Archive for December, 2013

Tonight is “Silent Night” in some quarters of town.  I doubt many bookstores will be open.  I was reminded of this when Philip Fried of the Manhattan Review sent me an electronic holiday card, illustrated with this excellent photo by his wife, Lynn Saville (check out her website here). Of course, we’d expect the Green Hand Book Store in Portland, Maine, to be a quieter place than the couple’s native Manhattan, but it’s good to be reminded that some places in the nation and the world will be mercifully subdued on a noisy night – bright beacons in a mad world.  Meanwhile, lift a glass of bubbly, celebrate the inevitable passing of time, and drive home safely.  And, as my electronic holiday card from Livraria Cultura in São Paulo says, “Feliz 2014!”

(Photo copyright Lynn Saville)

How I got the books home.

Tuesday, November 19, was a dreary day – the first rain of the season. I hurried around the Stanford campus collecting my mail from various locations just as the weather was thinking about getting serious. Then, at the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, I found a USPS postcard for an undelivered parcel. The card, too, had staggered about campus, from one address to another, before finding me. The last day for collection, before the package would be returned to the sender, was that very day. I was annoyed to see that it was an unsolicited book from a warehouse, and the parcel was being held for ransom at at a post office at the uttermost reaches of Menlo Park. As raindrops began falling on my head, I headed back to the car, and threaded my way through the awful rush-hour traffic, snarled by the miserable weather in the fast-falling dark, wending my way past the car accidents and the flashing police lights.

It was worth the trip.  The heavy package that awaited me was a book by a friend – Edward Hirsch‘s A Poet’s Glossary, 707 pages of it.  I rented a fork-lift to get it home in the traffic, where I’ll put it on a well-supported shelf next to Roland Greene‘s Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry & Poetics, weighing in at an unbeatable 1,639 pages.  How are they different?  Roland’s encyclopedia, the fourth edition by Princeton University Press, is authoritative and scholarly – “as essential for any working poet as a good dictionary,” according to Writer’s Digest.  Ed’s volume is clearly personal and somewhat whimsical.  “I believe its purpose is to deepen the reader’s initiation into the mysteries of poetic practice. It is a repertoire of poetic secrets, a vocabulary, which proposes a greater pleasure in the text, deeper levels of enchantment,” he said of the project, which was ten years in the making.

According to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt release, “With terms ranging from abecedarian to zeugma, Hirsch brings us along on a journey across the world, introducing us to Bedouin women’s ghinnawa (highly stylized verses conveying some hidden emotion – while leaving the excuse that “it was just a song”) and picong, the style of gentle banter that originated as a sung verbal duel in the West Indies, reminding us along the way of terms that have stayed with us since elementary school (remember acrostic poems?).”

Roland’s book doesn’t have ghinnawa, but it does have glossolalia, “the gift of tongues.” Both have ghazal, of course. Ed has maqāma, an Arabic term for picaresque stories in rhymed prose.  But he doesn’t have Marathi Poetry, a poetic commentary on the Bhagavad Gitā in Marathi rather than the usual Sanskrit, a radical move that started a trend. Roland’s book nailed that one.

Moreover, at a Company of Authors last spring, Roland made an unmatchable offer: if anyone purchased his tome, he offered to help the buyer carry it to the parking lot.  I say, buy them both!  I’ll loan you the fork-lift to get them home.  Many end-of-the-year columns are rating the best books of the year – but who is weighing the heaviest?  (Hirsch won’t be able to enter till next year, with an official 2014 publication date – but Roland’s labor of love is in the running.)

Far from home: a Russian in Sweden (Photo: Jurek Holzer / Svenska)

It’s exhilarating to discover a outstanding poet.  It’s also poignant when you first hear about the poet too late. I learned of the existence of Regina Derieva and her death on the same day, when I received a note from her husband, Alexander Deriev, telling me that the poet had passed away on December 11, in Sweden, her lasting home after emigration. She was two months shy of her 65th birthday.  A requiem mass for this prolific writer was celebrated at Katolska Kyrkogården Kapell earlier this week, on December 23; she was buried at Norra Begravningsplatsen, where this very Russian poet joined Sweden’s elite, including Alfred Nobel, playwright August Strindberg, Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, and Nobel poet Nelly Sachs.  A tribute page for Derieva is here.

Young poet

She is the author of twenty books of poems, prose, and essays. Her books in English include Inland Sea and Other Poems, In Commemoration of Monument, Instructions for Silence, The Last Island, and Alien Matter. Her work has also appeared in Poetry, Quadrant, Modern Poetry in Translation, Salt, and St. Petersburg Review as well as many Russian magazines. Her work was championed and translated by Daniel Weissbort, another recent death (we wrote about him here and here and here). Said Valentina Polukhina, Weissbort’s widow, “Regina Derieva’s relationship with the world was severe and tender, truthful and tragic; it reflects her own tragic life as well as the tragedies of the country she was born in.”

She was born in Odessa on the Black Sea, in Ukraine now, part of the Soviet Union then. From 1965 until 1990 she lived and worked in Karaganda, Kazakhstan – I understand it’s the back end of the world, a tough little city of labor camps, coal mining, and now, in the post-Soviet era, industrial pollution. She graduated from university with majors in music and Russian philology and literature. Her poetry was not approved by the state, and she was denied publication and guaranteed KGB oversight.  Her work came to the attention of Joseph Brodsky, who first encouraged her to leave the Soviet Union.

The Swedish author Bengt Janfeldt (we wrote about him here and here) gave the eulogy this week – I don’t yet have an English translation. However, Bengt once said this of her: “Like Brodsky, Tsvetaeva, she is a very bitter poet. She took every thought to its logical conclusion.” He added, “I believe that Regina is quite an exceptional poet, an unexpected poet. Even though it is not a popular thing to say, she is a masculine poet in her style, her philosophical thought.”

Drawing by Dennis Creffield

I bought Alien Matter online – the last copy in stock, and a bargain at four bucks.  Les Murray has a blurb on the back cover:  “Science teaches that eighty percent of the universe consists of dark matter, so called. Regina Derieva learned this same fact in a very hard school. She does not consent to it, though. She knows that the hurt truth in us points to a dimension whee, for example, victory is cleansed of battle. Her strict, economical poems never waver from that orientation.”

I’ve never met Les Murray, but in my background reading it appears the poet and I have many common friends. One of them, the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, reviewed Alien Matter in The New Criterion:

Derieva is, first and foremost, a Christian poet, a worthy heir to the long line of metaphysical poets, be they English, French, or Russian. Without inflated rhetoric or didacticism, her poems reach the very core of the Christian experience—a serious and fearless attitude towards life, suffering, and death. The imagery and syntax of the Gospels and the Prophets is, for her, a natural element—just as apocalyptic presentiments and mystical hope form the axis of her world outlook. She perceives atheism as a foreign language. Still, the religious vocabulary in Derieva’s writing is often juxtaposed with everyday slang and the intonations of prisoners’ songs. This is particularly true of her early poems which might be described as a metaphysics of the totalitarian world, with their constant symbolism of walls, barbed wire, lead poisoning, and torture. They describe a region where “war is forever going on.” The poetic word (and the divine Word) in this inferno “annoys the powers that be because it lives.” One discerns here an echo of Akhmatova’s “Requiem” and of Brodsky’s poetry. Looking for her kin, a reader may also think of Eliot. …  Derieva’s later poetry strives for the inexpressible (“writing white on white”) even more strongly.

Buried in Sweden, here. (Photo Holger Ellgaard)

In a 1990 letter to her that Alexander Deriev shared with me, Joseph Brodsky wrote:

“There is a point – literally the point of view – which makes it all the same how one’s life  is going, whether it is happy or nightmarish (for a life has a very few options).  This point is over the life itself, over the literature, and it becomes accessible by a ladder, which has only sixteen steps (as in your poem titled “I Don’t Feel at Home Where I Am”).  For a poem is composed of other things than life, and the making of verses offers more choices than life does. And the closer one is to this point, the greater poet he, or she, is.

You, Regina, are indeed this case – a great poet.  For the poem titled “I Don’t Feel at Home…” is yours only by name, by excellence.  Authentic authorship of this poem is that of poetry itself, of freedom itself. This freedom is closer to you than your pen is to paper.  For a long time, I have not seen anything on a par with your poetry either among our fellow countrymen or among the English-speaking poets.  And I can guess more or less – I can hear – what it cost you to reach this point, the point over the life and over yourself. This is why the joy of reading your poetry is also heartbreaking.  In this poem, you exist in the plane where no one else exists, where no one else can help:  there are no kin and, a fortiori, there are no equal to you.”

Here’s the poem  he praised:

I don’t feel at home where I am,
or where I spend time, only where,
beyond counting, there’s freedom and calm,
that is, waves, that is, space where, when there,
you consist of pure freedom, which, seen,
turns the crowd, like a Gorgon, to stone,
to pebbles and sand…where life’s mean-
ing lies buried, that never let one
come within cannon shot yet.
From cloud-covered wells untold
pour color and light, a fête
of cupids and Ledas in gold.
That is, silk and honey and sheen.
that is, boon and quiver and call.
that is, all that lives to be free,
needing no words at all.

– Translated by Alan Shaw

Daniel Weissbort has a handful of them here, and the Poetry Foundation has his translation of “Days and the Transit System Grind Their Teeth” here.  An interesting post on a Russian literature blog here.

Merry Christmas! Here’s our final poem from Clive Wilmer to celebrate the season.  It’s included in his New and Collected (Carcanet), which he sent me shortly after it was published last year.  I picked this poem out for a possible Christmas inclusion, so here we are.  Like the Sidney Carol yesterday, this one also evokes “that feeling of absence, dark and cold, but also of anticipation before some great, as-yet-unknown event.”

Here’s what Francis O’Gorman wrote about the New and Collected: “Clive Wilmer has a remarkable eye for places: for the living nature of a historical past; for hidden spiritual meanings; for the testimony of building … Here is the established voice of an exceptional writer, for whom language is the supplest tool in the creation of verbal mosaics, of patterned and precious – and also fragile – meanings. The religious dimension of Wilmer’s poetry is unmissable. This is writing that demnstrates a continual return to hopes, scrupulous sense that spiritual meanings might be present in places, things, events, people.”

We should also add that he’s one of the leading translators of Hungarian poetry, for which he has received Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal for translation from the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. Included among his translations from that difficult tongue are poems by  János Pilinszky, Jenő Dsida, Miklós Radnóti, and Anna T. Szabó. (You can read an interview with him on that subject here.)  He collaborates with another friend, George Gömöri.

Meanwhile, remember: this is only the first day of Christmas!  You have eleven more days to celebrate. Enjoy the rest of the season.

The Advent Carols

Aspiciens a longe

I look from afar. We stand in darkness.
A people in exile, shall we hear good news,
Who toward midnight, in mid-winter, sing?

Sing words to call a light out of the darkness
To thaw dulled earth, to unfold her fairest bud;
Our song holds faith that the Word will be made flesh.

Now we bear candles eastward, bear them into
Inviolate dark the Word should occupy:
Light disembodied swells the sanctuary

Where an old dream is mimed, without conviction,
Over again. I look from afar. Our sung words
Are herald angels, and they announce his name,

But lay no fleshly mantle on the King,
The one Word. And yet, in the song’s rising
Is rapture, and dayspring in the mind’s dark:

For the one sanctuary, now, is the word not
Made flesh – though it is big with child, invaded
By the dumb world that was before it was.

Quite the man.

Readers of the Book Haven know of my special fondness for Cambridge, after my single night as a Girtonian a couple years ago (I wrote about it here). I have an additional reason for my warm feelings for the place: the poet Clive Wilmer and I have never met face-to-face, but we’ve corresponded, off and on, for years.  The poet is a fellow at Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College, which was founded on St. Valentine’s Day in 1596 by legacy of Lady Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, for her nephew, the Elizabethan courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney. What better place for a poet than a college named for one?  And where better to turn for a couple Christmas poems than Clive Wilmer? (Second installment tomorrow.)

Clive considers this poem is more an Advent Carol than a Christmas one – so I had to hurry to catch the last day of Advent before the first day of Christmas.

The poem was inspired by an Advent Carol Service in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “The first item in that service – not at all the same as the famous Christmas Eve one that you see on TV – is a setting by Palestrina of a prose text which begins ‘I look from afar’, ‘Prospiciens a longe‘ in the original. I thought of the whole poem as trying to evoke that feeling of absence, dark and cold, but also of anticipation before some great, as-yet-unknown event.”

I’m not sure darkness and cold is part of a California Christmas – the sun is shining brightly outside my window as I patter away on my keyboard, and my black cat is lolling in the grass, reveling in the mild weather. However, a few weeks ago I was throwing bedsheets over my olive trees and orchids to keep them from freezing in the nasty cold snap and huddling over the oil heater.  See? Even Californians suffer.

Enjoy the poem and the day.

Sidney Carol

Each year it comes round again:
.       The aching chill,
.       The ashen sky,
The sunset bleeding through the fen,
The freezing of our warm good will,
.   The sense that things must die.
Each year it comes round again.

As every year, the shepherds squat
.       On bleaching grass
.       Around the fold.
Not asking if their life is what
Was always meant to come to pass
.   Or why good things grow cold,
As every year, the shepherds squat.

Sure as the stars at evening rise,
.       There are three kings
.       Who year by year
Come seeking what will make them wise:
The new life which the winter brings,
.   And which will now appear
Sure as the stars at evening rise.

In this bleak world what hope of joy?
.       The ordeal of birth
.       Has flecked with blood
A slight girl and her tiny boy.
They hear the song of peace on earth
.   And trust in human good:
In this bleak world a hope of joy.

The year runs on and there is change:
.       Not peace but war,
.       My path is lost.
And yet the power of time is strange.
The winter child comes as before,
.   Like snowdrops in the frost.
The year runs on and there is change.

Once more, a choir of angels sings,
.       As moonlight glows
.       Within the ice.
The shepherds join them, and the kings.
Let us, too, join them, while it snows,
.   To greet the new-born Christ.
Once more, a choir of angels sings.

Cloister Court, Sussex Sidney College – a poet’s college for a poet. (Photo: David Purchase)

One of NYC’s many treasures, the Park Avenue Armory. (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski) 

Here’s the Christmas I’m missing in New York City (I’m also missing one in Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Rome, and Madrid…)  I just received a holiday message from photographer Zygmunt Malinowski, with this photo.

“Living in New York City, I still surprise myself that there is a place or a street that I haven’t seen before. I passed Park Avenue Armory so many times but hadn’t been inside,” he wrote. “It’s known for its Gilded Age beauty with wonderful architecture and fine decorative elements, as you can see on my photo.”  It was also the site of Robert Wilson’s latest production, the opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, which he attended last weekend (I’ve written about the avant-garde director here).

Robert Wilson at Stanford, 2008 (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“Marina pioneered performance as visual art form (she had a retrospective at MOMA in 2010), and the actor Willem Dafoe had one of the leading roles. The opera sold out quickly but I caught the last performance,” he wrote.

The New York Times had mixed feelings about the the critically acclaimed re-imagination of the Belgrade-born Abramović’s biography, saying that “much of what takes place in Life and Death defies easy exegesis, or even simple comprehension”:

The rigorous, elemental aesthetic that has defined Ms. Abramovic’s own works here has been amplified by the manifold contributions of her collaborators, resulting in a show whose lavish effects tend to keep the woman at its center at a distance, atop a glossy pedestal instead of uncomfortably in our faces, as she is in her solo performances. The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic feels more like the gilding of an icon rather than the illumination of an artist’s experience.

Zygmunt, however, was sold: “Robert Wilson, the innovative theatre director, staged a Solidarity anniversary in Gdansk shipyard three years ago that I attended, but it was disappointing. However, he redeemed himself in the current production. It was awesome.”

More about the production below.