This Poet's Choice: W.S. Merwin

While the Treegap Governess may appear to be remiss of late, it's only because reading is sometimes more important than writing and better yet, conversations about poetry trump mindless prattle into the blogosphere.

That said, I was overjoyed to know that W.S. Merwin was named the new Poet Laureate today. The position of Poet Laureate is a tad flimsy in America—the distinction ceremonial and rarely acknowledged—yet I’m glad our country still tries to honor poets with some kind of gesture. Before the Washington Post disbanded their BookWorld section entirely, each Sunday I had the privilege of reading a column about a poem selected by the Poet Laureate at the time (namely Wilbur, Dove, Brodsky, Haas and Pinsky), and that particular space was devoted to a new author or a new collection of poetry or reminded one to take another look at an old author or unexplored volume of poems. When the bottom line fell out of the newspaper business, BookWorld was the first to go and sadly, with it the “Poet’s Choice.”

While void of my weekly dosage of poetry via newspaper, I’ll never forget the day I bought my first Merwin book—instead of poems, I opted for “The Ends of the Earth,” a collection of essays which feel more like an historical novel and explanation of his philosophical outlook on life than merely essays feeding upon themselves. It was within that same year that the now defunct BookWorld gave him an honor as the Poet’s Choice for that week. It came from the paper on 11/20/05 and I remember cutting it out carefully with my scissors so as not to ruin the border of newsprint which would inevitably seep within the pores of my fingers. Today I took that book from off of my shelf, and from the inner spine fell that very clipping and it gave me a sort of good omen or hope for things to come.

Merwin has been around forever, it seems-- a being with an ancient soul you can only dream of having within your own chest. He is perhaps most famous for his lyric poems, addressed to everyone from his mother, friends, and even a “friend traveling” to emotions such as grief and even objects like his car, legs or glass. I love that this poet has been relevant, passionate and devoted to words for his entire existence.

Reading and writing are two of the best exercises I can think of. For that reason, I have selected three brief but powerful W.S. Merwin offerings to honor his new appointment. I hope he can inspire others to read, write and love and perhaps know something akin to the profundity in the basics of life.

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

To Prose
…we know
only scattered fragments of you
glimpses of birds in bushes
gestures in car windows
of which we forget
at once almost everything
you define us
we are the ones who need you
we can no longer tell
whether we believe
anything without you
or whether we can hear
all that you are not
O web of answer
sea of forgetting is it true
that you remember

To Myself

Even when I forget you
I go on looking for you
I believe I would know you
I keep remembering you
sometimes long ago but then
other times I am sure you
were here for a moment before
and the air is still alive
around where you were and I
think then I can recognize
you who are always the same
who pretend to be time but
you are not time and who speak
in the words but you are not
what they say you who are not
lost when I do not find you

Adventures in Research

The Indiana Jones Grail Tablet

 After a week of non-stop work on a demanding project for a resident genius, my brain has been lacking in poetic verbiage. Instead, I’ve been on number and wording check overdrive with, thankfully, a wonderful team of colleagues. Last week my sister and I had a conversation about crazy work weeks and we concurred that in order to really love what you do, no matter what the sector, position or field, it’s important to have excellent people beside you in the trenches.

One such colleague offered up this poem, a respite amid the madness, which apparently came from the pen of a university student in a statistics class. In our field of public opinion research, and even more so on the consultancy side, you have to be able to not only understand certain concepts, but be able to talk about them in layperson language, which is not always easy. Even if you know what the concepts are, how they are run and the syntax to run them, it’s still a gift to be able to tell someone in plain speech. In other words, it’s one thing to read the Olde English version of Beowulf while using an archaic dictionary, or even a middling modern translation of the epic poem, but quite another to read the beautiful version translated by Seamus Heaney. In the poet’s translation, the spirit of the original words come alive-- evoked by the use of perfectly conjoined words like “God-cursed Grendel,” which allows for an action-packed brevity to this great work more in tune with its true rendering.

So, this one is for my colleagues, who, on a regular basis work with me in translating numbers into stories and turn complex statistical methods into real English that, just maybe, even Seamus Heaney could understand.

On statistical terminology

by Cory Lation

Whoever invented statistical terms
Had a head that was stuffed with worms.
All these new words are so much junk,
And if I don't learn them, I'm really sunk.

Why's the bell-shaped curve called normal?
Is it normal to be so formal?
There's nothing mean about the mean.
Its just average, as is clearly seen.
And what's so standard about that deviation?
Its a really malicious creation.
Confusing students is its only function.
It frustrates and mystifies, in conjunction.

And who needs the variance?
It only rhymes with hairy ants.
Variance is what analysis is of,
But all my friends would just love
To take all the sums of squares we've seen
And put them within the instructor's between.

I'm just not sure about probability.
I think it caused the prof's early senility.
I often frequent relatively conditional joints,
But that won't get me statistical points.

"Histogram" throws me, at least a bit.
I remember the first time I heard of it.
I wanted an antihistogram to get rid of it.
But then I studied it, and after some beers,
I learned its a bar chart--there went my fears.
Just a bar chart--like Norm's tab at Cheers.

Skewness and kurtosis, there's a pair:
Something you'd wash out of your hair.

Research design, such a burn,
Just more weird terms to learn.
Your constructs are valid, so's your internal,
But if your validity isn't also external,
You should flush your data down the urinal
Or you'll go to a place where the heat is infernal
And study statistics for time eternal.

Then there's t, a test with jam and bread?
And F, the test that we all dread.
And what's so square about the chi?
If I don't get to the root of it, I'll just die.

Scatterplots, boxplots, stems-and-leaves grow,
Sounds like a radio gardening show.

Heteroscedasticity, now there's a word.
I think its when a turtle mates with a bird.

Then we study regression analysis,
A major cause of mental paralysis.
Least squares I like--minimize the nerds!
They like numbers better than words.
The most cools straight line--that's what we need.
I think I know where that line will lead.
Straight out of this class.
Were nearly done with this morass,
And my rhymes are running out of gas.
There's no chance I'll ever pass....

The Five W's (and one H)

One of the best things about loving words, writing and poetry is the unlimited number of ways to convey one simple idea. One of the worst things about loving words, writing and poetry is the unlimited number of ways to convey one single idea.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a reference to the sestina, a kind of poem that I remember writing as a class assignment a long time ago, one of many creative exercises that only the best kind of teacher mandates. Sestinas are tricky for their structural difficulty and to be true to form must consist of exactly six stanzas with six lines per stanza concluding with a tercet. These thirty nine lines are not only supposed to be written in iambic pentameter, but follow a strict form whereby each line must end with only the same six words repeated in a different, but structured (retrograde cross) order.

If this sounds part poem part crossword puzzle, it is but it isn’t. The formula is this:
Stanza 1=123456; Stanza 2= 615243; Stanza 3= 364125; Stanza 4= 532614; Stanza 5= 451362; Stanza 6= 246531. The tercet repeats the six ending words but in three lines in the order of line 1 (6 and 2); line 2 (1 and 4) and line 3 (5 and 3). And if you don’t care to know how it works but want to see one in action, here is a link to Elizabeth Bishop’s blandly titled  but beautifully written "Sestina"

In writing my first sestina, I recall plotting out those crucial six ending words that I would have to use over and over again and how using concrete objects was the easiest way to go in terms of having a product that flowed and meant something. Bishop’s Sestina does the same, using nouns as her finishing lines.

This time I took a different route and, while difficult, was worth the exercise. In doing so I found that the one thing I miss in the adult world of having to work for a living and spent less time on a writing life is not having Mrs. Kernutt’s challenges and creative daily assignments to force me to find more of these kids of assignments.

If anyone else wants to accept the sestina challenge, please forward your poems and I will post them here at Treegap.

Journalistically Speaking

In your new life who
do you go to and how
do you behave when
they ask about us what
do you say in that moment where
you’d rather die than ask yourself why.

Detectives are unsure why
the driver of the pick-up who
careened through six lanes of traffic where-
by striking the cyclist or how
impossibly tragic the timing in what
began as a normal day. Odds are when

we’re not looking, taking a routine ride when
feeling just fine wondering why
the life you chose is not exactly what
you intended and ends up being about who
time is spent with when no one is looking and how
lovely it would be to live in a place where

we take care of each other’s fingers and toes, where
fellow passengers on a train say something when
the unbreathing man in the next seat needs to know how
to get help before he expires and why
hundreds of thousands of commuters who
went in and out of that car all day cared not what

his life meant, more interested in what
the latest news has to say of the weather and where
to get dinner that night and maybe who
to share it with if we’re lucky enough or when
we’ll see someone we love. But why
has it come to this for us and how

unfixable is it? I still don’t know how
to be the new me around you and what
I want to be without you or why
the corners of the fitted sheet never round where
they’re supposed to only when
I make the bed without you. But who

cares that it’s my bed, why not ours instead, or how
it looks to the ghosts who sleep there and what
it means to mummify in sheets where a person lived back when.

Small Things Make A Good Life Great

The Treegap Governess has been on vacation. The hiatus has not been without poetic thoughts, contemplations or ideas about poetry. Rather the time away was a time to live poetry. George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch this lovely passage which perfectly captures how full and beautiful life is wherever you are as long as you attune your ears in appreciation:

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silent.

One of my favorite things recently was watching the two Squirrel Girls eat hand-broken walnut pieces from the doorstep of my parent’s house. At one point when I went to feed the particularly fearless diner, I feared she was going to rush inside the house as I opened the door. These two are characters, one even puts her paws up on the glass door as if she was a pet asking for a fist bump. It’s entirely possible the squirrel thinks I’m insane as I take a few minutes to wonder when she’ll be back, whether or not she’ll pose for my pictures after scattering the walnuts (quickly because I really kind of want to feed her out of my hand but am scared to be bitten), and could sit all day long watching their backyard antics. I can’t help but be fully entertained in watching her jowls kick into overdrive as she carefully picks up a nut piece with two long fingered paws and proceeds to chew quickly, eyes focused straight ahead as she concentrates on her task at hand.

My parents get the credit for becoming the parents of these fun Squirrel Nutkins. It’s their back yard and I was merely a passerby, a willing feeder in an established relationship. But I loved every second of it and can’t help but think that when I came back from my long run that Sunday to find Squirrel Girl standing upright at the front of the house, she was saying welcome back, where have your paws tread and when will I see you again?

In honor of the Squirrel Girls and my parents who feed them, this Emily Dickenson poem presents a thoughtful summation of how I think about friendships.

Number 1073 (c.1865)

Experiment to me

Is every one I meet

If it contain a Kernel

The Figure of a Nut

Presents upon a Tree

Equally plausibly,

But Meat within, is requisite

To Squirrels, and to Me.

A new original poem, a Sestina, will debut on Friday.

The Art of War (Part II): Chroniclers of the Times

Goya's "The Tree Prisoners"

April 30 marked the 35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, perhaps the first war in which art and writing were publicized to reach a broader number of people. Continuing the conversation surrounding the artistry of war, it is with sadness that I believe that poets and artists in countries of military conflict must incorporate their conflicts in question in order to remain relevant regardless of whether or not they have a passion for such art. Goya, like Picasso, was more or less forced to chronicle the situation in Spain and genius poets like Seamus Heaney are forced to take questions from journalists regarding war. There is no longer an art for art’s sake any longer. The gene that makes a poet wake up every day and want to write doesn’t come with a media guide for how to speak or write about a particular war.

That said, journalists nowadays are considered artists in many cases, especially when embedded or of the photojournalist ilk. The writing and photography done in wartime brings out passionate pieces that the line between art and journalism has been blurred since the beginning of time. Here are two poems that strike me as directly offering up material for chronicling war in a most beautiful and direct way:

September Song

By Geoffrey Hill

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Whatever You Say Say Nothing
By Seamus Heaney

I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of 'views
On the Irish thing'. I'm back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,

Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'?
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree,'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.' '
They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably. .
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

II

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite's a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome's
a happy man this night.' His flock suspect

In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make

As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow

When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight

But that would be to ignore other symptoms.
Last night you didn't need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)

On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering-
The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke-while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait

To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.

III

'Religion's never mentioned here,' of course.
'You know them by their eyes,' and hold your tongue.
'One side's as bad as the other,' never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung

In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the 'wee six' I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

IV

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja -vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bit and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

 Eddie Adams' famous photograph from the Vietnam war

The Bomb's the Thing: Art of War (Part I)

"The Bomb" by Haleem Kasim of Iraq, 2007.

I was fortunate to grow up in peacetime in America, a generation born of parents who had seen the Vietnam War and before that endured school drills instructing them how to hide under desks to brace for an atom bomb. I went to a high school with Model UN where we learned diplomacy is how you solved problems. We only read of the horrors of the trenches, lived through a Cold War with few concerns for our safety.  We read The Song of Roland, Homer, Catch 22, Housman and Kipling and I think most of us believed the epic battles were over. We were “We Are The World.”

And then I wizened up. Rwanda, the Congo, Bosnia and Croatia, ongoing ethnic conflicts around the globe became the focus of the day and they became my passion in terms of how they were reported and being studied. In 2000 I found myself in Belfast studying all of this but also how art is impacted/made from war or conflict situations. And it saddened me to no end when two weeks into the US invasion of Iraq, massive looting and burning of museums and centuries old literature meant the destruction of many centuries of culture. A crisis of cultural identity, I fear, will only make things worse while groups claim ownership of the past.

And while all of my passion and education surrounding this topic has been useful and informs what I do for a living, I hadn’t thought about art and culture and war in a while, which is why I was truly moved to see someone actually write about this topic in my Sunday newspaper. Philip Kennicott’s commentary “War is Hell (On Art Too)” focuses on a new exhibition featuring contemporary Lebanese art shown at American University. The point of his well written article boils down to this: “Art doesn’t make sense of war. It’s the other way around.” In other words, if you’re an artist in (insert any war-torn conflict zone in its heightened state here) you either create art about the conflict or the way in which the conflict affects your society/people/country, or you’re irrelevant.

Think about Yeats. He was a poet who, after chronicling and eulogizing his society’s problems and martyrs started writing poems about twisting gyres and mysticism and got criticized for moving into a “crazy period.” I think he was sick and of writing about Ireland’s problems. He was a brilliant writer, he probably should have gone to Europe with James Joyce.

Would Salman Rushdie be famous or as well known today if he hadn’t written about the very minute at midnight when children like him (aka his country of India) was partitioned in 1947? Perhaps, but it’s doubtful that a novel about anything else would have caused the Supreme Leader of Islam to declare a fatwa against him.

Throughout history artists have chronicled events and perhaps influenced the way in which history is written and interpreted, which is why artists living in countries of war are deemed irrelevant if they don’t produce art reflecting that very conflict. The most touching and sad part of Kennicott’s critique of the Lebanese exhibit comes from an artist named Chaouki Chamoun who says “During the war, I stopped painting. I never wanted anyone to live off my pain.” In the end, his works turn out to be the least appealing, losing out to the edgier, more visually stunning works of his countrymen.

While art outlasts war, war overpowers the era in which art is created. Here are two poems that, while distinctly different in tone are viscerally and visually brilliant and could perhaps be applied to any war.  I find them equally brilliant. 

Redeployment

By Howard Nemerov

They say the war is over. But water still

Comes bloody from the taps, and my pet cat

In his disorder vomits worms which crawl

Swiftly away. Maybe they leave the house.

These worms are white and flecked with the cat’s blood.

The war may be over. I know a man

Who keeps a pleasant souvenir, he keeps

A soldier’s dead blue eyeballs that he found

Somewhere—hard as chalk, and blue as slate.

He clicks them in his pocket when he talks.

And now there are cockroaches in the house,

They get slightly drunk on DDT,

Are fast, hard, shifty—can be drowned but not

Without you hold them under quite some time.

People say the Mexican kind can fly.

The end of the war. I took it quietly

Enough. I tried to wash the dirt out of

My hair and from under my fingernails,

I dressed in clean white clothes and went to bed.

I heard the dust falling between the walls.

It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers

By Margaret Atwood

While I was building neat

castles in the sandbox,

the hasty pits were

filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school

washed and combed, my feet

stepping on the cracks in the cement

detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup

and literate, and I sit in my chair

as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-

brush is charged with soldiers,

the names on the difficult

maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical

toys, my body

is a deadly gadget,

I reach out in love, my hands are guns,

my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my

passive eyes transmute

everything I look at to the pocked

black and white of a war photo,

how

can I stop myself.

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key

on my electric typewriter,

speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

"War" by Ahmed Nussaif of Iraq, 2006.

"Abu Ghraib" by Assad Al Saghir of Iraq, 2007 

(Part II of this post to come)

A Brief Beauty; A Lasting Peace?

Taken by Nicole Speulda 4.3.10

I’m not sure what tour guides in DC say about the Cherry Blossoms but thanks to a lovely last few weeks there are a lot of them this year out on the mall, talking about how Japan gifted us these seeds and how they were lovingly planted along the Tidal Basin in 1912. It’s true, in 1912 Japan gave the U.S. government 3,020 cherry blossom trees as a symbol of diplomatic courtship—the card reading “let’s be friends.” What I doubt these tour guides mention is how the majority of these trees were killed during the construction of the Jefferson Memorial (beginning 1939 and finishing in 1943), a tremendous monument that completes the 5 points along the mall.  The Jefferson is magnificent, one of my favorite monuments, and I’m glad he’s there, but the trees paid the price.

Two years after the original cherry trees were plowed under, the U.S. reciprocated by delivering its own present: 9,700 pounds of uranium 235 (12.5 kilotons of TNT) and named this gift “little boy,” for the city of Hiroshima and then two days later, spread its "fat man," seed-- 20 kilotons of TNT in the form of plutonium in Nagasaki.

What I find most remarkable, or perhaps poetic, is that the trees I see today are actually a re-gift;  In 1965 the Japanese government gave us a second batch of seedlings, this time 3,800 trees.  Maybe it's just me but I'm not so sure I'd offer up beauty after that, but they did.  For me it's a reminder of the power of good-will, symbolism and embracing the future.
In the week and a half since my sojourn to the cherry blossoms at their peak their beauty has stuck with me as well as all of the people who come to view them. It’s an international event and this time it just happens to coincide with the Nuclear Energy Summit. It reminds me to enjoy and appreciate the beauty of life because there are really horribly destructive options out there. So today we celebrate the loveliness of life option, of poetry and cherry trees.

The first poets to celebrate the cherry blossoms called them “sakura,” (“Japanese Flowering Cherry”), and the highest praise for their springtime symbolism and blooms changed throughout history depending on the age. Remarkably, Japanese historians can separate historical eras based on the way in which poets wrote about the sakura. Hanami (viewing the cherry blossoms), began when the Japanese capital was moved to Kyoto in 812 AD and was conceived as an event for the upper classes, something I envision in my mind as akin to Irving Berlin’s 1948 Easter Parade with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland and all the frills upon them.

The nobility in Japan would start important invocations with Sakura poems and the blossoms became a most important cultural tradition:

Looking at the Mountain Sakura in mist
I miss a person who looks at the Sakura
 ~ Kino Tsurayuki

If there were no cherry blossoms in the world,
My mind would be peaceful.
~ Fujiwara Norihira

Perhaps unsurprisingly, and if you’ve lived in DC for any period of time, the cherry blossom is associated with mortality as the blooming period is very short. Most years, April is a cruel month. The trees bloom and the very next day we’ll have high winds, a thunderstorm or two and the branches are stripped of their pink petals, naked for the next wave of onlookers. Here are some other Haikus celebrating life and death:

Shining spring day
Falling cherry blossoms with my calm mind
~ Kino Tomonari

Wishing to die under cherry blossoms in spring
Cherry blossom season in full moon time
~ Saigyo

Sleeping under the trees on Yoshino mountain
The spring breeze wearing Cherry blossom petals
~ Saigyo

Taken by Nicole Speulda 4.3.10