Coincidence

Definitely poem of the day. How did The Writer’s Almanac know? It was so lovely to have (some) thoughts of the morning crystallized and delivered onto screen in this…

Literature in the 21st Century

by Ronald Wallace

<!– (from Long for This World: New and Selected Poems) –>

Sometimes I wish I drank coffee
or smoked Marlboros, or maybe cigars—
yes, a hand-rolled Havana cigar
in its thick, manly wrapping,
the flash of the match between
worn matchbook and stained forefinger,
the cup of the palm at the tip,
the intake of air, and the slow and
luxuriant, potent and pleasurable
exhale. Shall we say also a glass
of claret? Or some sherry with its
dark star, the smoke blown into the bowl
of the glass, like fog on portentous
morning, the rich man-smell of gabardine
and wool, of money it its gold clip?

Sometimes I wish I had habits
a man wouldn’t kick, faults a good man could
be proud of. I’d be an expatriate from
myself, all ink-pen and paper in a Paris café
where the waiters were elegant and surly,
the women relaxed and extravagant
with their bobbed hair and bonbons, their
perfumed Galoises, their oysters and canapés,
and I’d be writing about war and old losses—
man things-and not where I am, in this
pristine and sensitive vessel, all
fizzy water, reticence, and care, all reduced
fat and purified air, behind my deprived
computer, where I can’t manage even
a decaf cap, a mild Tiparillo, a glass of
great-taste-less-filling light beer.

I challenge anyone to read Cormac McCarthy and not want to be a manly, hunter type.I certainly want to be.

Red Sun

Sudeep Chakravarti sets out to write a book on the left-wing armed movements in India. He’s called it Red Sun. Someone added ‘Travels through Naxalite Country’ which confuses you into expecting a bit of a travelogue. Its not an easy task the man set for himself. To paraphrase him “it is easier to report a fait-accompli than a work in progress”. Since the movement in India is work in progress, his book cannot help but be the same.

A lot of history lessons and quotes from maoist literature are mixed into reported conversations from various participants – other journalists, bureaucrats, policemen and leaders of the various MLM (Maoist-Leninist-Marxist) parties. The ‘voiceless’ participants of the movement themselves don’t find much place in the book for obvious reasons (their voicelessness?!) but for all that the book is a decent introduction for someone who is not acquainted with the movement.

Besides some of the basics of the movement, this book provides an insight into how a journalist works. Where his contacts come from, the extent of ‘off the record’ and what goes on in his head that never quite makes it to paper (or camera) .

The highlight of the book for me though were the few translations of poetry from the movement. I’d become naxalite too if I heard words like these:

'When in love,
Do not become the moon.
If you can,
Come as the sun.
I'll take its heat
And light up the dark forest.
Whe in love,
Do not become a flower,
If you can,
Come as the thunder.
I'll lift its sound
And pass the message of battles to every corner.
 
The moon, the river, the flowers, the stars, the birds -
They can be watched at leisure
Sometime later.
But today
In this darkness,
The last battle is yet to be fought.
What we need now is
The fire in our hovel.
-- Murari Mukhopadhyay

 

My cribs in P.S.

a) For a book from Penguin, the book is miserably edited. Basic spelling, grammar and factual errors make one doubt the authenticity of the rest of the story on occassion. (E.g.  Mera Joota Hai Japani is iconic song from Mera Naam Joker).

b) The quality of paper is more worthy of rip-off Flora Fountain editions than a first edition hard-back for which you pay more than what some people that this book is about make in a month.

 

Riveted

Thinking this in the morning. My version was more longwinded, but this one gets it right.

Riveted

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.
— Robyn Sarah

Topical Misquotes

Read this one in a different context. Last two lines fit my sniffles so perfectly I had to misquote….

“ They did not die from cold without–
They died from cold within.”

Sigh. The Common Cold is uncommonly difficult to live with.

Oh F!

Although I have abandoned LJ I still go back to catch the poetry. Today, for instance I found this one and discovered Kim Addonizio.

Fuck -  Kim Addonizio
There are people who will tell you
that using the word fuck in a poem
indicates a serious lapse
of taste, or imagination,or both. It’s vulgar,
indecorous, an obscenity
that crashes down like an anvil
falling through a skylight

to land on a restaurant table,
on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.
But if you were sitting
over coffee when the metal

hit your saucer like a missile,
wouldn’t that be the first thing
you’d say? Wouldn’t you leap back
shouting, or at least thinking it,

over and over, bell-note riotously clanging
in the church of your brain
while the solicitous waiter
led you away, wouldn’t you prop

your shaking elbows on the bar
and order your first drink in months,
telling yourself you were lucky
to be alive? And if you wouldn’t

say anything but Mercy or Oh my
or Land sakes, well then
I don’t want to know you anyway
and I don’t give a fuck what you think

of my poem. The world is divided
into those whose opinions matter
and those who will never have
a clue, and if you knew

which one you were I could talk
to you, and tell you that sometimes
there’s only one word that means
what you need it to mean, the way

there’s only one person
when you first fall in love,
or one infant’s cry that calls forth
the burning milk, one name

that you pray to when prayer
is what’s left to you. I’m saying
in the beginning was the word
and it was good, it meant one human

entering another and it’s still
what I love, the word made
flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one
whose lovely body I want close,

and as we fuck I know it’s holy,
a psalm, a hymn, a hammer
ringing down on an anvil
forging a whole new world.

Music of a Mild Day

A month or so ago, when life seemed particularly bad, I decided to read Mary Oliver to cheer myself up. Bad, bad, bad idea. When one is sitting in an ‘open’ office, in a gray cubicle, with no windows, no idea of the time outside or the direction one is facing, it is very very bad idea. I only depressed myself more and had to click the page closed in a bit of a hurry before misery began leaking.

Now that I am back replete from the mountains and escape to even more good times seems close at hand, reading her is . Sitting by my window with the gurgle of pigeons nearby and a view of a sky amorphously light grey with cloud it is . Listing the first of my reads below for the lazy but for more click on …

A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company.
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees,
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

Mary Oliver

Marginalia

Staying with yesterday’s theme… I wish this were my Catcher in the Rye story.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O&apos;Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don&apos;t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot&apos;s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull&apos;s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake&apos;s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents&apos; living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I&apos;m in love.”

Billy Collins

Root Cause

Yesterday was not the best of days so I had to turn to random poem on minstrels for consolation. Having done this quite often, I’ve now got it down to the level where I look for omens in the poems the algorithm throws up. By those standards, yesterday became very good. I got lovely poems and poets thrown at me. Even one billy collins that I didn’t recall reading before. I also had this one thrown at me

What He Said

What could my mother be
to yours? What kin my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
But in love
Our hearts have mingled
like red earth and pouring rain.

       — Cempulappeyanirar

This poem has always blown me away and I thought, if its this good in English the original must be even better. A bit of searching led me here. It took me a few minutes to string the alphabets together and read it and then I realized I didn’t understand a word! Tchah.

Thank god for translators – those wonderful folks who are in touch with their roots and know their tam. 

Birds and Birds

Read the perfect poem today given recently acquired interest in things avian. 

Praise ThemThe birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We&apos;re the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn&apos;t hear
what singing completes us?

— Li-young Lee

My Fondest Wish May Yet be Granted

An appropriate post from the prison with high firewalls – don’t you think? 

Please Fire Me

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust   

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.   

Here comes another alpha male--
a man's man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:   

I've never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I'm through   

with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.   

I'd like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don't mean
Europe.
	-- Deborah Garrison