Author: admin

Language—died, brilliant and beautiful
on August 1, 2009 at 2:46 p.m. Lover
of raising his hand, language lived
a full life of questioning. His favorite
was twisting what others said. His
favorite was to write the world in black
and white and then watch people try
and read the words in color. Letters
used to skim my father’s brain before
they let go. Now his words are blind.
Are pleated. Are the dispatcher, the
dispatches, and the receiver. When
my mother was dying, I made everyone
stand around the bed for what would
be the last group photo. Some of us
even smiled. Because dying lasts
forever until it stops. Someone said,
Take a few. Someone said, Say
cheese. Someone said, Thank you.
Language fails us. In the way that
breaking an arm means an arm’s bone
can break but the arm itself can’t break
off unless sawed or cut. My mother
couldn’t speak but her eyes were the
only ones that were wide open.

Notes on the Poem
Over the next few months, our Poem of the Week will feature works from the seven collections of the newly announced 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. This week’s poem is from Victoria Chang’s deeply haunting collection, Obit—a series of surreal obituaries extending the definition of what can and can’t be mourned. Chang teaches us how to speak grief, a language in which the unsayable and the mundane coexis—a ghostly, yet deeply material syntax. 

Of Obit, the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize judges say: “...Death is not something that happens to someone else—it is yours too, up close and personal, and deeply particular. It is not just a name or person or relation that dies—it is a frontal lobe, language inside the phone, the voicemail, the view and experience, the language they made or didn’t make, their sounds too...Every bit of a lived life gets a spot. In this book ‘grief takes many / forms, as tears or pinwheels...’‘dying lasts forever / until it stops’ and ‘our sadness is plural, but grief is / singular.” 

In this Rumpus interview, Chang discusses Obit

Listen to her read from Obit Here

Hello Gozo, here we are,
the spinning world, has

it come this far?
Hammering things, speeching them,

nailing the anthrax
to its copper plate,

matching the object to its name,
the star to its chart.

(The sirens, the howling machines,
are part of the music it seems

just now, and helices of smoke
engulf the astonished eye;

and then our keening selves, Gozo,
whirled between voice and echo.)

So few and so many,
have we come this far?

Sluicing ink onto snow?
I’m tired, Gozo,

tired of the us/not us,
of the factories of blood,

tired of the multiplying suns
and tired of colliding with

the words as they appear
without so much as a “by your leave,”

without so much as a greeting.
The more suns the more dark –

is it not always so –
and in the gathering dark

Ghostly Tall and Ghostly Small
making their small talk

as they pause and they walk
on a path of stones,

as they walk and walk,
skeining their tales,

testing the dust,
higher up they walk –

there’s a city below,
pinpoints of light –

high up they walk,
flicking dianthus, mountain berries,

turk’s-caps with their sticks.
Can you hear me? asks Tall.

Do you hear me? asks Small.
Questions pursuing question.

And they set out their lamp
a      mid the stones.

for Yoshimasu Gozo

From Company of Moths, by Michael Palmer

Notes on the Poem
Our poem of the week has so far presented a selection of individual poems from our Griffin Prize poets. 
In an effort to highlight shared concerns and create conversations among the many voices of the Griffin poetry archive, we are now launching a curated monthly theme which will feature, every week, a poem from our list of shortlisted authors. 

Dreams of Language that Speaks by Michael Palmer opens our focus on poems about language. All poems are crafted with words but not all of them explicitly speak to the material they are made of. Palmer invites us to experience a “collision” with words “as they appear.”  He writes: 

 
“I’m tired, Gozo, 

tired of the us/not us,
      of the factories of blood,
tired of the multiplying sun                                    

and tired of colliding with

the words as they appear” 

In this collision, the discrepancies between language and what it designates in the material world become apparent. Within these clashes, frictions, and disappointments, writing emerges. The paradox or irony is that all we have is language to express the way language fails us. With words, we dream of letting go of words, of letting language become its own sentient entity: languages that can speak without us. 

Stay tuned for our next poem on Friday April 16!

I could never say anything about my mother:
how she repeated, you’ll regret it someday,
when I’m not around anymore, and how I didn’t believe
in either “I’m not” or “anymore,”
how I liked to watch as she read bestsellers,
always turning to the last chapter first,
how in the kitchen, convinced it’s not
her proper place, she made Sunday coffee,
or, even worse, filet of cod,
how she studied the mirror while expecting guests,
making the face that best kept her
from seeing herself as she was (I take
after her here and in a few other weaknesses),
how she went on at length about things
that weren’t her strong suit and how I stupidly
teased her, for example, when she
compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,
and I said, cruelly, but you know he
had talent, and how she forgave everything
and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston
to her funeral and couldn’t say anything
and still can’t.

Notes on the Poem
We were deeply saddened to learn this past week of the passing of beloved and revered Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewki, who left us on World Poetry Day. We are immensely grateful for the work he left us, especially so because we got to celebrate that life's work in person when Zagajewski received the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award in 2016.

In his Griffin Lifetime Recognition tribute, trustee Mark Doty referred to Zagajewski's best-known poem in English, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World". As the news of Zagajewski's passing was almost cushioned amidst a global day celebrating poetry, so did his magnificent poem come before us achingly well timed and so needed in the wake of the horrors of September 11, 2001. As Doty noted:


"Our capacity for praise may feel itself feel mutilated, it will be at times terribly difficult to find in ourselves the strength to praise, but Zagajewski’s essential poem reminds us that it is the human necessity to try. For what do we have, without praise, besides irony or bitterness? These poems make the work of affirmation more available to us; they remind us — gently, sometimes sardonically, but always with great compassion for what is mutilated in us — that the lucid moment is still possible."


While "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" has taken on worldwide significance, it does so with elements and observations on a small and intimate scale. Doty's wise assessment of what the poem achieves can also be applied to "About My Mother", which was part of Zagajewski's memorable Lifetime Recognition reading:



The poem's narrator is able to scrutinize and gently mock his mother, but not praise her. While cataloguing her foibles, the narrator is actually ruefully self-aware ...

"(I take
after her here and in a few other weaknesses)"

"and how I stupidly
teased her"

... but not enough to correct his soft cruelties before it is too late.

In this stricken portrait of the most profound regret and shame, sketched lightly but indelibly and therefore the more achingly poignant, Zagajewski reminds us all to appreciate and praise before it truly is too late ... and nothing more can be said.

When he comes down
or is seen coming down
when he reveals to us that he is coming down.

The waiting and silence

his entire lack
when he hearkens before the plants.

His caution when he comes down
like one postponed by a hush,
and by his being not “us”
and not “here”
death begins.

He bought a flower
nothing more, a flower
that has no vase and leaves no will.

From the hill, he can spot the military checkpoint, the paratroopers,
he can spot the squatters, the mountain edges, and the only road
where their feet will leave a print in the rocks, mud, and water.

Losses also will appear from the hill
abandoned without effort.

And the fragility in shadow,
the Jewish man with a long mustache
who resembles the dead Arabs here.

From the mountain edges, all the caves will appear peaceful
and the road will seem as it were.

While he was coming down
the caves continued to stare
and blink in the cold.

Notes on the Poem
This week, we're rereading a previous Poem of the Week and approaching it from some different vantage points. We have 9 years' worth of selections to choose from, and the poem that calls out to us is "An Enemy Comes Down the Hill", Fady Joudah's translation from the Arabic of Ghassan Zaqtan's original poem from the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems.

Let's examine this poem this time informed by some of our experiences reading and communicating through the myriad challenges of the worldwide pandemic.(We previously discussed the poem here.)

Let's be grateful we are still managing to read - even if it's just snippets, something to which reading poetry lends itself - through the stresses and distractions of this singular time. Many who normally find solace in reading have noted in the last year that the concentration needed to derive those comforts has eluded them. As we seemed to be emerging from the first wave of this situation, Glenn Sumi of Toronto’s Now Magazine explained some of the science behind why this normally pleasurable pursuit had become difficult. As the first wave became successive waves, the problem persisted, prompting advice (here and here, for example) on how to spark one's reading enthusiasm again. Rereading and poetry make significant appearances.

Rereading as a panacea to regain one's reading focus and momentum doesn't necessarily mean seeking out easy or comfortable reads. And that's where choices like this poem and collection are so appropriate. Sometimes it's the unusual or provocative that snaps you back to attention. As Scots Makar Jackie Kay remarked on Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, "The poems compel you, outrage and upset you, but also fill you with wonder." 

As we observed when we last studied "An Enemy Comes Down the Hill", what is in sight and what is perceived in the poem are both presented in fine detail. Still, we asked ourselves then, are things as they seem? Jackie Kay is correct - we are intrigued and decidedly compelled.

The opening stanza illustrates well how Joudah's words delicately balance what is seen, what is perceived, what the subject who is seen ("he", presumably the "enemy" of the title) tries to hide or convey - and how these can all be confused to blur what truly is.

"When he comes down
or is seen coming down
when he reveals to us that he is coming down."

While we imagine that an enemy would advance on us with caution, don't we also assume that advancing is a form of aggression, inherent in being an enemy? What then, do we make of his caution being gently described ...

"like one postponed by a hush"

What have we uniquely learned about communicating in this past year that might prompt us to reconsider how we reacted to these cues the first time we read this poem? For one thing, most of us are spending much more time online, often reluctantly in front of cameras and microphones, among others equally reluctant - and what have we learned about conveying and interpreting body language signs and miscues? Perhaps sufficient that articles about video call body language tips are pretty commonplace. Add to our online dissonances the frustration of a different kind of miscommunication during those rare occasions when we can meet in person and cannot express ourselves effectively because we're all wearing face masks.

Is he of Zaqtan/Joudah's poem really an enemy then? He's carrying a flower, and there's that "fragility in shadow" that suggests vulnerability, not menace. Have we ever misjudged someone's expression or the seeming indifference of what appears in the background of their zoom calls?

Do we despair then - even more so now - that we can never fully trust or comprehend each other? The caves are staring, but not so harshly that they don't also blink. Conversely, can we be heartened that how things appear can always be open to interpretation? If not put in the best light, can we assume that some appearances are at least benign and certainly not what they seem? In its way, does this poem cut us a bit of slack as we struggle with basic communications - incoming and outgoing - these days?

I.
I buried my bones.
              No trace was left.

I buried my bones and the landscape
              became settled in [its] disturbances.

There’s no telling where the hand that digs might
              unearth the outline of a dwelling place,
                            the shape of ivory in the process [of]

becoming human.
              It is not evident.

I buried my bones in the fault
              [where] they were of little consequence,
                            more matters to settle

in the end.
              The land remembered only now.

I want to live somewhere old
              in the earth. On the water
                            now there are many boats, [but] the vermin

they are hunting [is] dead
              with metal feet. His pelt
                            [is] already sinking out of reach.

Old in the water. Let me sink
              [mine] in enough earth to bury [me].

II.
Mother, it was my fault. I buried each of my other selves
              until I couldn’t see [ ] the earth was full.
              I was born(e) in this wound mother.

Singing made i[t] so. Steel singing. Destined
              men singing mercantile songs, manifesting
              swindling songs.

Singing say you see. Singing beautiful
              spacious skies, singing
              the brave in d(r)ead silence reposes.

You sang this land for me, (m)other. Each night
              I must find a new way to lay these arms
              stiff under the weight [of] my body.

III.
I don’t know what I expected but at length I found myself a loan. I found
myself a part in a room of my own making, susceptible to drowning, to cave-ins.
I couldn’t hold a shape my own among so many bones and matter besides.
The field turned relic into me.

IV.
                            like this, Apaq?
can I wear these faces? which [way]
              shall I bend these bones?
does my skin show [through] these furs?
              do my metal feet b(ear) too much weight?
can I bend my arms in light of mo(u)rning?
                            can I bend them in name for what I (k)now believe?

V.
Return every (last) bone to the l[and]
              I will shape my body in the sound [of]
                            waves breaking the shore

[if] singing made it so
              these days will not be many
                            no(w)

VI.
I wonder if you hear me, Apaq.
              I wonder if I say your [right] words.

Michael, will you row the boat (a)shore and dig a womb-shaped home
              with my arms
              for your arms
              for all the world worn arms

[until] the waters b(r)each our skin and skin these bones
              in their weight
              in the sand
              to begin again without blood in the print?

Notes on the Poem
In the 475 weeks we've celebrated Poems of the Week associated with Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poetry collections, anthologies and related works, we have regularly reflected on the power of poetry read aloud. It's fascinating to compare the words on the page to how you hear it as you read it to yourself and how others interpret it as they read it aloud. "(Re)generating Landscapes" by Abigail Chabitnoy from her poetry collection How to Dress a Fish from the most recent Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist is just one of many examples where putting the page and the audio rendition side-by-side is an intriguing and revealing exercise.

Every year since 2001 - save for that one year about which the less said the better - we've celebrated the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted works with public readings. We've extended those readings to as a wide an audience as possible by providing selections from those readings as individual videos and by livestreaming them (since 2012) and making those livestreams available for playback after the events.

We were deeply disappointed to not be able to present the work of Abigail and her fellow shortlisted poets and translators in a live setting last year. However, we were eventually able to capture some of the delights of readings by the poets by melding exclusive audio recordings from their works with specially designed video treatments and interpretations. Abigail's beautiful reading radiates from this arresting video setting:



and videos showcasing the voices of the other shortlisted poets and translators are found on their individual web pages and on the Griffin Poetry Prize YouTube channel linked above.

How much does the layout of the text on the page influence how the words play in your mind? And how surprised are you when you hear the poet or another presenter or performer read the words aloud?
Let's look, for example, at how Section I of "(Re)generating Landscapes" has an entrancing flow as it is laid out with regular indentations and spacing of stanzas down the page. Keep your eyes on that text as you listen to the poet read the same words. Does the rhythm and cadence of her voice support or contrast with how the text appears on the page? Is it what you expected?

The Academy of American Poets web site (www.poets.org) offers generous advice on how visual and sonic approaches to poetry. From "How to Read a Poem", there is this:


Before you get very far with a poem, you have to read it. In fact, you can learn quite a few things just by looking at it. The title may give you some image or association to start with. Looking at the poem’s shape, you can see whether the lines are continuous or broken into groups (called stanzas), or how long the lines are, and so how dense, on a physical level, the poem is. You can also see whether it looks like the last poem you read by the same poet or even a poem by another poet. All of these are good qualities to notice, and they may lead you to a better understanding of the poem in the end.

But sooner or later, you’re going to have to read the poem, word by word. To begin, read the poem aloud. Read it more than once. Listen to your voice, to the sounds the words make.


When you've finished this piece, we bet you'll be curious to go to YouTube and search on "robert creeley reading" ...!

A year ago, when live events and performances of all kinds were being shuttered, not only were our own annual celebrations suspended, but we realized we had to update our International Poetry Events Calendar (here and also on our home page). With sadness, we added "postponed", then "cancelled", then removed a lot of events, so as not to create confusion.

But then the tide rapidly turned. Artists of all kinds moved online and swiftly strove to replicate the power of live performance - including readings and spoken word - presented in various formats. Those events, then and thankfully still ongoing, were and are mounted with varying degrees of success but with consistent determination, commitment and resourcefulness. In the glow of all those sometimes fatiguing zoom screens, moments of connection, emotional resonance and true magic were and are still possible.

Kudos and much gratitude to all the poets, publishers, booksellers, reading series, providers of venues and more who have given and continue to give us countless opportunities to hear poetic words lifted off the page in wondrous ways ... even if it's just coming from our laptops, tablets and phones right now. Soon, very soon, we look forward to hearing poetry ring out with the gorgeousness and subtlety and power of Abigail Chabitnoy's reading here, in concert halls, bookstores, pubs and more.

Laid-up with all about me
a man could want: a stack of the cross-
hatched notebooks I always use,
a Stabilo pen,
a brand-new thriller that famously stole its plot
from The Spanish Tragedy, vodka,

a pineapple tub
of ice to sap (a little) the bright
fever that loosened my teeth, so I half-expected
to see them drop to the quilt
like sticky Chiclets,
laid-up like that, alone

you might say, but well provided for,
I felt a sleep coming on, so thick
I might have been sleeved in darkness; and next
fell into a dream quicker
than my eyes could close: in fact
I’d already declared for Bel-imperia

and was just getting down
past the damp in the crook of her knee
to those salty, pink petals
of crêpe-de-chine,
when a voice I recognised
had me up and out of there and back to my bed –

a hot, synaptic zip
that almost made me believe I’d woken up
until I saw the tattoo:
a letter to every finger neatly between
the knuckle joints,
as he collared the bottle and turned

a page or two of my notebooks. ‘Just here:
is this lorel or Lorelei? – each syllable sharp
as the detonations in ice
when you pour on vodka – ‘It’s plain
what’s fretting you, but look,
you’ll know it sure enough

when someone you claim to recognise climbs up
out of your bones
and legs it for the door
without so much as a kiss-
my-arse-goodbye (on a darkening day of “rain
moving in from the west”) or even a shred of song.’

Notes on the Poem
David Harsent weaves an underlying sense of unease, even menace through this and many of the poems in his 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Selected Poems 1969-2005. While poetry can comfort and shed gentle light on myriad subjects, it is often at its most potent making readers uncomfortable - which is not a bad thing. Let's observe Harsent's mastery and learn more about how he went on to wield it.

In the fever dream that is "The Good Companion", the ailing narrator thinks he is armed with the remedies that will get him through a presumably passing illness. How interesting that they turn out to be nostrums, ingredients making matters worse, disorienting, increasingly troubling. How about a good book to distract from one's discomfort? Well ...

"a brand-new thriller that famously stole its plot
from The Spanish Tragedy"

resurfaces in dream or hallucination about a woozy, interrupted encounter with that story's vengeful female protagonist.

Well then, how about some soothing libation? The medicinal liquid of choice and its related components somehow connect disturbingly to a common subject of nightmares: the loss of one's teeth.

The breadcrumb trail of troubling details are surely leading to some kind of discovery or meaning or revelation, aren't they? Fortunately, the underlying menace is coupled with lashings of caustic humour, culminating with ...

It's plain
what's fretting you, but look,
you'll know it sure enough

when someone you claim to recognise climbs up
out of your bones
and legs it for the door
without so much as a kiss-
my-arse-goodbye

We don't really know who is delivering the message ... and no, it isn't plain what deeper worry is below the surface here. What a wicked punchline with which to wrap this fascinating poem.

In 2008, the Griffin Poetry Prize judges noted in Harsent's poems "the haunting psychological situations that give you a novel’s worth of drama in a few lines." In 2012, when Harsent's collection Night won the prize, the judges that year noted his poetic explorations of "dream, terror and hidden impulse". 

Between the timeline of the poems collected in Selected Poems 1969-2005 and those in Night, Harsent's writing path took a turn both intriguing as a seeming departure from poetry, but also consistent with this dark current in his work. From 2006 to 2011, he crafted episodes of the enduringly popular British crime drama television series Midsomer Murders. The program is described as "featuring a mixture of lighthearted whimsy and dark humour", which sounds like an excellent match with Harsent's incisive literary skills.

Don't think, by the way, that even writing under a pseudonym, Harsent's work on Midsomer Murders went unnoticed and unconnected to his poetry achievements. In 2017, the extremely clever London Review Bookshop posited a brilliant conspiracy theory that drew in Harsent as well as several other Griffin Poetry Prize winners and shortlisted poets ... and connected them all to (spoiler alert) Midsomer Murders.

To verse, to turn, to bend, to plough, a furrow, a row, to turn around, toward, to traverse

When I was nine coming home one day from school, I stood at the top of my street and looked down its gentle incline, toward my house obscured by a small bend, taking in the dipping line of the two-bedroom scheme of houses, called Mon Repos, my rest. But there I’ve strayed too far from the immediate intention. When I was nine coming home from school one day, I stood at the top of my street and knew, and felt, and sensed looking down the gentle incline with the small houses and their hibiscus fences, their rosebush fences, their ixora fences, their yellow and pink and blue paint washes; the shoemaker on the left upper street, the dressmaker on the lower left, and way to the bottom the park and the deep culvert where a boy on a bike pushed me and one of my aunts took a stick to his mother’s door. Again, when I was nine coming home one day in my brown overall uniform with the white blouse, I stood on the top of my street knowing, coming to know in that instant when the sun was in its four o’clock phase and looking down I could see open windows and doors and front door curtains flying out. I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags and our four o’clock hunger with us and our grandmother and everything we loved in the world were waiting in the yellow washed house, there was a hibiscus hedge and a buttercup bush and zinnias waiting and for several moments all this seemed to drift toward the past; again when I was nine and stood at the head of my street and looked down the gentle incline toward my house in the four o’clock coming-home sunlight, it came over me that I was not going to live here all my life, that I was going away and never returning some day.

Notes on the Poem
We know and love them in our favourite songs. Refrains are powerful, captivating and often beloved features in music, but we can also find them interwoven into prose and poetry. 

Songsmiths ranging from Neil Diamond and Dolly Parton to Stan Rogers and André 3000 - and many, many more - wield refrains infectiously in their work. In very different works, so do Shakespeare, Allen Ginsberg, Sojourner Truth and Barack Obama. Think of anyone's spoken or written words that have captured your heart and mind, and it's very possible something in the form of a refrain has imprinted those words on you. So too does this excerpt from "Verso 4" by Dionne Brand from her 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted work The Blue Clerk.

This discussion of the refrain as a literary device offers excellent insights and examples, along with this useful definition to keep in mind as we consider Brand's piece:


"In a poem or song, a refrain is a line or group of lines that regularly repeat, usually at the end of a stanza in a poem or at the end of a verse in a song. In a speech or other prose writing, a refrain can refer to any phrase that repeats a number of times within the text."


With every repetition of "I was nine", along with the entrancing reordering of other words and phrases, Brand ploughs deeper and deeper into memories and turns up revelations. As the opening line of "Verso 4" suggests, what is being cultivated here can potentially be built, enriched, perhaps even harvested in future.

Arising from the details and intimacies of a particular set of memories are observations and wisdom that any reader can use, and gratefully so:

"... it came over me that I was not going to live here all my life, that I was going away and never returning some day."

With that goodbye, the plough turns, and the individual ploughing moves on to greener pastures.

What sprouts out of the ashes of
Samuel Beckett?

somewhere in this space is
his fading breath
and then a motionless utterance

in the beginning was the word
in the end of the body

What decomposes? What suffers?
meat still full of love
spoils in time
stinks
one has to bury it

Notes on the Poem
Reading the opening lines of the poem "Love Toward the Ashes", we realize that an oft-used symbol or image can deliver distinctly divergent effects when different poets wield it. Let's compare this poem excerpt - from the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Sobbing Superpower by Joanna Trzeciak, translating from the Polish written by Tadeusz Rózewicz - to another recent Poem of the Week selection.

We pondered the symbolism and significance of ashes when Poem of the Week turned its spotlight on "Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater" by Sharon Olds, from her 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Arias. Part of the exercise of gathering our thoughts and reactions to Olds' poem brought us to a purveyor of cremation urns, who offered interesting insights into religious and cultural interpretations of this end-of-life image and ritual.

Olds' lyrical ebullience imbues ashes with lightness, life and the optimism of considering life's continuum in her poem. What a contrast, then, to encounter Tadeusz Rózewicz's abrupt words, translated into crisp English by Joanna Trzeciak, in reference to the ashes of Samuel Beckett.

Olds' poem presumably comes from or at least arises from imagining a literal experience of spreading the ashes of a loved one. We can likely assume that Rózewicz's is a figurative reference, and might not be referring to the actual death of Beckett, but perhaps to Beckett's posthumous influence or oeuvre, based on an artistic arsenal of prose, poetry, drama and translation not unlike Rózewicz's own. Either way, both poems present ashes as a substance denoting a transitional state between life and death.

And either way, ashes symbolize the end of something. Depending on the approach, that something could be sad, horrifying, disgusting, profoundly and irrevocably final, or it could be a beginning or continuum, positive, hopeful, part of a greater whole. (This examination of the phrase "ashes to ashes" in literature offers a range of examples.) Either way, ashes or the related materials of burning or decomposition are fertilizer, with all that suggests, but in comparison to Olds' treatment, Rozewicz's words as translated by Trzeciak are earthier and more explicit:

"meat still full of love
spoils in time
stinks
one has to bury it"

The observation is acerbic, but not devoid of wit, either. 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize judge Heather McHugh captures this aspect of Rozewicz's voice and approach perfectly in her citation:

"Rózewicz proves as wary ... of heaven’s offices as man’s. Alert to our condition’s own momentous momentariness, he’s funny, fierce, or casual; but never inconsequential.”

Just because he's wary and acerbic and witty, funny, fierce and/or casual ... doesn't mean his words, for all their brisk, seemingly dismissive tone, lack positivity and, as the title points out, love.

Soon the present will arrive
at the end of its long voyage

from the Future-Past to Now
weary of the endless nights in cheap motels

in distant nebulae
Will the usual host

of politicians and celebrities
show up for the occasion

or will they huddle out of sight
in confusion and fear

Notes on the Poem
When a poem is spare and succinct, how that affects readers may differ widely. Does it make the poem cold and clinical? Conversely, does the poem come across as more honest if it is unembellished and to the point? Is there a greater sense of calm - or perhaps a stronger sense of emotion - with fewer, presumably well chosen, possibly more powerful words? Michael Palmer's "Soon", from his 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Company of Moths, quietly stirs up these questions.

The brief, unadorned presentation of Palmer's poem is reminiscent of, though not strictly structured as, haiku. Surprisingly, in 471 weeks of considering Poems of the Week drawn from Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted works, we've rarely come across the influential and much-emulated form. Not mentioned in Poem of the Week notes, but rather in the judges' citation, Jane Munro's 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection Blue Sonoma is commended for work with "the directness and clarity of haiku". 

Palmer's poems in Company of Moths seem to apply haiku-like constraints to achieve, like Munro, direct, clear words. The elegant simplicity of "Soon" imbues the words with both a sense of wise plainspokenness and timelessness. At a time when we perhaps have a particular appetite for it, the poem is glowingly prescient, although it was published over 15 years ago ... which feels like an eternity.

Amidst its simple words and phrases, though, something intricate is being played with the sense of time.

"Soon the present will arrive
at the end of its long voyage"

suggests that we or someone has been living in the past to this point.

Fascinatingly, the concept of "future-past" is that something would have or should have happened in the past, but didn't necessarily. With the arrival of the present, the Now (importantly, maybe ominously capitalized), does this mean that we or someone has been living with regrets?

The poem also features a notable and slightly disorienting absence of punctuation, when clearly statements are being made and questions are being asked. So in fact, the poem is not as simple and straightforward as it appears at first glance. Does this inform the title - "Soon" - with hope or trepidation?

   I tell myself: at last I have escaped the noise;
no one sees me on my way to the sacred nave.
Tall shadows attend,
and Darío who passes with lyre in mourning.

   With innumerable steps the gentle Muse emerges,
and my eyes go to her, like chicks to corn.
Ethereal tulles and sleeping titmice harass her,
while the blackbird of life dreams in her hand.

   My God, you are merciful, for you have bestowed this nave,
where these blue sorcerers perform their duties.
Darío of celestial Americas! They are so much
like you! And from your braids they make their hair shirts.

   Like souls seeking burials of absurd gold,
those wayward archpriests of the heart,
probe deeper, and appear … and addressing us from afar,
bewail the monotonous suicide of God!

Notes on the Poem
We were sorry to learn this past week of the passing of respected poet and translator Clayton Eshleman. We are grateful for the poetry and translation works he has left us. He was immensely dedicated to poetry and translation throughout his career, with distinguished work on Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud and more. His translation of César Vallejo's work was shortlisted for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize, and we are going to revisit one of those powerful pieces this week.

In January, 2019, Poem of the Week considered again how Eshleman beautifully transformed into English the work in Spanish of César Vallejo. That work is encompassed in The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition. In the fall of 2018, we also pondered Eshleman's work in the poem "Spain, Take This Cup From Me".

If one is proficient in both Spanish and English, the delight and the challenge of reading work like this is the facility with which one can alternate between the meaning and nuance of the original and translated text. Knowledge of both languages gives one the privilege of assessing the quality of the translation.



The bilingual reader is afforded the luxury of determining if the poem has traveled safely and soundly from one language and culture to another and is still, arguably, poetic. But if one is reading work that has arrived in English from an origin in which one is not conversant, what then? Trust in the translator is essential, not just to employ linguistic accuracy, but to apply cultural sensitivity, historical context and more, along with an ear for the original's lyricism and music. Here is an interesting collection of reactions to what can and cannot be translated when poetry moves from one language to another.

Ellen Welcker ponders this and more in her 2009 essay "Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation" in The Quarterly Conversation. Her piece includes ruminations by 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poet Joy Harjo, who performs a startling type of translation in her work by, as a person of Muskogee heritage, not writing in her native tongue but in, as the essay describes it, "the language of her people’s colonizers". This powerful essay posits:


"In poetry, as well as in translation, there is no ultimate meaning. Indeed, the “trans” in translation and trans-creation indicates that we are always moving across languages, across cultures."


and concludes:


"As post-colonial translation and trans-creation become bolder and more experimental, the idea of ownership of language falls away. Each newly created text becomes the author’s, and simultaneously becomes the world’s. These poetries are dialogues, conversations. Language becomes three-dimensional as it encompasses more of its history and culture. Poems to be translated are no longer mathematical equations filled with estimations and “equals” signs. As new poetries assert that there can be both “homage and reappropriation,” new methods of translation arise and language is stretched, tested, discovered, and discovered anew."


When we read poetry in translation, we either trust poetic and linguist guides such as Clayton Eshleman, Susan Wicks, Heather McHugh, Mira Rosenthal, Joanna Trzeciak and more to present us with a faithful rendition of the original work, or we are in a position to critique the quality of their work because we're conversant in the original and translated languages. Either way, we can appreciate that translators undeniably embark on daunting missions, often crossing thorny terrain, often crossing it alone, to bring us poetry from a place of origin to a new place that still respects and holds precious a work's roots and essence.

As Welcker observes, "translation and trans-creation are not only about what is lost, but also about new solidarities, built by a fusion of language."