How does this play out in your appreciation of the Tao Te Ching? — Tom Storm
For me, it's a circular process. Iterative. Without any real feeling I'm trying to get anything right. I try not to try too hard. — T Clark
So whatever I said about the translation above wasn't actually meant to denigrate the translation. — Dawnstorm
Maybe that's why I like Taoism so much - it's a lazy man's philosophy. I doubt many would agree with that. — T Clark
There's an imaginative poetic subtlety involved in Taoism that can't be readily described - hence the The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao I think that's what you've been getting at. — Tom Storm
Talking of poems about poems--and apologies to Moliere if this is off-topic. . . — Jamal
This was lovely to read. It's the exact sort of thing I'm looking for. Meiner Deutsch ist Kerput ;) -- but I remembered enough to get the phonic structure out of it, and it was nice to be able to read two renditions of lines for the purpose of preserving the meaning found in the original language -- the adjectives you use, I get exactly what you mean when you say them, though they are often physical metaphors: a line being "heavy", or debating between two translations on the basis of the way they "feel" in each language. That's exactly what I'm after. — Moliere
The issue is that this is based upon personal perspectives and choices about language, intent, mood, culture. Translators do not always agree on how things should be reconstructed and all they can point to is our personal preferences and justification. — Tom Storm
Ahhh!
This was lovely to read. It's the exact sort of thing I'm looking for. — Moliere
Robert Frost, Emily Dickenson, e. e. cummings. These three worth the dime obtaining complete collections of their poetry, usually in one volume, for long-term browsing. And worth a quick look at reviews of collections.
[...]
Another poem of his I like, for a certain visceral vividness, that's longer, is Home Burial, here.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53086/home-burial — tim wood
From: 'Creating Poetry' - John Drury
Ch XI - Other Arts, Other Influences, p184
Poems can imitate musical forms.
Michael Harper uses jazz as both inspiration and subject matter in poems such as 'Dear John, Dear Coltrane' and 'A Love Supreme' ( title of Coltrane's four movement masterpiece).
— Drury
The music:
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme [Full Album] (1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU — Amity
Leaves fall
Leaves pile up;
Rain ... beats on rain. — Gyōdai
The only Haiku poetry I can remember from my youth is,
Leaves fall
And pile up;
Rain beats on rain.
— Gyōdai
There was a connection there between the poem, the poet, and me but it's lost now. Too bad, I wish I could go back about 30 years ago and re-read the poem and re-experience those emotions again.
Numinous,
Back then it was,
Now,
Like a spent candle,
Nothing! — Mad Fool Agent Smith
I'd forgotten about it but searched there for a memorable poem posted by tim wood': — Amity
Another poem of his I like, for a certain visceral vividness, that's longer, is Home Burial, here.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53086/home-burial — tim wood
Talking of poems about poems--and apologies to Moliere if this is off-topic--I recently read the "The Thought Fox" by Ted Hughes. It's a poem about writing poems, or about creativity, and foxes:
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed. — Jamal
I chose Brian Bilston because he's contemporary, accessible, and writes in a style that is easily recognizable as poetry.
Philosophically speaking I want to contrast this with truth-conditions as a means for bringing out what else there is in meaning, especially in discussing meaning. — Moliere
[emphasis added]Poets, like journalists, historians, are after the truth. But what kind of truth, exactly, do we find in poetry?
[..]
The tension between poetry and truth gave Goethe the title of his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (“From My Life: Poetry and Truth”), written between 1811 and 1833. W. H. Auden borrowed Goethe’s title in 1959 for a prose sequence on love, and, in 1977, the poet Anthony Hecht (a great admirer of both poets) took the same title for a poem in which he considers, among other things, Goethe, the Second World War, and the thorny relationship between truth and art. Hecht conveyed the truth of his war experience as a poet not as a journalist or historian. [*]
[...]
When Goethe takes “Poetry and Truth” as the title of his autobiography, what he is suggesting in part, I think, is that experience, in a work of art, may be rendered most clearly, and in a sense most truthfully, by attending to something beyond the verifiable facts. Fine, you might say, but doesn’t art, then, become, as Jacques Maritain wrote, “a world apart, closed, limited, absolute”—not the apprehension of reality but a replacement for reality, an illusion? This was a mote to trouble the mind’s eye of Plato.
[...]
For Winters, poetry—and, in its concision, lyric poetry, especially—is the highest linguistic form because, taken together, connotation and denotation compose the “total content” of language. It’s true that the two exist together in other kinds of writing, a novel, say, but poetry, by dint of its meters, lines, and highly wrought rhythms, modulates feeling with the greatest control.
Connotation in poetry, then, acquires what Winters thinks of as a “moral” dimension. In order to render human experience truthfully, connotation or “feeling” must be precisely managed:
The artistic process is one of moral evaluation of human experience, by means of a technique which renders possible an evaluation more precise than any other. The poet tries to understand his experience in rational terms, to state his understanding, and simultaneously to state, by means of the feelings we attach to words, the kind and degree of emotion that should properly be motivated by this understanding.
The term “moral,” then, refers—at least in this instance—to a fairly technical process of selecting the best words in the best order for a given subject. “In so far as the rational statement is understandable and acceptable, and in so far as the feeling is properly motivated by the rational statement, the poem will be good,” he tells us. — Poetry and Truth by David Jezzi - The New Criterion
This challenge creates the underlying tension in Hecht’s most famous poem of the Holocaust, which takes its title from Goethe’s dying words, “More Light! More Light!”:
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
Hecht did not witness this scene at Buchenwald—it was not true for him in this sense—but takes it from a book by the historian and survivor Eugen Kogon. Even so, the scene resonates very directly with his own life. Hecht’s infantry company was present at the liberation of Flossenbürg at end of the war. As he later explained in an interview, Flossenbürg... — Poetry and Truth
It reminds me of a previous discussion where I highlighted the use of poetry as communicating first-hand War experience, when some truths were blocked from the public. — Amity
Although she has increasingly shifted toward writing in Ukrainian, her poems are rich with references to Russian literature (in one poem below she cites Pasternak’s 1912 line, “February. Get the ink and weep.”) Kiva’s war poems describe a young country desperately clutching life.
–Amelia Glaser, Cambridge, MA
This is the first in a series featuring contemporary poetry from Ukraine.
*
Three poems by Iya Kiva (b. 1984)
This coffin’s for you, little boy, don’t be afraid, lie down,
A bullet called life clutched tight in your fist,
We didn’t believe in death, look – the crosses are tinfoil.
Do you hear – all the bell towers tore out their tongues?
We won’t forget you, believe it, believe it, be …
Belief bleeds down the seam inside your sleeve,
Chants, prayers, psalms swell up in a lump in your throat
In the middle of this damned winter all dressed in khaki,
And February, getting the ink, is sobbing.
And the candle drips on the table, burning and burning…
Translated from the Russian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, 2014
*
and when it came my turn to be killed
everyone started to speak Lithuanian
everyone started to call me Yanukas
summoned me hither to their native land
my god I said I am not Lithuanian
my god I told them I said it in Yiddish
my god I told them I said it in Russian
my god I said to them in Ukrainian
there where the Kalmius flows into the Neman
a child is crying in a church
Translated from the Russian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, 2016
*
to hold a needle of silence in your mouth
to stitch your words in white thread
to whimper while drowning in spit
to keep from screaming spitting blood
to hold the water of a language on your tongue
which leaks like a rusty bucket
to mend things that are still useful
to sew crosses on the really weak spots
like bandages on the wounded in a hospital
to learn to search for the roots of a life
that has yet to learn its name
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, 2019
____________________________
Iya Kiva is a poet, translator, and journalist living in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Further from Heaven (Podal’she ot raya, 2018) and The First Page of Winter (Persha storinka zimy, 2019), and the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and translation.
Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at U.C. San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020).
Yuliya Ilchuk is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (2021).
Kiyanovska has recently written ekphrastic poems based on Khrystyna Valko’s digital graphic poster art. One poem accompanies a portrait of a heart, trapped in a brick wall, an homage to Mariupol:
серце впіймане в біль виною
сто п’ятнадцятий день війни
між душею і чужиною
маріупольські бур’яни
з-під асфальту попроростали
the heart trapped in guilt-pain
war’s hundred fifteenth day
between soul and stranger
Mariupol’s weeds
sprouted from the asphalt
This Mariupol is a violated, animate being. It is a body with blood, tears, and veins, dismembered and profaned by the atrocities of war. These lines open with the phonetic association between “guilt” (vyna) and “war” (viina). The string of painful images, lacking any punctuation, approximates the emotional pace of perceiving the city’s unfathomable losses. Another recent poem accompanies Valko’s poster to encourage blood donation. Kiyanovska reduces language to its simplest connections, using the verbal associations of blood and love to redraw the meaning of a Ukrainian community, one connected through the act of giving blood: “‘donor’ can translate to ‘love’”.
The “multilevel I” that Kiyanovska attempted to articulate with her Babyn Yar cycle in 2017 has become a way of understanding kinship among linguistically, geographically, and ethnically diverse Ukrainians in a time of war. Kiyanovska’s ongoing poetics describes a radically new understanding of identity: today, she asserts, Ukrainians should not be bound by ethnic blood-lines, but rather (tragically, heroically) by spilled blood. This is part ten in a series on contemporary poetry from Ukraine.
[...]
the heart trapped in guilt-pain
war’s hundred fifteenth day
between soul and stranger
Mariupol’s weeds
sprouted from the asphalt
hung from the veins
“Azovstal” dead suburbs up
to the horizon oxygen
in crematoria just-baked
blackened teeth and fingers
dead human – and stork-nests
the silence of a sharp shrill sound
shatters the walls today
the walls are writhing blood flows
from acacia blossoms
rising like a mustering of storks
a homeless windowpane broken
infinite black holes
they wanted to live in this city
and of course to love
and now there’s only air water
salty from the tears
no freedom in these ruins
just the carcasses of suitcases
(2022)
— "
Throughout the Spring of 2022, Kiyanovska has posted poems to her facebook page about those regions most affected by Russia’s full-scale invasion. Here too Kiyanovska highlights the collectivity of a “multilevel I.” One poem assumes a child’s voice to describe a missile strike in lines that are all the more brutal for their childish rhyme scheme and rhythm:
it’s our very last moment of silence
we’ve already had four
Three times since this morning: sirens
we all ran out the door
we knew Tanya’d run ahead
but the bomb buried everyone
Tanya, missing a leg, lies dead
still in kindergarten
це наша остання хвилина мовчання
до того було чотири
сирени вмикалися тричі з рання
ми вийшли всі із квартири
а таня ми знали побігла перша
та бомба усіх накрила
таня лежить без ноги і вмерша
вона ще в дитсад ходила
The deminers, part of the 113th Kharkiv Defense Brigade of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces, walked deep into fallow agricultural lands on Thursday along a muddy road between fields of dead sunflowers overgrown with high weeds. [...]
“One year of war equals 10 years of demining,” Dokuchaev said. “Even now we are still finding munitions from World War II, and in this war they’re being planted left and right.” — Guardian
...there was a connection there between the poem, the poet, and me but it's lost now. Too bad, I wish I could go back about 30 years ago and re-read the poem and re-experience those emotions again.
Numinous,
Back then it was,
Now,
Like a spent candle,
Nothing!
— Mad Fool/Agent Smith — Amity
I've lost touch with my poetic side it seems. — Agent Smith
John Stewart wrote "Daydream Believer" as the third in a trilogy of songs about suburban life,[3] recalling: "I remember going to bed thinking, 'What a wasted day — all I’ve done is daydream.' And from there I wrote the whole song. I never thought it was one of my best songs. Not at all".[4]
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
108
What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o’er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
Finding the first conceit of love there bred,
Where time and outward form would show it dead.
While browsing for poems -- I have never before ventured down the path of The Wasteland until now. And I really did love it. — Moliere
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