This I like.


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The new issue of Poetry arrived yesterday, always some kind of education.

The poetry in it, some of it quite sharp & talented. Makes me feel like a slowpoke yokel. The feeling, reading it, of an oscillation - between bright devotion to brilliant language & inventive, clever thought, on one hand, and then, on the other hand, an impression of spoiled green suburban rich kids & preppies, showing off their pseudo-experience, pseudo-profundity, pseudo-sophistication.

Poems on meditative themes : bats. wildflowers. so serious, so careful, so polished. "Life, friends, is boring."

Mr. Bones, you juss jealous maybe.

Kind of skimmed the essay by Mary Karr, on being a poet/neo-Catholic, may read it later. But I really liked the Milosz poem she quotes at the end.

Good op-ed piece by Robert Pinsky in today's NY Times, about Czeslaw Milosz.

Jonathan's comments on translation & Milosz are interesting. But to say you have a unique aversion to translation's effects seems a little like special pleading. Obviously the reader has to make allowances. But a diet consisting solely of poetry in the original would exclude a lot of readers, for one thing, and impoverish poetry in general on the other. Poetry thrives on translation and mongrelization.

Jonathan's aversion (should this be a name for a symptom?) is connected also with what seems to me to be a rather narrow focus on surface elements of style. Some of the awkwardnesses of Milosz might even be seen as virtues, if the telos or overall motive of his poems is viewed from a different angle (say, in Poundian jargon, through the lens of logopeia rather than solely through melopeia).

He's probably right, though, that much of the clumsiness is due to the translating.

Milosz does come across as a little slow & stolid, compared with the eccentric brilliance of Aleksandr Wat, for example. But his other fine qualities outweigh all that. His luminous simplicity, patience, metaphysical hope.

There's a fascinating book of conversations between Milosz & Wat, basically an oral history of Wat's incredible life, in the context of 20th-cent. Polish literary & political history (titled My Century).

Good poets often find good translators.

Good poetry sometimes breaks through - to some degree at least - translation's inherent barriers.

If all you can see in Milosz is flatness & dullness. . . oh well.

The new benchmark for US poetry (judging from Boston Poetry Massacre reports) appears to be "stand-up surrealism".

Y'all pass my effeteness test.

A great poet died on Saturday. You could say that "the real, not the calendar 20th century" ended yesterday too.

There was a good obituary for Czeslaw Milosz in the NY Times front section this morning, which included several of his poems.

(Seem to hear a little of Whitman & Eliot technique in his lines. Especially Whitman. That sort of patient, stately-humble reticulation of ordinary things, landscapes & people, rivers & trees. Simple, sonorous, direct.)

American poetry could learn quite a lot from the literary values he projects. It's not easy to write this way - simple, direct, yet not-so-simple, not-so-direct. His style stands as a kind of rebuke to shallow formalists & experimentalists alike.

I know what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

And this:

I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from the people, but also from radiance, heights.

This early poem, too:

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Vilnius, 1936

A memorial in Gdansk to shipyard workers shot by police in the early 70s carries these lines of his:

You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure: for a poet remembers.