The plowboy was something his something as I nibbled the lobe
of her right ear and something her blouse
for the Empire-blotchy globe
of her left breast on which there something a something louse.
II
Those something lice like something seed pearls
and her collar something with dandruff
as when Queen Elizabeth entertained the Earls
in her something something ruff.
III
I might have something the something groan
of the something plowboy who would with such something urge
the something horses, a something and a roan,
had it not been for the something splurge
of something like the hare
which even now managed to something itself from the something
plowshare.
Notes on the Poem
What kind of a whimsical puzzle has Paul Muldoon presented us with in the fractured sonnet that is "Winter Wheat", from his 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection Moy sand and gravel? We've pondered it before ... let's ponder it again.
Does the title offer a clue towards deciphering the sometimes sensual (ear lobe nibbling!), sometimes impish (lice like ... seed pearls, eek!) lines that follow? Winter wheat refers to strains of wheat planted - perhaps counter-intuitively - in the fall to germinate and vegetate under winter snows and continue growing the next spring. What has Muldoon planted here that might be germinating in the reader's mind ... to surprise, grow and nurture sometime later? (Winter wheat appears elsewhere in Muldoon's work, in his intriguing poem "The Merman".)
That "something something" tic throughout the poem is the heart of what puzzles, fascinates, maybe even kind of irritates the reader. Structurally, the occurrences of "something" are perfectly placed to maintain the poem's metre and rhyme scheme. Simultaneously, they maintain some of its mystery. Are these lines taken from other works, are they parodies (Joyce is one suggestion) ... or what? Are the "something something"'s indicative of a mind striving to commit something to memory, or of memories starting to break down?
When you look up, or out,
or in, your seeing is
a substance: stuff: a density
of some kind, like a pitch
that’s just outside the range
of hearing: numb
nudge of the real.
I saw air
once, in its nothingness
so clear it was a voice
almost, a kind of joy. I thought
of water – breath as drinking –
and the way it shows us
light. Or maybe it was light
I thought of – as though
water were the solid form
of wind, and air
a language with a single word
transparent to the world.
Your glance is this,
meltwater, mountain light.
The plunge and thunder of the pool.
The ripple at its farthest edge.
Notes on the Poem
At first glance (or even after several glimpses, as we are revisiting this poem), you might find the slim column of text that is Jan Zwicky's poem "When You Look Up" simple, modest and unassuming. But oh, the sensory shifts through which Zwicky swiftly takes you will make you appreciate each sensation in startlingly new ways.
To start, how you see is compared to something tactile:
"a density
of some kind"
... and then in rapid succession, to something auditory:
"like a pitch
that’s just outside the range
of hearing"
How delightfully disorienting is that?
It's not just how one sense is substituted for another that leaves you feeling this way. The line:
"I saw air"
leaps outside of the column of text surprisingly, mischievously, leading your eyes on a merry chase. As the rest of your senses follow in pursuit, it becomes clear (where the clarity, again, can take many forms) that all this sensory upheaval is created by the glance of a loved one, culminating in:
"The plunge and thunder of the pool.
The ripple at its farthest edge."
You arrive at the final line out of breath - whatever breath is! - and exhilarated.
The tenant she said call it.
He said I did, I did
And then the tenant’s boyfriend was like
I called you and a girl picked up and
Said it was the wrong number.
(And I’m like okay so it was the wrong number why are you even
Telling the guy that)
And then her boyfriend was like ya, I called it four times
She said it was the wrong number.
And then, then I was like okay. Hmm what the fuck.
And the tenant was like maybe it was your wife?
And her boyfriend was like no it
Was a girl.
So there’s a
Question there.
Also apparently the dog likes the cat
But the cat
Does not like the dog.
Notes on the Poem
In the poem "The landlord said he lost his phone", we're left breathless and intrigued again by Aisha Sasha John's highly attuned ear for colloquial interjections and rhythms. She hints at layers of meaning under the seemingly quotidian in this selection from her 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection I have to live.
The poem unfolds uncannily like that half of a conversation you can't help but overhear next to someone on their phone at a bus stop or during a quick lunch grabbed at the food court. The person speaking in this half conversation seems to be tossing off a sequence of remarks ...
"The tenant she said ..."
"He said ..."
"And then the tenant's boyfriend ..."
The speaker's recap of the situation is peppered with "likes" that, in normal parlance these days, are so ubiquitous it's almost surprising to seem them transcribed here.
The pointed suspicion of the parenthetical remark makes clear, however, that the casual tone is deceptive. The speaker is very attentive to what is going on, not unlike the seemingly heedless but very aware narrator of John's poem "I fold in half."
What might seem on one level to be light or even humorous - a recounting of different people interpreting a situation differently, a game of phone tag or missed connections - might also have an undercurrent of more menacing subterfuge, circling back to the poem's title. The landlord is avoiding calls, making excuses, and that might mean the roof over someone's head is no longer an assured thing. In other words ...
"And then, then I was like okay. Hmm what the fuck."
In addition to that dilemma, the poem closes with an enigmatic line. Is it the voice of the person speaking to this point, or is it the listener? "Also apparently" doesn't really sound like the idiom of the speaker to this point, does it? After the flurry of "likes" preceding it, the use of "likes" as a verb sounds almost jarringly unusual. Hmm ...
Anniversaries circle round again. My grandparents
marrying in the sun. The guests in their best attire.
The filled vaulted room. Then the clinking glasses.
Then the private rites of those who waited long.
It is there in the light. Light that is a window.
And is a mirroring seas for my grandmother
out in the sailing ship of her wedding dress. Her ashes.
Someone I loved dying alone. The month the wide frame
of her final leaving. It was also her birth month. Light
opens its window, and is window upon window.
Her living hair darkens beyond its living black.
That black is another light, no visible sun
burning in its origins but a dark transparency,
and it arrives like another her, again and again.
I too am a window. In August, two people
among the dead look out of it. They do not know
the window is me. And I am what a window can wish.
To open endlessly because it is light,
and because it is a mirror, let the silver erase itself
and arrive and wait flawless on the glass,
and darken, and erase itself, like life, like death.
Notes on the Poem
Russell Thornton's "Anniversaries, End of August" leaves us dizzy after one reading, but eager to read the poem again. How does he so entice readers in this selection from his 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection The Hundred Lives?
Anniversaries - yearly observances of occasions, such as weddings - and birthdays, arguably one's most precious anniversary of all, are often referred to as "a trip around the sun", the time it takes for planet Earth to circle the sun. Thornton reinforces this concept with immediate references to those very things - circling and the sun - and then takes us through a verging on vertiginous series of images and effects that reflect (pun rather intentional!) on our awareness of the passage of time.
Light, windows and mirrors whirl, collide and merge. How we and those we love are bathed in changing light and captured as ever-repeating and either ever-intensifying or fading series of images leaves us close to dazed. Is light helping us to understand something - shedding light, in effect - or is it blinding us to something? Are windows opening us to something?
"I too am a window. In August, two people
among the dead look out of it."
... suggests awareness of our lineage and mortality. But then ...
"Light
opens its window, and is window upon window."
... is like the effect of mirrors mirroring other mirrors and the images held in the mirrors, repeating infinitely. Does that depiction of the limitless of time offer comfort or create helpless despair?
Before readers tip into woozy sensory overload, Thornton establishes exquisite balance in the poem's closing lines:
"because it is a mirror, let the silver erase itself
and arrive and wait flawless on the glass,
and darken, and erase itself, like life, like death."
As we observed David McFadden doing in last week's Poem of the Week, Thornton lets the reader process whether or not the poem has ended on an encouraging or discouraging note.
Meditating in the back
of Jack’s green Volkswagen
rolling along Highway 2
east of Paris
I’m conscious only of the motion
of things speeding against me
on both sides of my head,
eyes closed, and a sudden braking
and a breaking of that dream.
I’m in a moving car among green hills
and cow grazings of the world,
motels, gas stations of Ontario
and a dog slowly walking across
into our speeding lane, a black dog,
and in tall grass at roadside, a boy,
waving his arms, screaming.
Notes on the Poem
We miss terribly David McFadden's wry, observant, mischievous voice, so adept at pulling us into stories and worlds. How grateful we are to have collections of his work where that voice runs like a strong current, such as Why Are You So Sad?, the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted work in which "Slow Black Dog" is found.
The 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize judges encapsulated beautifully the charms of McFadden's poetry:
"Like his hero William Blake, he lives at ease among the most supernatural of events, and gazes in wonderment at everyday things. As a poet he reminds you to be yourself, to be yourself in the world, and give it a chance to amaze you. While reading his beautiful clear language, you sense that he is a trickster, but you cannot help believing every stanza he writes."
In "Slow Black Dog", McFadden tells a story plainly, accenting it with small but striking touches. The green of the car brightens the first stanza, echoed by the green hills in the third stanza. Motion and how fast that motion unfolds is captured succinctly. And then oh!
"a sudden braking
and a breaking of that dream."
The irresistible frisson of this deceptively simple poem is that you, the reader are jolted too. Wisely and generously, McFadden lets you decide which way your heart leaps - in sorrow or in joy.
represents history and an angel
is beating the beast on the back
Both are made of marble
One is a dragon
Its head is flat
like the iron tanks
in muddy water
that drove the men into the Gulf of Tonkin.
…
In my experience
the angel with his wings up
is trying to kill the dragon of history
to prove that air
is stronger than the objects in it
and if he wasn’t made of stone, he would.
Notes on the Poem
With Fanny Howe's poem "The Dragon of History", we're reminded of what interesting paths a poem can take us down. The poem, taken from Howe's 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection On the Ground, offers a historical reference that of course, an attentive reader will want to learn more about and then, of course, might just pursue down unexpected avenues.
Before we head down one of those intriguing pathways, let's pause to admire how this excerpt - the opening and closing sections of this poem - so beautifully frames the poem's possible theme or thesis. Contemplating some kind of historical monument ("both are made of marble"), we're asked to consider history as the figure of a dragon, in conflict with the figure of an angel. If the angel is some kind of symbol of religious or spiritual faith, are we to believe that faith prevails over what happened historically, or what the forces of the historical past can still unleash? The closing portion of the poem leaves us plenty to ponder.
Amidst the concrete and symbolic images we're given to consider, the opening section of the poem makes a very specific historical reference, to the Gulf of Tonkin. Shrouded in mystery, military incidents in this region that have were not fully substantiated led to the intensification of tensions that ignited and escalated U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1964.
Political subject matter engaged Fanny Howe from an early age. She admits "Well, I had already been indoctrinated by my father who talked about politics with me over the dishes" in a 2013 interview. Deeply and evocatively informing her work throughout her life, it is fascinating to discover how Vietnam emerged early on in her life as an artist, in a somewhat surprising piece: the vintage nurse romance novel Vietnam Nurse, one of two VNRNs (yes, that's how one refers to them!) she wrote and published before her first forays into poetry.
This review of the companion novel, West Coast Nurse - both novels were written by Howe using the pseudonym Della Field (Delafield was briefly her married surname) - praises how progressively characters and themes are presented. Although apparently that subversive energy wasn't sustained in Vietnam Nurse, it's clear that early in her journey as a writer, Howe was imbuing a genre that some might dismiss as lightweight with serious perspectives. Those perspectives fully inform her poetry and other work to the present.
At night three elements enjoy our bodies.
Fire, water, air. One moment you’re water
then air the next, but flame encircles all.
At night we are reduced, small bits of tar,
soot on our skins, in cups. A storm enters
the room and clouds the mirror. There are others
from far away who look on us as food,
they eat and drink. They find each orifice
and enter us. Our bodies then become
the final element of earth and turn
to ash, dust, coal, compost where insects live
and snails leave tracks you ask about at dawn.
Once, at the world’s end, I threw a stone into
the open mouth of hell; I can’t complain.
Notes on the Poem
Upheaval of various forms is captured memorably and forcefully in the poem "The Storm," translated by Mira Rosenthal from the Polish poem "Burza" by Tomasz Rózycki, from the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Colonies.
"At night" ... Rózycki asserts we are not getting much rest. The three elements that swirl throughout this brief poem are, simultaneously, the fundamentals of which we are composed, but also seem to be the essence of demons that torment us.
In an essay examining several of Rózycki's works, including Colonies and The Forgotten Keys (also translated by Mira Rosenthal), Nicole Zdeb observed:
"His poetic terrain is infused by place and by lack of place, place and displacement. He speaks from a place of permanent exile."
That displacement refers to the post World War II displacement of "whole towns, communities, and families of Germans and Poles forcibly moved due to geopolitical schemes that revised the map." As Rózycki speaks for successive generations still feeling and processing that disruption, could that in part explain the literally elemental disruption the haunted and distressed sleepers suffer in this poem?
That rueful last line ... Zdeb also praises Rózycki's "rollicking, smart, and bitter humor", which Rosenthal has maintained so poignantly in translation. Even amidst the poem's sturm und drang, he "can't complain" and clearly will cope.
Zdeb's essay, incidentally, refers to Colonies as a series of sonnets. Considering this is work in translation provokes an interesting conundrum. If, as some insist, sonnets must rhyme, can a poem in translation that might or might not have rhymed in the original language be considered a sonnet?
This is how you see me the space in which to place me
The space in me you see is this place
To see this space see how you place me in you
This is how to place you in the space in which to see
Although brief and seemingly spare, this section of Layli Long Soldier's poem "He Sápa" is dizzyingly powerful and provocative. How does she pack such potency into this selection from her 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Whereas.
Long Soldier takes as her inspiration for this five-part poem an isolated mountain range in South Dakota. Translated from the Lakota words Pahá Sápa, the mountains known as The Black Hills appeared dark from a distance, as they were covered in trees (as explained here).
The layout of this section of the poem is another example of Long Soldier's incisive use of concrete poetry - turning the poem or poem excerpt into visual art to convey its message. But if the poem is about mountains, as readers/viewers, we're not going to be handed a simple visual transcription resembling mountain peaks. There is a space here, framed by pointed and incantatory words. To take in all of the words, readers/viewers are literally compelled to change their perspective.
How do the words framing this space, this eloquent emptiness, this brimming void help us to decipher and interpret the message? John Freeman's May 2017 review of Whereas doesn't offer clues, but does provide insightful guidance:
You do not slip into this book on silken bolts of easy beauty, but scratch yourself raw on language disassembled into glittering shards: "He is a mountain as he is a horn that comes from a shift in the river, throat to mouth," starts "He Sapa," a poem about how many beings tumble forth from two words.
Once he comes to live on the outside of her, he will not sleep
through the night or the next 400. He sleeps not, they sleep not.
Ergo they steer gradually mad. The dog’s head shifts another
paw under the desk. Over a period of 400 nights.
You will see, she warns him. Life is full of television sets,
invoices, organs of other animals thawing on counters.
In her first dream of him, she leaves him sleeping on Mamo’s
salt-bag quilt behind her alma mater. Leaves him to the Golden
Goblins. Sleep, pretty one, sleep.
… the quilt that comforted her brother’s youthful bed, the quilt he took to band camp.
Huh oh, he says, Huh oh. His word for many months.
Merrily pouring a bottle of Pledge over the dog’s dull coat. And
with a round little belly that shakes like jelly.
Waiting out a shower in the Border Cafe; the bartender
spoons a frozen strawberry into his palm-leaf basket while they
lift their frosted mugs in a grateful click.
He sits up tall in his grandfather’s lap, waving and waving to
the Blue Bonnet truck. Bye, blue, bye.
In the next dream he stands on his toes, executes a flawless
flip onto the braided rug. Resprings to crib.
The salt-bag quilt goes everywhere, the one the bitch Rosemary bore her litters on. The one they wrap around the mower, and bundle with black oak leaves.
How the bowl of Quick Quaker Oats fits his head.
He will have her milk at 1:42, 3:26, 4 a.m. Again at 6. Bent
over the rail to settle his battling limbs down for an afternoon
nap. Eyes shut, trying to picture what in the world she has on.
His nightlight – a snow-white pair of porcelain owls.
They remember him toothless, with one tooth, two tooths,
five or seven scattered around in his head. They can see the day
when he throws open his jaw to display several vicious rows.
Naked in a splash of sun, he pees into a paper plate the guest
set down in the grass as she reached for potato chips.
Notes on the Poem
The title of this excerpt from C.D. Wright's 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Steal Away has a tinge of the ominous to it: "What No One Could Have Told Them". But we know we're in good hands with Wright, and she will only take us down a treacherous path if necessary and with the utmost care and guidance. There is just as good a chance the foreboding of this title is in service to a tale told humorously and with generous helpings of self-deprecation.
And indeed, that's it. Once we launch into this lovingly fractured tale of the fraught discoveries of new motherhood and parenthood, we know each crisp episode with its vivid little moments and drama packs both an underlying punchline and resonant emotional revelations. What no one could have told them - however autobiographical, Wright ruefully holds the parents at third person arm's length - they are finding out for themselves, in spades.
Oh, to have had the chance to hear C.D. Wright read this poem, with her signature timing and gently sardonic tone. Such was the privilege of a student audience in 2005, as recounted on the Robert Creeley Foundation web site:
"The first poem she read was ‘What No One Could Have Told Them.’ Students reveled in the humor, and her reading of the poem opened many students' minds to the idea that poetry can be humorous and meaningful and touching and rich with craft. For the remainder of the reading, the students sat mesmerized, understanding poetry's meaningful nature and its accessibility. Her presence and her poetry were gifts to students that day, and the introduction to poetry for so many in attendance proved to compel them to grow to love the art form. Her legacy lives in those students' revelation and through their ongoing appreciation of poetry that she sparked in that encounter."
Wright's down to earth examination of the foibles of motherhood in this poem is cited in a scholarly paper from 2016, Embodied Poetics in Mother Poetry - Dialectics and Discourses of Mothering by Sandra L. Faulkner and Cynthia Nicole. That paper's abstract provides an intriguing approach to the poem as a whole (which readers can enjoy in the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology or in Steal Away):
"Mothers are evaluated by society and one another based on what they do and don’t do, and even what they think and don’t think about mothering (the action) and being a mother (the role)."
In addition to the meditation on motherhood and the lively, poignant storytelling the poem encapsulated, Wright apparently reveled in playing with individual scenes and elements in the poem. As this critical piece observes:
"C.D. Wright is a collector ... she organizes scraps of memory that seem relevant to whatever feeling she’s trying to capture, then she overlays bits of overheard speech, road signs, song titles, newspaper headlines, and sets them one after the other on the page, separated by spaces like courtroom exhibits."
Read further in this piece to find out which scrap from this poem fascinated her ...!
Children of the world,
if Spain falls — I mean, it’s just a thought —
if her forearm
falls downward from the sky seized,
in a halter, by two terrestrial plates;
children, what an age of concave temples!
how early in the sun what I was telling you!
how quickly in your chest the ancient noise!
How old your 2 in the notebook!
Children of the world, mother
Spain is with her belly on her back;
our teacher is with her ferules,
she appears as mother and teacher,
cross and wood, because she gave you height,
vertigo and division and addition, children;
she is with herself, legal parents!
If she falls — I mean, it’s just a thought — if Spain
falls, from the earth downward,
children, how you will stop growing!
how the year will punish the month!
how you will never have more than ten teeth,
how the diphthong will remain in downstroke, the gold star in tears!
How the little lamb will stay
tied by its leg to the great inkwell!
How you’ll descend the steps of the alphabet
to the letter in which pain was born!
Children,
sons of fighters, meanwhile,
lower your voice, for right at this moment Spain is distributing
her energy among the animal kingdom,
little flowers, comets, and men.
Lower your voice, for she
shudders convulsively, not knowing
what to do, and she has in her hand
the talking skull, chattering away,
the skull, that one with the braid,
the skull, that one with life!
Lower your voice, I tell you;
lower your voice, the song of the syllables, the wail
of matter and the faint murmur of the pyramids, and even
that of your temples which walk with two stones!
Lower your breath, and if
the forearm comes down,
if the ferules sound, if it is night,
if the sky fits between two terrestrial limbos,
if there is noise in the creaking of doors,
if I am late,
if you do not see anyone, if the blunt pencils
frighten you, if mother
Spain falls — I mean, it’s just a thought —
go out, children of the world, go look for her!…
Notes on the Poem
Readers of poetry in translation feel they're in good hands when renowned translator Clayton Eshleman transforms into English the work in Spanish of César Vallejo, captured so generously in The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. "Spain, Take This Cup From Me" is one of the fine examples from this extensive collection.
Readers put their trust in translators when reading works in translation for which they (the readers) do not know the original language of the work. The 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize judges clearly were confident in this translator's stewardship of the poet's original work when they observed in their citation
"[how Eshleman shows] respect for the original, verification and confirmation not only of what one recognizes as alien or unknown, but of which one seems to know, invention of words in English that will work in a way similar to the Spanish words coined by Vallejo, absolute awareness of the fact that one is creating something else, a different music, different possibilities of sound, wanting only to stay level with the original intentions, turning the already said into something sayable again."
Interestingly, other translators can consider the same source material with the same thought and meticulousness ... and craft a notably different translation. That does not necessarily mean that one translation is qualitatively better than another, nor that readers should withhold that trust for one but not the other translator or translation, but the different interpretations will afford readers different experiences, perhaps subtly, perhaps more dramatically. With Eshleman's translation here before you, consider as well this translation by Sandy McKinney (which we'll open in a separate browser window for you).
Both renditions have a consistency of tone and voice. Eshleman's parenthetical "I mean, it's just a thought" characterizes a voice that seems somewhat warmer and more colloquial than McKinney's, which renders the same phrase as "I say, it's a manner of speaking", which sounds a bit more formal. Both address the audience directly as "children", although one uses "of the world" and the other "of the earth". Does that difference matter to the reader?
Each translator arranges word and meaning with different levels of simplicity or complexity ...
"How you'll descend the steps of the alphabet
to the letter in which pain was born!"
versus
"How you are going to go down the steps of the alphabet
to the letter in which grief was born."
... but the relative meaning remains intact. Or does it? Does the direct "descend" lend a different connotation than "going to go down" that in turn changes how the reader feels about the destination, which in turn is characterized subtly differently as "pain" in one, "grief" in the other?
"if the blunt pencils
frighten you"
versus
"if you are alarmed
by pencils without points"
again vary in directness and, in turn, perhaps in the seriousness of what the poet and the translator are trying to convey.
Discerning readers can read each version as a whole and contained work, and find good reasons to trust them both as accurate representations of what the original poet intended.
