Now & Then, page 26
are echoes of Rilke throughout Kinnell’s work, so it is fascinating to have
his own versions of Rilke, made in collaboration with Hannah Liebmann,
in front of us in The Essential Rilke (Ecco Press).
Readers who have never gotten around to Rilke will find a whole fall
and winter’s quiet, absorbed, and adventurous work in reading through
these two books. No one emerges from reading Rilke entirely unchanged.
He aims to go deep, to speak to our deepest and most fugitive sense of the
possibilities and limitations of our lives, and, like Picasso or Proust, he’s an
artist who helps to define the art of this last century. I would add to the
shelf of anyone setting out to read him two other translators, the Selected
Poems (Random House) by Stephen Mitchell, which was published in the
1980s and has become for most people the English versions through which
they came to know the poet, and the translations of the two volumes of
Rilke’s New Poems by Edward Snow, published by North Point Press.
Rilke thought that we lived most of our lives behind bars. One of his
best known poems is about a caged panther at a zoo. The panther is us.
Here is Kinnell’s version of the poem:
The Panther
in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His gaze has grown so tired from the bars
passing, it can’t hold anything anymore.
It is as if there were a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.
The soft gait of powerful supple strides,
which turns in the smallest of all circles,
is like a dance of strength around a center
where an imperious will stands stunned.
Only at times the curtain of the pupil
silently opens—. Then an image enters,
passes through the taut stillness of the limbs—
And in the heart ceases to be.
Another of Rilke’s most celebrated poems comes from a late suite
called Sonnets to Orpheus, and it contains a phrase that seems to sum up
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the quest of his poetry. It is something that Apollo, god of the lyre and of
lyric poetry, has to tell us: Gesang ist Dasein, or in English something like
“Singing is being.” It means, roughly, that to be alive fully is to find your
way to the fullest expression of your being. But are we capable of it? Here
is Kinnell’s version of the poem:
A god can do it. But tell me how a man
is to follow him through the narrow lyre?
The human mind is cleft. No temple for Apollo
stands where two heart-ways cross.
Singing, as you reach it, is not desire,
not suing for a thing in the end attained;
singing is existence. Easy, for a god.
But when do we exist? And when will he
turn toward us the earth and stars?
It’s not, young people, when you’re in love, even if
then your voice thrusts open your mouth,—learn
to forget you once lifted into song. That doesn’t last.
True singing is a different kind of breath.
A breath about nothing. A blowing in the God. A wind.
Here is Gass:
A god can do it. But tell me,
how can a man follow him through the lyre’s strings?
His soul is split. And at the intersection
of two heart-riven roads, there is no temple to Apollo.
Song, as you have taught, is not mere longing,
the wooing of whatever lovely can be attained;
singing is being. Easy for a god.
But when are we? And when does he fill us
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with earth and stars?
Young man, this isn’t it, your yearning,
even if your voice bursts out of your mouth.
Learn to forget such impulsive song. It won’t last.
Real singing takes another breath.
A breath made of nothing. Inhalation in a god. A wind.
It’s like hearing two pianists interpret the same piece of music, and it
begins to create in the listener an almost teasing sense of what the unhear-
able, ideal performance of the poem would sound like. That unhearable
performance is also, more or less, what Rilke meant by “true singing,”
when he urged us to find it in our lives.
octobe r 3
Andrew Hudgins
I was out this week walking along a beach and noticed that the migra-
tion of birds had really begun. Watching a flock of Canada geese lift off
a salt pond and head south, I had the vague thought that seeing them
leaving the place where I had seen them all summer feeding in the reeds
was like watching the body separating from the soul. And then I remem-
bered where that thought had come from: a single vivid image in a poem
that I’d heard Andrew Hudgins read this summer at the Sewanee Writers
Conference in Tennessee. What had stayed in my mind was the picture of
a flock of grackles rising up out of a chinaberry tree, retaining the shape
of the tree for a moment in the air, and then scattering.
The poem comes from his most recent book, Babylon in a Jar (Hough-
ton Mifflin). The poem actually describes the event twice. In between the
two descriptions, the poet dramatizes the speaker’s response and interprets
it. It’s an interesting pattern—description, interpretation, description. I
can see how I got the idea that the poem was an image of the soul peeling
off from the body, a mysterious visual enactment of a kind of dispersal,
but the interpretation in the poem is more indirect and suggestive than I
had remembered. Look at the way it moves from the birds and the trees to
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the body and its shadow, and the way the speaker seems to have stumbled
onto some mocking self-knowledge. It’s very strange. Here’s the poem:
The Chinaberry
I couldn’t stand there watching them forever,
but when I moved
the grackles covering
each branch and twig
sprang
together into flight
and for a moment in midair they held
the tree’s shape,
the black tree
peeling from the green,
as if
they were its shadow or its soul, before
they scattered
circled and
re-formed
as grackles heading south for winter grain fields.
Oh, it
was just a chinaberry tree,
the birds were simply grackles.
A miracle
made from this world and where I stood in it.
But you can’t know how long
I stood there watching.
And you can’t know how desperate I’d become
advancing
each step on the feet of my
advancing shadow,
how bitter and afraid I was
matching step after step with the underworld,
my ominous, indistinct and mirror image
darkening with
extreme and antic nothings
the ground I walked on,
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inexact reversals,
elongated and foreshortened parodies
of each
foot lowering itself
onto its shadow.
And you can’t know how I had tried to force
the moment, make it happen
before it happened—
not necessarily this
though this is what I saw:
black birds deserting the tree they had become,
becoming,
for a moment in midair,
the chinaberry’s shadow for a moment,
after they had ceased to be
the chinaberry,
then scattering;
meaning after meaning—
birds strewn across the morning like flung gravel
until
they found themselves again as grackles,
found each other,
found South
and headed there,
while I stood before
the green, abandoned tree.
octobe r 10
Heather McHugh
Heather McHugh’s new book, The Father of Predicaments (Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press), just came into my hands. And it has in it, appropriately
enough since we are in hurricane season, a poem about storms.
McHugh writes, typically, a riddling, punning, sometimes almost jangly,
almost syncopated iambic verse, but it’s organized on the page so that
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it looks like free verse. Reading her, the eye is doing one thing and the
ear is doing another: it makes for a quick, quirky nervous rhythm that is
her characteristic sound. Also, her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to
language, it’s like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her
steps. She’s practically playing with her words as she writes them down.
“Joycean” is the word that comes to mind. There may be something Irish
about this almost compulsive playfulness. Here’s the poem:
Not So Fast
I thought my life was
my intelligence. But then a dimming overcame me,
then a wind, and then the whole
sound waveletted, aroused.
I was extremely gradual in my
misgiving, as I looked (for things did not
look) up—and there the buffeted
high race of K’s revealed, so that a man could
see it for himself, the fabled column in the clouds
(which heretofore I’d only known
from books): and it had one
long eyehole through it
to a blue too light
to trust. (The lightest blue is heaven’s kind
of founding oxymoron.) It’s not there
for us to understand; it’s there for us
to be looked down on through . . .
How clumsily I made my way
upstairs from shore to cover—
where a forest took my thrashing for me.
Still I’d had my awful
eyeful of the future, in which we
are bearing up for life, while it
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bears down, a mind for legalism,
slow. It has the time. (Forget
your airs.) It has the grounds.
You see what I mean? The beginning of the poem could be organized as
three lines of iambic pentameter—
I thought my life was my intelligence.
But then a dimming overcame me, then
a wind, and then the whole sound waveletted,
—as if it were Shakespeare’s blank verse, but she’s dis-organized it, made
it nervous rather than flowing.
She’s describing a storm coming on, but you’d hardly know that she
was talking about a darkening sky from “But then a dimming overcame
me.” The effect is more psychological than physical. And you can’t be sure
whether “sound” means “bay” or “noise.” They both surge in waves, so it
could be both. And then there is the perfectly accurate but slightly sinis-
ter invented word: “waveletted.” The next bit is also riddled by wordplay.
The speaker only gradually realizes what the weather is telling her: “as I
looked (for things did not look) up.” And then the description of the sky.
For these lines I may need help from my inventive readers:
the buffeted
high race of K’s revealed, so that a man could
see it for himself, the fabled column in the clouds
“The buffetted high race of K’s”? Like the k’s for strikeouts in a baseball
score-keeper’s book? Something in the clouds that looks like letter k’s?
Anyway, it reveals the stormhead, “the fabled column in the clouds.” Hard
to tell—since I’ve never seen one—whether this is hurricane or cyclone.
“It had one long eyehole through it to a blue too light to trust” may be
the eye of the storm, or some faintly ominous opening in the clouded
sky, or both.
“Heaven’s kind of founding oxymoron”? The tender blue sky that is
also a terrifying power? We look up, as if interpretation were also a power?
It’s not. Anyway, the speaker retreats from the beach to the bedroom,
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“from shore to cover.” And there, perhaps from an upstairs window, she
sees the forest take the thrashing. And has an “awful eyeful”—this is what
I mean by compulsive play; textbooks are full of learned disquisitions
on the sublime in art evoking “awe” before the terrible force of nature;
McHugh has turned it into an uneasy quip—of the future, everyone’s
future—when life bears down on us and we try to bear up. More word-
play in the face of the awful and inevitable. And the future seems to her
remorseless as a lawsuit. It owns the ground, and it has the grounds.
This kind of writing could seem like pure playfulness, but in her it
rarely does. McHugh thinks of the world itself as a cunning and danger-
ous construction. (This also seems Irish to me.) She isn’t trying to outwit
it so much as trying to play the game quickly enough to stay alive, like
some Oedipus fielding every riddle the Sphinx tosses up. Oedipus in a
batting cage. Or a chameleon changing color on a mirror. She’s a poet for
whom wit is a form of spiritual survival.
octobe r 17
Dean Young
Sometimes the world, or your life, seems so confusing, you need a call
to order—like a clear account of the history of the world to remind you
how you got here. From his new book, First Course in Turbulence (Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press), Dean Young seems to be making such a gesture:
Tribe
The first people came out of the lake
and their god was the raven. Craving
over the mitochondrial plain. The second people
came out of the volcano and their god,
the shark, ate the raven so the first people
turned orange and died. Song gone, dance
done. No one is sure where the third people
came from but they didn’t last long.
Somehow they learned to turn themselves
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into toads to frighten their enemies
but the toads couldn’t pronounce the spells
to turn themselves back into people
and to this day you still hear them trying.
This is where Wagner got his ideas.
Then the shark god gave birth to the coyote
and the whistling ant who mated with a cloud
and gave birth to the hawk and they all
battled and intermarried so the second people
invented the drum as a way of participating.
It was the drumming that brought forth
the fourth people who thought it was important
to always be elsewhere, searching for
some purple root, some flashy feather
for the hat’s brim so most of them
were squashed by trucks when they wandered
onto the interstate at night. By then
the second people were pretty sick of
each other and they dreamed of mating
with fish, with lightning in puzzling
contortions, woke up, and to their credit,
wrote everything down. Then they would gather
in their condominiums, sharing descriptions
and disagreeing about the use of color and
whether a shovel could symbolize fear of intimacy.
But then it rained and the earth was covered
with water which was bad but not as bad
as when it gets covered with fire which
everyone knows is going to happen next.
Everywhere you look was once a sea and
in the sea grew gigantic serpents and
in their bellies precious stones and
inside the stones the eggs of another people
and inside these people, well, you get the idea.
Nothing is ever finished and nothing ever
perishes completely, there is always some
residue. Sometimes, in the dust, a cape clasp.
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Sometimes, a rat. Everywhere are carved trees,
buried nameplates, initialed cliffs but
the earth, like a fox in a trap, is never done
gnawing itself just as the gods are never done
bickering and swallowing each other, jealous
of our beauty and ability to die.
