, in his poem Soonest Mended, seems to have had in mind the old proverb “least said, soonest mended,” when he wrote of Ingres’ damsel in distress:

And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering
The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though
       wondering whether forgetting
The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.

Tranströmer’s haydnpockets

Tomas Tranströmer’s Allegro begins:

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready.  Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

Dreaming in Swedish

My poems are meeting places.  Their intent is to make a sudden connection 

between aspects of reality that conventional languages and outlooks ordinarily keep apart.

—Tomas Tranströmer

On a bitter winter evening this past February, I left the bustling warmth of New York City’s Grand Central Station and headed to Scandinavia House.  The wind blew frigid air at me in a sideways slant, the sort of weather that usually keeps me pinned to my chair at home.  But there was a concert on, and I’d arranged to meet a fellow named Michael Douglas Jones.

In the Beginning, Cracked Duck Eggs

After a far-too-early blast of winter here and a power outage that wouldn’t quit, it’s not surprising that the re-dawn of electrical power might call to mind the beginning of the world.

de·scrip·tion

And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, even more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.
—Kay Ryan

The first time I read Edmund White’s comment on Rimbaud’s Antique, I wondered what he was on about:

“Verlaine? He’s hidden in the grass, Verlaine”

Verlaine ? Il est caché parmi l'herbe, Verlaine
—Stéphane Mallarmé

Long ago, I sat in a circle of fifteen girls as Madame __, her hair brittle with red-orange dye, put us through French conjugations.  I hadn’t much patience for the grammar, but I loved the sound of French words, the epitome of which seemed, at the time, to be Paul Verlaine’s Chanson d’Automne:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
      De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
      Monotone.

Maine's Great Clepsydra

“Clepsydra” is really a meditation on how time feels as it is passing.

—John Ashbery

John Ashbery’s poem, Clepsydra, begins with the phrase “Hasn’t the sky?”  The question, opening out to anywhere, lured me into the poem.

Hasn’t the sky?  Returned from moving the other
Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of
That severe sunshine as you need now on the way
You go. . . .

Clepsydra is the Greek word for water clock.  John Steinbeck used it also, to describe the action of the tides:  "Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."

Waltzing to Eurydice

You don’t have to review.  Just respond.
—David Bloom

A couple posts back, I asked, “Does Anyone Still Compose a Waltz?’  I feared that, for 21st century composers and performers who (understandably) thrill to the challenge of playing rhythms like 5 against 4 against 3 against 2 (just try clapping that one out!), 

the waltz’s plain old one-two-three, one-two-three might be the exclusive province of those of us who wear our trousers rolled.  I realized, though, that I hadn’t really been listening for that and made a mental note to try.

Alice in Ashberyland

His basic attitude toward language is joy.  It amazes me how many people have a problem with that.
—Mark Kerstetter

The poet John Ashbery is considered impenetrable by many.  Yet if the first poem a reader encounters is The Instruction Manual, that’s hard to understand.  The poem begins

As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses
  of a new metal.

Who among us has not had a wish like this?

Doing the Watusi with Rimbaud

I put my hand inside his cranium, oh we had such a brainiac-amour
But no more, no more, I gotta move from my mind to the area
(go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud)
And go Johnny go and do the watusi,
Yeah do the watusi, do the watusi ...
—Patti Smith, Land

I had hoped, when I picked up John Ashbery’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, that I’d find a way into it without need of the commentary that swirls about Rimbaud and his work.  I figured, since I’d not read a line of Rimbaud and didn’t know a thing about him, I could come at Illuminations “fresh.”