Coming Out of the War

Teacraft: A Treasury of Romance, Rituals & Recipes by Charles and Violet Schaffer (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Press, 1975)

Our authors offer us the reminiscence of a character dubbed "Our Man" about the time some thirty years ago [1940s] at a boarding house, The Pink House on Waverly Place in Kowloon.

"Afternoon tea was more to my taste. The elegant service and leisurely civility on the veranda in fine weather and in the livingroom when weather was bad agreed with me.

"To this ritual I unwittingly contributed an American revolution. Following a lifetime of profligacy, I innocently spread my bread with both butter and jam. At first my fellow lodgers looked askance. They spread one or the other on their bread, never both!

"Soon they were imitating my extravagance, first to see whether they liked it and then to enjoy the extravagance at dinner.

"Mrs Mather [the keeper of the boarding house] was utterly dismayed by this ruinous turn of events. It threatened to throw her budget off balance, she protested, and it probably did.

I am reminded of the story told by Jane Rule about the ham and the pan.

There is a story about a young woman who always cut a generous slice off a ham before cooking it. When asked why she did it, she said, "My mother always did it." Piqued for a better reason, she asked her mother why she had done it. "My mother always did it." The grandmother, fortunately still alive, was finally able to explain, "I never had a pan big enough."

Quirks.

And so for day 1530
20.02.2011

In the land of "attar of carexhaust catcorpse and cookinggrease"

How not to love a poem that begins with the word "Dawndrizzle" and ends with a series of other compound words or kennings?

Slumbers now slumtrack unstinks cooling
waiting brief for milkmaid mornstar and worldrise

In the middle there is a striking image of female potency.

bigthewed Saxonwives stepping over buttrivers
waddling back wienerladen to suckle smallfry

Got to take a look for yourself at this rather exclusive excluding enclave "a ghetto gotten for goyim" as exposed in Anglosaxon Street. Earle Birney (1904 - 1995). The poem appeared in David and other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1942). Not a street I would want to live on where the mindless procreators sit on their stoops "swearing hatedeeds"

I am left with a lexical quandry.

Alongside in lanenooks carling and leman
caterwaul and clip careless of Saxonry
with moonglow and haste and a higher heartbeat

Trying to understand "carling and leman". leman = lover. carling = timbers in a ship sustaining the deck. Could we have here a misprint for "darling"?

And so for day 1529
19.02.2011

Liquidities Equivalencies

BookThug has a conversation between Chantal Neveu and Nathanaël to which is appended this note

It was no doubt foolhardy on our part to have structured our conversation around such an untranslatable term as fuites; it is at once flight, escape, leakage, puncture and drain, and none of the available equivalencies in English carries the same degree of polysemic, never mind acoustic resonance. (N)

Comes to mind the term as used in the work of Deleuze and Guattari but here flight takes on dimensions other than the line. Other than the line.

Brian Massumi warns the reader in "Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments" A Thousand Plateaus that

FLIGHT/ESCAPE. Both words translate fuite, which has a different range of meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying.

Tempus fugit.

And so for day 1528
18.02.2011

Dialogue des Courgettes

The third of the garden poems "Zucchini" in A Gathering Instinct by Betsy Warland.

you admire
the zucchini's proliferation
i think
it incapable of discretion

I like how the observations in dialogue almost an imbroglio is peppered on both sides with "i". promiscuous i.

And so for day 1527
17.02.2011

Behold the Fan

Janine Beichman. Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry

Discussions on what form we should translate tanka into have focused until now on tanka in its printed forms. One argument for example, is that, because tanka are usually printed in one line, English translations should be one line too. But calligraphic versions show that a tanka poem (and the same goes for haiku) has traditionally been seen as convertible into myriad visual shapes. In fact, if we take the calligraphic versions as our models, then there are an infinity of ways to divide our lines and an infinity of ways to indent them. Why should we invent for ourselves a consistency that Japanese poets have never felt obliged to maintain? Why not take advantage of the expressive possibilities offered by modern English poetry's variety of lineation, spacing, punctuation, and capitalization?

Brings to mind the work to bring the 19th century envelope writing to light — see Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings. It is an invitation to think the materiality of the writing process. Holland Cotter in the New York Times review of The Gorgeous Nothings speculates

It’s also plausible to think that, for Dickinson, writing on recycled envelopes had practical advantages, material and psychological. It probably appealed to her waste-not New England sensibility. It also meant that she didn’t have to face the equivalent of a blank canvas. Her chosen paper already carried words, familiar names and addresses. It was stained with life, with postmarked dates and the dust of distant places. From that resonant content, she could generate new content, just as she had always generated poetry from the immediate facts of the physical world.

I do like that expression "stained with life" almost belongs in a tanka preferably written on a fan.

And so for day 1526
16.02.2011

Illusive Allusions

The intertextual is not merely interstitial. It sometimes runs interference.

I like the central image in Rhea Tregebov "Vienna, November 1983" in no one we know and how it connects with the haunting mention at the close of the poem of a locale (Mauthausen) that was the site of a concentration camp — mere mention of the name undercuts the quotidian contentedness evoked by cream in coffee.

Allowing herself cream; cream marbles
the good coffee, turns it from liquid
into something extraordinary, something
like a body.

Through enumeration and allusion (pearls as eyes) the poem comes to the closing mention of Mauthausen. I think this is where for me it fails — I bring too much to the reading. I bring my previous reading of the Shakespeare and the T.S. Eliot. They register for me in the singular number which for Tregebov is positioned as a multitude.

Ariel's song from The Tempest

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Eliot's The Waste Land

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Cream does pearl in coffee when the last drops drop. The image though is not caught at the point the cream is poured but in the swirl when it is allowed into the good coffee. Notwithstanding the meddlesome allusions, to connect a simple cup of coffee with a concentration camp is audacious.

But who drinks the coffee?

What is enumeration and allusion is recapitulation.

The beginning of the poem:

Most, people her age, allow themselves …
a certain sentimentality now. Those
are pearls. The five foxes circle her neck,
their squared noses pointing down dark
with a polished sheen dark as the wood
building the walls of the café; nothing
[…]

The ending:

[…] the good coffee, turns it from liquid
into something extraordinary, something
like a body. All their rings, the light,
voicing that soft gold, extraordinary
how little the sizes varied, the human hand
human, the light living, once, nothing. And those
are pearls, those everlastingly mild eyes
that were their eyes, dark as the wood building
the walls that were their eyes. Mauthausen.

Ever so easy, distracted by coffee, to miss the repeated (but differently segmented) "dark as the wood building walls". An architectural trick overriding the allusions.

And so for day 1525
15.02.2011

Sunlight buttered on the grass.

In a poem where the speaker repeatedly mentions an inability to remember the names of things, there comes this splendid evocation of roses that turns for all its colour and specificity upon the mention of names.

Do the roses bloom? I hope so: how I love roses!
        Bunches of roses on
The dining table, Georg Arends, big and silver-
        pink with sharply
Bent-back petals so the petals make a point: no
        other rose does that:
or Variegata di Bologna, streaked and freaked
        in raspberries and cream,

The feast is limited to two types of roses but seems in its precision to invoke a whole gamut of hybrids. And later in The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler one finds a similar abundance conveyed by a repetition with variation: "Sunlight buttered on the grass" will some lines later be reprised "Light freshly buttered on the grass." Same effect. Different wording. Once would be showing off. Twice is the mark of a master.

And so for day 1524
14.02.2011

Radish Pyrotechnics

Rhea Tregebov. "The fire under control" in no one we know.

This is a poem that begins with the collection and consumption of vegetables (such as peppers and rhubarb and of course radishes) and moves on to consider fire that is not to be dug up.

Radishes figure a peevish,
proletarian vegetable.
When you bite them, they bite back.

This seems likes a simple innocent remark about the pungent taste of radishes. However, by poem's end we are aware that the fire under control is radioactive — after Chernobyl. The burn burns deeper.

And so for day 1523
13.02.2011

Waiting

A line from Tu Fu (translated by J.P. Seaton in Bright Moon Perching Bird)

Wind, and dust, but no news comes.

Reminds one of "Waiting for the Barbarians" by Cavafy.

Not because of the wind. Not because of the dust. But because no news comes.

And turn again to Tu Fu, the sixth of the six quatrains from a group of twelve ("Grief Again")

Barbarians. How can there be so many?
Shield and spear: unwilling to put by.
At the village gate, listen to the children
Laugh and shout; play war.

We skip a beat. Where Cavafy cannot carry us over — his speaker is arrested ("And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution."), Tu Fu brings us close to the integral.

And so for day 1522
12.02.2011

Anaphora

I was debating whether to buy this handsome edition of the Collected Poems of Stephen Spender in its red jacket. In the time-honoured tradition of the browser, I opened the volume and read "The War God" which begins with the following question

Why cannot the one good
Benevolent feasible
Final dove, descend?

Not put off by the Christian allusion to the Dove of Peace, I read the next stanza with its anaphora

And the wheat be divided?
And the soldiers sent home?
And the barriers torn down?
And the enemies forgiven?
And there be no retribution?

Sold, I headed to the counter to finalize the purchase and so home to read the rest of the poem and rest in the resonance of its final line: "Love's need does not cease."

And so for day 1521
11.02.2011