PUTTING POETRY IN THE WORLD

The earth is hiding
the sun is gliding
soon will be backsliding
then solstice dividing
the seasons.

There are reasons.

This fumbly effort was my contribution this morning to a couplet conversation with a half-Blackfeet high school girl in Calgary who will respond in kind.  We don’t say anything really -- just a few lines that rhyme.  Sometimes more like “slant rhyme,” which means sounds that are almost the same, but not.  It showed up in my mailbox right next to a forward from Tim Barrus, my co-writer, a review of Jonathan Galassi’s translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s “Canti” (songs) from Italian.

The reviewer (Peter Campion) offers this example: 
   Sometimes your image comes to mind again,

Aspasia. Either it shines fleetingly

in lived-in places, in other faces;

or in the empty fields, on a clear day,

under the silent stars,

as if evoked by gentle harmony,

that exalted vision reappears

in a soul still verging on dismay.

Campion says:  “This passage balances, gorgeously, on the border between adoration and loss. Galassi conveys the tremble between opposing emotions with delicacy and strength. The subtle rhyme of “clear day” and “dismay,” for example, underlines that central duality.”

I found this quick description of Leopardi.  “In the Zibaldone, Leopardi compares the innocent and happy state of nature with the condition of modern man, corrupted by an excessively developed faculty of reason which, rejecting the necessary illusions of myth and religion in favor of a dark reality of annihilation and emptiness, can only generate unhappiness. The Zibaldone contains the poetic and existential itinerary of Leopardi himself; it is a miscellaneous of philosophical annotations, schemes, entire compositions, moral reflections, judgements, small idylls, erudite discussions and impressions. Leopardi, even while remaining outside of the circles of philosophical debate of his century, was able to elaborate an extremely innovative and provocative vision of the world. It is not much of a stretch to define Leopardi as the father of what would eventually come to be called nihilism.”  (No author is attributed -- it’s a wiki.)

In youth Leopardi was physically captured by his family (tried to run away but was brought back) and in adulthood he was captured by illness, dying of cholera in 1837, not quite forty years old.  His desperation struggles with love without achieving optimism.

Jonathan Galassi, who heads Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, may be one of the last of the traditional publishers: a poet, a translator, and a civilized man with a strong sense of romance.  He appears able to stand astride the risk of daring and harness of practicality.  When asked about boyhood reading he mentions both “Wind in the Willows” and “The Alexandria Quartet.”  But he also describes his parents and grandmothers reeling off words from memory.  He loves the summoning of images, no matter the mode.  And now, of course, “writing” is able to present actual images, even videos, meshed with words, a rhyming, a new kind of coupling being explored by Tim as the last best use of his powers.

By now I have four figures in this post:  a high school girl in Calgary, a despairing poet in 19th century Italy, a generous poet and publisher in Manhattan, and Tim.  The thread of continuity is the love of words.  I’ll curl this post back to the girl in Calgary with a Galassi poem.

Girlhood
by Jonathan Galassi

If your bearded friend
helps you catch the trout  
barehanded
in the pool of the dream  
and you carry it in his pail  
barefoot
up the rocky stream
to the playhouse where he fries it in his pan;
if you snip the dill
for the carrots and then swim
until your lips are bluer than the lake
where will it take you?
Not anywhere as pure
and primal as these sunstruck days  
sistered by starstruck nights.  
Don’t cloud the drowning  
brightness of your eyes,
don’t answer my asking look  
with anything but the truth,  
don’t spill the fresh-picked  
raspberries on the car seat
and stain your shirt with indelible blood.

Or spill them, darling.  
How else will you know
the color of crushed time;
how else will you feel
what it is to change and remember,
to lose and absorb
this summer inside you,
xylem and phloem of your leafy future  
already starting to spread its shade above us?

This is the world Leopardi never had, a free and sensory relationship with the world itself, accompanied by the love of an adult.  (I’m not talking about just sex.)  This is what Tim puts against the nihilism expressed by his dying boys, even as he dies with them.  Both Galassi and Barrus “put” this joy in their heads and hearts with words.  There is a religious doctrine that the purpose of human beings, what they are best suited for, is the perception and celebration of the natural world.  (Creation, if you need a creator.)

The mechanisms of this “putting” are located in two poetically (or at least metaphorically) named little curls of tissue in the brain, one over each ear.  Somehow the senses feed into the front and memory (including emotion) come out the back.  Words are produced and managed by the whole brain and word-weaving is much like lifting weights:  the more one does it, the more cells and synapses thicken and connect.  For a poet with a rich and daring life the secret -- oh, the secret -- is not in the words but in the world they encode, “the color of crushed time.”  But brains dwindle and die.

Tim knew that Tristan, an over-experienced child, would be dying just a little ahead of him and determined to make the fall of the season a clear and clean beach of life where they could sit on the rounded stones to sip Scotch from cups and share their blankets with the dogs.  Now Tim’s thick brain remembers but soon the weaving will thin and then fail. 

I’m not a poet, but I am a translator of experience -- this is what my life has taught me to do.  So then I will pick up the strands, sharing with young men who were boys when I first knew them, and we will go on with this work of being human, the remembering, the escaping, the translating, the joy of words in couplets.  Or not.

Either it shines fleetingly

in lived-in places, in other faces;

or in the empty fields, on a clear day,

under the silent stars,

as if evoked by gentle harmony,

that exalted vision reappears

in a soul still verging on dismay.