*Essays On Hilda Hilst* Now Available

Thanks to the dedication of editors Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho, Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World Literature, the first English-language scholarly volume dedicated to the work of one of Brazil's most singular and path-blazing authors, is now available for purchase. Published by Springer this month, the book opens with an insightful introduction about Hilst (1930-2004) and her relation to the category of "World Literature," by Morris, a gifted translator and scholar who produced an exceptional rendering of Hilst's 1986 novella Com os meus olhos de cão (With My Dog Eyes, Melville House, 2014), as well as works by Jõao Gilberto Noll, Beatriz Bracher, and other major contemporary Portuguese-language writers, and Carvalho, a Princeton professor of Spanish and Portuguese, whose scholarly interests span an array of topics and whose study Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (2013), received the Brazilian Studies Association Robert Reis Book Award in 2014. Other essays in the volume explore different aspects of the late author's oeuvre, ranging from her plays (Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato), fiction (David William Foster), poetry (Alva Martinez Teixeiro), and broader theoretical, political and ideological readings (Deneval Siqueira Azevedo Filho, Eliane Robert Morães, Morris, and Nathanaël).

For my part, I contributed a revision of a talk I delivered in at the New York Public Library back in 2014, "Translating Brazil's Marquis de Sade," which explores the complexities of Hilst's Cartas de um Sedutor (Letters from a Seducer), for which Carvalho wrote the introduction, and the challenges I--and anyone--might face bringing it and her work in general into English. (In "Derelict of Duty, "Nathanaël also discusses some challenges faced co-translating Hilst's A obscena Madame D (The Obscene Madame D, Nightboat and A Bolha Editora, 2013). It is especially exciting to see this essay in print and in this volume, which I hope will serve as an enticing overview and introduction that I hope sparks more studies in English about Hilst, and spurs more translations of Hilst's work. I believe a translation of Hilst's Fluxo-Floema is on its way soon, and this year, Hilst's Of Death: Minimal Odes, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin, will be published by co•im•press.

Please consider getting a copy of this volume, or at least suggesting your nearest library do so. And please, read Hilda Hilst!

Poem: Lorna Dee Cervantes

Lorna Dee Cervantes

One of the poets whose work appears in the PINTURA: PALABRA portfolio is Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954-). A major late 20th and early 21st century American poet, Cervantes has long been a leading figure in Chicano/a and Latinx literature. Her first book, Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), which explored her upbringing and experiences as a Chicana growing up in California, and dealt with themes of self-recognition and self-expression, familial and other forms of violence, and the development of a feminist vision, received considerable praise and won the 1982 American Book Award, bringing her to wider attention. She has gone on to receive numerous other awards and publish four more volumes of poetry, found several literary journals, and teach, both inside the university system (she was a professor at the University of Colorado for nearly 20 years) and outside it. Throughout Cervantes has remained an advocate for

Her PINTURA: PALABRA poem that I reproduce here is entitled "Night Magic (Blue Jester)." It carries the epigram "After Federico García Lorca," but it was not until I started to read it that I recalled the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's (1898-1936) poem "Romance Sonámbulo," with its opening gambit of repetition, "Verde que te quiero verde. / Verde viento. Verdes ramas," or in English, "Green, how I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches," and the subsequent dreamscape threaded through with dark and disturbing elements. If this is the García Lorca poem she had in mind, Cervantes begins by riffing on the Spanish poem's repetition and its citation of color, García Lorca's green becoming her blue, a direct response to the dominant color in the late Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz's (1941-1989) painting, from which the poem draws its title.

All these "blues" produce a kind of blues, embedding them in a dreamscape that is akin to but distinct from García Lorca's and Almazar's, yet also in conversation with both, especially the latter, an urban night scene in which the Blue Jester's magical, looming presence sparks and channels the positive and negative associations and events Cervantes details in her poem. The poem's syntax and pacing allow no stasis; the prevailing mood is one of anxiety, coupled with awe. The incantatory cadences feel especially appropriate to the dream-space that the painting and poem present, and also have echoes, particularly in the rhymes and swift shifts in imagery, of popular songs, spoken word poetry and hiphop. The effect is a poem that feels both very contemporary and out(side) of time, that is substantial and yet as evanescent as dreams or nightmares; as the poem reminds us at the end, after our journey through this world, the night, the dream, the poem itself "blew."

NIGHT MAGIC (BLUE JESTER)



By Lorna Dee Cervantes



   After Federico García Lorca



Blue that I love you
Blue that I hate you
Fat blue in the face
Disgraced blue that I erase
You lone blue
Blue of an alien race
Strong blue eternally graced
Blue that I know you
Blue that I choose you
Crust blue
Chunky blue
Moon blue glows that despise
You — idolize you
Blue and the band disappears
Blue of the single left dog
Blue of the eminent red fog
Blue that I glue you to me
You again and again blue
Blue blue of the helium
Bubble of  loveloss
Blue of  the whirlwind
The blue being again
Blue of the endless rain
Blue that I paint you
Blue that I knew you
Blue of  the blinking lights
Blue of  the landing at full tilt
Blue of  the wilt
Flower of  nightfall
Blue of  the shadow
In yellowed windows
Blue of the blown
And broken glass
Blue of the Blue Line
Underlines in blue
Blue of the ascending nude
Blue before the blackness
Of  new blue of our winsome
Bedlam Blue of the blue
Bed alone: blue of the one
Who looks on blue of what
Remains of cement fall
Blue of the vague crescent
Ship sailing blue of the rainbow
Of  wait blue that I whore
You — blue that I adore you
Blue of the bluest door
Blue my painted city
In blue (it blew.)

You can read the rest of the PINTURA : PALABRA portfolio in the March 2016 issue of Poetry. All images in this portfolio are courtesy of and with permission from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Night Magic (Blue Jester) by Carlos Almaraz, gift of Gloria Werner © 1988, Carlos Almaraz Estate. Source: Poetry (March 2016)

Night Magic (Blue Jester), 1988, by Carlos Almaraz

Poem: Anne Carson

Anne Carson

If you were to list the iconic works of American visual art, Edward Hopper's (1882-1967) "Nighthawks," with its unforgettable glimpse into the clear panes of a brightly lit all-night West Village diner, would most certainly have to be included. "Nighthawks" (1942) is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which describes its history and backstory like this:

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Jeremiah Moss, who started the Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog, chronicling hyper-gentrification's dramatic transformation of New York City over the last two decades, and who last year published a companion volume, Vanishing New York: Now a Great City Lost Its Soul, devoted several posts back in summer 2010 and again in 2013 to figuring out which buildings in Manhattan might have served as a model for "Nighthawks." He concluded that there was no diner, and that Hopper had drawn more upon his imagination than anything else.

I have to say, though, that although there may have been on strict model at the spot or spots Hopper stated, or where Moss conjectured the diner might have stood, I can attest to having walked past similar spots, late at night in the late 1980s and especially in the late 1990s, on my way back from NYU, and unconsciously picturing an analogue to Hopper's scene. It captures a fundamental truth, transformed into a memorable image (would we call it a meme today?), about US urban life, especially during the mid-20th century, the isolation amidst connection, in a commercial space, outside the constraints of conventional normative time.

In the painting the figures are all white and could be viewed as a quasi-community or family, though all appear to be operating in semi-separate spheres of existence; but they aren't a heteronormative nuclear family, they aren't sitting down to dinner with kids, and three of them, at least at first glance, are not at work. Or are they? (The man behind the counter is.) There is a timelessness (outside of daily time) to the painting's image, a feeling almost outside of time, and, speaking of feeling, a tone of loneliness, perhaps even sadness, hovering over everything. And yet the diner's bright lights suggest a harbor amid the surrounding darkness.

Poet, European Classics scholar, artist, and performer Anne Carson might not be the first person who comes mind to be writing a poem about "Nighthawks," since he focus so often are stories drawn from the European Classical storehouse, but she included the one below in her collection Men in the Off Hours, whose title seems also to gesture towards Hopper's painting. There is a sense of "off hours" being depicted, not just in the painting but in the poem. Carson's poem is operating on multiple levels, with paralleling throughout, from the stanzas' ladderlike appearance to the mirroring of the end words, or teleutons, with rhyming when the words are not exact. "Shadows" and "widows" connect figuratively as well.

Carson has created a story about at least two of the figures, the flame-haired woman and the man sitting beside her, and the brief poem shares this narrative. One could imagine others, but Carson emphasizes it with her repetition of the lines, suggesting a passion that has taken the participants out of time--"off hours"--providing a foundation for this reading this by breaking through the poem's chief voice with the disorienting quote from St. Augustine's Confessions. "Time...were not" as the lovers have run away and figured out what their relationship meant, yet the distances have found them--this (homeo)stasis preserved, for all time now, in Hopper's painting and in Carson's poem.

"NIGHTHAWKS," 1942

by Anne Carson

I wanted to run away with you tonight

but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you—
Past and future circle round us
       now we know more now less
            in the institute of shadows.

            On the street black as widows
       with nothing to confess
our distances found us
the rules of you—
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight.

Yet I say boldly that I know that if nothing passed
                              away, time past were not.
And if nothing were coming, time future were not.
And if nothing were, time present were not.
                         (Augustine, Confessions XI)

Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours, New York: Vintage Contemporary Poetry, 2001. All rights reserved.

Hopper's painting:

Edward Hopper, "Nighthawks," 1942, oil on canvas 84.1 x 152.4 cm (33 1/8 x 60 in.) signed l.r. "Edward Hopper" Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51, Art Institute of Chicago

Poem: Jorie Graham

When I think of the poetry of Jorie Graham (1950-), what immediate comes to mind is a dense, philosophically and phenomenologically infused lyric, ever searching, in pursuit of something--ideas, memories, experience--that lies just to the edge of where the language might take her. To me the acme of this approach in her work appeared in her early volume Region of Unlikeness (1991), which, when I read it, felt almost unlike any other poetry book I was reading at the time. (Jay Wright's poetry had a similar effect, but in a different way.) Its unremitting strangeness--"the sax pants up the ladder, up"--has stayed with me more than 25 years later.

Yet a few years before I had come across Graham's work, and what struck me was its mellifluousness, its sensuous quality. I am thinking particularly of Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, her 1980 debut, and Erosion (1983), in which she refined this style and from which I draw the poem below. By her next book, The End of Beauty (1987), she had shifted into the style and subject matter for which she is now very famous; this collection also includes the poems about angels, the poems with the blank spaces, and so on. "San Sepolcro" bears the name of the town where the Italian Renaissance Florentine artist Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) lived and painted, and references one of his most famous paintings, "The Madonna del Parto," which is in the Monterchi Museum, in the Comune di Monterchi, Italy.

"San Sepolcro" opens Erosion and sets the tone for all the poems that will follow. Its invitation is a seductive one, letting the reader know an adventure is beginning, guided by the poetic speaker, a cicerone of tremendous skill, that will require some work, some dynamic participation with the texts, the imagery, the books ideas. "I can take you there, / snow having made me / a world of bone / seen through to. This...." Just read those lines aloud, and note how the mind and tongue trip and then rebalance on that turn at "bone / seen through to." In fact, as the poem proceeds, it is clear that this will not primarily be a description of the Madonna del Parto" as much as a conversation between the artwork, the poem itself, and the reader, a step into contingency, interpretation, feeling.

"This is / what the living do: go in." That is exactly what we do when we read poetry or look at art or listen to a song, at least if we go at all beyond a superficial engagement, but then again, even if we think we're operating on the surface, as "San Sepolcro" suggests, some deeper process may be underway, a peeling away so that those multiple layers of meaning reveal themselves, briefly. Like the Madonna here, a relic, the poem carries the traces of the past it invokes, as well as the substrate of the poet's process of writing it and poem's coming into being. This brings to mind both theorizations about art and our encounters with it by very different minds, Martin Heidegger and John Dewey, chief among others. As I noted a few posts ago with Rainer Maria Rilke's and Francisco Aragón's poems, in the encounter we are altered, even if temporarily--or, as Aragón wittily asserts, made blind. And then, we see again.

At any rate, here is Graham's "San Sepolcro," which I think is best experienced when read aloud, or when Graham reads it.

SAN SEPOLCRO

by Jorie Graham

 In this blue light
     I can take you there,
snow having made me
     a world of bone
seen through to.  This
     is my house,

my section of Etruscan
     wall, my neighbor’s
lemontrees, and, just below
     the lower church,
the airplane factory.
     A rooster

crows all day from mist
     outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
     ice on the oily
lemonskins.  How clean
     the mind is,

holy grave.  It is this girl
     by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
     her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
     to go into

labor.  Come, we can go in.
     It is before
the birth of god.  No one
     has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
     line--bodies

and wings--to the open air
     market.  This is
what the living do: go in.
     It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
     from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
     is a button

coming undone, something terribly
     nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.

From The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, by Jorie Graham, published by The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1995 by Jorie Graham. All rights reserved.

And the image:

The Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca
© Comune di Monterchi 2015 – Monterchi Museum

Poem: Elizabeth Knapp

Elizabeth Knapp

Cindy Sherman (1954-) is one of the most important living American artists. I have to admit, though, that while admire her early Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) series, I used to find the rest of her work that I encountered be a bit repetitive and unengaging. For the life of me I missed why people raved about it and her. I've since seen more of her work, and read a good deal of theory and criticism about her particular approach to (self-)portraiture, its importance in the history of feminist representation and its challenges to female stereotypes, its critiques of the cis-heteropatriarchal male gaze, its play with subjectivity particularly under the rubric of the visual, its narrative force and relationship to prior artists working in a similar vein, and its influence on younger photographers and visual artists, as well as popular culture--think the selfie. More simply, I think I understand much more what she has long been up to, grasping the clear continuities and connections across her oeuvre.

One set of newer images she has been producing really do intrigue me, however. These are her Instagram portraits, a series of curated wgrotesques produced using mobile phone technology that manage to send up the selfie and underscore the insistently performative nature of this genre, especially on Instagram. Sherman has maintained that her staged self-portraits are not her, that they are characters created to interrogate the ways society and culture shape representations. In fact, she has stated that she "hates selfies," and yet, she is using the platform chiefly dedicated to them to turn them on their heads. Her portraits range from the absurd to the wonky to the experimental. They also include "plandids," or planned candid selfies, which she created specifically for W Magazine.

As the magazine put it last year,

Sherman’s project for W apes the social media phenomenon known as the plandid—the planned candid photograph, which is “like a newer, hotter version of the selfie on Instagram,” as one social media expert recently put it. They are carefully composed images of studious nonchalance; they capture subjects who are determinedly carefree. Presented here is a mise en abyme of looking: a woman—or should I say women?—posing for herself on her phone as she poses for another photo that she is pretending not to pose for. Perhaps we are seeing the same images that she is viewing on her screen as she tries out different visages on the fly, shuttling through an uncountable number of aesthetic options with taps and glides of her finger. These works have a particular charge at a time when we snap ourselves with the understanding that our image will ricochet onto any number of screens, devices, and platforms. We are all striving to get it right.

Sherman is characteristically humble, almost flip, about her new digital concretions. “All these Instagram images are, for me, just playing around,” she says. “I don’t think it at all competes with my serious work. They’re just fun, like a little distraction.” But while she says that these “silly sketches” have not yet influenced her art directly, she does seem to be enjoying the ease with which these programs function. “I’m not such a perfectionist with using the apps. If you can erase the background and add another background, I don’t really care if the edges are all clean, and if it looks kind of funky, or if things overlap in a not-so-perfect way. It’s kind of freeing me up a little bit and maybe making me more open to experimentation.”

What does this any of this have to do with poetry or the series of poems I'm posting here? As it turns out, poet Elizabeth Knapp has written a poem--there may be more--in which the speaker produces a self-portrait "as Cindy Sherman's Instagram Account." Except that this sonnet-length, stanza-long verse is not really a self-portrait or a selfie,  but like Sherman's photos, something aslant, the focus not on the artist or person herself, but on the platform, the medium itself. The poem's language sounds more graduate seminar theoretical than lyrical, the argument a series of questions, its focus as much on what the Instagram account is depicting and how it's doing so as much as whom it is sharing with world.  Who and what are those "million followers" consuming as they go from image to image?

It is yet another approach to ekphrasis, one engaging with one of the most dominant social media platforms of our time, and with one of the major visual artists of today. From what I can tell, Knapp, who is the author of an award-winning collection entitled The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011) and a professor at Hood College, has been writing a series of "self-portrait" poems examining various states of being, experiences by others, and so on, taking the very idea of the "self-portrait" into new realms. I hope she will conside new poems focusing on an array of celebrities, particularly ones who are innovating with the (plat)form and others who are buried so deep in their narcissism and self-regard that they may be missing the play they're engaging in.

***

SELF-PORTRAIT AS CINDY SHERMAN'S INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT



by Elizabeth Knapp



And why not Sherman herself, you ask?
Because in this instance, the inclusion
of social media denotes a postmodern
approach to self-portraiture, a Baudrillardian
hall of mirrors in which the self is projected
against a million anonymous eyes, all hungry
for a taste of her. How will she deform
herself next? Will she sport a new prosthetic
chin, her hair stand on end, electrocuted?
A Dr. Frankenstein in the lab with herself.
A million followers, and not one will ever
know her—nipped, tucked, and bruised beyond
all recognition. Das Umheimliche: an unhomely
home. A rubber crotch on a mannequin.

Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Knapp. “Self-Portrait as Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Account” originally appeared in Kenyon Review Online. All rights reserved.


 Here are four images from Cindy Sherman's Instagram account, at @cindysherman. The fist looks like a drawn caricature of Julianne Moore, though it is in fact only a digitally enhanced (and warped) photograph of a bewigged and made up Sherman:

Poem: Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali,in 1967

I could have sworn I had posted the following poem, by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), a poet whose work I, like anyone educated even passably in the US before the last 25 years, was required to read at various intervals--in grade school, junior, high school, college, and graduate school--and which I have increasingly come to adore. She was, like William Carlos Williams, whose poetry I featured a few days ago, a leading figure in American Modernism, and, as many critics have noted, a superlative stylist and magician with language. Instead, it turns out I'd posted about Moore's poem "Poetry," which carries with a publication history worthy of a scholarly lecture. Moore also was, like T. S. Eliot, a poet I regularly heard about growing up because she was born and grew up in the near suburbs of St. Louis--in Kirkwood, Missouri, to be exact, the next town over from Webster Groves, where I spent a good portion of my youth.

In fact, I sometimes think that the deceptive simplicity and apparent naturalism of Moore's work leads readers, as it did for me, to assume they will "get" her work when in fact its complexity is right there before your eyes. But a little deeper reading usually opens the poem's meanings up, like paper flowers unfolding in water. Like Elizabeth Bishop (1917-1979), Moore's poems also avoid, at least on the surface, the personal and confessional, but her variable perspective on the world does eventually become clear, and that surface control seems at times to lie atop something burbling below, a rich vein of feeling. (As Dan Chiasson discussed in his thoughtful review, Linda Leavell's acclaimed 2013 biography of Moore, Holding on Upside Down (FSG), reveals how much personal tumult the seemingly placid Moore did live through, from childhood on.)

"No Swan So Fine" is one of Moore's briefest masterpieces, unsurpassed in its music, precision, wit, and irony.  I taught it most recently in "Foundations of Literary Studies," Rutgers-Newark's introductory course for potential undergraduate English majors and minors, and it left most of the students bemused, until we walked through it together and, as is so often with Moore's poems, it clicked. They started to get it and wanted to talk about it; some did with considerable exuberance. It was the direct result, critics have pointed out, of Moore's lifelong observation and careful notation. Scholar Patricia Willis writes that in March 1930, Moore saw in the Illustrated London News a pair of Louis XV candelabra, the "property of the late Lord Balfour," a friend of her friend, British critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933), to whom she had sent a condolence about Balfour earlier that year. She even sketched them (see below).

A year later Moore read a New York Times Magazine article (19 May 1913, pp. 8-9), by Percy Philip, about the Rockefellers' restoration of Versailles, and notated above a clipping of one of the featured images (cf. below) the line "There is no water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." I find it fascinating to consider how she fits that resonant aperçu into the poem, leaving it as a prose quotation but transforming it into poetry, not unlike the poem itself, which unfolds as an argument attempting to make sense of disparate and contrasting images, artifacts, ideas. The overtly rococo language not only evokes Louis XV but embodies that era--"with swart blind look askance / and ambidextrous legs, so fine / as the chintz china one with fawn - / brown eyes and toothed gold..." This tongue-twisting ornateness, which is nevertheless not superficial but full of depth and seriousness, continues in the second stanza, culminating in that falling final sentence, like a guillotine.

Lastly, the theme of the past and the evanescence of culture was in Moore's mind as well because, as Willis adds, she wrote the poem to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Poetry magazine, but with the thought that it would shutter that spring; it is, however, thankfully still with us, and Moore's poem appeared in that October 1932 issue, alongside poems by Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Witter Bynner, Eunice Tietjens, and others. Here, then is the poem:

Moore's poem, copyright ©
Poetry Magazine

And now, those images--the candelabra, Moore's sketch, and the clipping (all from the Marianne Moore Archive Online):

The actual swan candelabra
sold at Christie's

and

Moore's sketches of the candelabra

and

From the New York Times Magazine: "The Tapis Vert at
Versailles Where Melancholy Now Reigns as Queen"

Remembering Ursula Le Guin, Visionary Fiction Writer & Nicanor Parra, Anti-Poet

Photograph by Dana Gluckstein / MPTV Images
via New Yorker

Let me start my note about Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) by pointing out that I always write her name as "Ursula LeGuin," closing that Breton gap between "Le" and "Guin." As it turns out, that was the original spelling of her husband Charles' name, but when they married in France, when both were in graduate school, a clerk urged Mr. Le Guin to use the linguistically correct form. This is neither here nor there, really, except that Ursula Le Guin was very attentive to naming, and more specifically, to language and its power, using and probing it to explore alternatives to the oppressive structures that defined our real world in her visionary fiction career, which spanned half a century, and which left a deep and lasting mark on literature.

Bibliomane and bibliophile though I am, I first learned about Le Guin's work when I saw the first film version--now hard to find--of her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven on PBS, when I was a high schooler in 1980, and recall being transfixed by it. The novel, a dystopia set in 2002 Portland, Oregon, turns on the powers of the protagonist, Charles Orr, who can willfully dream new realities, past or present, into being. A psychologist, William Haber, figures out a way to manipulate Orr, for nefarious purposes, but one of the most enlightening aspects of Le Guin's novel is how she explores the potentially devastating consequences of what may, without extensive consideration and extrapolation into the future, seem to be positive or even neutral changes to our reality. To give one example, when Haber utilizes his machine to have Orr eliminate racism, the result is that all people end up turning the same, dull color of light "gray," which addresses the issue of color prejudice but also eliminates a major component of human difference, beauty and identity. (Of course one could also argue with the idea that racism hinges solely on skin color and does not also entail physiognomy and other distinguishing traits, let alone structural and system components, but in the sense that "color prejudice, "as the classicist George Snowden famous put it, lies at the heart of the European project of racial categorization and scientific racism, Le Guin made a justifiable choice.)

The Lathe of Heaven is a powerful example of how her work was less interested in technology, and more engaged with profound philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and, like much realist fiction, psychological questions. I think it once saw it called "soft science fiction," though there is nothing lesser about how she and others explored alternate ways of imagining our world, or alternative and parallel ones they had created from their imaginations. The Lathe of Heaven was a standalone work, though, and not part of her well known Earthsea and Hainish cycle series, for which she is best known. The five Earthsea books, commencing with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), depict an archipelagic world in which magic plays a key role, and whose characters tend, as I learned with surprise upon reading A Wizard, brown-skinned. The Hainish novels, exemplified by The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), tackle social, political and cultural questions head on; in this novel, a visitor from one planet ventures to another, where he encounters a very different cultural context, including ambisexual characters, which unsettles his initial attempts to understand and connect with them. Social, political and cultural questions run throughout all her work, but Le Guin highlights them in these novel such that it would be hard to walk away from them not somewhat transformed by the questions she raises and allows the texts, and her readers, to mull over. If there were ever a set of works ripe for serialization on TV, and a more opportune time than our current moment of social and political crisis, I could hardly name them. So perhaps some director and production companies will take a hint, negotiate with heirs, and, once greenlighted, start filming.

In addition to her speculative fictional novels for adults, Le Guin also published collections of short stories, one of which, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," I have taught a number of times over the years. Her work also includes works for children, and works of nonfiction, including essays and a guide for better writing, Steering the Craft (1998), which I am proud to admit is sitting on work table right now. (I'd fished it out in preparation for rereading, as my sabbatical got underway.) She remained a powerful feminist, anti-racist, progressive voice till the very end, delivering a knockout speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, where she overtly critiqued capitalism and the hyper-commercialization of books.  She concluded her brief, powerful oration with the following words:

We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Though Le Guin is no longer among the writing, the conceptual power, assured craft and vivid world-making of Le Guin's art, in the fullest senses of that term, should ensure readers return to it. I know I plan to, beginning with the Earthsea books. May she rest in peace.

‡‡‡

Regular J's Theater readers know that I am a fan of Nicanor Parra's (1914-2018), and have featured his work and posts about him several times over the years. Back in 2012, I posted his anti-poem "Young Poets," and one year prior, I wrote about his receipt, tardy though it was, of the Cervantes Prize, one of the highest honors for a Spanish-language writer. The very idea of the anti-poem, which is to say, a literary work that in many ways eschews what are thought to be the fundamentals of poetry while nevertheless employing poetry's unique resources, especially drawn from everyday speech and the vernacular, have long fascinated me, as has Parra's wittiness and humor, and his willingness to incorporate non-lyric elements in poetry, including images, drawings and charts.

I also have regularly lamented that he was not awarded the Nobel Prize (see the first link above), a prospect extremely unlikely at this point, now that he has passed at the age of 103, but then any number of major authors have been and will be passed over, including John Ashbery, who died late last year, and Ursula Le Guin, who I plan to memorialize below. Neither inventiveness nor longevity was enough to move Parra onto the laureate plane, but not winning the Nobel Prize is not the end of the world (and winning it, as a certain musician did a few years ago, is no guarantee of great poetry), and Parra will remain a vital poet for anyone who is interested in poems--or anti-poems--that make the most out of the simplest means.

Here are a few Parra poems I posted on Twitter that I wanted to share here. Note the first, partiularly cheeky if you ask me. (The first two poems are from, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, antitranslation by Liz Werner (@NewDirections, 2004), and the second from After Dinner Declarations, translated & w/ an intro by Dave Oliphant (Host Publications, 2009). Consider drafting an anti-poem, and enjoy.

Poem: Mabel Segun

WRONG DESTINATION

I hired an aeroplane
And put my thoughts on it.
"Take us," I told the pilot
"To that place where I believe
Thoughts can develop,
Watered by imagination,
Nourished in freedom."
But the plane was hijacked
And taken to a place
Where nothing grew but weeds.
My thoughts strove ever so bravely
To grow among the weeds,
But they were choked to death,
The weeds choked them, My God!

Now I'm without my thoughts;
They've given me new ones,
But we do not get along --
They're someone else's thoughts,
Not mine.
-- Copyright © Mabel Segun (1930-), from Conflict and Other Poems, Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1986.

Poem: Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez
(courtesy of AALBC.com)

Earlier this semester, as part of my undergraduate literature class on The Black Arts Movement, I taught a number of poems by Sonia Sanchez (1934-), about whom I've written on here before, and among the many that moved me again, after having not looked at them in many years, was this one, "blues," from the landmark Black Fire anthology that LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal edited in 1968. In it Sanchez demonstrates the gifts that have made her one of the most important poets of that group as well as major poet today; the skillful handling in manner almost so subtle as to seem effortless of poetic music and rhythm, her grasp of irony and humor, the ability to shift registers, and the ability to make the personal resonate beyond herself. Likeher sister poets in the Black Arts Movement she made the male "warriors" did not forget there would be no revolution--or any of them--without women, and she often did so, as critic and poet Cherise Pollard points out in a wonderful article on the Black Arts Movement, with a deft, subversive hand and eye. The poem opens with a statement of real blues, and by the end, as the blues often do, has turned those challenges, that pain, inside out. As she was turned (inside) out, bringing out another aspect of the blues. Several students have called her poetry a revelation. I feel the same way about her. Great in so many ways.

blues

in the night
in the half hour
negro dreams
i hear voices knocking at the door
i see walls dripping screams up
and down the halls.
                 won't someone open
the door for me? won't some
one schedule my sleep
and don't ask no questions?
noise.
      like when he took me to his
home away from home place
and i died the long sought after
death he'd planned for me.
                        (yeah. bessie
he put in the bacon and it overflowed
                                  the pot)
and two days later
when i was talking
i started to grin.
as everyone knows
i'm still grinning.

Copyright © Sonia Sanchez, from Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc. 1968.

Poem: Amy Lowell

I've asked the same question on this blog about her distant relative Robert Lowell (1917-1977), but does anyone read Amy Lowell (1874-1925) any more? In school or elsewhere? I recall having to, and neither liking or disliking her work. Returning to it long after childhood has not increased my enthusiasm, though it has helped me to appreciate her overall efforts more. She was from the same prominent Boston family that produced James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), the sometime-abolitionist, scholar and poet, and her brother, A. Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943), one of Harvard's major presidents, as well as a notorious anti-Semite and anti-gay bigot, yet unlike these male figures, she was not allowed any education beyond what she provided herself, which included copious reading and book collecting. With her wealth she was able to travel, live quite independently for most of her life, and challenge many conventions, including indulging her love of smoking cigars.

Amy Lowell was an early and consistent advocate for free verse, which few poets today think twice about, as well as of stylistic innovation in terms of form, particularly through her theorization of "polyphonic verse," which advocates for the use of prose lines and a range of styles within a single poem (do many poets today even know where this comes from?), but in the late 19th and early 20th century, she stood among the Modernist avant-garde. Her work also articulates an erotics of female desire, especially same-sexual desire, quite transparently in certain ways, yet veiled in others, as is clear in the poem below, the "Moon-white" body leaning beside the poem's speaker the unnamed actress Ada Dwyer Russell, with whom Lowell is thought to have had an extended relationship. (A Boston marriage, you could say, but I am unsure whether they lived together.) She also got under Ezra Pound's skin, to his mind hijacking the Imagist movement from him, although the school was big enough for both and whereas Pound approached his poems with a scalpel, Lowell employed a large house-painting brush with hers. "July Midnight" makes a good argument for why we should keep reading her work. Whether there'll be an Amy Lowell vogue is another matter altogether.

JULY MIDNIGHT

Fireflies flicker in the tops of trees,
Flicker in the lower branches,
Skim along the ground.
Over the moon-white lilies
Is a flashing and ceasing of small, lemon-green stars.
As you lean against me,
Moon-white,
The air all about you
Is slit, and pricked, and pointed with sparkles of lemon-green flame
Starting out of a background of vague, blue trees.

Copyright © Amy Lowell, from The Complete Poetics Works of Amy Lowell, with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955. All rights reserved.

Quote: Clarice Lispector

"Before the appearance of the mirror, the person didn't know his own face except reflected in the waters of a lake. After a certain point everyone is responsible for the face he has. I'll now look at mine. It is a naked face. And when I think that no other like it exists in the world, I get a happy shock. Nor will there ever be. Never is the impossible. I like never. I also like ever. What is there between never and ever that links them so indirectly and intimately?

"At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.

"This instant is. You who read me are."

--Copyright © Clarice Lispector, from Água Viva, newly translated by Stefan Tobler, with an introduction by Benjamin Moser, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2012. All rights reserved.

Quote: Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace
(Kapi Mana News)

I would like to start talking a little bit about the beginning of your writing career.

Well, I always liked writing when I was a child, even though we didn’t really do creative writing as such. I was also a keen reader and I began writing in my mid-twenties when I joined a woman’s writing group that was based in Auckland. I was living too far away to go to the meetings, but I joined as a country member and took part in the monthly writing competitions that they held throughout the year. It was from the encouragement that I got from judges, sometimes doing quite well with my stories, that I gained confidence; and then I began sending stories to be published in journals and magazines and in particular the Te Ao Hou magazine, which was the official journal of the Maori Affairs Department. That was where I also started seeing writing by other Maori writers in English for the first time, so that also helped me develop the kind of confidence that I needed. And eventually my work came to the notice of a publisher in Auckland—Phoebe Meikle—who contacted me and asked me if I had enough short stories for a collection. So that’s how my first collection of short stories Waiariki came about and it was published in 1975.

What was happening in New Zealand at that time? 

I believe there was a group of women who started having their work published around 1975, like Fiona Kidman, Rachel McAlpine or Lauris Edmond.

Did you feel that you were part of that generation or, on the contrary, that you had arrived at that point independently? 

I didn’t really notice it at the time. But it was only later when I came to know these otherpeople that had books published around the same time, although I do remember that I was at Fiona Kidman’s and Lauris Edmond’s book launch in the same year. I suppose my main realisation was that there was beginning to be work by Maori writers published because Witi Ihimaera’s book Pounamu, Pounamu, which came out in 1973, was the first book of fiction ever written by a Maori person. Before that was Hone Tuwhare’s poetry. Hone became a role model for Maori writers, and not only Hone Tuwhare, but there were also other pioneer writers who did not have books published but they were writing at the time.
--from "An Interview with Patricia Grace," conducted by Paloma Fresno Calleja, in Atlantis 25:1 (June 2003): pp. 109-20.

(Patricia Grace, a writer of Maori descent, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1937. She is the author of the first collection of short stories published by a Maori woman, Waiariki (1975), and has subsequently published 7 novels and works of nonfiction, 6 collections of short stories, and three children's books. She received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2008.)

Naipaul's Sexist Diatribe

Some things should not be dignified with a response. To slightly torque Ludwig Wittgenstein's words, Of those of whom we need or ought not speak, let us pass over in silence. As little time as I have these days I really should spare my words. But perhaps silence is too kind for the vileness that has regularly emanated from the person and letters of V. S. Naipaul, a writer whose work, packed to the cornices as it often has been with racist, sexist, classist, nationalist, eurocentric, jaw-droppingly ignorant commentary, and whose personal behavior, if one can assume Paul Theroux post-friendship (though they allegedly made up this week) account and Patrick French's authorized biography of the man to have any truth, has repeatedly redefined the monstrous. His pretentiousness, arrogance, hauteur, pettiness, and self-absorption are legendary. They run like a poisonous aquifer throughout a good deal of his nonfiction prose and some of his later fiction. I have never been fond of Naipaul's work, particular after A House for Mr. Biswas, and still cannot understand why he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; I wish it had never gone to him, but I am not a member of the Swedish Academy and have no say in such matters.

Long before his belaureling, Naipaul did not stint on offensive statements. I won't recount any here, but let's just say that he has shown no little love for women, his native Trinidadians and other Caribbean people, other human beings of South Asian descent, Africa in particular and blacks in general, and so on.  He has a particular loathing of and for "Negroes," not that he always uses that polite a word to describe us. I say this having read the man's work. Periodically he must reprise his shtick, which is to blurt out in an interview or write something proving to the world how repellant he is. Recently he did not disappoint. According to the Guardian Online, at a public interview this past Tuesday at the Royal Geographical Society, the 78-year-old responded to the question of whether any woman writer--ANY--was his literary peer, and he replied, "I don't think so." He continued, saying of Jane Austen that he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world." Then he...oh, I'll just quote directly from the paper:

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."

Emetic. Without a doubt, the man embodies what it means to be a sexist, a misogynist, a total crank, a nutcase. Admittedly this is a man who has arrogated to himself superiority to the likes of many another male writer of the contemporary or earlier ages (cf. Joyce, Dickens, Forster, Maugham, Keynes, Powell, Derek Walcott, etc.), but that does not mitigate the sheer and grotesque ignorance and male chauvinism, let alone narcissism on display here. One need only dip into Theroux's and French's accounts of Naipaul's life to find the psychosexual sources and analogues of this putrid commentary; this is a man after all who cruelly humiliated one wife, who slapped around and tormented another woman, who...oh, if you're really interested, it's all there in both books. Perhaps if anyone now needs a reason to make this person persona non grata at the literary festivals and salons and classrooms of the world, let this most recent outburst be it. He's received his prizes, the grave is calling. Don't give him another platform. His books, if they survive, will; if not, they won't. Women will keep on writing and producing work better than anything ever to have left his fingertips. But we all know this. What we also should try, pretty please, as the common Net phrase goes, is simple enough: let's not feed the troll. Ever. Again.

And as for sexism and misogyny in general--we've had enough to last a gogoplex lifetimes. Stats by the women's writing advocacy group VIDA show that the sentiments Naipaul expresses aren't isolated, if not in intent, then in practice.  Enough. Seriously. When we see it we should call it out.  Men, we have to admit it and get our acts together. Seriously.


His "publisher" Diana Athill's responds with a laugh.

Courtesy of VIDA's twitter feed, some responses:

Roxana Robinson "on that old...well, you know who...."

Roxane Gay "on the same old writer guy whose name we need not mention...." 

 

Diana Abu Jaber "on that old writer guy whose name we need not mention.... "

Quenby Moone "spanks...pompous dudelio ass."

AND

Finally, Reggie H. sent this link to Ta-Nehisi Coates on that person.

NUFF SAID!

Poems: Muriel Rukeyser

I have been thinking about poetry, politics, political poetry and the politics of poetry quite a bit of late, and one poet from the middle years of the 20th century whose work was insistently political, often successfully so and not to its aesthetic detriment, pressing on in her attempt to address the social, political and inequalities in and through her verse was Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Whether it was covering the Scottsboro Boys Case or writing about the effects of silicosis, whether it was speaking as a feminist or talking about her identity, as Jewish woman, her sexuality in all its complexity, whether it was being before the letter before the letter was dreamt off, composed and mailed off to poetry's many precincts, Rukeyser was there. Her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), was selected by judge Steven Vincent Benét for the Yale Younger Poets Series, and she went on to publish numerous books, of poetry, critical essays, memoir and autobiography, anthologies, drama, and her rich store of correspondence. The two poems below are among my favorites by her; both are political, fairly straightforward on the surface, and yet contain powerful currents below. First, the more lyrical of the two, then what could be read as an ars poetica, the title rippling out, despite its simplicity, into multiple meanings, which is to say: a poem.

THE POEM AS MASK    

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and
      wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
      down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
      myself.
     
There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
      child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.





From Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems by Muriel Rukeyser. Published by Library of America (American Poets Project). Copyright © 2004 by William Rukeyser. All rights reserved.

POEM

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem” from The Speed of Darkness. New York, Vintage Books, 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser. All rights reserved.