One (or more) Reasons Among Many

As I usually find some sort of twisted pleasure in stating the obvious, I’ll start with it: I write to communicate. A pretty basic starting place. If only it were that easy! Human beings have an overwhelming desire to connect and at least feel heard. In the preface to one of his novels Joseph Conrad describes the artist’s role as one of creating a sensory experience and an emotional connection for their audience: “My task which I’m trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all—to make you see (ital). That—and no more, and it is everything.” I don’t know that it’s everything, but it is certainly a huge drive of art in general. One of the reasons I focus on writing poetry is its unusual ability to convey emotion and understanding in a not necessarily linear or logical fashion. After all, in some ways isn’t that a more accurate method when it comes to emotion and the way our minds work? Which, of course, is not to say that’s all poetry is suited to, or that fantastic poetry can’t also be analytical, logical, or serve billions of other purposes. I noticed, however, that some of my favorites tend to subtly communicate a resonant emotion on at least one level. This is probably why I like Federico Garcia Lorca’s analysis of duende—that bizarre gut-check that can happen in a song or poem, often containing “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical” (Maurer from In Search of Duende, ix). It can certainly go over the top and often sounds better in Spanish, but, for me, there’s something truly satisfying in a duende-filled poem like Edwin Honig’s “Graciela of the Bitter Root” (though I’m not sure the last lines really translate if ya know what I mean):

There is a bitter root
and the world has a thousand terraces.

Nor can the smallest hand
shatter the door of water.

Where are you going, where, oh where?
The sky has a thousand windows
—battle of livid bees—
and there is a bitter root.

Bitter.

The ache in the sole of the foot
Is the ache inside the face,
And it aches in the fresh trunk
of night only just lopped off.

Love, my enemy,
bite your bitter root!


Poetry’s flexibility fascinates me. Sometimes through various constructs like metaphor you can get at an idea obliquely but with complexity and depth (there I go sounding like I’m at a wine tasting again, but you know what I mean). And sometimes you can lay it out there on the table (still with depth, of course) as Deborah Meadows does in the last stanza of her “Faux translation of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘To the Reader’”: “You know it’s true, that monstrous delicacy, / that drug of hypocrisy, like me, like you” (83). This ending (a wonderful and difficult-to-pull-off balance of emotion and idea in my opinion) touches on another important role of the poet, that of social critic (for want of a better term) and observer. Meadows' work engages this role with its questioning of our cultural, economic, and historical assumptions on many levels we’ve already touched on. Though Meadows' poem stands on its own, when I read the Baudelaire poem and it’s translation it was fascinating to see how the original poet’s work filters through and mingles with the new. I’m putting it on my list of things to try. I am also including my poem for this week (draft!!) mainly because it’s one of the stranger things I’ve ever written (beware of word associations, heh, heh), and maybe if I throw it up against the blog wall someone can tell me what sticks for them. (fyi-some of the line breaks don't fit.)

The Slide-rules of Somnambulant Geometry

I stood upon the pyramid and found a cube.
Looked down and saw thousands of roads,
straight and curved stretch before me.
The straight roads of water held fish.
Felines stalked along the curves.
All could speak, but cats told truth and fish lied
in soapy bubbles of speech.
I was the center,
but I did not know my circumference.
“Should you though? Should you?” Chanting cats
wended their way.
“End at beginning, who ever gets that?
The light of the stars swirling above you,
Draw circles around it. Try. Try, and fall flat.”
Water roiled below—fish didn’t like it.
No’s popped into the air between stars.
Hoary gray salmon spawned their way to my peak,
then bludgeoned me into the cube with a glare.
Three bars on one window and
an obsidian sink without stars.
But, in the basin, a catfish, grinning through whiskers,
showed me the way to slide down the drain.
Out on the roadless seas, it asked if I would ever begin
or would siphon my time chewing on ends.

Not that it matters much but here’s the chain of associations, though I forget what Lauren chose as the original words:
Pyramid—cube—star
Straight—curved—flat
Fish—feline—jail
Truth—lies—sink
Circumference—center—begin