THE WOMB OF ALL LANGUAGES: Remembering Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Everything In Greece, said Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, is difficult, uncertain, unplanned or badly planned. 

“I’m leaving,” says my cosmopolitan self, “I can’t take it anymore,” she wrote in 2016. “And suddenly the day breaks, another door opens. Light, light everywhere from all around, in the mind and in the soul. Broad-leafed light. Greece. “I’ll stay,” I say, “I’ll stay a little longer.” (LARB)

Goddaughter of Nikos Kazantzakis, Fulbright Scholar, Ford Fellow, winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a Greek poet til the end, passing away yesterday in Athens at the age of 81.

RIP, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939-Jan 21 2020). 

After studying foreign languages and literature at the Universities of Nice, Athens and Geneva, poetry at University of Iowa; after translating works of Beckett, Shakespeare, Mayakovsky and Dylan Thomas into Greek; after teaching at SFSU and Harvard; she returning to her homeland and the island of Aegina, outside Athens, where she lived the last years of her life weaving and unweaving the threads of her complicated life in poetry and prose.

The poet was praised by critic Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books for her “uncanny knack for getting to the heart of every matter or crisis at hand — with incredible humor and dangerous wit. Whenever I’m back in Athens, the first person I call is Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke.”

For American readers, the best introduction to her work is ‘The Scattered Papers of Penelope’ (Graywolf 2009). It is the first full retrospective collection available in English, and translated from the Greek by an array of noted scholars, including the editor Karen Van Dyck.

Of wide ranging interests and subject matter, there are many threads to follow in the selected works.

The influence of Kazantzakis is worth searching. In many of her poems, such as 'In The Sky of Nothingness With Nothing' (translated here by James N Stone in poeticanet), the strains of her godfather's philosophical inquiry are profoundly present.

I peer at life through a keyhole.
If I look closely enough, maybe I’ll understand
how life always wins
while all of us lose.
How values are born
and branded onto the body
which is the first to melt.
I am dying inside my mind without any hint of sickness.
I live without the slightest need of encouragement.
At least I’m breathing. Who cares
if I can almost touch warm things
about to go up in flames.
I wonder what other connections
life will invent between the trauma
of absolute disappearance and the miracle
of every day immortality.
I owe my wisdom to fear;
I dispense with petals, sighs, subtleties.
I clutch earth, air, roots.
The useless things can go, I say.
Let me in to the sky of nothingness,
with next to nothing.

Her sensibilities as a woman poet reveal themselves, and are of particular interest, in poems that re-examine Greek history and myth through the female body — the bodies of Penelope and Helen in particular -- and her own body, scarred by illness.

I wasn't weaving, I wasn't knitting I was writing something erasing and being erased under the weight of the word

Anghelaki-Rooke maintained a delicate engagement/disengagement with politics. Some of her poems take the form of a journal kept during the first Gulf War, and there are a number of prose poems about modern violence and dictatorship in her new and selected collection.

This subject -- Anghelaki-Rooke's refusal to cooperate with the junta during the military takeover of Greece in the late 60s -- was of particular interest to researcher Myrnah Kostash (Univ Alberta), who quoted her as saying this:

"For me it wasn’t politics, it was a disease, a disaster. When your house catches fire, that isn’t politics. You have to find some water and put it out.” 

If someone with pro-junta sympathies argued that the junta was doing some good (the trains ran on time), Anghelaki-Rooke told Kostash, she was unmoved. “If an angel with big white wings had come down, smashed open my door, entered my house, taken me by the hands, and told me he was going to save me, I would kick him in the balls...’ (Some Greek Writers, Their Memory, Their Politics, Their Art in the 1980s, Brick Magazine 2006)

For a full view of Angehlaki-Rooke’s writing, one must turn to her lyric descriptions of the domestic world on the island of Aegina. These poems, of great and profound beauty, help us to to comprehend her humanity and human understanding.

In the taverna garden
it is spring and the blossoming
chestnut trees lean attentively
over the pensioners.
Beards, mustaches, all white,
a little laughter in their faded
blue eyes peeking out behind the beer froth
the slender waitress
like a doll just out of her box
with the divine department store tag
still around her neck.
The brown spots on the old men's hands
- maps of an unknown geography -
the flowers scattered by the wind
on the wooden table
and suddenly I understood silence:
it is the womb of all languages.

fr Lipu Revisited

To read the work of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke is to experience THAT Greece, with all its complexities. 

On a visit to the poet in Aegina, Kostash noted how the poet invited her in and offere her 'a jug of water, and a bottle of ouzo, a bowl of pistachios cultivated on the family farm... she has just returned from a reading and lecture tour of the United States, and she told me that undeniably, the international exposure is “exciting , but not crucial. Being a writer in and of Greece is."

Despite many years in America and international profile, poems like these illustrate that the poet remained at heart and to the end, a truly Greek poet.

Readers of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke in America and worldwide are the richer for it.

To raise the shades, to look out into the New York City day

Birthdays Before And After, Puma Perl

Beyond Baroque Books 2019

 

For countless authors, New York City is a metaphor -- the overwhelming city, with its charms and caresses, its turn-ons and turn-offs, its nooks and crannies, its sheer titanic girth. Its opportunities and dangers, its callous and dismissive disinterest in anything but itself, the pure expression of itself, myriad, unassailable, New York.

 

But for Puma Perl, in her new collection Birthdays Before and After, New York City is more than a metaphor. It is a life itself – told from the inside out.

 

Intersectional New York City, with all its contradictions, and with all its scales pitched in perfectly cacophonous array. The New York City of railroad apartments and Coney Island chicken coops, where you grow up afraid to get a dog because they killed your cat. The New York City of speedballs and rainbow cookies, where love is ‘waiting on the corner in the drug dealer’s boots.’ Streets ‘smelling of blood, death, car wrecks and maybe a little bit of hope.’ The contradance of junkies and bill-paying American thieves, and beautiful lost poets who have lived so long writing poems for a gig in neat handscript (and then throwing them out) that life itself has killed them.

 

Old men playing dominoes in the park. Tattoo’ed girls proud of their shoulders. Vampire cups of coffee brewed at sunset. New York City -- where taxi vomit is for amateurs, where being homeless is ‘not the same as a bottle of Wild Irish and a doorway,’ and where vacancy is an art unto itself.

 

A city that lives above and below the radar, carrying on multiple simultaneous existences most of which are invisible to visitors and passers through.

 

Today is a New York holiday

The transplants are gone

Streets are deserted and promise nothing

Neither do we.

 

In her new collection Perl offers us a kaleidoscopic glimpse of it all. She prowls the streets of Gotham with the elusive skill of a tried and true ‘denizen’ of the city, and does not even bother asking if you want to tag along -- because obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be here. Living in a city like this, as she has, there are simply too many small matters in ordinary human existence to tally it all up like a waitress presenting the bill. Terrible and delicious matters, intrinsic to an overwhelmingly brutal and specific city, a city as uncertain as it is bold, a city as tantalizingly flirtatious as it is unforgiving.

 

Puma Perl’s poems possess a devotion to the discoverable in the ‘off-moment,’ a quest for aperture, a la Frank O’Hara, who knew how to find a revelation in a doorway, on one or another of his lunchtime strolls through midtown.

 

They also possess the gritty insistence on the possibility of hope in a seemingly hopeless city, a la Lou Reed, who claimed there’s a book on magic at the bottom of the garbage can, and if you can get hold of it and count to three you can disappear.

 

Birthdays Before and After, by contrast, is no disappearing act. What we have here are moments of clarity in an overilluminated world, approximating insight.

 

Drop a five dollar bill on a homeless girl if you want to, it ‘may or may not be her birthday,’ and it ought to make you feel good to do it. But know this -- the gesture carries in itself the very seeds of doubt and disappointment, and anyhow is little more than ‘a shot of dope/lasting a minute and then you’re back where you were//sitting on cardboard. ‘

 

Give away all your stuff – band shirts, tight skirts, silk dress, workout gear – to people more virtuous than you, and they’ll just worry and think you’re going to kill yourself. Of course you’re not going to do that:

 

“It’s been done

and 4 am phone calls and railroad

stations will haunt me forever.’

 

Though they do not attempt to shock or tease, these poems succeed as well as they do in part because they don’t have to go that route. There is a wry believability in these poems, a street-weariness told with survivor aplomb, and with an undertone of unextinguished resolve that makes it possible to believe that a person can swallow the indigestible and keep on going, can keep asking the unanswerable questions.

 

What does it mean to open your eyes in the morning to ‘bridges and rivers, trees hurting more than the ugly,’

 

What does it mean to ask ‘when do you cry? When do you stop?’

 

What does it mean to declare I’m not afraid of my city, and ask us to believe that the sheer pluck of saying so can make it true.

 

Here in 80-something pages is a life revealed with as much honesty as the facts themselves allow. Half a dozen lives really, rolled up into one, so far. Lived way beyond the punk thing -- an oversimplification of the author’s wide-ranging aims and attitudes -- that help to give dimension and full human context to the label ‘New Yorker.’

 

Though for those seeking a glimpse into ‘that’ scene, they’ll find much that is satisfying in this book. Deglamorized though, not your standard anti-glam punk chic. Punk made real. I have no doubt Perl could do a whole chapbook name-dropping punk celebrities -- but that would be doing it on the cheap and easy, and if this collection is any evidence, this is a poet who decidedly aims higher than that. 

 

And anyhow, if you hang around in New York long enough, brushes with celebrities are not the point.

What is the point is the way the human drama reveals itself, teetering on stilettos and dirty martinis, leaning against incoherent walls, doing shots with the girls, sprawled out blind in the middle of a party, spiked on LSD on some stranger’s couch. Shouldering onto some stage for a moment of tinsel glory before all the souls around you break into jagged pieces.

 

“We were all born broken,” observes Perl in an understated inner city drawl. “I was born broken too…

 

I break soft in hard places

I break quiet on rooftops and subways…

…Men slit their throats for me

 Each time I break.

 

This is neither bravura nor the stuff of leather femme fatale. It is cold, hard, authentic. Human. The kind of poetry that is only possible to write if you have lived it, been a citizen to it, part victim and part perpetrator, part instigator and part accomplice.

 

A world that offers a kind of transcendence to have simply survived another night of it, woken up with the eyes still in your head and a willingness to open them up and take a chance on another day -- the silences and the sighs, the curses and blessings littered among the sirens, the smacktalk and sidewalk lies.

 

‘Every morning I raise these shades and it’s still too beautiful not to hurt a little more.’

 

To write poems like these is to raise the shades and look out into the New York City day. And no matter the conditions of society or the weather, have the resolve to either plunge yourself back into it, or shut your eyes and save yourself for another day.

And along the way, put some of it to pen to paper.

 

“It isn’t depression,” writes Puma Perl “It’s August.

 

like a bad play that never ends...

Why bother to talk at all?

People’s intelligence rises

As temperatures fall

Look for me in February

I’ll be wearing boots and black jeans

Just like August but smarter.

SERGEI YESENIN: ‘THE LAST POET OF THE VILLAGE’

THE LAST POET OF THE VILLAGE

Sergei Yesenin, tr Anton Yakovlev, bilingual

Sensitive Skin Press 2019

 

In America today, there are a number of Russian poets of the early to mid-20th century who are famous enough to name drop comfortably in a literary gathering without drawing a blank stare.

And there are a couple of others whose names will be known enough that a person might feign familiarity.

 

And then there is Sergei Yesenin.

 

A man who declared 'if I hadn't been a poet I would have been a thief or a conman' -- but who, behind his prototypical revolutionary era belligerent street-tough image, offered a yearning heart-strong Russian populace with a romantic/nostalgic pipeline back to the lyrical wealth of 'old country' peasant Russia.

 

Sergei Yesenin -- part Mayakovsky, part peasant Pushkin. A poet whose words are on the lips and in the hearts of countless ordinary Russians -- for today’s discerning American readers, it's arguably not enough to feign knowledge of the man. You gotta know why his poetry’s so beloved.

 

The opportunity to find out why has just been presented to American reader anew, with the publication of Anton Yakovlev's fine book of translations 'The Last Poet of the Village’ (Sensitive Skin, 2019).

 

It worked for me. Cruising through this collection of shorter works by Yesenin, it became quickly apparent why the man was a giant figure on the literary landscape in his own country 'back in the day', and why his reputation has outlived him by going on 100 years in his own country.

 

Sergei Yesenin. Golden haired, blue eyed boy from the countryside. Part romantic part brawling counterculturalist. In life fawned over like a pop star. In death raised up to the pinnacle of fame, one of the most quoted modern poets among Russians today. And 'sadly neglected in the English-speaking world," says the translator.

 

With this book, Yakovlev declares his goal clearly -- a new 'first introduction' to the work of a beloved, necessary poet in the Russian canon.

 

If Yesenin's reputation has thus far failed to 'stick' in the poetry firmament for readers in America, but it is arguably to ourselves -- not him -- that we should ask why.

 

While the originating charisma and music in the man and his words may be unavailable to English speakers a century on, it is certain that Sergei's personal story is a colorful one. Raised by peasant grandparents in the holy Russian countryside (where he was made to chase game like a hound dog as a child) he began publishing romantic pastoral poetry at the precocious age of 15.

 

By his early 20s, he had rocketed to fame as an au courant, swaggering iconoclast... with a heart of peasant gold. By the age of 18 he had emerged in the turbulent streets of pre-Revolutionary Russia as one of the street-wise poetry toughs -- with a penchant for hooligan poetry and brash wise guy street talk -- but mixing in plenty of references to lime trees blossoming and nightingales singing.

 

And in the precious last few years of his life, he enjoyed a fast life as a pop idol, playing up to adoring female fans, marrying and divorcing with abandon (including a brief marriage to Isadora Duncan) -- dancing around the long tentacles of the increasingly intolerant Soviet state until his death at age 30 at the end of a rope, an apparent suicide, but quite possibly state assassination.

 

In this handsomely produced collection, Anton Yakovlev makes as good a case for us to fall in love in our own limited vashion with the poetry of this 'near-forgotten' man.

 

There's little doubt that Yesenin was good, early. 'Your harnessed horse drank from your palms/Reflections of birches broke in the pond.../I wanted, in the shimmering foaming streams, to rip a raw kiss from your scarlet lips' he wrote at the tender age of 15. Nothing maudlin or tawdry in lines like these.

 

But as early as 1916, and his attention turned to the turbulent streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, Yesenin's poetry began to grow in complexity.

 

I'm tired of living in my native land

Yearning for the vast fields of buckwheat

I'll leave my shack

To be a vagrant and a thief.

 

That's precisely what he did, mixing with the literary ruffians of the day, experiencing the highs and lows of street life -- living a raucous, sometimes miserable existence with untrustworthy comrades and women who turned him out of their houses.

 

Taking it all in and spitting it back out, with the bravado only a boisterous 20-something year old in the middle of the heady days of a revolution could muster ('This is nothing, he says, standing before the unfriendly, laughing rabble with a busted bloody nose...it'll heal by tomorrow').

 

I'm not a villain. I haven't robbed anyone in the forest.

I haven't shot wretches in dungeons.

I'm merely a street rake

Smiling at passing faces.

 

Dogs are recurring motif for him -- as they were for Mayakovsky, the best known of the poet cum werewolf of the era. Mayakovsky pushes the envelope hard, going so far as to declare that he has BECOME a dog and ending a poem about that with growls and barks.

 

For all his snarling, in the case of Yesenin there is less metamorphosis going on, and more return to his pastoral origins. ('I'm a good friend to animals/Healing them with my verses').

 

In particular, we find this in his early poem A Song About A Dog, a farm dog which has had seven pups, and must abjectly follow her master and watch as he drowns them in an icy river ('when she walked back, just barely/Licking the seat off her sides/She imagined the moon over the hut/to be one of her puppies').

 

This kindness to animals, with all its underlying boyish charm, takes on an appealing level of emotional complexity on a visit to the home of a famous poet, when he goes out back to make friends with the family dog (Give me your paw, Jim, for good luck/I've never seen such a paw/Let's bark together while the moon is out/At the quiet, noiseless weather'), and ask it to lick the hand of a woman inside the house.

 

She'll come, I give you my word

And in my absence, staring into her eyes

Please gently lick her hand on my behalf

For everything I was and wasn't guilty of

 

Sergei Yesenin -- a naughty reckless Moscow loner...known to every rundown hopeless jade in town, who would give his tie to a shaggy dog,;or take off his top hat, fill it up with gold oats, and feed the horses.

 

This is more than identification with animals in order to outrage the comfortable elite -- it is the wistful tenderness behind the mask of the tough guy poet, who cherishes the memory of his rural upbringing, and never really shake it off: 'how nice it is in the morning mist

 

To trace lines of grass with a scythe in a field

so that a horse and a sheep can read them.

 

That's memorable stuff, full of brilliance, audacity and charm -- and it is easy to see why a people big-hearted about the land which nurtures them, would commit it to memory.

 

Because all the while, the redemptive spirit of village and country life in Mother Russia -- where a revolution-weary citizen could celebrate 'a tender girl in white (singing) a tender song... the sweet happiness, the fresh blush of cheeks.'' Without pushing the analogy to far, Yesenin is a kind of tragi-romantic figure who tells us out loud 'There's no place like home' while falling further and further into the clutches of tragic demise. 

 

Yesenin says it, out loud. He can return home, he says, but it will be a poignant thing, tinged with something way past sadness, a homecoming in which he will find his former townspeople happy, but himself in misery, and he will hang himself and be buried plainly while the village dogs bark.

 

The moon will float up in the sky

Dropping the oars into the water

As ever, Russia will get by

And dance and weep in every quarter.

 

SF poet Jack Hirschman was on the money when he pegged Sergei Yesenin as 'Not really a peasant poet nor a Soviet revolutionary (but) a brilliant modern image maker, very Russian in a national sense." In poem after poem, Yakovlev presents a man who, rather than a competitor to the arch-decadent bad-boy Mayakovsky, is a persona in his own right, his maudit bravura palpable even though we never really lose sight of the wide-eyed peasant boy, golden haired and adorable, behind the pose.

 

Today in America there are a number of 20th century Russian poets whose reputation have eclipsed Yesenin. Mayakovsky. Anna Akhmatova. The three 60s dissident Russian writers who were popularized by City Lights in Anselm Hollo's pocket series book Red Cats (Yevtushenko/ Kirsanov/ Voznesensky). And there are a number of Russian poets whose names and works should be more familiar to American writers -- I could mention Burliuk, Kamensky and Khlebnikov.

 

But if Anton Yakovlev is right, there’s only one Sergei Yesenin.

 

With The Last Poet of the Village, he presents a new and compelling case for us to place the poetry of this tragic, beautiful Russian poet, at the very least, side by side with his peers.

DROP ON YOUR KNEES, PETALS OF DRIED FLOWERS: On the poetry of Tanya Ko Hong

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 If I could leave my senses

I would be no trouble.

You don’t give food

to the fish you’ve caught.

Fr Yeobo, 2015 (Rattle)

 

 

In the sometimes harshly direct and confrontational world of today’s American social dialogue, it is refreshing to experience the poetics of a writer and activist like Tanya Ko Hong. A Southern Cal Korean-American and émigré living in the rough and tumble of Southern California, she has achieved a remarkable feat – paying deference to a very confrontational American aesthetic environment while maintaining allegiance to the deftly symbolic indirectness of expression found in great Korean poetry of the last century.

 

Leonore Hildebrandt, Creative writing faculty, University of Maine, calls her work ‘sparse and precise.’ John Rosenwald, Co-editor, Beloit Poetry Journal, calls it ‘compressed and intense.’

Close. Ellen Bass gets closer than that, noting in Ko Hong’s poetry something ‘spare, elegant…beauty juxtaposed with pain so deep it’s almost impossible to put into words.’

 

What it is – the nearly inutterable tension of the 'Indirect Gaze' -- is a covert presentation of image with hints of socio-political intent beneath it. A veneer. The peasant rabbits lighting an artistocratic tiger’s tail on fire. A man exiled from his home and family who can’t go more than a couple of miles before his feet start to hurt.

 

A thing firmly rooted in traditional Korean poetry and folk art.

 

I know. In the 1970s i attained some fluency in Korean during a couple as a Peace Corps volunteer – and not incidentally, was exposed to the particular flavor of Korean arts - including the covertly suggestive folk paintings which ridiculed the aristocratic class; and more particularly, the rebellious political undertones of wanderer poets, set against the otherwise agrarian/Confucian world, in poems of Tae Hung Ha ( Zigzag we climb up Namsan Mountain/ Lubdub, lubdub, our hearts beat loud and fast/With hazy drunken eyes), and Pak Mok Wol (The hills surround me/and tell me to live my life/sow the seeds/till the land).

 

Through long winter nights in my little room in Suncheon, Cholla Nam Do, I read and reread the works of these 20th century authors in Korean and in English, and was struck by their remarkable ability to achieve socio-political impact through clear focus on natural imagery and folk scenes; and the careful use of those images to offer points of view on very specific social and political themes of their day.

 

In fact, this Indirect Gaze technique should not be thought of as terribly new to the student of poetry in America -- it goes back to the early 20th century, after all, and the Imagists/ Think Ezra Pound, and his exploration of the precise techniques he found in Chinese poetry, and attempt to represent -- in poems like River Merchant’s Wife (The paired butterflies are already yellow with August/Over the grass in the West Garden;/ They hurt me. I grow older).

 

Tanya Ko Hong – born and raised in South Korea, emigre to the United States at the age of eighteen, Antioch MFA grad and writer in both English and Korean -- brings all that to 21rst century Los Angeles. The traditions of Korean poetry and imagism find new ground, as Hong applies the fertile literary canon of indirect creative commentary to new social and political purpose.

 

To be sure she is capable of shooting straight from the hip on a variety of politically charged issues, including women’s rights and immigrant. More often than not, however, her poems are address her experience as a Korean-American -- as in this longish poem which recounts her family’s device for obtaining permission to come to America.

 

Rumor of war,

when the Korean President,

Park Chung Hee got shot.

Mother wanted us to go

to America,

the strongest, happiest and richest place.

But how to get us there?

Fr Look Back, II Paper Divorce, (Cultural Weekly ‘15)

 

Exploration of the immigrant experience is ‘in her wheelhouse,’ it would seem. In Generation 1.5, published in the 1990s, Ko Hong provides a full book of poems on the immigrant experience.

Just last year she hosted an event at Beyond Baroque providing a platform for fellow immigrant poets to tell stories of their journey to America – such as So Hyun Chang's poem "Sugarcane Arirang" recounting the first Korean Americans' long days in the sugar fields of their new country.

 

But Ko Hong's field of vision for choosing socio-political subject is broader than that, as we may see in her well-regarded tackling of the story of 'Comfort Workers,' the sexual enslavement of more than 200,000 Korean women by the Japanese during World War II.

 

In this carefully sequenced poem we can see the poet's ability to straddle the conventions of contemporary American directness with the more traditional indirectness, imagism and symbolism of Korean aesthetics.

 

Here’s a section from the poem, reproduced in full :

 

1939, CHINJU, SOUTH KYANGSAN PROVINCE

We are going to do Senninbari, right? No, Choingsindae, Women’s Labor Corps Same thing, right? Earn money become new woman come back home—

Holding tiny hands
red fingertips
bong soong ah
balsam flower red
together and colored by summer’s end
red fingertips

ripening persimmons
bending over the Choga roofs
that fade into distance

When the truck crosses over the last hill
leaving our hometown in the dust
Soonja kicks off her white shoes Ko Mu Shin

Fr Comfort Women, (LunchTicket.org, Beloit Poetry Journal ’14)

 

Ko Hong’s intent focus on ripening persimmons bending over rooftops (and the kicking off of white shoes by one of the women as the truck takes off, leaving their home town in the dust) is symbol and image at its best -- and firmly rooted in Korean poetic tradition.

 

Yet, in deference to her American audience which may be inured to the quietude of such writing, she has added a prefatory and italicized dialogue which grabs her audience’s attention.

 

An effective device to help explicate the more subtle, sidelong aperture provided by the poet’s careful choice of image and singularly nuanced voice. Just enough to grab audience attention, amid the cacophony and buffeting of a 21rst century poetry reading.

 

water is boiling in the rusty kettle

dark clouds cover half the moon

a yellow cab stops in the dark…

…drop on your knees

petals of dried flowers

--Fr. Mustard Flower, 2017 (Los Angeles Poet Society)

 

There are a lot of ways to get the balance wrong. Fortunately for those who know her work, often enough Tanya Ko Hong gets it right. And for this, those among us looking for a little nuance and indirection in the head-on world of rant and confrontation -- ie grace -- might drop on our knees, and give thanks.

STANDING AT THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE AND POETRY: WWBA Poet in Residence Jane Hirshfield

Over the course of the past four decades, many renowned figures from the high and rare echelons of American poetry have paid a visit to the little farmhouse off Route 110 in West Hills, birthplace of Walt Whitman, to take on the mantle of Poet in Residence; and place their shoulders to the wheel of poetry with the putative ‘pater nostra’ of their field.

Some have embodied modern versions of the Good Gray Poet’s poetics. Others have subscribed to or paid deference to his politics or philosophy. 

In her recent visit to the Whitman birthplace's 2019 poet in residence Jane Hirshfield -- a figure who has firmly taken her place in the firmament of contemporary American poetry -- proved herself well suited to her tenure in the position.

It's not just that Hirshfield possesses an impressive list of credentials -- a train of national awards and prizes trailing behind like daffodils on a well-worn wooded path in April.

More than that, her eclectic set of influences are particularly well-matched, in the bicentennial of Whitman's birth, to the Good Gray Poet's ideas -- from his linking of the specific to the universal and his insistence that a democracy 'does not know national borders to his 'I encompass multitudes' mantra.

And in fact her remarkable poetry is informed by a galaxy of influences that stretches across thousands of years and span continents.

Ancient Greeks and Romans. The ancient court of Japan. Chinese classics and Buddhist Zazen. Horace. Eliot. Akhmatova. The Taoist poet Yu Xuanji. Cavafy. Neruda. Simone Weill.

And importantly, Long Island’s own Walt Whitman, who with fellow 19th century poetry giant Emily Dickinson form the foundational Father and Mother figures of modern American poetry.

“They are our great forefather and foremother,” said this year’s poet in residence, “each bringing profound originality to a tradition that hadn’t previously existed. Whitman’s was an outward form of observation, Dickinson's work was oriented towards interiority. Between them they make the whole.”

There is an arresting ‘nowness’ and specificity to Hirshfield’s poetry which is understandably late 20th century. One often finds her probing the harrowing and hopeful moments ‘at the turning point’ of ordinary experience, seeking aperture to revelatory perception.

Take as just one example her poem The Husband, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2015.

‘Some things can surprise you both coming and going,’ she writes in her opening line, and then goes on to define a turning point in domestic relations that sends the readers heart and mind in several directions. ‘I took you as a husband, love. Then you left me.// I took surprise for a husband instead.’

From here, she doubles down on the intense scrutiny of the transformative possibilities embedded in turning points in relational understanding such as these – contemplating the shape of the Phoenician letter ‘heth,’ origin of our H (H as in husband). Heth the poet notes, was a triple-runged ladder, symbol of destination, vision and quest, dwindling over time to a more domestic ‘double-hung window.

Husband, surprise, I climbed you, I climbed right out you.’

These are poetics that possess an intent focus on the moment of common human experience, offering aperture into wisdom and insight. A poetics firmly rooted in the late 20thcentury American grain.

Beyond that, however, they are grounded in world poetry, and particularly ancient Japanese and Chinese writing.

And in a corollary way, it helps explain her role in exploring the poetry of indigenous languages in North America -- including Nahuatl, a language native to the American/Mexican borderlands that is 

foundational to the emergent borderland culture of America’s Southwest.

And while the poet tips her hat to Whitman for this impulse to embrace indigenous languages, she adds that she actually came to Nahuatl poetry “early on, from a Fresno poet named Peter Everwine."

"Part of that,” she says, “was because it makes use of something similar to the vocabulary of ancient Japanese poetry – flowers, impermanence, the idea that our lives are transitory," a ‘narrow environment’ that only opened up during a family excursion to the countryside when she first saw ‘the blue sky above her, and tasted blackberries growing wild in the broad world of nature.’

For those following contemporary trends in American poetry, of interest is Hirshfield’s take on identity poetry. She’s aware, she says, there is a need for a kind of poetry that accurately addresses "the true and lasting griefs” of those feeling the effects of marginalization in society.

But she adds that rather than creating ‘separation between human beings,’ poets may serve a different function than that -- ie, to stand at the threshold between worlds, making poems as 'gates' that open people’s worlds to each other.

“I have a certain skepticism with identity,” she declared in a 2012 Youtube interview with Michael Collier, Howard County Poetry and Literary Society of Maryland. “The necessity is (the search for) an authentic self; the danger is an ego-based narrow self which limits a life and creates between human beings an ‘I am this you are that,’ mentality."

This corresponds to her idea that literature is more than an expression of identity, but an opportunity for the reader to expand their identity through cultural learning.

“If we could not be influenced by work coming from lives different from our own, if experience could not be passed from person to person by art, what would reading be?" she asks in a recent Agni interview with Ilya Kominsky. "To deny the power of art to transmit the whole of human comprehension from person to person is to deny it any standing, seriousness, consequence.”

Where does this perspective of hers come from?

East 20th Street, New York City, Hirshfield explains, in the projects where she grew up. It was, she recalls, a 'narrow environment that only opened up during family excursions to the countryside, when she saw 'the blue sky above her, and tasted blackberries growing wild in the broad world of nature.'

Her first experience of that, she remembers, was at the age of two. and it was the moment, she says, she first recognized her hunger for a larger existence.

“I tasted the sweetness of blackberries in my mouth,” she explains. “I looked around and I knew there was more. Something in me said ‘yes there is a larger world, and I will make my way towards it.’”

”For me, literature was that way.”

By extension, poetry can be that for any of us. And the poet -- the one who has built a gate in perception allowing us to pass through and experience that larger world.

Next time you enter a poem, think of a gate that joins people to each other, and to the larger world beyond them.

Think of a poet who has made that gate and stands there, beckoning people to walk through it and see what she has seen.

Think of Jane Hirshfield, inviting you to pass through one of her poems and taste, as she has, the sweetness of blackberries.

(As seen in the Long Islander Newspaper, 4.18.19)

Walt Whitman At 200: The NYPL Jumps Into The Celebration

One wouldn’t really need a crystal ball to predict that, it being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Walt Whitman, celebrations will be mounted all across America and beyond this year.

And in fact, there are Whitman-related activities galore in 2019, including at least two major International celebrations centered at the Whitman birthplace in West Hills.

But for sheer numbers, it will be hard for any venue to match the reach of the current Whitman exhibition at the main branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. The library's colorful and richly narrated Whitman show, entitled 'Walt Whitman: America's Poet," is drawing hundreds of visitors a day, according to organizers -- and by the end of its three month run, that translates to hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens of the world learning anew (or for the first time) the wonders of America's Good Gray Poet.

"Some of the objects we have on view are the equivalent of Holy Grails of American literature," says show organizer Michael Inman, curator of Rare Books at the NYPL. "There are some things in this show, that, just to lay eyes on them, is an exceptional experience."

Inman, who said the show was years in the making, recently gave me a 2 hour tour of the library's exhibition -- housed in the 'jewel-box' Wachenheim III Gallery, a compact room located just to the left of the First Floor foyer -- a testament to the detailed devotion that he applied to organizing the show. As visitors from far and wide streamed through, he stopped lovingly each step of the way to reveal details of the photographs, paintings, original manuscripts, first edition books, and ephemera he had gathered together to tell the story of Whitman (1819-1892), who at 200 years old remains one of America's most influential writers and a cultural icon.

"The years preceding Whitman's death would see his encompassing vision -- a mix of earthly and cosmic, common and highbrow -- (was) embraced and celebrated by readers throughout the world," noted Inman. "And his advances in format and language, resulting from a distinctive American poetics, would prove formative for generations of writers, artists and thinkers."

The first portion of the show features some of the formative influences on Whitman's life, including vintage images of old Long Island, the Whitman birthplace, old Brooklyn, and New York City, where Whitman spent his early adulthood as a journalist.The second portion presents a first edition of Whitman's great Leaves of Grass, with its distinctive green and gold cover, and lettering made to resemble roots, branches, leaves and trunks of trees.

A third section focuses on the very important Civil War years, when Whitman served as a nurse in the war zones of the conflict, and as a government clerk in Washington DC. Of particular interest in this section is the letter of dismissal issued to Whitman when the Secretary of the Interior found a copy of Leaves of Grass on the poet's desk -- a situation which ultimately contributed to Whitman's further elevation to a figure of cultural importance during his early adulthood.

The exhibition continues with handwritten manuscripts by the Good Gray Poet, including his well regarded Passage to India and an annotated copy of Leaves of Grass which he used during his lecture tours.

And importantly, the final section includes Whitman's impact on his successors in literature and the arts -- highlighting poets (Sandberg, Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara), musicians (Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen), filmmakers (DW Griffith), and a host of others.

"Whitman declared 'the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it,'" said Inman. "By this standard or almost any other, he has proved himself.”

One look at the faces in the steady stream of visitors to the New York Public Library's evocative show is proof positive that old Walt's still doing so.

Walt Whitman: America's Poet, runs through Jul 27, 2019 at the New York Public Library in New York City. Visit nypl.org for more information.

WRITING THE LOWER EAST SIDE: It Might Change But It Won't Go Away

Sensitive Skin: Selected Writing, (2016-2018)

Sensitive Skin Books (2019)

 

A couple of years back, the newly resurrected Sensitive Magazine was feted at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, in a show described as a coming together on the Lower East Side (Loisada, or LES, depending on who's doing the talking).

 

'Ventilated veterans and legendary pink dot swallowers meeting fresh Midwestern émigrés,' reported The Spirit, a local paper for the Upper West Side of Manhattan:’ Old-timers…represented Loisaida in its glory days… more recent denizens brought the fly to the spry Everyone was on their best (if not soberest) behavior, old scores were settled and newer feuds begun.'

 

A blow against gentrification, the event was just one in a series of determined efforts to defy the forces of time and change, and make a stand for the netherworld of NYC’s downtown that has served as a platform for underground, alternative, boho-savant funk for over a century now.

 

Fast forward to 2019. The people at Sensitive Skin are at it again, with their first-ever print edition of selected writings from online postings.

 

Entitled ‘Sensitive Skin: Selected Writings 2016-2018,’ the collection is nearly 300 pages of prime cull, drawn from some of the best works published on line by the magazine's editors since going online exclusively in 2015.

 

"Up until 2015 we were producing hard copies of the magazine," says editor Bernard Meisler, "including art and written work. I would then post the articles online over the next six months or sow, with reviews, etc, sprinkled in."

 

That's when Meisler saw what he thought was a better way to go about his business. "I realized in this crazy modern world, I was doing it ass-backward -- I decided to just post an article of two every week, and then release an anthology of selected writing."

 

Aside from any possible marketing lesson to be had (Sensitive Skin online has reportedly doubled its monthly traffic), the publication of 'Selected Writing: 2016-18' is a safe-place for those who seek to hold in their hand a tangible product from what is proving to be a durable, linear continuum linking together the moveable feast known as the American avante garde.

 

One of the prize catches in the collection has got to be the publication of two letters from Timothy Leary to Ginsberg, one from Zinuatemejo Mexico (1963), the other a 1969 letter from Berkeley.

Reproduced by photograph the letters are fascinating enough for their content -- but take the communication beyond the informationally interesting to something far more palpable. (And reflective of what letters really looked like during the manual typewriter era -- old!).

 

While not strictly focused on the writers of the Lower East Side, among the 300 pages are many contributions from luminary poets whose names will be more than familiar to latter-day writers who continue to call LES spiritual home -- or even just a way station. Among them, find Ron Kolm, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Puma Perl, Valery Oisteanu. Chavisa Woods,Jeffrey Cyphers Wright. Eve Packer, Larissa Shmailo; Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky.

 

Hal Sirowitz. D. Nurske.

The now-legendary Emily XYZ.

 

John Farris, Max Blagg, Carl Watson, Thurston Moore, Wanda Phipps.

 

It should be said that Sensitive Skin is fearless at the deep end of the literature pool (Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein), yet not above wry epithet ('Prince died the day we got married/and though our love was strong//things got worse from there" -- Joel Landmine in The 

Second half of the Second Decade of the Twenty-first Century).

 

And the prose is particularly engaging. Powerful and wide-ranging fiction and non-fiction from the likes of Francine Witte, David Huberman and LA's Rich Ferguson. Frequently, we find a subversive LES counter-cultural infusion, indicative of the origins and editorial predelictions of the editors.

 

Some of it is American Jewish ghetto street talk, sweet and menacing as a dirty needle, as in Vincent Zangrillo's 'The End of the World': "Mark wanted to see how fast he could burn through the $10,000 inheritance from Grandpa Dave, who sold shmatta to Hendrix on St Marks, and who despite his gnomic wisdom -- Never eat at Katz' deli they serve horse meat! -- did a dry dive out of his 22nd floor co-op window, so Mark's plan was to burn through the $10,000 and get addicted."

 

Some of it lives on the edge between avante garde and Caribbean/Latinx societies (All the Dominican cooks and busboys are filled with amor writes Coree Spencer in 'Carmen Miranda on East 5th Street,' they try in vain to get all us white waitresses to move our his like hot-blooded Latinas).

 

And some of it is unabashedly choice Punk Nostalgia, blending gonzo journalism with Seinfeld 'show about nothing' -- as in Emily XYZ's 'meeting Joey Ramone' (Went down to Punk to return the raincoat. No one was there.); or Jurgen Schneider's RMX (Amy Winehouse staggers in shortly before midnight. It doesn't go without notice how unwell she is.).

 

Here’s Drew Hubner, in 'The Dance Band at the End of the World':

 

Texas is not a good place to run out of junk. This was the story (Jim) Gilroy was telling Rockets and dark Tim, who represented the Replacements who were playing after Sid. He wanted his band to open for Sid. He didn't think it was a good idea for them to try to follow the Pistols and he had a real good point.

 

The Pistols are an end not a beginning! He says very seriously then laughs at himself for sounding so absurd...

 

Sid Vicious comes by and says hello in his way which is to say hardly at all. Nancy Spungen does all the talking. There's a beautiful tapestry tablecloth Sid uses to wipe his hands and lighting a cigarette, burns it.

 

After a minute or two it's the irritated unfortunate Capote who smells the burning cloth and makes a noise, half porcine half rodent. Dramatically he rises to leave.

 

This is the last straw! I want to move to a new table at least! he says to Andy Warhol, who tries to assuage him with champagne.

 

Sensitive Skin itself has gone through a number of changes since it first came out in 1991, partnering with the Living Theatre to host release parties and benefits, while publishing key downtown New York writers. Over the years, it has moved from print to online, but remained true to its mission -- keeping its finger on the pulse of established contributors to the American avante garde (Herbert Hunke, Gary Indiana, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jack Micheline, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and key international figures like Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova, who have informed their work.

 

I recommend this collection highly -- no deep dive into the asphalt, but full immersion into the latest iteration of an American aesthetic well worth savoring, one that may change but won't go away.