This week I have been writing things not for online publication, so in lieu of a newsletter, here is some writing about poetry I enjoyed in print.
People talk about missing the live element from performance, during the pandemic, when events were relocated online or did not happen at all. Paradoxically, the live element was what I used to miss from in-person performances. Why was it that audiences seemed to coffin and confine themselves to the narrowest possible range of response, at least off the slam circuit? I refuse the easy answers, ‘respect’ and ‘culture’, as too sad, too deathly; as if respect had to take the form of mute submission, and as if culture were synonymous with blanking out the body. Have you been among people who shout ‘Preach!’ ‘Word!’ or ‘You lie!’? How often have you wanted to whoop, or stamp? Would you do this in contexts where poetry is not a million miles from revolution or parlour? What about in contexts where you want to bring the revolution or take the breeze in a parlour? What are the many little ways that a ‘reading’ can progress more like an encounter, less like a delivery? During Zoom sessions I enjoy seeing participants feel free to switch off their cameras. It encourages me to see absurd emojis redden and yellow the screen. Cartoon hearts float, signalling an audience full of bounce. Out of sight, they have freedom of movement.
Upright and polite, in-person audiences sit quiet as if being inoculated with poetry, not galvanized; as if being spoon-fed poetry, not plunging wilfully into a cold stream, gasping and drinking. What is the internal cost, or effect, of this? Is it a positive self-stilling, while the meditative interior comes alive? Is it self-censorship, a refusal to be moved, all present and correct? There was that violinist in Florence who threw his lion-head back and brought it forward to growl at his violin. He stamped back and forth, right to the edge of the stage. These sounds would have been edited out in a recording studio. They were not part of his ‘act’. The music, his idea of it, was picking him up and flinging him about. His connexion with his instrument was a full-body process. He breathed with his arm movements, as much an athlete as any unnamed pearl diver or sponsored Olympic swimmer. The sounds he made as a musician would not have been possible without the sounds he emitted as an embodied being, making music. Why don’t poetry lovers make sounds and movements back?
Vahni Capildeo, ‘On Not Listening Quietly’, PN Review 262, November-December 2021
As Frost put it, a poet’s utmost ambition is to “lodge a few poems where they are hard to get rid of”. Among Millay’s sonnets alone, at least half a dozen can claim this honour, including “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”, “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink”, “What lips my lips have kissed, and when and why”, “I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex” and that ultimate sonnet ars poetica, “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines”.
Many of the lyrics have also achieved that Frostian ambition. Consider the earworm catchiness of “Recuerdo” (1922). I always hear a ghostly percussion (a tambourine, perhaps, sounding like the bright clink of change) at the end:
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Do I agree with all Fane Saunders’s choices? I could do without the sonnet on rutting dinosaurs (if there exists a great poem about dinosaurs, I have yet to meet it), and a few excerpts would convey the psychological realism of the sonnet-sequence-cum-short-story Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree. I missed some favourites: “Counting-out Rhyme” seems an omission, and “Menses” (“quite possibly the first poem explicitly about menstruation published in America”) deserves inclusion for its subject alone. I would have happily traded “Moriturus”, which I once had by heart, for “Renascence”, to which “Moriturus” (1928) is a mature rebuttal.
But then any fan of Millay carries around a private, unique anthology of favourite pieces; that’s what keeps the work alive. This elegant paperback, with Art Deco flappers gracing the cover, a sprightly introduction, a revolutionary reordering, and new prose material, will recommend itself to readers who think they are familiar with Edna St Vincent Millay as much as to a new young readership for whom she will be an enviable discovery.
A.E. Stallings reviews Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poems and Satires, ed. Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet, 2021), Times Literary Supplement, 14th January 2022
This conversational register is now the default of much modern translation — not just in amateur versionings of Sufi poetry — that serves the twin market goals of readability and contemporaneity. It’s born of the American breath-based impulse from Whitman to Projectivist verse that made a superstar of Coleman Barks’ Rumi, and now washes up as so much free verse flotsam. Somewhere in that divesting of formality we got to a point where no one recognizes the utterly tone-deaf writing the sublime.
[…]
It’s true that I’m often left just as frustrated by translated poems that attempt prosody — because they are not the thing in itself… they scan and rhyme but they don’t give off the aura promised by the reputation. So I go to sites like Gamard’s ‘Dar-al-Masnavi’ and pick over his heavily annotated prose renditions of Rumi and reconstruct the poetry in my head. And I realize this is not so different from those audiences for boil-in-the-bag spiritual poetry, sans rhythm, sans complexity, sans everything: I realize they too are reconstructing — finding bliss in contemplation of a beauty hidden behind a veil.
But every so often lightning is captured in a bottle. And as a beacon I offer this intricately woven translation by little-known polyglot translator and linguist A.Z. Foreman; he worked it, as he states, to make it sound ‘more like sung lyric does in contemporary English, as after all Hafiz’ verses were sung in his own day, and it was transmission by (often illiterate) singers that probably gained him [his] fame…’
Though wine be pleasing and the breeze
be rife with roses, we must cease
Drinking to harp music, for here
come the sharp-eared sharia police.
If you find wine and a fine friend
to drink with, drink, but be discreet.
The times we’re living in are dire
days of oppression and caprice.
Gather no more in public. Hide
the wineglass up your ragged sleeve.
For as your flask weeps wine, the times
are shedding all the blood they please.
‘Ghazal 42’, trans. by A.Z. Foreman
Khaled Hakim, ‘Translating Sufis as One of “Us”’, Poetry Birmingham, Autumn/Winter 2021
[The notes to Khaled Hakim’s Poetry Birmingham essay point to A.Z. Foreman’s blog, Poems Found in Translation, with its ‘incredible array’ of languages and readings in period pronunciation: http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/]