Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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Poetry
Posts about Poetry
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
If there is a scheme,
perhaps this too is in the scheme,
as when a subway car turns on a switch,
the wheels screeching against the rails,
and the lights go out—
but are on again in a moment.
Nice! I tried reading it being conscious of its meter, of where the stresses fall in the cadence, and discovered that I want to insert the word "up" between "screeching" and "against", went over the line with a couple of different stress patterns to see if there's one that works better with the existing wording.
It turns out that in my first reading, I was reading "the wheels screeching" without pause, placing "whee" and "scree" on downbeats/stresses, whereas I think a pause is intended after "wheels" - this gives the rhythm a syncopated quality. If you hold a pause *(cæsura? I am not sure, just, what this term means but I think it might be applicable) here long enough you can elide from "screeching" to "against" and keep to the poem's rhythm. This in effect substitutes the pause, the absence, for the syllable that I was interpolating.
Wondering now if this poem could be expanded into a lyric -- it seems to have a lot of possibilities in it.
Thinking that the insight about pauses standing in for syllables might help me clean up my wordy lines a bit.
posted evening of January 12th, 2012: 1 response ➳ More posts about Readings
In Savage Detectives Group Read news, Rise links to two videos: Laura Healy reading fromRomantic Dogs, and Natasha Wimmer talking with Daniel Alarcón about how she discovered Bolaño's work. (Wimmer's biographical essay "Bolaño and the Savage Detectives" is online at Anagrama.)
Brandon Holmquest's analysis of the practice of translating poetry is well worth reading. Holmquest translates Borges' poem "El general Quiroga va en coche al muere" and examines closely the decisions he is making at each juncture.
Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.
It's a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.
Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,
but the clocks are against it.
Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.
Auto-body shops occupy old barns.
Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.
And these sites keep on getting bigger
like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for
burying strangers."
Came Blanaid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk, Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry, Dark Balor, as old as a forest, his mighty head sunk Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.
Discussing "The Wanderings of Oisin," Judith Weissman calls "this list of unforgettable and irreplaceable names... the poem's most powerful passage; the names themselves call Oisin back to what he remembers..." This statement stuck in my head last night while I was reading Cosmicomics and I was struck by the incantatory nature of the names of Qfwfq's family members...
My introduction to Calvino was 14 or so years ago, on a weekend trip -- Ellen's writing group was staying for the weekend at Joyce and Jim's place in New Paltz (or, well, possibly this was when they were living in Coxsackie -- there were a number of such weekend retreats); I found a copy of Cosmicomics in the guest bedroom and spent much of the weekend holed up in there reading. It is a difficult book to put down. I started reading it again last night and am finding the stories just delightful, all over again.
posted morning of October first, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Cosmicomics
Oh many are the lovely northern rivers!
the Housatonic and Connecticut and Charles and James and Thames and Roanoke and the St. Lawrence and the Kennebec and the Potomac and the sweet Delaware
and not of them the least the lordly Hudson; and all of them have made the fortunes of famous towns as arteries of trade, but all of them flow down into the sea, all of them flow down into the sea.
Today is the anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that bears his name; on September 12th, 1609, he sailed as far north as Albany (had there been an Albany) looking for a shorter passage to India.
Oh and look at that -- Goodman would be 100 years old just a few days ago now, he was born September 9, 1911.
posted evening of September 12th, 2011: 2 responses
(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of
you,
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd.)
We had a great time last night watching More or Less I Am -- such a great idea for a show, and put together pretty flawlessly and on a shoestring budget... I was struck throughout the poem (which I have not read since high school, IIRC) by how strongly and explicitly Whitman invites the reader into his head and vice-versa. I kept thinking of how a second-person pastiche might start out,
You celebrate yourself, and sing yourself,
And shall assume what you assume;
For every atom in yourself is yours is me is you.
Interesting... there were a enough spots in the poem where the poet identifies himself with the reader, the act of identification seems to be a primary theme of this poem. I ought to spend some time with it.
I want to try posting a rough translation of the first canto of Gerbasi's "My Father the Immigrant". The loose rhythm and magical language of the poem are seeming to come across into English pretty naturally.
My father, Juan Batista Gerbasi, whose life inspired this poem, was born in a winemaking region on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy; he died in Canoabo, a tiny Venezuelan village hidden away in the wilderness in Estado Carabobo.
We come from the night; and into the night we go.
We leave behind the earth, enveloped in her vapors;
the dwelling place of almond grove, of child and of leopard.
And leave behind our days: lakes, snowstorms, reindeer,
dour volcanoes, enchanted forests
where the blue shadows of fear live.
And leave behind the graves beneath the cypress,
lonely like the grief of distant stars.
And leave behind our glories, torches blown out by secular gusts.
And leave behind our doors, muttering darkly in the wind.
And leave behind our anguish in celestial mirrors.
And time we'll leave behind, time with man's drama:
Progenitor of life, progenitor of death.
Time, which raises up and wears down columns,
Which murmurs from the ocean's multitude.
And leave behind the light which bathes the mountains,
which bathes our children's parks, our altars white.
But also the night with its mournful cities,
quotidian night, no longer even night,
that brief respite, trembling with lightning bugs,
or passing through our souls in savage strokes.
Night which falls again against the light,
awakening the flowers in moody valleys,
remaking the waters' lap among the mountains,
launching horses into clear blue streams;
meanwhile eternity, gleaming golden,
makes its silent way through heavenly fields.
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by
his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
The Compagnia de' Colombari theater company is going to be performing "More or Less I Am" around the city next week -- it is a musical theater piece based on Whitman's Song of Myself. The Times has a schedule, and you can read a review of an earlier performance at the New Yorker. All performances are free of charge. We're going to the show at The Calhoun School on Friday and looking forward to it!
posted evening of September first, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
The hiss of the cicadas in the trees behind our house is at its peak this evening -- really reverberating through our entire second floor. (It's a sound I love, for which small mercy I give thanks.) As I was listening to the buzzing just now a new approach hit me to a problem of tense that I'd been batting around a few weeks ago:
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£)
by Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Thus spoke el maestro
de Tarca:
Catch the cicada
by its wing
At least
you're holding in your hand
its song.
I believe this is both truer to the source and better sounding, more poetic, than what I had previously.
