inspirations

Of Architectonics and Poetics

2011-01-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

Amatoritsero Ede: You have a conception of some connection between poetry and architecture. Could give us an overview of it?

H. Masud Taj: A strip of paper, with ‘architecture’ on one side and ‘poetry’ on the other, with half a twist and ends taped together. Poetry and architecture are the two sides of the Möebius strip that topographically has only one side. Poetry will lead you back to poesis which means making (cognate with Sanskrit: cinoti, cayati i.e. to gather, arranges in layers); construction will lead you to the act of construing. They are “mirrors: each drawing its own widespread streaming beauty back into its face.” That was Rilke speaking of beginnings. In other words: different epistemologies but similar ontologies.

A.E.: Would you then say there is an architectonics of poetry?

H.M.T.: Plato’s Republic is suffused with the very thing that he sought to expunge: poesis (a fictitious dialogue studded with the Cave, the Ring, the Myth of Er, etc). Is there an architectonics of poetry flips to: is there poetics of architecture? Both emanate from our brains that are islands of neurons in a sea of synapses that have to be crossed in a leap of faith. I read Wallace Stevens spatially by folding his poems from the centre and seeing the persistent symmetry in the displacement of words. It allows me to interpret his poems and also decide between competing interpretations (did the same thing with the films of Stanley Kubrick teasing out the labyrinth which became my post-professional dissertation in Architecture).

H. M. T.: Poetry is both for the cochlea and cornea and thus I recite poems orally (the process and products sans paper) but also indulge in calligraphy exhibits. An architectonics-on-steroids poem was Bat first recited in 1998 and exhibited the next year in Galerie Jean cocteau; paradoxically an iconic poem for a creature that cannot see. The synapse between the sound and the sight is crossed by the blind calligrapher in tandem with the deaf musician.

A.E.: Actually is a poem not like a building, with words as the brick blocks, with the poet as architect, and the aesthetically grand poem being comparable to good design?

H.M.T.: The poem is not the building but the body that experiences the building whose architecture lies in the space between the walls and not in the walls themselves. Your question is akin to one I was asked after a reading in England - whether the sestina was a room with six doors. It was more like the body with its six orientations (up, down, front, back, and left, right). When you listen to a poem the hearing in the inner ear occurs right next to the semi-circular canals, behind your eyes, that orient your body’s balance. The reception of a poem is visceral with your brain frantically trying to catch up with what the body has unwittingly responded to. Gravity connects the poem to the building via the body.

A.E.: You are an architect in real life. How has this affected your relationship to poetry or your work as a poet.

H.M.T.: I was first a poet and then a calligrapher before becoming an architect while all along trying to be real in real life. I think architecture’s yearning for order has something to do with the formalist phase in my poetry in the early-80s, when I revelled in sonnets and villanelles. I came out of that phase as a better receptor. Architecture also added a spatial sensibility along with the ability of zooming in on a detail without loosing sight of the big picture; both the angle and its resident angel sharing etymologies. In the final analysis architecture lent poetry its environmental criterion: poetry as an immersive experience. When you listen to me recite a poem you inadvertently turn into a dweller of its architecture. Hören “hearing” being folded in Gehören “belonging” renders you vulnerable. Real architecture is one that enters your heart like a thief at night.

A.E.: When did you begin writing poetry and who were your influences.

H.M.T.: When I turned thirteen, far from home in an enchanting boarding school named after its location high in the mist laden mountains of India, and have been at it since. Poetry ‘reading’ always consists of standing before an audience, sans text and downloading from mental archive poems that may have occurred twenty years ago as fresh as the one that occurred yesterday. But I am not a performance poet; I leave it to the poem to perform (with me or without me). The earliest influence was the house I grew up in. It had 11 clocks and 17 mirrors. For instance the living room had two wall clocks, a three-dimensional clock on the table and a clock on the sideboard giving simultaneously different times from around the world. There were clocks in all the bathrooms, in the kitchen, and one added to old Vauxhall’s dashboard. The car’s rear view mirror was replaced with a panoramic one with a more attractive view of the world behind than the one ahead. The mirrors in the house were also larger than life. The angled ones on the dressing table not only duplicated space, they multiplied it. Space was as mouldable as clay. The dining hall mirror ran across the width of the wall; eating was a synchronous activity in real and virtual rooms. The mirror also reflected a clock face. The clock had no numerals; double-strokes stood for the quarter-hours and single-strokes for the hours in-between. Its reflected-face remained unchanged but when the mirrored-clock showed 8.45 I knew it was 3.15 and nearing high-tea time. Only at lunch, which always began at 12.00, was when both clock-faces reached a consensus. As I ate, they went their separate ways; I lived simultaneously in clockwise and anti-clock times. Even outside the mirror it was difficult to tell the time. All the clocks couldn’t exactly agree at what pace time ought to flow. They were honed in different schools of gears: paleface was always slow, black ahead of its time, the 3-D timeless (it stopped long ago) and only the international-clock was on time (whatever that meant). I grew to be a time-sceptic: clocks only conveyed their respective point of view. I settled instead for ‘sunrise and sunset times’ in the daily papers that resembled the local train time-tables and were as accurate. The house was on the western shore, so while sunrise at 06h.25m was taken on faith, evening would find me sitting on the front steps cross-checking my favourite clock with the 18h.46m sunset in the sea. The horizon was a reliable keeper of time. Little wonder I became an architect configuring space, and an oral-poet revealing time. You would have noticed of course that I have deflected your question from ‘who’ to, what is more significant in my case, ‘what’.

A.E.: India has a great tradition of poetry – Vivekananda , Aurobindo, Tagore. Is this tradition traceable in your work.

H.M.T.:The contemporary poet in Urdu (my mother tongue), Gulzar traces his influences to both Tagore and T.S. Eliot. Vivekananda and Aurobindo were better thinkers than poets. If there be a poetry gene, you could trace me to my grandmother’s grandfather the classical Urdu poet whom Harvard’s Annemarie Schimmel referred to as “the high-sounding Amir Minai (1828-1900) who continued the Lucknow tradition.” It was the great Ghalib’s relative, Nawwab Mirza Khan Daag, who helped my ancestor’s poetics to eventually lighten up. Apart from his collected poems and his later love lyrics, Amir Minai was famous for his dictionaryAmir al-lugat which remained incomplete thanks to his inexhaustible erudition. A century later his work persists, as in the contemporary singers Jagjit Singh and Chitra’s plaintive rendition of his ghazal Ahista Ahista. There was also the awe inspiring renditions of the Quran; ecstatic Qawwallis in the Indian courtyards of Sufism and the Indian movie songs of the golden era when the songwriters were leading Urdu poets. Add to that my mother’s creativity in Urdu – rewriting the endings of novels she read and sometimes even replacing the author's version with her own; and my father, who for one unforgettable year, was an inspired poet in Urdu turning our staid house into a spontaneous tavern of Ghazal-guzzlers. Urdu poetry was the aural architecture of my childhood; if I belonged to a tradition it was a living one.

A.E.: Would you describe your poetry as Avant-Garde in the terms in which experimental poetry today is seen as such?

H.M.T.: No, I would not. The term Avant-Garde makes sense if there is a consensus, a tradition, against which one measures an advance. In any case that term is born of linear time while I am more comfortable with a spatial notion wherein the three tenses of time coexist. You get adept at moving sideways, glancing tangentially from the corner of your eyes. With a peripheral vision the world appears different which may be misconstrued as avant-garde.

A.E.: I wonder if the rich Indian tradition of verdic scriptural literature had much to do with poetry in that country. What do you think?

H.M.T.:There is a certain sensibility that India imparts. This is clear when I look back from Canada, just as Khalil Gibran had remarked that the mountain’s profile gets clearer from afar. Growing up there you acquire a sense of time that takes recent history with a pinch of salt. It allows the co-existence of the pre-modern with the modern; both slightly displaced, but neither erased.

A.E.: Does your work follow that trajectory? At what point in your work do you break away from tradition?

H.M.T.: Only in a refracted sense; once the prism has dispersed the colours it is difficult to return to any sense of pristine luminosity. So you allow yourself to be seduced by colours but you don’t let yourself be fooled by them.

A.E.: Thank you for your precious time.

H.M.T.: It is precious, but it is not mine. Thank you for having me as your guest.

taken from Sentinel Poetry (Online) #51 ISSN 1479-425X: The International Journal of Poetry and Graphics

http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/0207/interview.html

Logic of Poetry

2011-01-02T00:39:00.000-08:00

Bertolt Brecht

The following are a few comments on a poem by a wirter of above average talent, in which it seems to me that a fine subject has been ruined by disregard of the rules of logic. Another way of putting this would be to say that the poet’s emotional involvement was not sufficiently deep and consistent for some thorough, compelling logic to bring his poem into equilibrium. The poem in question is Fritz Brugel’s ‘Whispering Song’, published in Das Wart, 1936, no. 1.

We are not seen, we are not known

we wear no badges.

The enemy’s cunning does not burn us,

he cannot reach us.

We are not caught, we are not heard,

we do not live in the light.

The enemy’s hatred does not destroy us

the network of silent cells.

We go on spinning our threads,

the net grows ever tighter,

from town to town, from place to place

despite hangmen, prisons, judges.

4. We are like breath, air and wind,

the enemy cannot catch us.

He stares until his eyes are blind

and only feels that we are maturing.

Those who today in the greyness of the twilight

are digging the narrow paths:

they have nothing, they have nothing,

they will have everything.

The image of ‘burning’ is not a happy one. The reader can choose if the enemy’s cunning leads to our being burned, or consists in our being burned. A brief check shows the first alternative to be unacceptable. It would be possible to speak of cunning if the enemy were to succeed in burning us despite the fact that we are invisible and wear no badges; if not, it is we who are cunning. If the poet meant to say ‘even the enemy’s cunning’, then the ‘even’ should not have been omitted. There is nothing cunning about burning us, or if there is the poem does not go into it. A particularly sensitive reader would find something disturbing in the near-juxtaposition of ‘The enemy’s cunning does not burn us’ and ‘We do not live in the light’. But even the least sensitive must reject ‘We do not live in the light’ as an explanation ‘why we are not heard’. In the case of such identically constructed lines as ‘The enemy’s cunning does not burn us’ and ‘The enemy’s hatred does not destroy us’ it is essential that the second line should show a more marked progression than that from cunning to hatred. What is really bad, however, is the fact that after ‘does not destroy us’ and, worse still, ‘does not burn us’, whose effect is prolonged because of its vividness and its similar position in stanza 1, a sudden accusative should be hitched on, viz. ‘the network of silent cells’. It turns the accusative ‘us’ in ‘destroy us’ into a sudden dative. Nor is the silence of the cells happy, since ‘we do not live in the light’ remains the over-all explanation of the whole stanza. ‘Drak’ cells would have been better, though not all that beautiful maybe.

The spinning of the net in stanza 3 likewise contains disturbing elements. After a certain amount of thought it becomes clear that ‘the net grows ever tighter’ is an interpolation (and ought accordingly to be between brackets). Read naively, the net grows tighter from town to town. (In which case, ‘from place to place’ can and should be dispensed with). A point of detail: the ‘ever’ in line 2 here is banal. I say ‘here’ advisedly, because the over-all tone is not naive enough, nor is the sentenced place in a setting whose refinement would give it a special quality of simplicity.

‘And only feels that we are maturing’ is the most unfortunate line in the entire poem. ‘Maturing’ is an utterly flimsy psychological expression, and it has banal repercussions on the spinning of the net. The whisperers acquire biological characteristics of the most nebulous kind; presumably maturing ‘politically’ is what is meant. But this is something that is never developed in the poem. And what is going to happen once we have matured? Will the enemy then see us? If so, why? How do breath, air and wind mature?

The last stanza completely abandons the net-spinning image and goes ove to that of digging narrow paths. There is no preparation for the (repeated) ‘they have nothing’; ‘nothing’/’everything’ has little to do with the digging of narrow paths. As for the shifts of imagery (burning, nets with threads and cells, breath, air and wind, maturing, twilight, path-digging), legitimate as it is for the poet to indulge in this he has absolutely got to cut each individual image off, and must not let them blend into one another. In a short poem like this it is impermissible to keep a particular image going (‘we do not live in the light’ and ‘in the greyness of the twilight’) while at the same time swapping one subsidiary image for another (net-spinning for path-digging). And the maturing of the net-spinners interferes with the thickening of the net.

Over-fluent shifting of images might be termed ‘stream of imagery’ on the analogy of ‘stream of consciousness’. The images in question are mainly of the most superficial kind. It is a process whereby certain of the poet’s associations go itno his verse unfiltered. The burning in 1 is no doubt derived from the burning of the books. The maturing of stanza 4 rests, as I have said, on some kind of maturing ‘politically’. The expression ‘A network of silent cells’ involves bulldozing an optical image into acoustic one (neither nets nor cells can talk).

At first reading the poem is attractive but has no force. It doesn’t greatly matter whether one says that it lacks force because its logic is shaky, or that its logic is shaky because it lacks force.

On Picking Poems to Pieces

In so far as he appreciates poetry, the layman normally takes strong exception to what is known as picking poems to pieces: applying cold logic to those delicate, bloom-like structures and plucking words and images from them. Against this it must be said that even flowers don’t fade when one cuts into them. Poems, when they are capable of life at all, are quite remarkably so and can stand the most drastic surgery. A bad verse by no means utterly destroys a poem, anymore than a good one utterly redeems it. Spotting bad verses is the obverse side of the faculty without which there can be no such thing as a genuine ability to appreciate poems, namely that of spotting the good ones. Sometimes a poem calls for a very little work, sometimes for a lot. The layman who maintains that poems are unapproachable forgets that though the poet may be inviting him to share his own insubstantial moods, such as they are, their formulation in a poem is job of work, and the poem itself something fleeting that has been held fast, in other words something comparatively material and massive. Anybody who maintains that the poem is unapproachable really has no chance of approaching it. Half the pleasure is to apply standards. Pick a rose to pieces, and every petal is lovely.

Poetry in Context

I skimmed a small volume of Wordsworth’s poems in Arnold’s edition. Came on ‘She was a phantom of delight’ and reflected on this now remote work and on the dangers involve in laying down the law. Even such labels as ‘petty-bourgeois idyll’ are hazardous. There are indeed some petty-bourgeois tendencies which are directed towards the perpetuation and consolidation of the petty-bourgeoisie as a class, but within the petty-bourgeoisie there are also other kinds of tendencies that conflict with those. The individual pretty-bourgeois currently patrolling the English countryside equipped with a shotgun and a Molotov cocktail (as used against tanks in the Spanish Civil War, so a general assured us on the radio), has up to a point legitimate enough grounds for blaimng his Wordsworths; yet it is just in dehumanized situations like these that

A lovely apparition, sent

To be a moment’s ornament

helps to conjure up other situations less unworthy of the human race. Certainly ours is a time when the poem no longer serves ‘to haunt, to startle, to waylay’. Art is an autonomous sphere, though by no means an autarchic one. A few points:

possible criterion for the work of art: does it enrich the individual’s capacity for experience? (An individual, perhaps, who goes ahead and is overtaken by the masses moving in a predictable direction.)

It may enrich the capacity for expression, which is not the same as the capacity for experience but more like a capacity for communicating. (Perhaps the questions is to what extent the How is linked to What, and the What bound up with specific classes.)

Poetry is never mere expression. The absorption of a poem is an operation of the same order as seeing and hearing, i.e. something a great deal less passive. Writing poetry has to be viewed as a human activity, a social function of a wholly contradictory and alterable kind, conditioned by history and in turn conditioning it. It is the difference between ‘mirroring’ and ‘holding up a mirror’.

-- Brecht, Bertolt. Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956. eds Willet, John and Ralph Manheim. USA: Mathuen Inc. 1979. pp 477-483

Free, I Walk on the Mountain and Enjoy the View

2009-11-11T01:04:00.001-08:00

Ho Chi Minh

Mountains. Clouds.
More mountains. More clouds.

Far below a river gleams,
bright and unspotted.

Alone, with beating heart,
I walk on the Western Range,

And gaze far off towards the South
and think of my comrades.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Good Days Coming

2009-11-11T01:02:00.000-08:00

Ho Chi Minh

Everything changes, the wheel
of the law turns without pause.

After the rain, good weather.

In the wink of an eye

The universe throws off
its muddy cloths.

For ten thousand miles
the landscape

Spreads out like
a beautiful brocade.

Gentle sunshine.
Light breezes. Smiling flowers,

Hang in the trees, amongst the
sparkling leaves,

All the birds sing at once.

Men and animals rise up reborn.

What could be more natural?

After sorrow comes happiness.

And one after being released from prison.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Good

2009-11-11T01:00:00.001-08:00

Everything changes, the wheel
of the law turns without pause.

After the rain, good weather.

In the wink of an eye

The universe throws off
its muddy cloths.

For ten thousand miles
the landscape

Spreads out like
a beautiful brocade.

Gentle sunshine.
Light breezes. Smiling flowers,

Hang in the trees, amongst the
sparkling leaves,

All the birds sing at once.

Men and animals rise up reborn.

What could be more natural?

After sorrow comes happiness.

And one after being released from prison.

COLD NIGHT

2009-11-11T00:57:00.000-08:00

Ho Chi Minh

Autumn night.
No mattress. No covers.

No sleep. Body and legs
huddle up and cramp.

The moon shines
on the frost-covered banana leaves.

Beyond my bars
the Great Bear swings on the Pole.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Clear Morning

2009-11-11T00:55:00.000-08:00

Ho Chi Minh

The morning sun
shines over the prison wall,

And drives away the shadows
and miasma of hopelessness.

A life-giving breeze
blows across the earth.

A hundred imprisoned faces
smile once more.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

AUTUMN NIGHT

2009-11-11T00:53:00.000-08:00

Ho Chi Minh

Before the gate, a guard
with a rifle on his shoulder.

In the sky, the moon flees
through clouds.

Swarming bed bugs,
like black army tanks in the night.

Squadrons of mosquitoes,
like waves of attacking planes.

I think of my homeland.
I dream I can fly far away.

I dream I wander trapped
in webs of sorrow.

A year has come to an end here.
What crime did I commit?

In tears I write
another prison poem.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

A comrade's paper blanket

2009-11-11T00:50:00.000-08:00

Ho Chi Minh

New books, old books,
the leaves all piled together.

A paper blanket
is better than no blanket.

You who sleep like princes,
sheltered from the cold,

Do you know how many men in prison
cannot sleep all night?

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

For Edwin Thumboo and All of Us Who Suffer Through English in Asia

2009-11-11T00:46:00.000-08:00

Alfrredo Navarro Salanga

A travesty, they say,
a tapestry, we contend,
as we worm verses

                  into languaged
                                 silk.

                                 Or silt,
they say, these coccoons
are empty anyway--

                                  Cotton, they add,
                                  cotton
is the cloth of the people.

Silk is as good as silt to
them,
        butterflies a luxury
        because inedible,

except in extreme cases
because hunger

                       gives them
                       strange appetites.

Poetry is as silk is
just as novels are, for that matter,
                          as pretty flowers
                          on a table.

When empty, the flowers fade
into other meanings:
                                     "Poet,
can verses in your language
feed me?"



Can your verses
                       coccoon
my fear?           Can it
shut off
           the howling
           of my children,

their hungry mouths
wide as mothwings,

                              the wick
of my lamp gone dry?

                                 "Poet,
can verses in my language
feed me?"

Can they build
                    a coccoon
large enough
                  to weave
my anger?

              Or
                   will your verses

remain
         food for the few

                 who love tapestries
                 who love silk
                 who love butterflies

                 and flowers
                                   on their tables?

Dregs

2009-11-11T00:39:00.000-08:00

César Vallejo

This afternoon it is raining, as never before; and I
have no desire to live, my heart.

    This afternoon is sweet. Why should it not be?
Dressed in grace and pain; dressed like a woman.

    This afternoon in Lima it is raining. And I recall
the cruel caverns of my ingratitude;
my block of ice over her poppy,
stronger than her "Don't be this way!"

    My violent black flowers; and the barbaric 
and terrible stoning; and the glacial distance.
And the silence of her dignity
with burning holy oils will put all end to it.

    So this afternoon, as never before, I am
with this owl, with this heart.

    Other women go by; and seeing me so sad,
they take on a bit of you
in the abrupt wrinkle of my deep remorse.

    This afternoon it is raining, raining hard. And I
have no desire to live, my heart!

Translated by Clayton Eshleman

Doveglion

2009-11-11T00:37:00.000-08:00

E.E.Cummings

he isn't looking at anything
he isn't looking for something
he isn't looking
he is seeing

what

not something outside himself
not anything inside himself
but himself

himself how

not as some anyone
not as any someone

only as a noone(who is everyone)

Desiderata

2009-11-11T00:33:00.000-08:00

Max Ehrmann

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others,
even to the dull and ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be
greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career
however humble;

it is a real possession in the
changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you
to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,

gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit
to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore, be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham,
drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

Crossings

2009-11-11T00:32:00.000-08:00

Ravi Shankar

Between forest and field, a threshold
like stepping from a cathedral into the street—
the quality of air alters, an eclipse lifts,

boundlessness opens, earth itself retextured
into weeds where woods once were.
Even planes of motion shift from vertical

navigation to horizontal quiescence:
there’s a standing invitation to lie back
as sky’s unpredictable theater proceeds.

Suspended in this ephemeral moment
after leaving a forest, before entering
a field, the nature of reality is revealed.

Carts

2009-11-11T00:31:00.000-08:00

Ricardo M. de Ungria

And so I live happily ever after.
I have fathered, written poems, and planted trees.
I get my daily bread and mug of beer.
Fruits spill from the bowls and vased flowers keep fresh.
The drainage works and the telephone rings.
All one-night stands have upped and gone unkissed
and money from teaching restocked the shelves
with groceries. Green has recovered
the mountains, and the air and the waters
have been freed of their annals of big business dirt.
Even the president waxes lyrical,
and stray cats no longer lie squashed on the road.
Books I had wanted to read have been read,
and every music that spared me waltzes played.
Every stolen glance and stolen feeling
returned to their unwitting muses
and all disproportions of desire solved.

But today these happy days remain homeless,
counting the lampposts or asleep in their carts.
They keep seeing things and dream of flying.
I see to their needs and fit them out
to their ends. I square them off against
the emptiness that stepped out of its dream
without warning. I’m ready for anything,
I say. Come. Come and get me.

Be Near Me

2009-11-11T00:24:00.000-08:00

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me—
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
                               with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
                           of inconsolable children
            who, though you try with all your heart,
                            cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
                        dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.

Translated by Naomi Lazard

Anniversary

2009-11-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

Gabriela Mistral

And we go on and on,
Neither sleeping nor awake,
Towards the meeting, unaware
That we are already there.
That the silence is perfect,
And that the flesh is gone.
The call still is not heard
Nor does the Caller reveal his face.

…..

But perhaps this might be
Oh, my love, the gift
Of the eternal Face without gestures
And of the kingdom without form!

A blade of grass

2009-11-11T00:21:00.001-08:00

Kahlil Gibran

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, "You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams."

Said the leaf indignant, "Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing."

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again -- and she was a blade of grass.

And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, "O these autumn leaves! They make such a noise! They scatter all my winter dreams."

A Private Fall

2009-11-11T00:17:00.000-08:00

Robert Bly

Motes of haydust rise and fall
With slow and grave steps,
Like servants who dance in the yard
Because some prince has been born.

What has been born? The Winter.
Then the Egyptians were right.
Everything wants a chance to die,
To begin in the clear fall air.

Each leaf sinks and goes down
When we least expect it.
We glance toward the window for some-
Thing has caught our eye.

It’s possible autumn is a tomb
Out of which a child is born.
We feel a secret joy
And we tell no one!

Those Who Do Not Dance

2009-11-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

Gabriela Mistral

A crippled child
Said, "How shall I dance?"
Let your heart dance
We said.

Then the invalid said:
"How shall I sing?"
Let your heart sing
We said

Then spoke the poor dead thistle,
"But I, how shall I dance?"
Let your heart fly to the wind
We said.

Then God spoke from above
"How shall I descend from the blue?"
Come dance for us here in the light
We said.

All the valley is dancing
Together under the sun,
And the heart of him who joins us not
Is turned to dust, to dust.

Refusal

2009-11-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

Maya Angelou

Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body's haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die.

The Nobodies written by Eduardo Galeano

2009-11-03T21:42:00.000-08:00

Aimee Rozen

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream
of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will
suddenly rain down on them- will rain down in buckets. But
good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter
how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is
tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or
start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The
nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits,
dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the
police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them

a smile to remember

2009-11-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

Charles Bukowski

we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, "be happy Henry!"
and she was right: it's better to be happy if you can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't
understand what was attacking him from within.

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled

The Sick Rose

2009-11-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Utopia

2009-11-03T21:38:00.000-08:00

Wislawa Szymborska

Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

April Rain Song

2009-11-03T21:35:00.000-08:00

Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.

Dreams

2009-11-03T21:34:00.000-08:00

Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

A Dream Pang

2009-11-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

Robert Frost

I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway;
And to the forest edge you came one day
(This was my dream) and looked and pondered long,
But did not enter, though the wish was strong:
You shook your pensive head as who should say,
‘I dare not—too far in his footsteps stray—
He must seek me would he undo the wrong.

Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all
Behind low boughs the trees let down outside;
And the sweet pang it cost me not to call
And tell you that I saw does still abide.
But ’tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,
For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

2009-11-03T21:31:00.000-08:00

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

You darkness

2009-11-03T21:29:00.000-08:00

Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!-
powers and people-

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Translated by Robert Bly

Tie your heart to mine

2009-11-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

Sonnet LXXIX
Pablo Neruda

Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.

Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.

Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,

So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.

A Word to Husbands

2009-11-03T21:25:00.000-08:00

Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

A Book

2009-11-03T21:24:00.000-08:00

Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,

Nor any coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of toll;

How frugal is the chariot

That bears a human soul!

We Real Cool

2009-11-03T21:18:00.001-08:00

Gwendolyn Brooks

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks

And because Love battles

2009-11-03T21:16:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

Gabu

2009-11-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Carlos Angeles

The battering restlessness of the sea
Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
At Gabu, and its pure consistency
Havocs the wasteland hard within its reach.

Brutal the daylong bashing of its heart
Against the seascape where, for miles around,
Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones part
And drop into the elemental wound.

The waste of centuries is grey and dead
And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,
Where the split salt of its heart lies spread
Among the dark habiliments of Time.

The vital splendor misses. For here, here
At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs
All things forfeited are most loved and dear.

It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.

Saddest poem

2009-11-03T21:10:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.

Dream Tiger

2009-11-03T18:04:00.000-08:00

Jorge Luis Borges

In my childhood I was a fervent worshipper of the
tiger--not the jaguar, that spotted "tiger" that
inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along
the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon,
but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can
be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an
elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of
the cages at the zoo. I would rank vast encyclopedias
and natural history books by the splendor of their
tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot
recall without error a woman's brow or smile.) My
childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them
faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that
underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I
sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and
suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those
moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure
diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited
power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seen to engender the
creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but
it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has
impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or
it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a
dog or bird than like a tiger. ---

Clothing dreams

2009-11-03T18:02:00.000-08:00

Margaret Atwood

Oh no. Not this again. It's the clothing dream. I've
been having this for fifty years. Aisle after aisle,
closetful after closetful, metal rack after metal rack
of clothing, stretching into the distance under the
glare of fluorescent tubing -- as gaudy and ornate and
confusing, and finally as glum and oppressive, as the
dreams of a long-time opium smoker. Why am I compelled
to riffle through these outfits, tangling up the
hangers, tripping on the ribbons, snagging myself on a
hook or button while feathers and sequins and fake
pearls drop to the floor like ants from a burning
tree? What is the occasion? Who do I need to impress?

---

There's a smell of stale underarms. Everything's been
worn before. Nothing fits. Too small, too big, too
magenta. These flounces, hoops, ruffles, wired
collars, cut-velvet capes -- none of these disguises
are mine. How old am I in this dream? Do I have tits?
Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to
live? ---

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

2009-11-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Desiderata

2009-11-03T17:58:00.000-08:00

Max Ehrmann

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

If You Forget Me

2009-11-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Ode to a beautiful nude

2009-11-03T17:52:00.000-08:00

Pablo neruda

With a chaste heart
With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music

Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes

The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth

From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form

It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within

The moon lives in the lining of your skin

Clenched Soul

2009-11-03T17:50:00.000-08:00

Pablo Neruda

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.