May 082014
 

A. AnupamaA. Anupama

A. Anupama, one of our regular contributors, dusts off her translating skills, bringing us hilariously sexy, curiously modern couplets from the classic Tirikkural, a vast book of over a thousand rhyming couplets written in ancient Tamil and dating from about 2,000 years ago. They run the gamut from agricultural advice to law to flirting couples (the most charming).

I thought about you, I said. Then sometimes, you forgot, she reminded,
keeping out of my arms, pretending to be peeved.

A. Anupama gives us a rare glimpse into this ancient world, also providing us with a brief gloss on the difficulties of translation and her modus operandi, plus, joy of joys, some sound files with the original Tamil verse (beautiful liquid sounds) and the English translation.

This is not her first translation effort. See also her “Poems from Kuruntokai” and “Sweet to my heart | Translations of Tamil Love Poems.”

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Tirukkural is a collection of 1,330 rhyming couplets (called kural) written by the Tamil poet-saint Tiruvalluvar perhaps around 30 BC (dating is vague). The verses were meant as a comprehensive portrait of Tamil culture, a description but also an epigrammatic guidebook in verse to the formulas of this south Indian civilization. The poems cover every aspect of society and right living from the conduct of kings to the sowing of fields, from aspects of ascetic virtue to the intricacies of lovers’ quarrels, and from the art of friendship to dire warnings against vice.

I gaze at her, admiring her every line, while she scowls
with whom do you compare me, staring like that?

The couplets are organized into chapters of ten each, and the entire work is divided into three sections, Virtue, Wealth, and Love. Tirukkural differs from other classical Indian philosophical literature (e.g., the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) by not including the fourth section of traditional teaching on spiritual release. Tirukkural emphasizes domestic life over ascetic or religious practice.

Tiruvalluvar_statue_LIC

The colossal statue of Tiruvalluvar built on a small islet at the meeting of the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and Arabian Sea, just offshore from the town of Kanyakumari at the southern tip of India, represents the poet’s legendary status. Designed by sculptor V. Ganapati Sthapati, this granite monument stands 133 feet high, representing the 133 chapters of Tirukkural. The height of the statue’s base, at 38 feet, represents the 38 chapters of the first section, Virtue, symbolically setting the foundation of the other two sections, Wealth and Love. The poet is depicted holding up three fingers, a stylized and definitive gesture of Tirukkural’s three sections.

According to tradition, Tiruvalluvar lived in about the first century BCE (though estimates vary by a few hundred years) and was a weaver from Mylapore, near present-day Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu. The Tamil culture and language are the oldest of Dravidian heritage, originating in the southern tip of India.

Tamil Nadu

Tamil is the oldest living language in the world, with a rich classical literary history. Tiruvalluvar’s work dates from the period of the classical Cankam, a famous gathering of poets, scholars, and sages in the ancient city of Madurai. His poetic couplets are the shortest verse form in Tamil literature, and his work was known and referred to by the writers of classical Tamil epics like Cilappatikaram and Manimekhalai.

If you search YouTube for “kural recitation,” you’ll find videos of young schoolchildren reciting memorized couplets, sometimes with a little prompting, but mostly with ease and confidence. The boy in this video recited chapter 40 from Tirukkural, a set of ten couplets on learning.

On the other hand, centuries of erudite commentary on Tirukkural have revealed its subtlety, and its influence on modern thinkers and writers has been significant. Leo Tolstoy quoted several couplets from it in a letter to an editor at Free Hindustan, a letter that was later translated into Gujarati and published by M.K. Gandhi. Albert Schweitzer said about Tirukkural, “There hardly exists in the literature of the world a collection of maxims in which we find so much of lofty wisdom.”

I couldn’t find a tougher or more rewarding translation challenge than this. Arthur Schopenhauer in his essay “On Language and Words” remarked, “Take translations of authors from antiquity: they are as obvious a surrogate as chicory for coffee. Poems cannot be translated; they can only be transposed, and that is always awkward.”[1] W.S. Merwin in the prologue to his collection Selected Translations, cites advice he received from Ezra Pound: “He spoke of the value of translation as a means of continually sharpening a writer’s awareness of the possibilities of his own language… Pound also urged—at that point and to me, at least—the greatest possible fidelity to the original, including its sounds.”[2] Tirukkural is a particular gift to the translator because in addition to offering fresh mental vistas, it invites one to stricter attention through the voice and the ear.

The couplets, like most proverbs, are designed to be easy to remember and repeat: the alliterative and assonant strength of the compositions aids memory, and tight line-length keeps each verse within a single breath. These same qualities make the couplets difficult to translate, requiring the translator to create equivalencies in sound and sense in a very tight space. Kural 12 showed me quickly how impossible it might be to honor the sound of the original. “Living” sounds nothing like “thupakith,” and yet, the poem in English requires the repetitive transformation of the single word for the purpose of the poem’s sense. The Tamil “Thupaarkuth thupaaya thupaakith thupaarkuth thupaaya” turns into “living,” “live,” “life-giving,” and “life” in my translation.

Still, I found that evoking the original’s sound was possible in many places, with some effort and luck. For example in Kural 18, the “s” sounds in the first line and the “v” sounds in the second line were reproducible, though they lack the alliterative effect of the original. In Kural 20, I added the words “nearness” and “farthest” at the beginnings of the lines to mimic the sounds of the Tamil words “neerindru” and “vaanindru,” which altered the sense only slightly by emphasizing the nuance of distance in the poem’s imagery.

Nearness of rain—without which all worldly work ends, whomever you are.
Farthest skies—without which all natures end.

Word order and integrity of the poetic line are another challenge, because Tamil syntax runs in the opposite direction from English. Subject-verb-object in English often translates to object-verb-subject in Tamil, and even prepositions become postpositions. Sometimes, I could maintain word order, as in Kural 19: “Charity and penance, twins, make their exit from our world, / sky unyielding.” In Kural 20, however, I had to flip word order for sense, translating the two phrases “all worldly work ends” and “all natures end” exactly inverted. The rest of the word order, as well as the couplet’s line integrity, I carefully maintained.

I learned my method of line-by-line translation in Richard Jackson’s translation workshop at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the summer of 2011 when Patty Crane showed us her work translating poems by Tomas Tranströmer. For each line of poetry, I add directly underneath it a literal translation, maintaining the syntax of the original. Alternative word choices are included in this step. Then, directly under that is a first draft of my literary translation of the line. I continue in this way, adding lines for each line of the original poem. I keep everything, every attempt to translate stays in the document. If the lines of poetry get too far away from each other in the process to look at on the computer screen, I copy and paste what I want to work with on a new page in the same document.

Kural 11 in Tamil
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Kural 12 in Tamil

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In this work with Tirukkural and in my previous translations from Kuruntokai, I relied on my co-translator B. Jeyaganesh for literal translations and recorded readings of the original poems. B. Jeyaganesh is a native speaker of Tamil, the son of a scholar with a Tamil PhD, and a fellow self-described non-expert in this classical literature. For this selection from Tirukkural, we spent over three hours coming up with alternative word choices in English and discussing the relative emphasis of words in the couplets. I listened to the recording over and over to gain a familiarity with the poems’ sounds. I used the recordings again to check my work, often reading my drafts aloud for comparison. Another helpful tool was an English transliteration of the full text online along with the original Tamil and the classic translation by Rev. Dr. G.U. Pope from 1886.

Palm-leaf manuscript

I chose this particular set of couplets to translate (the second chapter and the penultimate chapter) from Tirukkural partly to keep this first try easy for me and easy for a reader unfamiliar with this work. The poet intended these very specific moral edicts and proverb-like statements for people living in a certain cultural and philosophical context, making translation for a contemporary reader in English difficult. The universality of the need for rain and of quarrels between lovers is obvious, and I found this a generous place to begin. My idea was to bracket the work as a whole, but also to bring its didactic verse and its elegant love poetry close together in this small set. The couplets in the third section on love are beautiful, witty, and very different from those in the preceding chapters. In words, sounds, and imagery, however, the thread of the work from beginning to end is wonderfully consistent. The recent drought in South India, and its continuing effects in the region, also inspired me to bring this poetry off my shelf and to translate the chapter on rain.

Tiruvalluvar statue and Vivekananda memorialPhoto by Bennet Anand

In two instances in these couplets, I departed slightly from the literal meaning in order to evoke the sense of the whole work. In couplet 17, my eco-poetic commentary in the addition of “those who don’t give from within” reflects Tirukkural’s moral standard of generosity and right action, as in Kural 211: “Duty expects not anything in return / just as rain expects none.”[3] The literal translation of the line is roughly “gives not, if that’s the state of things.” The state of things today is marked by the urgency of eco-conscious moral imperatives. I found in this a beautiful opportunity to investigate how Tirukkural in translation might evolve in order to retain its original function, which was to describe the cultural, ethical ideal. My initial idea for the change in this line, however, came from the poem’s sound: the end-word “vitin” sounds like my “within.”

My second departure from the literal translation is in Kural 1323, the couplet taken from the last chapter of Tirukkural. My version ends “with earth and water inseparable as in a clay vessel: the water drum of the heart,” while the literal includes no mention of a clay water vessel. My addition of the object attempts to bridge the distance between that specific culture and universal understanding. While this image would hover in the subconscious mind of a Tamil reader 2000 years ago and offer another level of mystery to the poem, a contemporary reader from another culture might miss it.

These departures from the literal in my translation are experiments based on an essay by David Damrosch, titled “Translation and World Literature.”[4] In writing about the problem of translating one of the oldest known lyric poems—an Egyptian poem inscribed in 1160 BCE—he observes, “Some literary works, indeed, may be so closely dependent on detailed culture-specific knowledge that they can only be meaningful to members of the originating culture or to specialists in that culture; these are works that remain within the sphere of a national literature and never achieve an effective life in world literature.” In regard to the Egyptian word mss in that poem, which has been variously translated as tunic, dress, loincloth, and clothing, he writes,

…however mss may be translated, most readers will be unable to visualize the ancient garment in all its authentic particularity. Yet as long as the translation doesn’t impose a wholesale modernization, we won’t assimilate the mss directly to our modern experience, as we remain aware that we’re reading an ancient poem: whatever we think a mss is, we won’t envision it as a Gore-Tex windbreaker, though this might be a modern equivalent of the original item. All the same, we can never hold the poem entirely away from our own experience, nor should we. As we read, we triangulate not only between ancient and modern worlds but also between general and personal meanings: however the mss is translated, different readers will visualize it very differently, and this variability helps the poem to resonate with memories from the reader’s own life. (Italics mine.)

In my translation, adding the material object of a water vessel creates a specific resonance and aids the reader’s associations within the ancient world of the poem. Adding the phrase “or if by those who don’t give from within” aids the reader’s associations in the modern world, simultaneously awakening moral consciousness, which is the original objective of Tirukkural. Though I initially felt awkward treating translation as a sort of geometry problem, I felt that the result brought me closer to the text. The availability of many complete translations of Tirukkural also lessened my concern over maintaining literal exactitude in every line. I hope that my work inspires more readers to take a close look at this ancient literary treasure.

—A. Anupama

 

Translations from Tirukkural

 

Chapter 2: On the excellence of rain

The sky, so distant, gives to our living world
rain, its own self, living essence.

The living live by the life-giving gift of the seed of life itself:
nourishment spraying down, this rain.

The sky, yielding no rain in spite of these steep surrounding seas,
will bite you from inside your hunger.
.

.

The plow won’t plow if the farmer’s awaited downpours, which sow
and grow their wealth, ebb.

Drought’s devastation crushes lives and brings ruin, while its reverse is
restoration in rain.

The sky’s quell of falling raindrops upsets
the lush grass, whose heads will then hide from sight.
.

.

The enormous sea, voluminous and teeming, will diminish if not diminished by clouds,
or if by those who don’t give from within.
.

.

Grand rituals and extravagant offerings will end if the sky is
rain void, serving the little gods no festivals.

Charity and penance, twins, make their exit from our world,
sky unyielding.

Nearness of rain—without which all worldly work ends, whomever you are.
Farthest skies—without which all natures end.
.

.

Chapter 132: On pretending to sulk

I—She

Women’s eyes savor your every line,
but mine won’t embrace your broad chest.

Our silent spat dragged on, so he sneezed on purpose, so that I would say
“bless you.” So he thought.

II—He

A whole branch of blossoms for a garland, and you accuse me of wearing it to catch another woman’s glance,
showing off how I’m dressed.

I love you more than anyone, I said. She sulked,
demanding more than whom, whom!
.

.

In this life, we will never be apart, I said.
Eyefuls of tears, she replied.

I thought about you, I said. Then sometimes, you forgot, she reminded,
keeping out of my arms, pretending to be peeved.

She blessed me when I sneezed, then altered, asking
Who thought about you to make you sneeze?

My next sneeze I quelled, but she cried, someone is thinking of you,
I know, you’re hiding it from me.

She spurned all my assurances, imagining the other women for whom
I’ve offered the same.

I gaze at her, admiring her every line, while she scowls
with whom do you compare me, staring like that?

 

from Chapter 133: On the pleasures of lovers’ quarrels

Inside this lyric sulk, a heaven nears, with earth and
water inseparable as in a clay vessel: the water drum of the heart.
.

—A. Anupama

.

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, Fourteen Hills, and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

 

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Peter Mollenhauer, transl. “On Language and Words,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
  2. Merwin, W.S. Selected Translations. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2013.
  3. Rajaram, M., transl. Thirukkural, Pearls of Wisdom. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2009.
  4. Damrosch, David. Translation and World Literature: Love in the Necropolis,” in The Translation Studies Reader, third edition, Lawrence Venuti, ed. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Mar 132014
 

Gillian-Conoley-448

Peace quietly lends two quarters for a coffee in the hospital lounge while I wait, reading. White space percolates this lyric, while the current lull in American military actions forms the occasion of this book, Gillian Conoley’s seventh poetry collection. With poems titled “late democracy,” “[Peace] contrary to history,” and “Trying to Write a Poem about Gandhi,” the work pulls one way and then pushes back another, testing the inner ground for breath. — A. Anupama

Peace-Cover

Peace
Gillian Conoley
Omnidawn Publishing
112 pages, $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-890650-95-7

 

Peace quietly lends two quarters for a coffee in the hospital lounge while I wait, reading. White space percolates this lyric, while the current lull in American military actions forms the occasion of this book, Gillian Conoley’s seventh poetry collection. With poems titled “late democracy,” “[Peace] contrary to history,” and “Trying to Write a Poem about Gandhi,” the work pulls one way and then pushes back another, testing the inner ground for breath.

Conoley is founder and editor of VOLT, the literary magazine of Sonoma State University, where she currently works as professor and Poet-in-Residence. A book of her poetry translations, Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux, is expected out later this year (City Lights Pocket Poets Series). Previous collections include The Plot Genie (Omnidawn Publishing), Profane Halo (Wave Books), and Tall Stranger (Carnegie Mellon University Press), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Other honors include the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, the Fund for Poetry Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She was born in 1955, in Austin, Texas, where her parents owned and operated a rural radio station. Her father fought in Guam during WWII and was honored with a Silver Star for bravery and three Purple Hearts.

In an interview with Rusty Morrison, Conoley comments on her process of poetic inquiry: “In the longer sequence poems, “Begins” and “Peace” I found a formal construct that seemed to me to work well with the question or notion of whether or not peace and war could co-exist on an experiential plane, if we are to have any peace at all. So the short lines began to press against one another line to line, oppositionally, in a paratactic way. I love that parataxis is Greek for ‘placing side by side,’ because I called this short lyric form I started to work in “Sapphic paratactic”—that was my private name for it.”

Parataxis, according to the OED, is a grammar term for “the placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between them, as in Tell me, how are you?” In the poem “The Patient,” Conoley cunningly plays this unhinged element of poetic craft against firmly attached biological and material elements.

I am the patient. That is my mineral fact.

I have long term storage in double helixes

my two long polymers of nucleotides

my backbone made of sugars and phosphate groups

joined by ester bonds. I see imagist pears dissolving down

golden arms I hear needle-less the sleep aid cd’s

real violins, then float blue-black

at the eventide, injure

of the taut to and fro, cut-back

asphalt road, a path of greening twigs nourishing

nothing personal…

The poem continues for five pages, shaking loose any false adhesions. In Conoley’s paratactic tactics, the phrases are often balanced in length and only separated by the line break, not punctuation. Another five-page poem, “My Mother Moved My Architect,” takes the inquiry deeper, this time plying parataxis with the grain of the physical disconnections.

My mother moved
my architect
cutting out newspaper clippings
making the life-long collage
had I sense
I would have
papered the hallways with
instead it is an ephemeral art

a flaxen gene
her left shoulder
out of its socket

The end of the poem continues the line of inquiry through doubling of images (echoes, heads, tail lights, gloves), and then turns quietly to become an ars poetica.

My mother moved my architect
bade fair
she slipped the bolt
upright
like the great sea chest
none of us
had ever seen open

My mother moved my architect
she made it pump and eat

She made this lake
where I come to

over-identify with the dead and call

Dear Echo to my echo,

She made me nude —sheer— and nude again
She made it interesting right up to the end

So that
I have to think what is with

these two heads blurred and blended, this veil
not seen back through

Tail lights,
white gloves with the green stain

as you entered the sunless woods
best to keep the road a little feral where the color is

and your world part dust
fed and unkilled            I am not through
being a poet or a being

What fallen ash
is the power to live

what pituitary
is the grace to keep
doing so

and what good
is temporary measure—

did you say thank you                   and were you                   thanking

The shorter poems in the sequence titled Peace use parataxis in tandem with opposites (descend v. ascend, vision v. blind, vagina v. cock, peace v. war). But in the sixth part of this sequence, the oppositional forces dissolve a bit, and the caesurae (by which I mean the spaces within the lines indicating pause) reveal time working up through the lines while the breath slips down deep.

one mystery of the breath: it does not hover

in the body but spirals

and up to two hours            in the less known

mammalian diving reflex            water must be

ice-cold            some people survive

if time began we would do it again

the lungs two oars in the middle of the ocean

Conoley envisions specific people and events in her inquiry, too, as in “Opened,” which includes references to both the tragic shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. From the second page of this six-page poem—

so that’s where

the two bullets went through.

What sphinx pushes up out of the fog in the parking lot

turning each

upon each

our moral imaginations. If it’s a gun law,

this tragedy will pull through.

And what was there to                        and did she

see, gritty blue sink of desert night sky            with her

off to the side like a wonder, or

your basic hospital room, sleep,

a solitary male nurse, a husband.

 In her interview with Rusty Morrison, Conoley explains some of her inquiry into peace and nonviolence in the process of writing this collection: “I was initially concerned that some might read the title as a call to action, or a promise of peace, somehow. The book contains neither, but is really more of an extended meditation/inquiry of the notion…. Once I began to realize what I was writing about, I started to read about the lineage of nonviolence that runs through Thoreau to Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King. Gandhi’s notion of ahimsa (nonviolence) dates back to the Upanishads, 8th or 7th century BCE, which bars violence against all creatures (sarva-bhuta). I began to think about these historical figures who wrote about peace and how to get it, and how they may still operate in or haunt our lives.” In the poem “Trying to Write a Poem about Gandhi,” the speaker moves between abstract reflection and the concrete actions of doing laundry and looking outside at the garden. Without shying away from the great leader’s failings, Conoley’s poem seeks balanced footing on a field of percolating magma.

Why think
God doesn’t like

pussies, cocks, girls, Gandhis           all together

well, you’d have to ask the girls,
and later

It’s a subrosa geological planet, with shifting hot mantels of tectonics,
someone should tell Einstein—
even though it’s too late—who said,
“Future generations will hardly grasp that
such a man as this walked upon the earth.”

Conoley attempts a glimpse of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Toughness of the Serpent,” which ends this way—

MLK really tired at this point.

Wonder what he’s got on his mental sky.

Moon yellow scorch of the morning iron, serene, serene

The 12-part poem that ends the collection is titled “Begins,” and it does exactly that, offering no conclusions, offering instead to launch you in a dozen different trajectories with the caffeine hidden in the parataxis—

for one eye, a small Mesopotamian figure

for one eye, a big abstract

I look, and your face is like a part of speech not spoken

a tragedy so near its comic ash

one eye is my future, one eye, my mausoleum

the divine in what is seen

in which we view only the shade of

possibility: a semi-reluctant scribe I read her book trembling

Peace holds some beautifully revealing poems in the middle of the collection, especially “A hatchet with which to chop at the frozen seas inside us” and “Plath and Sexton,” which deserve their places at the center. In these, the duality is stripped away—from the first: “what if paradise was only lifting the veil to flirt.” And from the beginning of “Plath and Sexton”:

there should have been a third
my friends and I

to not feel so incomprehensible
we were carrying your dead books

we were washed in the blood of them
but we were wanting one more

The collection’s overall organization seems to concentrate these central poems at the heart. Though Conoley claims to offer no answers, she insists on the energy of inquiry throughout her lyric. Peace lends us the price of using the percolator, even as the K-cups in the vending machine are steep.

—A. Anupama

.
A. Anupama

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, Fourteen Hills, and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

 

 

Nov 142013
 
Photo by Hank Lazer

Photo by Hank Lazer

Urban Tumbleweed

Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
Harryette Mullen
Graywolf Press
120 pages, $15
ISBN: 978-1-55597-656-9

Walk, don’t run, or you’ll miss it—Harryette Mullen’s feat of taking to her feet to capture the hum of bees in the botanical garden, droning of news headlines, and blare of vuvuzelas, all within 31 syllables. In Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, Mullen’s daily discipline of walking and writing tanka poems blossoms page-by-page into this reflection on nature and human nature.

Born in Alabama, Mullen grew up in Texas, and received degrees from University of Texas and University of California at Santa Cruz. She published her first book, Tree Tall Woman, in 1981 and went on to write several more including Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995) (Graywolf collected these three books in Recyclopedia in 2006). She is a language poet, influenced by Gertrude Stein among others, also known for her wit and humor and her interest in social activism. Mullen is now an English professor at UCLA, teaching creative writing and African-American literature. A decade has passed since her collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

In the introduction to this new work, Mullen claims to be engaged with merely taking walks and writing poems, on a mission of personal health, mind-body alignment, and closer observation of human-versus-nature duality. This book doesn’t flaunt her wondrous powers of poetic play, punning, and language games, which are showcased in her previous collections. The real accomplishment of this collection occurred to me while I spent a couple of days without my car, walking my usual school-home-work circuit after hitting a high-bouncing soccer ball on a six-lane highway. Urban Tumbleweed offers up the beautiful heartbreaks of encounters in an urban ecosystem. Mullen’s skillful subversion of stereotypical thinking has merely taken on a stealthier strategy in her diary of 366 days of walking and writing.

In Urban Tumbleweed, Mullen uses her own variation on tanka, which is a Japanese form traditionally written in a single line with a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. When translated or written in English, the poems usually take line-breaks at the end of each syllabic unit. Mullen’s variation adheres to the 31-syllable limit but uses a three-line format. Throughout the book, a consistent layout of three poems per page promotes a sense of conversational tension across the gutter of every page-spread. An example from early in the collection of two poems directly facing each other:

Flowers of evergreen tree called bottlebrush,
not stiff bristles but velvety filaments,
leave fingers brushed with yellow pollen.

Flame tree, I must have missed your season
of fire. All I see are your ashy knees, your kindling
limbs, branches of extinguished blossoms.

The images of pollen-dusted fingers and ashy knees overlap subtly across the page, bringing into focus the conversation between human and nature. In other instances, poems contrast sharply with each other, as in this example of facing-page poems from near the middle of the book:

These colorful little stucco houses in
Sunkist Park don’t look so bright today
beneath this overcast sky of cloudy gray.

We’re jerked awake as helicopter blades beat air.
Light glares from above. An amplified shout
orders a fleeing suspect to halt.

Darkness in the middle of an ordinary day versus blinding brightness in the middle of the night sets up the scene for the two poems beneath each of them, which push and pull against each other with complaint, image, and specific observations.

A shivering dog left out in the rain,
dripping wet and cold as a miserable
werewolf, each raindrop a silver bullet.

My usual half-hour ride to work took
two hours today because the president
returned for another fundraiser.

Expressions of complaint and keenly observed natural detail define Japanese poetic diaries, including classics as Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road through the Provinces and Masaoka Shiki’s A Verse Record of My Peonies. Ki no Tsurayuki, an acknowledged master of the tanka form and one of the compilers of the first imperial anthology of tanka poetry, invented the Japanese poetic diary with The Tosa Diary (935 CE), a fictional account from a female protagonist’s point-of-view based on his own travel experience with a group returning to Kyoto from a distant province. The discomfort of travel by boat, unfavorable weather, and her recent loss of her young daughter set the scene for many poems of longing, hope and sorrow. Different characters compose and recite tanka poems, which Tsurayuki varies according to their roles and personalities in the story. The overlaps and contrasts seen in Mullen’s collection are abundant in this and other Japanese poetic diaries. A short excerpt from Earl Miner’s translation of The Tosa Diary:

The 4th

The captain said, “The condition of the wind and the sky is extremely unfavorable,” so that it has not been possible to put out the boat. All the same, neither the wind nor the waves rose so high. This captain really seems unable to tell anything about the weather. On the shore of this harbor there are many beautiful little shells and pebbles. For all their beauty, because they are just the sort of thing she would have liked to gather, they remind me of my little girl who has passed away. I made a poem.

Beating upon the shore,
O waves, I wish that you would bring
Shells of forgetfulness
That I might pick a shell of comfort
From the heavy thoughts of her I love.

When I spoke the poem, there was one with us who was unable to remain silent and made a poem on the sufferings of our voyage.

Shells of forgetfulness—
Not they the things I shall take up,
But pretty pebbles
To remind me of a precious child,
To be a souvenir of her I loved.

Mullen also shares a little of this collaborative effect of writing tanka:

After hearing that poem from my tanka diary,
you handed me a smooth and pleasing stone
shaped like a lopsided heart.

A kind friend sent me a hastily scribbled note,
inquiring about my “tanka dairy.”
I wrote back to say, “I’m milking it.”

Because her poetic has tussled directly with identity politics throughout her work, I was surprised to find so little obvious sign of it in her approach in this collection. From her poetic statement in American Women Poets in the 21st Century:

My desires as a poet are contradictory. I aspire to write poetry that would leave no insurmountable obstacle to comprehension and pleasure other than the ultimate limits of the reader’s interest and linguistic competence. However, I do not necessarily approach this goal by employing a beautiful, pure, simple, or accessible literary language, or by maintaining a clear, consistent, recognizable, or authentic voice in my work. At this point in my life, I am more interested in working with language per se than in developing or maintaining my own particular voice or style of writing, although I am aware that my poems may constitute a peculiar idiolect that can be identified as mine. I think of writing as a process that is synthetic rather than organic, artificial rather than natural, human rather than divine. My inclination is to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic, trivial, debased, or aberrant in the language I speak and write. I desire that my work appeal to an audience that is diverse and inclusive, at the same time that I wonder if human beings will ever learn how to be inclusive without repressing human diversity through cultural and linguistic imperialism.

The following consecutive poems veer toward explanation of Urban Tumbleweed’s method:

This curly cloud don’t grow straight or need
straightening. It takes rough wind to wreck the ‘do.
To some, when brushed and combed it still looks tangled.

You could say I am borrowing light
from the moon when I write my tanka
after reading translations of Princess Shikishi.

Toward the end of the collection, the cross-talk between tanka poems increases as does the musicality of the individual poems. These two poems across the middle of their pages speak of “head” versus “heart”:

At first, the dog walker mistook it for a horror-
movie prop—that severed head found in the park,
beneath the HOLLYWOOD sign.

The heart of a saint, stolen from a church
in Dublin. Thieves leave golden chalices,
costly art, choosing this most priceless relic.

Some of my favorites from the collection accomplish together the inclusiveness that Mullen strives for with a touch of humor, especially where nature turns around and examines the poet. In one a hummingbird momentarily mistakes the poet in her red dress for a giant flower. And much later in the collection:

“Who do you think I am? Tippi Hedren
in an Alfred Hitchcock film?” I wondered,
when that flying object pecked me on the head.

Another represents Mullen’s intent throughout the collection with this:

TUMBLEWEED, name in black letters
on the side of a bright yellow bus
delivering students to open gates of Windward School.

Mullen mentions in her introduction that she leads students on tanka walks in the botanical garden where she teaches. This glorious discipline of the mind and body moving through poetry is better experienced than explained, and Urban Tumbleweed offers a moving invitation.

DSC_0300

—A. Anupama

Final photograph of the New York Botanical Garden’s 2013 exhibition, Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden, including the drummers from Taiko Masala, and poetry displays co-presented by the Poetry Society of America and curated by Jane Hirshfield.

References:

Rankine, Claudia, and Juliana Spahr, eds. American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Miner, Earl. Japanese Poetic Diaries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.

———————————–

A. AnupamaA. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

Sep 122013
 

pinwheel book cover image

Pinwheel
Marni Ludwig
New Issues Press, 2013
63 pages, $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-936970-14-8

photo by Kristine MorfogenPinwheel, selected by Jean Valentine for the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize, is Marni Ludwig’s first full-length collection of poetry. “By what small margin we escape and look up” is Ludwig’s own synopsis of the collection, taken from the last line of her poem “A Reenactment.” Perhaps then it is fitting that I used this slim volume of poetry as my substitute for a sunhat in my poolside chair, simultaneously escaping the summer sun and looking up into this mysterious and effective darkness.  And perhaps it’s fortunate that I read Pinwheel in such pleasant environs—Ludwig’s evocation of trauma and addiction builds a powerful empathy. But as difficult as the terrain is, the poems tempt with hints and subversions, with intensifying repetitions and images, with intelligent sound play. The poem “Ceremony for Lying Completely Still” occurs early in the collection and sets the style of Ludwig’s poetic inquiry.

I say I had my accident,

after which two men ran
into the street while I counted

the number of steps it took
to get to where the door hurt.

All drawings are by thieves
with beautiful hands.

All silences are accurate.

I like a mask. I like music.
When I get sick I take my logic
with a spoon.

Did you notice if he was wearing gloves?
I’ve come to trust only questions.

At approximately 2 p.m. I was lying face-down
on the floor, asking nicely for an afternoon.

“Among the Living as Among the Dead,” also appears near the beginning of the collection, and this one reads like a lightly spun ars poetica while highlighting the poetic devices Ludwig uses. “How do you cure memory?” she asks, as though rhetorically. In this poetry, however, nothing is ever rhetorical, and the sound-play attempts to solve the question’s dilemma.

…Choreograph the sky
and the birds all turn to plastic bags

or else they smack the glass.
Say something less true
but with one true face,
like a statue. Say something else.

I sold the future for a second past,
told the snow my name
but it knew. White logic,
black spoon, scare tactic,

nodding out in a hospital bracelet
humming some third harmony
you shouldn’t sing
a kid. You shouldn’t sing.

You should step aside.
The birds hit back here,
where want is an event
visibly breathing in its sling.

You died twice in a lace dress,
in a folding chair,
you didn’t hear the door…

Ludwig’s repetitions act to intensify attention, especially as objects reappear in different poems, like characters do in different acts of a play. In the poem “Confectionary,” which appears at about the two-thirds mark in the collection, the birds and the act of dying twice share a poem again, where the question is “Who cares what flowers are for, /  selling jigsaw puzzles door-to-door?” Answer: “Life without relief. / Layer cake mystique / telling secrets to the tongue.” The repetitions intensify even more here by Ludwig’s sound-play and slant rhymes between and within the lines. Following closely: “Life without relief. / Layer cake mystique / telling secrets to the tongue” leads to the word “seek” hidden in the word “secrets,” but very slightly revealed in the heightened sound of these poetic lines. The last poem in the collection is titled “Secret.”

I sought out the repetitions of objects and phrases in the collection, as though they were clues in a mystery novel. But, unlike a mystery novel, this book invited flipping back and forth, looking for the lemons, lakes, canaries, mirrors, and spoons. The repetitions also represent the poet’s process of inquiry, where the images are tested against each other, or in different contexts, or from different points of view.

Ludwig has mentioned Joseph Cornell, famous for his surreal assemblages, as one of her inspirations. One example is the parallel inquiry between the two poems “Cigar Box” and “Refrigerator.” In “Refrigerator,” the box itself speaks: “I am liking you leaning in / for yogurt and morphine.” The sharp humor here is welcome relief from the powerful lyric voice that enacts most of this collection. Still, the brilliance is unabated, as this metaphoric Cornell box speaks to that voice of their shared experience:

—and the eggs hum
to the insect
in your chest—

One is frightened
and spins all night
in its carton.

In “Cigar Box,” the box remains a witness or silent accessory to the voice, which remarks: “In school I was good in death and math. / I practiced your name on yellow scratch paper.”

Another instance of repetitions and their effect on poetic inquiry are the many references to the moon and death. Each of these poems also takes a different twist or theme, as in “Ceremony for a Susie” (moon + death + a doll) and “Ferry” (moon + death + river stones). The poem “Parade,” in the center of the collection and marked off by blank flanking pages, contains four sections, the first and last of which participate in the moon-death arc. The first section begins

All the songs about the electric chair
sound like love songs. Weather

carries our Chevy to sea,
merrily, merrily, merrily.

A mariner with a stand-in moon
can’t quite stomach daybreak.

The reference here to a nursery rhyme set my poetic ears on its own delightful inquiry, as to whether the moon and the spoon would reconcile somewhere. The fourth section heightened my curiosity and seemed to encourage the idea with “blow a birthday / cake into orbit. Moon podium, dead satellite, / the physical feeling of falling back / into favor.” The suggestion is “Hey Diddle Diddle” and Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” as opposed to Walter de la Mare’s “Silver,” or maybe it’s some deft remix of the three childhood rhymes. The moon and spoon do end up together, trysting in the first stanza of “Arrow,” as the collection starts to accelerate toward its end.  The very next poem “Everything Is a Hat” declares

The moon,
a chipped tooth
confused
with the room
you died into.

Sleep,
like a black
kite soaring
from your wrist.

Sleep,
lying prone
in the family
position.

She leaves the moon/death motif behind at this point, and sleep takes over. Anesthetists and “muffled white sheep” inhabit the next poem, and the poem after that asks “Are you sleeping?” In “Mermaid Parade,”

I wish you slight misfortune
and a self-prescribed sleep disturbed
by dreams of immaterial lobsters.

Ludwig packs wonderment in the collection so that empathy for the difficult movements of pain and fear can take. In the first lines of “Petite” near the end of the collection, she writes, “The author wants you / to be interested in her nature.” The poem “Parallax” sums up this beautifully dark poetry collection of image and sound and herself.

I can’t swim in my condition.
Say the sand is discarded by the sea,
The flowers you loved were weeds.
It hurts to be right, a slight need satisfied.
The dead kick a ball around the yard.
The living remain wedded to their paths
Like rooks. Once I took a dandelion
For granted, with some sun.
It is possible to be sick with intuition.
I seem to be leaving, but still I am looking.

—A. Anupama

————————————–

A. Anupama

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

Aug 052013
 

A. Anupama

A. Anupama used to be on the NC masthead, but she decided to take time off from her onerous duties here to do necessary things such as care of her family, finish her MFA, and polish her book manuscript. Now she is back. Look for more of her poetry reviews, poems, essays, and translations on a more regular basis. She has already contributed a LOT! Please check out The A. Anupama NC Archive Page for the whole collection.

dg

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs at seranam.com.

Aug 022013
 

A. Anupama

Stunning poems from A. Anupama who also translates classic Tamil love poems (in Numéro Cinq: here and here): you can see the traditional Tamil markers (the lotus, Shiva, the hibiscus blossom, the poem to a lover). But A. Anupama has welded the old to the new, the new being an American vernacular, an easy, confident humour, and a lovely way with line breaks and rhyme (internal and slant rhymes). There is a surprise, a turn in every line. And, oh my goodness, the parrot — the parrot that disappears into the hibiscus in the first poem (the flower ends up in Minakshi’s hair) returns in a later poem to croak the words of Shiva: “Will destroy you all, all, all, all…” over its sleeping mistress. These are the poems of a mature, cosmopolitan poet, a poet who can mix genres and traditions and, instead of a muddle, create poems of surpassing impact and beauty.

dg

Listening

A red hibiscus flower in a tall hedge
attracted me with its color
and its long bright stamen,
extended in a sort of greeting.

I didn’t notice until I got closer
the green parrot sitting directly above it.
I stopped still, for fear of startling the bird.
It looked at me with one eye, then hopped
deftly into the flower,
where it disappeared.

I was startled.
I stood in front of the hedge
examining the branches behind the flower.
The parrot was gone, maybe flown out
from the back of the hedge, or disappeared
into higher branches, I reasoned.
Since it seemed to be done
with the flower, I picked the bloom
and put it in my hair behind my ear.

§

SPACE

When a man and a woman are very much in love with each other, and, not thinking of any pain or hurt, embrace each other as if they were entering into each other’s bodies either while the woman is sitting on the lap of the man, or in front of him, or on a bed, then it is called an embrace like a ‘mixture of milk and water.’

–from The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, tr. by Sir Richard Burton

Minakshi Meets Her Shiva

When her third breast disappeared, her blouse sagged in the middle.
It had been specially tailored for her with that extra point and fold.
It lay empty, and she covered it with the drape of her sari,
pulling it higher on her chest, as though with modesty, her downturned eyes
implying chaste shyness were just her observation of her newly balanced chest.

He looked up from his ascetic practice and saw her, with her chin pointing down.
He looked down, tilting his head with the crescent moon toward her, and felt
the eye in the center of his forehead fill.
Not with tears, with milk.
It overflowed, and an ocean
of milk was made
for us.

§

SPACE

Lotus Heart

I see small islands in oceans of clouds.

Kilauea is over there, some Rockies,
and the sphere turns. Old tectonics.

In several hours I see Kailasa
and the archipelago of Himalayas.
Let me down, I want to say.

Why am I exiled here, I ask instead.

I sit down again on the lotus seat,
letting the petals slowly close again.
I weep.

The tears run down my face
and into the cup of the flower.
Some nectar spills out in a little trickle
running down the stem.

Why was I suddenly brave?

§

SPACE

A Poem and Its Translation, Line by Line

The river is frozen today.
It doesn’t shimmer the way it did that day,
the end of the warm summer
when daybreak leapt on the ripples,
which this morning are limited to the creek,
water still running from under the streets.
Under, the water flows under the ice
and runs toward the sea.
The sea receives it, the warm under-water.
A still gleam of sunlight here,
but sunlight there shimmers still
on the never still, always churning ocean.

I am cold.
I miss you.
We were making our own warmth.
You saw my nipples for the first time.
We didn’t restrain ourselves.
We are still running from ourselves.
Our feelings are not frozen.
We will die too soon.
Something vast receives us.
I still love you.
It is a shining memory, our lovemaking.
I live.

§

SPACE

After Moon Salutations, Outdoors

Savasana
SPACE looking at stars and
SPACE SPACE in front of them, fireflies
occasionally a bat
SPACE across the clouds’ dark shapes
SPACE SPACE and the blue that is leaving.
The sky will be dark
SPACE soon and the moon
SPACE SPACE will have a blue halo.
I don’t close my eyes.
Bugs pass close
SPACE I can hear
SPACE SPACE and hear the droning of their families and families
in the trees.
SPACE The bell rings
SPACE SPACE more stars.

§

SPACE

Minakshi’s Parrot

She is sitting on a shelf in their bedroom
watching him with one eye.
Her head is turned
so her hooked beak shows its powerful profile.
“Kill you,” it squawks.
“Destroy you,” it croaks.
“Destroy, destroy you,” and Shiva looks up
from where he lies in bed.
The sheets just cover his shoulder
and he looks around the morning room,
remembering where he placed his keys
the night before and checking to make sure
the damn bird hasn’t moved them.
The parrot turns her head too
and then stretches out her neck,
letting the feathers on her back
restack themselves more neatly.
Her mistress is still asleep and
hasn’t moved, and she’s waiting
impatient
for the morning smile, calling her to her hand.
Shiva has closed his eyes, put his head back down,
and the parrot cries out now,
“Will destroy you all, all, all, all,”
while bobbing its head.
Shiva turns and opens all his eyes
and the bird vanishes into
dust, a light white ash coating the shelf
where the colorful feathers had gleamed before.
His glare closed again,
Shiva puts his head back down in the cool pillow
turning his face now to his wife.
Minakshi still sleeps
her face calm as a mango
and heavy.
He caresses her hair
and a new smile cradles her lips.
As her dream leaves her,
her eyes open and her hand rises
from under the sheets
to the air above their bed.
A whir of feathers beats a breeze on their faces
as the parrot alights on her middle finger.

— A. Anupama

——————-

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

Apr 102013
 

A. Anupama

 

Okay, these are love poems and not love poems. Deeply erotic, they are also metaphors for consciousness and its object, for the way the mind works in our dualistic universe. And make no mistake, we humans do experience our universe as dualistic; it’s not a matter of preference as some people think; it’s deeply inscribed in the language we use, in the concepts of self and mind and reality; and the dance between the self and what it thinks reality is can most effectively be described as something like love. The ancient Greeks, just as the ancient Tamils, knew this. A. Anupama offers here luscious translations of very old poems, poems from a sophisticated and civilized tradition, articulate, knowing and eloquent.

See also her earlier translations ” Translations of Classical Tamil Love Poetry, Essay and Poems” and the essay we published in this self-same issue, “Poetry’s Om.” For the majority of us who are brought up in one tradition, it is an immense privilege to be tendered an insight into something very different and profound.

dg

 §

Poem from the purple-flowered hills

Talaivi says—

Swaying vines sprawl under the honeybees’ hive.
A seated cripple curls his palm into a bowl beneath,
pointing and licking. Like mountain honey, my lover,
who doesn’t care, doesn’t love
but is sweet to my heart, which sees again and again.

Paranar
Kuruntokai, verse 60

 

Poem from the hillside woods

Talaivi says—

Pink as a partridge’s leg, the roots of the black mung bean plants,
which the deer trample and rob of their ripened pods.
In this harsh morning dew, I’ll find no cure.
No medicine for me other than my beloved’s chest.

Allur Nanmullai
Kuruntokai, verse 68

 

Poem from the bare desert

Talaivi says—

I will not tie a vow on my wrist
in the cracked caverns to win grace of the victorious goddess.
I won’t seek auguries, won’t stand watching for omens.
My friend, I won’t think of him, soul of my soul,
without whom I die each moment.
For him, strong enough to stay away and forget, I won’t.

Korran
Kuruntokai, verse 218

 

Poem from the blue lotus seashore

Talaivi says—

Thick buds unfold above the prop roots of the screwpines,
petals spreading like a perched pelican’s wing.
And in the front yard of this small house, all surrounded by water,
waves come and go. Even though
I give him up to his land far away,
he is near my heart in his cool country.

Ceyti Valluvan Peruncattan
Kuruntokai, verse 228

 

Poem from the blue lotus seashore

Talaivi says—

“I’m leaving, leaving,” he said. And I, thinking it
another bluff like before,
said “and stay away.”
Where is he now, who used to shelter me like a father?
Black-eyed white egrets could wade
in the large pond I’ve made in the space between my breasts.

Nannakaiyar
Kuruntokai, verse 325

 

Poem from the fertile fields and ornamental trees

Talaivan’s mistress says—

On cool ponds, colorful thick buds
tempt bees, which force open each stemmed mouth.
When I lie down with him, our two bodies
are close as the archer’s fingers on the bow.
But, if I clasp his strong chest, we become one body.

Villakaviralinar
Kuruntokai, verse 370
.

—Translated by A. Anupama
———————————-

A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York. She blogs about poetic inspiration at Seranam.

 

Nov 252011
 


.

Peering over the Precipice

A Review of Fall Higher by Dean Young

By A. Anupama

.

Fall Higher
By Dean Young
Copper Canyon Press
96 pages; $22
ISBN-13: 9781556593116
.
Trying not to be one to judge a book by its cover, I opened Fall Higher to skim the table of contents and immediately laughed. The title of the first poem in the collection is “Lucifer,” which struck me as the opposite direction I was expecting the collection to take, given its title. This first moment, its instant detonation of my assumptions, was a good preface to the rest of the experience of reading this newest collection by Dean Young.

This particular concoction of poetry manifesto, imaginative integration of tradition, and lyric exploration exposes Young’s passion for the art of poetry and his technical skill in this, his ninth collection. But amazingly and tellingly, just days before the book’s publication, Young underwent heart transplant surgery, which was a triumph for the poet after over ten years with a life-threatening degenerative heart condition. Many of the poems in Fall Higher peer over the precipice of that struggle. In the poem “Winged Purposes,” for example, he describes falling higher as “voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman / out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating / yet getting brighter.”

Young is among the very accomplished in contemporary American poetry: he currently serves as the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, and his collection Elegy on Toy Piano (2005) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been awarded Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, among other honors. Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955, and received his MFA from Indiana University. His poetics are self-described as being influenced by the New York School and the French surrealists, and in this most recent collection the influences come from many other corners of the poetic tradition.

Young’s engagement with the themes, devices, and specific works of the Western canon are rendered as a kind of dispersed ode running through the collection. He plays with rhyme in some poems, sometimes embedding them deep within the lines instead of at the ends.

Since the book begins with Lucifer, evoking the traitors of Dante’s Inferno, my first guess was that betrayal would be a major theme in Young’s lyric. This guess, at least, was right on. The poem “Elemental,” is one of those heartbreakers. Young leans toward the pantoum with characteristic four-line stanzas and a heavy dose of repetition, but within the lines and every which way. So the form is evoked for beauty, but the emotion has its willful way within the poem, refusing to acknowledge the form’s rules of repetition:

Walked into the burning woods and burning
walked into me. One day we’ll wade
into the sea and see. Your coming
won’t summarize your leaving

nor waking sleep, sleep our dreams,
fireflies over wet grass, ice
settling in an abandoned glass. Winter
can’t summarize that summer, your body

in my hands won’t summarized be
by your body far from me.
Already you’re in the air
and my hands are nowhere,

my dreams mostly water.
This end won’t summarize our forever.
Some things can be fixed by fire,
some not. Dearheart, already we’re air.

In the poem “Madrigal” Young uses end-rhymed lines throughout, saying

You feel like something fallen from its shelf,
a yo-yo with a busted string, chipped ceramic elf
because all you can think about is not there,
the eyes not there, not there’s hair.

Here, the poem cops an attitude of disregard for contemporary poetry’s aversion to rhyme. But, at the end of the poem, Young pulls the form away and leaves us the unrhymed fragment “detonating with laughter.”

With the poem “Non-Apologia” Young makes a deliberate gesture of defying the craft of poetry by writing a poem about it. He begins “Maybe poetry is all just artifice, / devices, hoax, blood only there / to rhyme with mud.” He goes on to defend the way that meaning and symbol keep escaping back into words, he defends metaphor and the way that poetry offers delight. He ends by saying “Soon shadows are all that’s left, / that’s why poetry is about death.” He’s broken the secret rule about not saying what poetry is about. He’s broken the standard rule of creative writing instructors: “show, don’t tell.” The arc of contradictoriness instead of conclusions, however, makes the poet’s point by showing the way.

In the poem “The Decoration Committee” from the collection Strike Anywhere, Young has this to say about lyric poetry:

I know of no studies concerning and in how many cases
the lyric poem eases heartache by initiating 1.
the beloved’s return, the door flies open,
the bra unstrapped, the moose dappled
with dew and/or 2. a getting-over-it
happiness at just having written/read the poem
which is about misery in the old way
but also in a new way and then noticing
the pretty barmaid…

Young is tracking something more than relief from heartache in his lyric. The odes in Fall Higher have a lyric sensibility in them, especially “Infinitive Ode,” but Young seems to use these poems to explore the disjunctions in the human experience of time and space. “Irrevocable Ode” presents a litany of images of moments that can’t be repaired or taken back and the resulting experience of regret. The poem concludes lyrically, referring to careless betrayers, “maybe you’ll search and petition / and wander until you’re heard from no more.” “Omen Ode” gives the opposite perspective of everything connected: “Maybe a million strings connect / tomorrow to now.” In “Infinitive Ode” the cleverness of using the infinitive itself as the object of praise is immediately tempered by the dark superimposition of imagery: “To see the pile of skulls Cezanne sketched / as practice for his painting of hovering peaches” and “To see in the pantomime of invalids / the corps de ballet.” Theories break down, and the end of the poem illuminates the inquiry:

To preserve the dream under the tongue
all day, not garbling a word. To wash
with cold water. All the way to the ground
the sky comes, just lying down we’re flying.

In Young’s recent book on the craft of poetry, The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf Press, 2011), he writes, “The poet is like one of those cartoon characters who has stepped off the cliff only to remain suspended. But while the cartoon character’s realization of his irrational predicament brings about its fall, for the poet imagination sustains this reckless position over the abyss; it is what extends the view. As readers, we are charmed by the postponement of our plummeting even as we are made aware of its inevitability.” Fall Higher does exactly this, vastly opening up the view.

–A. Anupama

Oct 112011
 

The Perplexing Other

A Review of Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men

by A. Anupama

 

The Book of Men
By Dorianne Laux
W. W. Norton
96 pages, $24.95
ISBN 978-0-393-07955-5

“It was the title. I admit, I thought that maybe Dorianne Laux was giving us the answer key right here in her new collection of poetry, The Book of Men. I ran to get a copy. Well, I didn’t actually. I downloaded mine on a reading tablet, I admit, which I don’t like to do with poetry books, but I was in a hurry to take a look. Luckily, Laux’s book isn’t the sort of visual poetry that loses some of its elegance in the tablet. Even so, I dislike the way mine breaks a poem on the screen or shifts to landscape when I shift the tablet to the side, as when I lie on the couch to read. It is different, something to get used to, and it reveals my own expectations of the experience of reading as I adjust settings so that it annoys me less, or contemplate upgrading to a newer model. It just added to my experience of Laux’s theme—the struggle to read our perplexing others, to reveal to ourselves our expectations of love and life.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this wasn’t the “answers” book I had imagined, but rather a place for Laux’s questions to flourish, seeding our own questionings. Some of the poems are personal ones, about past lovers and friends. She also picks out a few of the “gods” of the Sixties, men whose art defined her generation: Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Mick Jagger. She takes her attention to them, with questions, requests, awe, and dismay. Her personal reactions and observations are rendered with humor and vulnerable honesty.

In the poem titled “Bob Dylan,” the epigraph is taken from his song “Father of Night,” which is a stark contrast to Laux’s poem. Dylan’s song lyrics are almost hymn-like in their tone of reverence to the Father. Laux’s poem’s Father is asleep on a bench somewhere; he is someone who has abandoned the speaker of the poem, a speaker who says things like “I knew there was no mercy but me.” The image of the ant in the middle of the poem is Laux’s portrait of Dylan:

one, without a leg, limped
in circles, sent two front legs out to stroke
a crooked antenna, a gesture
that looked to me like prayer. I knew
it wasn’t true.

Her doubt sends her “on with my empty plate, / like everyone else, calling, calling.” I considered too, that Laux might have meant the poem to be read as a persona poem, in which case, the ant would be one of the regular folks of Dylan’s songs, and the old man is the Father of that song, but changed into a vagrant “his sack of clothes beneath his matted head.” What a change from the Father in the Dylan song, who builds rainbows, teaches birds to fly. This one is “twitching in dream. One hand clutching / the bald earth, the other waving me down.” It is strange and ambiguous. I wondered when I read this–is this a good thing?  The birds in this poem are not flying. The ants are not praying. But the speaker has gotten down on knees and has noticed the dreaming old man’s waving, beckoning.

The question “is this a good thing?” came up again for me at the end of the poem “The Beatles.” Laux lambasts them with her sarcastic hypothesizing on why the band broke up. Was it love? Was it greed? Was it a damaged sense of reality? Laux’s last stanza suggests an answer:

Maybe they arrived
at a place where nothing seemed real. A field
bigger than love or greed or jealousy.
An open space
where nothing is enough.

If nothing itself could be enough, that’s the answer isn’t it? If nothing is enough, then desire itself is frustrated to the point of annihilating itself—isn’t that a good thing? Or, is desire the only eternal thing for our cultural gods who, by singing from the heart, have gorged themselves with wealth and fame by creating insatiable desire—Beatlemania and the reverence of fans even today? The multiplicity of meanings in Laux’s one-line punch is remarkable for the cascade of new questions it sets off. I found myself examining the post-Beatles activities of its members, mulling over the possibilities of what the answer could be. It brought me up short at the present, with McCartney writing a romantic opera for the New York City Ballet and Starr’s official website displaying a photo of him in a gesture of two fingers up for peace and love. I couldn’t really place a value on the merits or sincerity of these projects. And that seems to be Laux’s brilliant point. Her sarcastic tone evaporates into uncertainty, seeding questions.

The poem “Men” is a deliberately crafted statement, but a statement with subtle lies in it. So the questioning starts again. Laux begins with

It’s tough being a guy, having to be gruff
and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh
it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff

Every line of the poem ends in the “f” sound, except the penultimate line.

Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different
from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

The word “different” frustrates the pattern of the poem, emphasizing its presence in a way that sets off questions again. There is this doubt. If one were to reverse all the adjectives and metaphors in this poem to make it “easy being a girl,” would the poem say the same thing? And what about the word “lover” in the middle of that same penultimate line? Every other word in the line can only be used to refer to men. The placement makes “they are different” seem ever so slightly like a lie. The final image stating that men and women only seem alike when in suffering or solitude seems ambiguous after that. The question again–is that a good thing?

Interestingly, in the second section of the book, Laux questions her mother, her mother’s friend, her niece, a pregnant mare, Cher, a female neighbor, a female friend, Emily Dickinson–a lot of people who are not men! And there’s a poem about a dog howling at the moon who “has one blind eye, the other one’s looking up.” A poem about gardening, “pulling stones like tumors up,” and another about gold, “Color of JCPenney’s jewelry, trinket / in a Cracker Jack box…” Laux’s collection makes a meandering progress from questioning the gods, to questioning her companions, to questioning the animals and the inanimate objects in our lives. She arrives at the last poem, which is a meditation on trees overlooking water, essentially a nature poem. Here she compacts the questions, so elegantly, in the stark comparison between the pine tree leaning from a cliff over the ocean and the “blossoming cherry growing up over / the shed’s flat roof,” dropping petals into a pond. In this poem, she embraces the passion and desire in human experience at the beginning, and at the end gives us a haunting image of our mortality:

and a few bright petals settle
onto the black pond. They float only a moment
before the moon-colored carp finds them
with his hairy ancient lips, and one by one
carries them down.

The Book of Men as a whole does this, and this final poem mirrors the brilliant movement of the collection from its beginning to end.

Charles Harper Webb’s article about Laux’s poetry in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle (October/November 2011) focuses of the power of her work. Webb offers some insight into technical elements in her poems, but he concludes that the success of her poetry comes from her willingness to allow her personality to blaze strongly in a way that is accessible to the typical reader. The result is that the enduring quality of human emotions illuminates her poetry. I agree, and I would add that she has let her wisdom blaze here in The Book of Men with her willingness to enter into her own questions unwaveringly.

—A. Anupama

Sep 122011
 

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A. Anupama contributes five poems translated from the anthology of classical Tamil poems known as the Kuruntokai (pro-nounced Kurundohay), gorgeously symbolic love poems that work within a strict formal structure. Strange and beautiful they are, a revelation of an ancient culture and tradition to which we have as a guide, also, a lovely essay by the translator who uses, yes, Ludwig Wittgenstein as an entry point into her own considerable cultural heritage. The essay is a delight, not the least because it lays bare some of the structures of the poems and thus does what good criticism should always do–help us read more deeply.

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On Translating from Kuruntokai

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Wittgenstein wrote “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This wasn’t exactly the reason I set about learning and translating Tamil, the language of my south Indian heritage, but I admit that I liked the idea of pushing back the limits.  In my work of distilling English in my poetry, I had begun to notice my many refusals to use foreign words and syntactic differences, which often correspond to my thoughts stemming from Indian philosophy. I turned to learning my mother tongue and attempting translations with the hope of finding a door through which I might reconcile these two movements in my own writing.

I didn’t have to look hard to find a compelling doorway. A.K. Ramanujan’s translations of Kuruntokai, an anthology of love poems from the Cankam era of Tamil poetry, illuminate the beauty of both languages. Reading this work was not only an opportunity for me to walk into Tamil with a brilliant guide, it represented a chance to roam in the genius of a community of poets and scholars in ancient India.

Cankam (pronounced “Sangam”) means community, and the poems in Kuruntokai are a formal genre called akam written by many different poets based on a common poetic language of five landscapes, with corresponding symbolism in the specific plants, animals, bodies of water, occupations, seasons, and more in each. These poems revolve around a love affair with a cast of five speakers: the heroine (in Tamil, talaivi) and hero (talaivan), her friend, her mother, and his mistress.  Each poem is a short monologue or half of a dialogue, part of an unfolding drama, but is self-contained, a glistening snapshot of a particular moment.

The simplicity of the verses in the translations is deceptive. I was amazed to find allusions and symmetry working together to create a trapdoor in each poem. As I worked on my own translations from the original Tamil, I found poetic devices like parallel feet in symmetric opposition representing the dichotomy of the senses and the mind. An example of this is verse 237, where the hero speaks about his heart setting out boldly to embrace his lover at the start of the second line of the poem and then speaks of his mind as hardly daring to think at the end of line 7. These are set symmetrically around the center of the poem: the image of the dark ocean and the words referring to the obstacle between the two lovers. Symmetry presents a different meaning from the literal sense of the hero’s monologue, in which it is the distance and the forests that are the obstacles. The symmetry suggests more than the literal sense of the words, creating a superimposition of meanings so that the reader’s understanding can shift away from the expected storyline, the bold heart and distracted mind, and see something more. Another set of parallels occurs even closer to the center of this poem, amplifying the effect: the image of arms clasping is set opposite the word for circling or echoing. In both cases, the references are ambiguous. The first one suggests that the heart, lacking arms, can’t embrace his lover. The other one could refer to the waves of the ocean or to the deadly tigers. The effect demonstrates the futility of trying to comprehend this sort of circling inward with one’s head-on logic. (I’m grateful, or I might have spent a lot more time trying to figure out the Tamil metrics looking for more clues.)

Sometimes the image or word in the geometric center of the poem is a hinge point or a clue. In verse 36, the central foot of the poem is about the inseparable intimacy of the two lovers. Interestingly, this word is a partial rhyme for mÀõai and for the usual Tamil word for elephant, which is not used in this poem. The effect here is that the conscious statement of the heroine is contradicted by the very way she is making her statement. The elephant is in the room, even though she denies it by her words. On another level, the deeper intelligence, sleeping under the surface, is the point here.

Sometimes the poem seems to flow backwards, with images at the beginning of the poem only making sense at the end. Throwing the reader back to the beginning of the poem seems to be one of the reasons for this device, as in verse 46. The original doesn’t begin with any mention of the lover. Ramanujan reordered this poem in his translation (and I followed him in mine) so that the heroine’s suggestion wouldn’t be lost in the poem in English. The original poem unfolds from the opening image of the wings like faded waterlilies and ends with the statement that her lover has left for another land. When the reader skips back to the beginning, automatically because of the surprise of the revelation at the end, the image of those limp brown wings suggests that no one is really going anywhere. This device superimposes that suggestion over the heroine’s suggestion that her lover will return to her, as the sparrows return to their nests, because he can’t escape the loneliness of life without her. This sort of set up, with no escape through the ends of the poem, forces the reader to circumambulate the center of the poem, where the image of the sparrows playing in the dust of dried cow dung is the trapdoor’s hinge. In traditional Indian villages, dried cow dung is used as fuel.

The mysteriousness of these love poems is even more striking because they were compiled during the legendary gatherings of Tamil poets and scholars roughly a thousand years ago. I wondered, why love poems? Why landscapes and flowers? I went to philosophy texts for those answers. (Thanks Wittgenstein!) The commentary in Edwin F. Bryant’s translation of The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali explains: “The senses can grasp only sense objects, but not vice versa; the mind can perceive the senses, but not vice versa; and the purusa [soul] can perceive the mind, but not vice versa.” So one conclusion is that the love poetry of Kuruntokai and the other akam poems of the Cankam era mean to stand firmly among the sense objects of the world and point absolutely in the direction of the soul, transcending the limits of this world.

A.K. Ramanujan’s books Poems of Love and War and The Interior Landscape offer a fascinating discussion of Tamil akam poetry. I also consulted Robert Butler’s translation, which includes informative footnotes on the language, flora and fauna, and traditional commentaries on the verses. I’m grateful to B. Jeyaganesh and my mother, who offered literal translations and discussion. None of us are scholars on these poems or on ancient Tamil, so I can only claim that these translations are my attempt to make guideposts, in contemporary American poetry-ese, pointing to the sublime trapdoors embedded in these poems. These guideposts have helped me to find my own poems, too, by inspiring a sequence based on the landscapes and poetic devices of akam poetry. Pushing away the limits of my language has expanded my world a bit; thanks, Wittgenstein.

—A. Anupama

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Translations from Kuruntokai, Ancient Indian Love Poetry

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Poem from the purple-flowered hills

Talaivi says to her friend—

He swore “my heart is true.
I’ll never leave you.”

My lover from the hills,
where the manai creepers
sometimes mount the shoulders of elephants
asleep among the boulders,
promised this on that day
when he embraced my shoulders, making love to me.

Why cry, my dear friend?

Paranar
Kuruntokai, verse 36

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Poem from the fertile fields and fragrant trees

Talaivi says—

Don’t you think they have sparrows
wherever he has gone, with wings like faded water lilies,
bathing in the dung dust in the village streets
before pecking grain from the yards
and returning to their chicks in the eaves,
common as evening loneliness?

Mamalatan
Kuruntokai, verse 46

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Poem from the jasmine-filled woods

Talaivi says—

The rains have come and gone.
The millet grew and now is stubble
nibbled by stags while jasmine blossoms flourish
alongside, their buds unfolding to show white petals
like a wildcat’s smile.
Evening comes, scented with jasmine
bringing bees to the buds,
but see, he hasn’t come,
he who left for other riches.

Okkur Macatti
Kuruntokai, verse 220

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Poem from the blue lotus seashore

Talaivi says to her friend—

My heart aches, my heart aches!
My eyelids burn from holding back these hot tears.
My love, who alone comforts me, is called unworthy
by even the moon. My heart aches.

Kamancer Kulattar
Kuruntokai, verse 4

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Poem from the desert road

Talaivan says—

Fearlessly, my heart has departed
to embrace my beloved.
If its arms are too slack to hold her
what use is it?
The distances between us stretch long.
Must I think of the many forests
where deadly tigers rise up roaring
like the waves of the dark ocean
standing between us? I don’t dare.

Allur Nanmulla
Kuruntokai, verse 237

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—Translated by A. Anupama

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A. Anupama holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her career has spanned molecular biology, legal publishing, and orthopedic surgery textbooks in her search for beauty, truth, and the marrow of life. Her book Kali Sutra: Poems was a semi-finalist for Tupelo Press’s 2011 First or Second Book of Poetry Award. She lives in Nyack, New York.