Stars: Poem — David Helwig

Oct 242010
 
For your edification and delight (while I do packets), here is a lovely new poem by David Helwig (um, who apparently has a new dog). I have introduced David before on Numéro Cinq so I won’t go on about our long friendship, his incredibly prolific career, his honours and acclaim. He has already published a translation of Chekhov’s story “About Love” and “La Rentrée,” a poem, on these pages.
dg

 

Stars

By David Helwig



The puppy stares through the log corral at the tall
companionable horses ambling to the fence;
the hair of her ruff bristles, fear of these giants
stirring her, though the abrupt newness holds her gaze.

Her brain all imbrued with the complex perspectives
of perfumery and stench, she studies these odd
grand beings who interrupt our evening walk
while the air cools and the blazing October sun

sets beyond the toy farm on the empty road
of the toy village, time falling away from us
over the old graveyard as the black dog watches
with careful eyes these creature of the distances,

attendant to night’s stubborn bestial wisdom,
the galactic white blaze on her chest retracing
a sign out of some far genetic wilderness;
she is hearing wild dogs in the whine of the wind.

We read the graves, small histories inscribed on stone.
What more is to be said about them, the lost ones,
who are recalled tonight while all-stars-that-are come
in white fire to the observers? Morning will bring

starfish, oysters on the beach, the glitter of light,
in the house of love, new confusions of friendship.
The horses now stand sleeping under this tall sky,
the dog dreaming fear beneath the bright evening star.

—David Helwig

After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat: Poem — Jacob Glover

Oct 192010
 



After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat

By Jacob Glover

 

Being is not naught, but will be.
I saw it in a rat on a driveway
A few days into fall,
A rat, what had been a rat, but
Now was not naught, but
Something not being.
The rat had had being but now it
Had cold and stiff darkness
On a driveway a few days into fall.
Surrounded by Being, in Being,
That which was rat, was no longer being.
Time was, being was in that Rat.
Time was, Being was that rat, as that rat
Was being.
But now, Being is not naught, it is gone,
From this rat, anyway, so it might as well be.

A Diet Plan That Works: Poem — Nickole Brown

Oct 112010
 

CockatooheadshotHere is a poem by the prolific and amazingly energetic (I tried to count the number of jobs and teaching gigs she has but didn’t have enough fingers) Nickole Brown. Nickole is a Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate in fiction (I have been reminded that, in fact, she was in a workshop with me, yea, these many years ago). As a student and a graduate assistant, Nickole was a graceful, kindly presence on campus. I do recall her brightening my day now and then in the lunch line at Dewey. She worked for Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s made her way in publishing, teaching and as a woman-of-letters. She is determined, focused and persistent, qualities I admire. And it’s a great pleasure, after all these years, to still be in touch and to publish her here.

dg

A Diet Plan That Works

By Nickole Brown

 

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
—Virginia Woolf



Do not buy like the nouveau riche: tin of black
caviar, sad plate of parrot fish,
marbled pink slab of exotic
meat served with expensive
and appropriately bitter
wine.  Fill your cart instead with
things to make you feel rich: the oiled flesh
of artichoke hearts, the slippery vowels
of asparagus and arugula and asiago,
bread with an uneven
leaven of holes.  Buy things
still teeming, invisible cultures
swimming in a cup, taut colors
soaked in sun so far from this winter
your palms ache with the bright hot
light of oranges. Display the carrots
with their full peacock
greens on the counter next to cheese
that glistens with a softness of slow
time. This is what you’ve worked for, leaving
behind those dim nights
nuked with infomercials, the florescent
maraschino, the milky dressing’s cheap blue
water. Let go a past of unwieldy portions,
perishables sealed in boxes and cans,
all those puffed, sugared, colored
mornings that tore
your mouth to shreds.

This is what you always wanted: the cool
fruit held to your face,
its sweetness given
to your hunger. Cherish it,
thank it, let your teeth
break the skin with a sound
that reminds you of weeds
pulled from the garden, a pop
that sounds like one sound
but is in fact made of many,
each white strand snapped
from the dark
a sound of letting go, a hundred letting
go’s, a sound of a thing
dying under your grip, yes,
but not unlike the sound
made by that stubborn
horse who refused the trail
for a moment to lean his bridled
head down to this earth to stop,
to chew.

—By Nickole Brown

 

Four Approximations of Horace: From the Odes — Steven Heighton

Oct 062010
 

author-u6-a53Herewith a sequence of poems from Steven Heighton‘s book Patient Frame. Numéro Cinq readers will (or may not) recall Steven from two earlier appearances on these pages (here and here). He is an old friend, a hurting hockey player, father of a daughter, and he published a book of poems and a novel this year, which is more than I have (probably you, too). He sent me “A Strange Fashion horaceof Forsaking…” months ago for fun and it’s been biting at the back of my brain ever since, not the least because he refashions Horace after Thomas Wyatt, one of my favourite poets. I leave it to Steven to introduce Horace and these translations—which he prefers to call “approximations”—in his own words.

dg

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Horace, or Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was a Roman poet. During his lifetime (65 BCE – 8 BCE) he served briefly as a military officer, as a functionary in the Roman treasury, and as a writer, producing satires, epodes, epistles, literary criticism, and poems. He was a highly versatile poet, both formally and thematically; his Odes comprise work ranging from personal lyrics to moralistic verse, and from private, occasional poems to public, ceremonial verse. Horace’s words survive not only in Classics departments and in translation (David Ferry’s The Odes of Horace is deservedly respected and widely read), but in common parlance: the phrase carpe diem ­comes from one of his poems.

In approaching these four odes of Horace I’ve stuck with my usual practice as an amateur translator, giving myself the freedom to make each approximation as “free” or as “faithful” as the original inspires me to be. So “Pyrrha” sticks close to the untitled original in its structure, imagery and level of diction, while “Chloe” has morphed from an unrhymed twelve line poem into a short-lined sonnet. “A Strange Fashion of Forsaking” is inflected and re-gendered by way of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem “They Flee from Me”, while “Noon on Earth!” has gone from a linguistically formal eight lines to a highly colloquial seventeen.

Robert Kroetsch once observed that every poem is a failed translation. What a translation can’t afford to be is a failed poem—or at least an uninteresting one. My aim in approximating a poem that I love is, of course, to make a compelling counterpart in English—something to entertain you, startle you, pry you open—while in the process entertaining myself: sitting up, by candlelight, with dictionaries and a glass of Douro red, the house silent, even the bats in our walls asleep; reciting the original lines aloud, in some cases two thousand years after their conception; weighing how best to re-conceive those cadences in English; serving as a kind of stenographer to the dead, a medium at a prosodic séance, an avid collaborator, an apprentice always learning from the work. And for me, the most mysterious, engrossing work lies in finding a way into old or ancient poems and making them young again. Hence Horace.

I’ll conclude by quoting the middle section of a poem I translated several years ago—a poem by the contemporary Italian writer Valerio Magrelli, which suggests some of the addictive bustle and exertion of the translator’s work. (The unquoted opening lines introduce the metaphor of the translator as a one-man or –woman moving company.)

I too move something—words—
to a new building, words
not mine, setting hands to things
I don’t quite know, not quite
comprehending what I move.
Myself I move—translate
pasts to presents, to presence, that
travels sealed up, packed in pages
or in crates . . .

The final unpacking, of course, is the task of the reader.

—SH, Kingston, Ontario

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Pyrra (i:5)

What slender elegant youth, perfumed
among roses, is urging himself on you,
Pyrrha, in the fragrant grotto? Have you
bound your yellow hair so gracefully

for him? How many times he’ll weep because
faith is fickle, as the gods are, how often
will the black, sea-disquieting winds
astonish him, although for now

credulous, grasping at fool’s gold, he enjoys you,
hopes you’ll always be calm water, always
this easy to love. Unconscious of the wind’s wiles
he’s helpless, still tempted

by your gleaming seas. But high on the temple wall
I’ve set this votive tablet, and in thanks
to the god for rescue have hung
my sea-drenched mantle there.


Chloe ( i, 23)

You flee from me, Chloe, a young deer
urgently in search of mother, lost
in lonely, high forests
tremulous with fear

at the mountain’s slimmest breeze, or
springtime’s delicate revealing
of leaves, or a leafgreen lizard’s spring
from thickets. (What terrors seize

the fawn then!). But Chloe, I’m neither
a tiger nor a lion, intent
on savage appetites, or upon

causing you any pain. Forget
looking back for your mother
now, woman:
it’s time to love a man.



“A Strange Fashion of Forsaking . . .”
(i, 25: via Thomas Wyatt)

The wilder girls hardly bother anymore
to rattle your shuttered window with fists, or
pitch stones, shatter your dreamfree sleep, while your door,
once oiled and swinging,

nimbly hinged, hangs dead with rust. Less and less
you wake now to ex-lovers crying, “Thomas,
you bastard, how can you sleep?—I’m dying for us
to do it again.”

Seems to me your turn’s long overdue—solo
nightshift when, like some codger in a cul-
de-sac, you’ll moan for all the women (scornful
now) who one time sought you.

The cold will be what finds you then—northeasters
whining down in the gloom of the moon, and lust
in riddled guts twisting you like a stud in must
who has to stand watching

his old mares mounted. You’ll know then, the desire
of girls is for greener goods—such dry sticks
and wiltwood, blown only by the cold, they just figure
who has the time for.

.

Noon on Earth!
(starting from i, 11)

Why trouble wondering how long
breath will last, how long your eyes
will still bask in the heavenshed
lucence of noon on earth. Horoscopes,
palmistry, the séance gild pockets
but confide nothing sure. We have to take it—
the future’s shrugged whatever, that weather
of uncertainty—unknowing whether gods
will grant us the grey of further
winters that’ll churn the sea until the sea
gnaws, noses into the littoral
of our lives, eroding whatever is
so far unclaimed.
Enough.
Better open the red, pitch the cork, toast
our moment—tomorrow’s an idle
nevering, ghost of a god
unworth such wasted faith.

—Translated by Steven Heighton

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Steven Heighton, born in 1961, is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Afterlands. His poetry and fiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the London Review of Books, Poetry (Chicago), Europe, Tin House, Agni, The Independent, the Walrus, and Best English Stories. His work has been widely translated, has received a number of prizes, and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.

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“Hasbrouck and the Rose,” a Poem to Meditate Upon

Sep 162010
 

Hasbrouck and the Rose

Hasbrouck was there and so were Bill
And Smollet Smith the poet, and Ames was there.
After his thirteenth drink, the burning Smith,
Raising his fourteenth trembling in the air,
Said, ‘Drink with me, Bill, drink up to the Rose.’
But Hasbrouck laughed like old men in a myth,
Inquiring, ‘Smollet, are you drunk? What rose?’
And Smollet said, ‘I drunk? It may be so;
Which comes from brooding on the flower, the flower
I mean toward which mad hour by hour
I travel brokenly; and I shall know,
With Hermes and the alchemists—but, hell,
What use is it talking that way to you?
Hard-boiled, unbroken egg, what can you care
For the enfolded passion of the Rose?’
Then Hasbrouck’s voice rang like an icy bell:
‘Arcane romantic flower, meaning what?
Do you know what it meant? Do I?
We do not know.
Unfolding pungent Rose, the glowing bath
Of ecstasy and clear forgetfulness;
Closing and secret bud one might achieve
By long debauchery—
Except that I have eaten it, and so
There is no call for further lunacy.
In Springfield, Massachusetts, I devoured
The mystic, the improbable, the Rose.
For two nights and a day, rose and rosette
And petal after petal and the heart,
I had my banquet by the beams
Of four electric stars which shone
Weakly into my room, for there,
Drowning their light and gleaming at my side,
Was the incarnate star
Whose body bore the stigma of the Rose.
And that is all I know about the flower;
I have eaten it—it has disappeared.
There is no Rose.’

Young Smollet Smith let fall his glass; he said,
‘O Jesus, Hasbrouck, am I drunk or dead?’

By Phelps Putnam, from The Oxford Book of American Verse, Oxford University Press, New York (third printing, 1952).

DG found this poem, one of his favourites, at a lovely blog site called Recently Banned Literature by William Michaelian.

Disperspective: Poem — William Hathaway

Sep 092010
 

William “Kit” Hathaway poem (see links at the bottom of the post for two other poems published on Numéro Cinq plus other Hathaway web presences) is an acute and generous reader. When I asked him for a new poem, he wrote back: “Here’s a poem that seems to fit with the fine Balgach poem, though I wrote it thinking about a Tony Hoagland essay in Poetry before I read ‘Fighting.'”

Just to add a little perspective, here is a paragraph excerpted from Kit’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

…he mixes tragedy and comedy to satirize and criticize himself, other poets, academia, and various other targets. This blending of tones and modes, along with his recent change to a more serious, wide-ranging satire, make him distinctive and may account for his high standing among his fellow poets, such as Albert Goldbarth and Norman Dubie, who have highly praised Looking into the Heart of Light (1988), with Dubie calling him “a great American poet.”

DISPERSPECTIVE

By William Hathaway

Yes, even for you
who weren’t here yet before
the traffic became too much, too always
and too loud to think, it is
what it is, even so. A saying you say
often that says no matter
what’s said nothing can change
what so relentlessly changes
and so the less said the better,
flipping open your phone,
beeping your car to life,
easing into the ceaseless rush.

A jackknife nests
in my pocket I’ve lost & found
so often for so long I’ve lost the story
of my feeling for it. When it’s lost,
nestled unbeknownst to me
in the crack of a dusty couch, is it
not lost until I miss it? No.
Yes, I’m always saying no
to you now. Look, I’ve found no
you’ll say when you listen.

There’s nothing to say
is the only thing left to say, you say.
So many amusing ways
to say this just by saying something
else before you finish saying
what you were saying. When night
falls and the road becomes
a gushing stream of light, out
creep dark creatures to eat
the dead swept up on the shores
of that river. Even without light
their eyes would blaze out
from black shapes into blackness.

— William Hathaway

See also “Bufflehead Dawn,” “Martin Points,” “Bitterness,” “Betrayal,” “The Poetry Career,” “Today.”

Author Interview with Adam Tavel in Poets’ Quarterly

Fighting: Poem — Martin Balgach

Sep 072010
 



Here’s a poem by Martin Balgach. He sent me a batch, but it was difficult to choose. Martin and DG met in 2008 during the Vermont College of Fine Arts Slovenia residency. Martin was a student in DG’s workshop, a mixed workshop with poets, fiction writers and nonfiction writers and no end of exuberant discourse and inter-genre translation. Martin is a great traveling companion, full of appreciation, astonishment and gentle good humour. He bought DG coffee the day the ATM ate his card in Croatia–upon request DG can supply you with a photo of the ATM machine. Martin has since graduated, lives in Colorado, and writes lovely poems. The photos DG took in Slovenia and Croatia.

dg

Fighting

By Martin Balgach



In the battle for emotional supremacy
I’ve challenged the wind to a duel
but I’m carrying an idea instead of a gun

Now I know the wind is tough and cold
and not in that romantic
this is invigorating kind of cold
but more that middle-aged guy
in baggy black dungarees
drinking alone at a dive bar cold

It’s that tough in your gut
like a memory-you-want-to-forget
cold, it’s the kind of cold
that spits in your lungs
and tugs at your heart like a kid
tugging on the tail of a pet
but the pet is whimpering
because the game went too far

And I know why the motion
of each new morning keeps teasing us—
The problem is heaven—
We have the idea of more so we want more

I’ve been considering this for days
I’ve branded the hindquarter of my brain
with the melancholy symbol of a neon duck
fucking itself with a crucifix

Yeah, there are a thousand funny things to say
but the real things get caught in my throat like paste

Either way, tomorrow will be a new massacre
I’ll be losing the fight, staring at the sky

The cosmos will look like an old string of Christmas lights,
the kind that all go out when one bulb breaks
But it won’t be Christmas as the wind keeps kicking

—Martin Balgach

 

Becoming a Writer: Poem — Dave Margoshes

Jun 252010
 

On Emma Lake



This is a poem by my friend Dave Margoshes, also a short story writer (also someone I could depend on for Best Canadian Stories in the decade of my editorship). Dave lives in Saskatchewan which is a province I used to visit a lot–those lovely summer residencies at Fort San (a retired tuberculosis hospital turned into a summer arts centre–some details from the place made it into a story of mine called “A Piece of the True Cross”) in the beautiful Qu’Appelle Valley. Every morning we were awakened by the call of bag pipes wafting over the dry hills. But he knows Vermont well, having been a guest at the Vermont Studio Center.


Author’s Note:

“Becoming a writer” is one of the poems in my collection The Horse Knows the Way, which came out last fall (from Buschek Books in Ottawa). The poem was sparked by something I read or heard – I thought by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – to the effect that “Everything I needed as a writer I had acquired by the time I was six.” In fact, I used that quote, or what I thought may have only been a paraphrase, as an epigram to the poem, and it appeared that way in The Queen’s Quarterly. Later, as I was preparing for the publication of The Horse Knows the Way, I was unable to verify the quote – now I have no idea from whence it came – and dropped the epigram. The poem, and an explanation like this about the epigram, appeared later in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2009, from Tightrope Books in Toronto. So I owe Marquez – or someone – a debt of gratitude.

Becoming a writer


What could be easier than learning to write?
Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,
they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,
the bowel,  the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod.
Reach inside and there they are, the people
one knows, their scandalous comments,
the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling
of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek.
This moment, that, an eruption of violence,
a glancing away, the grandest of entrances,
the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful,
all conspire with feeling and passion to transport,
to deliver, to inspire. Story emerges
from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies
flashing like lightbulbs above the heads
of cartoon characters. All this within you
where you least expect  it, not so much in the head
as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking
with the knowledge of the body, the writer
neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging
within himself for riches unimagined, for salt.

—Dave Margoshes

On Reading the Poems of Someone Buried in Poet’s Corner: Poem — Julie Larios

Jun 032010
 

It’s great pleasure to post here a poem by Julie Larios, a generous and playful Numéro Cinquoise and a member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. In a way, we already know her and she needs no introduction. But there are links here  to various sources and interviews where you can find the hard data–books, teaching, publications.

dg

 

On Reading the Poems of Someone Buried in Poet’s Corner

“Dear Lizbie Brown…”
that’s all our hero Hardy needed for a letter.
But he was better at it than the rest of us.
The best that we can do is “Sir or Madam,”
and “Sincerely Yours.”—even when love stirs
the soul and bakes the brain, our best refrains
fill with adolescent templates and clichés,
not Lizbie,
Lizbie,
Lizbie Brown.

Even Hardy’s frowns went deeper down than ours—
his stars were brighter, fields greener, cows cleaner,
cream more clotted,  world more Wessex, thrushes darkling,
and his Bettys were all Lizbies,
Lizbies,
Lizbie Browns.

Darling, if we lived in England and you died in time,
before me, I would love you Hardy-style, epistolarically
and lyrically and all seized up by grief and elm trees.
As is it, you’re hale and hearty, and I’m hardly Hardy.
But I’m sincerely yours. Love, Julie,
Julie,
Julie,
Julie.

P.S. I’m sorry but
the toilet’s running
and I tried to fix it
but I can’t. Just thought
you’d like to know.

—Julie Larios

See also “What Bee Did” not to mention Julie’s entries in the Numéro Cinq Villanelle contest. And here are a couple of interviews with the author: The Miss Rumphius Effect and  Cynsations.

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Burning Land: Poem — John B. Lee

May 212010
 

Here’s a poem by John B. Lee, a poet who lives in Brantford, ON, just along the highway from the farm where I grew up and which my family still owns. For a while, John even taught at the high school I once attended. One nice coincidence: The first time I co-judged (with the novelist Lisa Moore) the Winston Collins/Descant Best Canadian Poem contest, we picked John Lee. The judging was blind, so the convergence of fates was particularly appealing. “Burning Land” is written, yes, in Canadian. “Stoneboat” is a word I grew up with: a flat plank sled on low iron-shod wooden runners, drawn by horses, used to haul stones out of the fields. (See also “tobacco boat”–a tall narrow sled on steel runners, drawn by a single horse between tobacco rows during harvest.)  James Reaney was a massively influential and inspirational southwestern Ontario (Sowesto, as we call it) poet and mythographer. Raymond Knister was an early modern short story writer and novelist who died young in a drowning accident. His was the first Canadian novel I ever read that was about my home territory–he even talks about tobacco growing (we raised tobacco from the 1920s on). Raymond Knister’s daughter still lives in Waterford, my home town. I ran into her in the drugstore last fall.

dg

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Burning Land

“talk farmer …”
my mother chastens me
in conversation, for
though I have been to school
I’m still her wayward son
and what shall I say
shall I say
clevis and gambrel
sheaf and stook
shall I limit my earth
to the matter of mud
the matter of water and loam
or lambing in April
or driving a spile in the bloat of a cow
or the bark of maple in spring
what shall I tell her
concerning the Georgics of Virgil
the shearing of ewes, the keeping of bees
of Piers and his plough
of Jefferson’s science
of the three sisters of the Iroquois
or of Clare who wept at the closures
of the Idylls and eclogues of Spenser
of old or the pastoral beauty
of Eden and Eve
of her murdering son
and the land where he roamed

how David the King was a poet
with his lyre and his psalms, how he sang among sheep
how Wendell Berry walks on Sunday
with his pencil to the page
how Frost came appling out of orchards
blunt and rubbling at his dry stone wall
how Reaney
lost his Milton in a furrow
how his father
pierced a gasy rumen with a fountain pen
how Knister came to wintering after horses
writing “the horses will steam when the sun comes”
and how I listen for such lines
how I learned my Greek on shoulders
my mind much like a stoneboat with a single earth-heaved stone
how I came to Latin
in a cowflap, Latin fallen from the paper cows of Rome
how I told myself such stories
with a clay clod in my hand
I might have been Prometheus
with my breath of ancient words
while the ashes of my forehead
burned like burning land.

—John B. Lee

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