Native American poet Smith

Thursday’s post on Joseph Brodsky reminded me of the hundreds of lines of poetry the Nobel poet made us memorize at university – an exercise some students defied and ridiculed, but my earlier training in Shakespearean theater taught me to appreciate.

If you want to own a poet, memorize his or her lines.  In this sense, as once said Brodsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam was more deeply married to poet Osip Mandelstam in her widowhood than her marriage, as she preserved his poems against the Soviet regime that would erase them:

“…repeating day and night the words of her dead husband was undoubtedly conneced not only with comprehending them more and more but also with resurrecting his very voice, the intonations peculiar only to him, with a however fleeting sensation of his presence … And gradually those things grew on her.  If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy. Gradually, the lines of those poets became her mentality, became her identity. They supplied her not only with the plane of regard or angle of vision; more importantly, they became her linguistic norm.”

But what do to do in an era when reading a 300-page book seems like an insurmountable task, and memorizing a poem seems – oh, such a leisurely activity in an increasingly hectic world?  OK, here’s two 8-line poems for you. See if you can get these out of your head – then memorize them, so you can’t.  No excuses.

The first, by William Jay Smith, is dark, cryptic, compact, and layered.  I think it’s one of the finest short poems of the 20th century. The second encapsulates one of Richard Wilbur‘s moments of incandescent euphoria.  (As he once said, “Giving up doesn’t always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go.”)  Jay Parini writes that, in this poem, one of two in “Two Voices in a Meadow”: “Wilbur aspires to a Blakean intensity, with his casual lyricism achieving a kind of perfection rarely found among his contemporaries.”

Elizabeth Frank wrote nearly two decades ago in The Atlantic: “When the whole history of twentieth-century American poetry is eventually written, it will surely be revealed that despite the apparently larger and often noisier triumphs of ‘open’ forms, astonishingly good verse that we can call ‘metrical’ or ‘formal’ has continued to be written by some of the country’s best poets – Smith himself along with his contemporaries and near-contemporaries Richard Wilbur, John Hollander, and Anthony Hecht. That Smith has written poems replete with rhythm, rhyme, wit, and melody – what Louise Bogan called ‘the pleasures of formal poetry,’ in an essay by the same name – is cause for celebration, homage, and gratitude.”

I’ve had the privilege of meeting both nonagenarian poets – but that’s another story, for another time.  Both live in Cummington, Massachusetts.  Must be a delightful place for a visit, for that reason alone!

“Note on a Vanity Dresser”

The yes-man in the mirror now says no,
No longer will I answer you with lies.
The light descends like snow, so when the snow-
man melts, you will know him by his eyes.

The yes-man in the mirror now says no.
Says no. No double negative of pity
Will save you now from what I know you know:
These are your eyes, the cinders of your city.

“A Milkweed”

Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.

Somewhere, my heavy gray backpack

Occasionally I run across forgotten treasures at the bottom of my heavy backpack, which I carry like a creature from the Fourth Circle of the Inferno.

For example, today I retrieved, and finally read, M.G. Stephens‘s “Sunday Morning at the Marlin Cafe,” which was published in Ploughshares in autumn 2008.  The London writer had sent it to me months ago, and I had neglected this riveting memoir of meeting Joseph Brodsky in a “sleazy, reeky old man’s dive” on Broadway near Columbia University, when he was “moments away from being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

Meeting the poet could be life-changing – and seems to have been so for Stephens, who was seeking “a Sunday morning hangover drink.”

Unequal tussle

The two quickly grappled over the HBO offering Richard Pryor.  Said Joseph:  “This man is terrible. How do you allow him on your media? To rant and rave in this obnoxious and vulgar manner.  America has become a decadent country.  You have no restraints.  You allow this vulgarity – this profanity – to be spread throughout the world.  It is like a virus.  A contagion.  It is an insult.  It is …”

The burly bartender intervened:  “Because he’s funny. That’s why. He’s funny. And you’re not. You ain’t funny at all.  You’re a royal pain in the ass. That’s what you are. Am I making myself clear?”

He was, but the narrator tried to remonstrate that Pryor is a modern Aristophanes.  J.B. would have none of it:

At first he ignored me.  Then he said, “It is nothing like Aristophanes. Language is the domain of poets. The Greek dramatists were all poets first and playwrights second. Language was their domain. This fellow is not using language. He is speaking words – vulgar words from the street.  No, no, you’re wrong. This has nothing to do with Aristophanes.”

At first I mistrusted the whole tale.  As I recalled, the Nobel poet didn’t care for vodka, preferring wine.  And it was hard to see him as a Sunday morning drunk. But what convinced me is the way Stephens is haunted by the episode, going on to discover, and fall in love with, Brodsky’s prose.  Decades later, he’s still arguing with the poet, turning the brief encounter over and over again in his mind.

Well, Joseph could have that effect on you.

And so I am turning Stephens’s provocative piece over and over in my mind.  I don’t agree with all of Stephens’s contentions – he finds Joseph’s poetry “too formal, too academic, too patrician.”  Academic?  J.B. was an auto-didact who dropped out of school at 15, a Leningrad street fighter who was roughed up by the KGB.  And I don’t necessarily agree with this argument … at least I’m not sure I do:

Isn’t that always the case with a good personal essay? It is the voice that seduces us, not the content; it is the rhythm of the prose that draws us in, not the thoughts necessarily.  At least I am more often attracted to an essay by the prose style. It is only later that the content registers.  This has been true for me reading Thoreau just as it has been reading Orwell.  In fact, it is the rhythm of Emerson‘s essays that I most struggle with, not the thoughts themselves… Brodsky’s prose rhythms were so good that they drew me into his orbit.

A contrary p.o.v.:  Ludmila Shtern recalled in her memoir an uneducated peasant, “Uncle Grisha,” who was listening to a very young Brodsky read one night at her Leningrad home, crossing himself repeatedly during the reading. “I don’t understand poetry. I’ve only had four years of school. But the issue isn’t the poetry, it’s the thoughts,” he explained, “your Joseph spoke so many thoughts last night, most of them wouldn’t have even occurred to another person even if they lived to be a hundred. And the way he read, it was as though he was praying.” Uncle Grisha then asked if Brodsky was a believer, and was undeterred by the indifferent replies. “Naw, he ain’t a simple person. But he’s gotta believe because God made him special and blessed him with thoughts. It seems to me, He gave him a mission to preach His thoughts. If only he doesn’t take the wrong path.”

Stephens cites this marvelous passage from Watermark, describing another Sunday morning, this one in Venice during the unfashionable winter season, and yes, the rhythm of the prose zaps you into its orbit:

In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers.

The New York Review of Books is grumpy. Or at least a tad cynical.  Tim Parks comments on the Swedes picked a Swede, calling the selection of Tomas Tranströmer for the prestigious lit prize “a healthy decision in every way. Above all for the Nobel jury.”  The lifetime judges are “condemned for life to making, year in year out a burdensome and near impossible decision to which the world increasingly and inexplicably ascribes a crazy importance.”  Picking someone they don’t have to read in translation is an inevitable temptation, the bottle of ibuprofen always on one’s desk.

Conclusion?

What a relief then from time to time to say, the hell with it and give it to a Swede, in this case the octogenarian acknowledged as his nation’s finest living poet and a man whose whole oeuvre, as Peter Englund charmingly remarks, could fit into a single slim paperback. A winner, in short, whom the whole jury can read in the original pure Swedish in just a few hours. Perhaps they needed a sabbatical. Not to mention the detail, not irrelevant in these times of crisis, that the $1.5-million-dollar prize will stay in Sweden.

But most healthy of all, a decision like this, which we all understand would never have been taken by say, an American jury, or a Nigerian jury, or perhaps above all a Norwegian jury, reminds us of the essential silliness of the prize and our own foolishness at taking it seriously. …

Meanwhile, the Times Literary Supplement blog considers calls the choice a brave one:  “The Nobel Academy already stood charged of Eurocentrism, making Tranströmer something of a defiant choice.”

In 1998, the TLS called  Tranströmer’s poetry “the work of a major, even a great, modern poet,” raving about the “icy Nordic romanticism of bleak forests, remote villages, and shorelines” where “half-smothered, the gods of summer / fumble in sea-mist.”

Controversy erupted in 2007 when Alan Brownjohn considered Robin Robertson‘s “versions” of the Swedish poet, and all hell broke lose.  The controversy is here.  Versions, adaptations, translations – what’s the difference?

Not a problem for this year’s Nobel judges in Stockholm:

Of course, the Swedish Nobel committee did not need to translate Tranströmer to consider him for this year’s laureateship. They chose him because “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”

Say it.

Kap LAY ya

Say it again.

There.  You have now dramatically increased, if briefly, the number of people who speak Koro, an endangered language.

That’s according to David Harrison, Swarthmore linguist, National Geographic Fellow, and an absolutely riveting speaker this weekend at the Modern Language Association Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona.  His talk:  “Endangered Languages: Local and Global Trends,” was followed that night by a screening of a documentary featuring his work: The Linguists.

Attending a large conference with hundreds of people is always a crap shoot.  Any particular session could be a crashing bore, or among the most thought-provoking and stimulating presentations of a lifetime.  I was lucky.

Harrison explained that there are over 7,000 languages in the world.  The 83 “big languages” (you know, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, and so on) are spoken by 80% of the world.  About 2,935 are spoken by 20.4% of the world.  And the final 3,586 are spoken by .2% of the world.  (I know, I know, they don’t add up, but still.)

That last .2% are Harrison’s concern.  Think linguistics is boring?  Not when Harrison explains it.  These small languages are perishing – and with each of them goes a whole worldview.  They contain “traditional knowledge” of plants, animal species, ecosystems and medicinal remedies.

In some cases, Harrison has made the first recordings ever of these languages – “sometimes the last,” he added sadly.  For example, the Chulym language of the remotest regions of Siberia is spoken by only 6 or 7 people now – they call their language “Ös.”  (Harrison is also the author of The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages and When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge.)

The Chulym language’s youngest speaker, a 58-year-old man with a third-grade education, created a written form for the language, using the Cyrillic letters of Russian.  Harrison calls Vasily Gabov‘s innovation “a work of genius,” something that would have been difficult for an experienced linguist with advanced degrees. “It was really brilliant,” said Harrison.  “It didn’t need tweaking.”

Although the first book in Ös has been published – which goes some way to validating the language – the language “is in the terminal stages of its existence” and likely to be extinct within the next decade.

Harrison also did extensive field work among the Tuva people, a nomadic Siberian tribe that herds camels, goats, yaks, and sheep.  These people reinforced “how inadequate our theoretical tools are,” said Harrison.  For example, the simple verb “to go” has no equivalent for the Tuvans.  The word varies according to whether you are ascending or descending, or going with or against the current of the nearest stream.  “They laugh if you pick the wrong one, but they can’t say why.  All this knowledge” – for example, the subtle sense of sloping ground beneath their feet – “is completely second nature to them.”

Oh, and see below for one young man’s solution for the disappearance of his own language in India – Aka Kora, the language cited at the beginning of this post.

The young man set it to hip hop.  “The elders somewhat disapprove,” said Harrison, but “people like him are key to keeping the language.”

“Speakers generally love their languages, and want to keep them.”

Below Songe Nimasow‘s hip hop rendition of his dying language is a young Tuvan musician Marat Damdyn, who does a little “throat singing,” beginning about 1 minute in.  If you haven’t heard this before, it’s astonishing. And below that, David Harrison himself.   (Read about his work at his Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages here.)

Shrinking

So the Nobel Literature sweepstakes had a happy ending this year: By now, everyone knows that Tomas Tranströmer at last took home the prize.  It’s enormously gratifying that someone of this heft and stature has bagged the prize, but a lot of my friends and colleagues are saying:  “Who?”

It is, as the Associated Press noted, not really a surprise:

The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday to a psychologist who used his spare time to craft sparsely written poems about the mysteries of everyday life — commuting to work, watching the sun rise or waiting for nightfall.

Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden’s most famous poet, had been a favorite for the prize for so many years that even his countrymen had started to doubt whether he would ever win.

The Nobel judges are understandably reluctant to reward one of their own, a fellow Swede.

I’m not terrifically familiar with his oeuvre, though I like what I’ve I read so far.  Since I’m currently on the road, I took his The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems with me – one of those books I bought but never really had a chance to do much more than thumb through.

“His poems have a kind of stark, piercing inwardness that’s very striking,” said Robert Hass, who edited Transtromer’s “Selected Poems.”

“There are lots of poems written about driving back and forth to work, poems about dawn, poems about dusk. He gets those moments in life, those ordinary periods of change.”

So few of the articles have quoted any of his poetry.  So how about this, the last stanza of “Morning Birds”:

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows
while I myself shrink.
It grows, it takes my place.
It pushes me aside.
It throws me out of the nest.
The poem is ready.

In Spain, 2010 (Photo: Vitoria Gasteiz)

Can you believe that Bob Dylan, who had fallen off the charts a few days ago, has now risen to #1 for this year’s Nobel Literature Prize?

He’s been given 5:1 odds, putting him ahead of Syrian poet Adonis, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and the Hungarian writer Peter Nadas.

What is going on?  “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…”

The eminently worthy Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has fallen to #6.  Down Under poet Les Murray has climbed to #8.  Cormac McCarthy, last summer’s #1 heartthrob, has dropped to #12.  You can check out some of the other punters at Ladbrokes here.

Dylan has regularly figured at the bottom of the lists for years – like Communist Party candidate Gus Hall used to in the presidential elections.  But for no reason anyone knows, the songwriter shot to the top of the list overnight on Tuesday.  According to a Washington Post blog:

…overnight on Tuesday, Dylan’s odds jumped from 100/1 to 10/1. Wednesday, the site had his odds for winning at 5/1, beating out all other contenders. Ladbrookes reported that 80 percent of all bets in a 12-hour period went to Dylan.

Earlier this summer, the singer was nominated for the $50,000 Neustadt international prize for literature, often considered a precursor to the Nobel, losing to Indian-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry. He won a “special citation” Pulitzer in 2008.  Is he headed for better things?

Ladbrokes hopes not.  It said it would have “a significant five-figure payout” on its hands if Dylan wins the Nobel on Thursday, according to the Guardian:

“We’ve seen enough activity from the right people to suggest Dylan now has a huge chance this year. If he doesn’t make the shortlist at least there will be some seriously burnt fingers,” said spokesman Alex Donohue. “As Dylan said, money doesn’t talk, it swears. If he does the business there might be a few expletives from us as well.”

The Washington Post cited the lyrics of another song:

… could be the bettors are taking gambling advice from Dylan’s own songs: “Make your money while you can, before you have to stop, / For when you pull that dead man’s hand, your gamblin’ days are up.”

Postscript:  The new #2  is Algerian novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar.  Ever hear of her?  Someone is fooling with us …

And Vaclev Havel made it to #38 today, on his 75th birthday.

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.” – V.H.