week gone by

A long week gone by and a good one but long which is sometimes how the good ones are.

Teaching is serious now, the introductions done and the work at hand at hand. Reading Whitman and Lorca with Pound on the horizon (and Lorca a constant). With Whitman some interesting conversations that go from his influence into the present as well as his work over his own time. We've been reading Leaves of Grass 1855 and Leaves of Grass in the deathbed 1891/92 editions and thinking about how much the small changes mean and the larger ones as well, the sense of the earlier work in some ways as the poems in process and the last work as the poems as done (which they obviously by that point more than are). A serious joy here is reading Whitman again and again and recognizing just how much pleasure there is in doing just that.

The same is true of Lorca, although until now more time has been spent setting the stage for the rest of the semester, a lot of background, Spanish history, Lorca's life, Lorca's New York. Reading the first Poems of Solitude at Columbia University makes me realize how much a part of me the poems have become. I read the lines and remember how much time I spent working with them, the conversations Pablo and I had in the intense three years we spent on the book. Interesting how much presence it has, the intersection of that with memory.

I'm pushing myself now to finish the Hinojosa selected. I've been feeling good about it, sure and certain of the voice. The final translation draft should be done by the end of February, early March. The introduction should be done as well. Funny to be conscious of, if not exactly able to see, the light at the end of that tunnel.

And working hard on new poems. A good feeling to do that. Going through the most recent moleskine typing even as a newer one is being slowly filled.

Snow coming. The storm is supposed to center more to the south, with DC and Philadelphia taking larger hits. But the coming 2-6 inches could be romp in the snow fun.

abrazos,

Mark

Whitman (again?)

It's interesting to see that I posted about Whitman the other night--wasn't even thinking about how in one of the courses I'm teaching Whitman is the first poet on the syllabus--first thing we're reading is "Song of Myself" from both the 1855 edition and then the 1891/92 deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass. As always I stand in amazement at the rhythm and movement of the poem, both in terms of the form and the content (this I that is so powerful and is both about description and place and time, and out of place and time, which is the point of the Whitman I, to be both in and out of location of self, other, etc). The juxtapositions (the pimpled prostitute and the president), the use of names (places, plants and trees, tribes, etc), the repetitions of phrase and structures to move the poem along, what a pleasure.

And to see words like pismire and kelson!

In other news: because of the Tobenski/Algera series tomorrow night (tobenskialgera.com), will miss the State of the Union, something I haven't done in years. The president will use the word fight a lot and he will talk about the need to listen and be thoughtful and in all of it I fear will come a further deflation of hope--that he will listen and be thoughtful and in the spirit of compromise (the new nickname for leadership, how thoughtless and passive) that the fight will be to advance an agenda that is not bold and not progressive and, finally, ineffective.

I don't like feeling that after a only a year the president has missed some big opportunities to be bold and decisive and that he has made the good elusive , but this is what I worry about. Still, I refuse to give up on hope. I see the power of it in small ways in my life and if that's what I've got, well it could be worse, even while longing for better and better on a larger scale.

Abrazos,

Mark

A poetry of place

Had a good talk with Pablo this evening about the ways in which certain poets transcend time and place and become poets of that place. The most obvious one is Whitman, it is the project of his life to write an American poetry (one that easily goes beyond nation borders). Pound is a poet who does this with the Cantos, and Williams does it through the whole of his career. Neruda does it (we had some uncertainty here on how effectively--there is the problem of how Neruda does have a tendency to change a lot, but if one takes the early poems, takes Residencia and Macchu Picchu, etc). Stevens does not--more of a philosophical poet writing of a place that resembles a place. Nor does Eliot because his place is more about the absence of culture or cutural decline than it is about making it or representing it. Mistral gets it in her last book, but too thinly. Snyder wants to, so does MacGrath in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, but there's too much history there. The whole point in the transcendence is that it almost needs to be ahistorical.

This of course led to a digression on poets of love and here it was interesting to come back and see Whitman as a great poet of love as well (Neruda fits in here well, as do so many others). But it's an interesting reminder of how much Whitman means in the whole conversation about poetry from the late 19th century to present. It's hard to imagine, too, the idea of a poet writing today who would be willing to take on a life's project of a single idea (place in time, outside of time, place defined and expanded) the way Whitman does (and to an extent, Williams, Pound and Neruda do).

Nice conversation. Which started with a question I had about Enrique Lihn, who I am reading now and who is a good read but there's something not quite there. He's not as compelling as Paz, but it's a quality I find in Paz too, a need to see beneath the surfaces (here Paz is more rewarding than Lihn). This moved us to Vicente Huidobro whose Altazar I have not read but will soon enough (waiting only for delivery).

A good night to talk about poetry. The semester starts tomorrow and I am getting in the mood.

In the country and happy

July 4th weekend in Bridgehampton. Have done a ton of work--on my own poems (only three poems left in the old moleskin!), on Hinojosa (nine first draft translations), and wrote about 1500 words of a review of a Garcia Lorca book I'm doing for Performing Arts Journal. I think I need to cut it a little and the deadline is soon but I like how the piece looks. It's a very good book by Maria M. Delgado. One of the strengths, I think, is her discussion of Garcia Lorca's impossible theater. Although she doesn't make this argument, I do think it helps to refute critics who see the surreal nature of Poet in New York as an aberration. These plays, written during and after the period of Poet in New York are very much in the spirit of the surreal that informs that book. She also does a very good job, in general, of describing the plays, the various productions both during his lifetime and after his murder. It's a book I recommend and I'll post when the issue of PAJ appears.

Also, a nice long talk with Pablo today about the problems we encountered in translation (the question had somehow come up) and we came up with three. One is the question of meaning: when Garcia Lorca is at his most surreal the critical question of what does the poet mean by this is practically unanswerable. The second is the issue of biography. The poet of Poet in NY is not Garcia Lorca but a construct who looks like Garcia Lorca and experiences New York much in the same way Garcia Lorca does and is changed by it much the way Garcia Lorca was. But it is not autobiographical (for example, Garcia Lorca goes to Vermont and upstate NY before he begins his studies at Columbia; he visits Coney Island in December but describes the place as though mid-summer). The third is the Whitman poem, which shows how nuanced and eccentric Garcia Lorca was about his own homosexuality and what I think is a desire to claim Whitman not as a homosexual poet but as an American poet (in the same way that Garcia Lorca, finally beginning to come to terms with his own sexuality, wanted to be claimed as a Spanish poet).


So being in the country is more than just writing. There are flowers everywhere. It's swimming (fun with Jesse yesterday playing some kind of water football),playing catch with Jesse (who nearly took my head off with a 65 mile an hour fastball the other day) and watching Wimbledon (bravo Williams sisters), the Mets, eating good food, having good conversation with Katherine, Jesse and Karen. Katherine was working on a pretty little water color of the yard. Jesse has been working a lot on his screenplays. Karen plays piano and since our room where I work is above the piano room it's really nice when she practices. Of course, Cannonball loves it here, being able to run around the yard, chasing frisbees and sticks. Somewhere there were 4th of July fireworks but we didn't see them (nor, I admit, was I wearing my American flag pin). The weather could be nicer. Sag Harbor (where we went for lunch today) could be less crowded but on the whole, all satisfying. Mahi mahi on the grill tonight for dinner, corn, potatoes, maybe some pre-dinner mojitos (the mint is overflowing).


Hope everyone has had a wonderful weekend. We return Monday to Brooklyn where I hope to be as productive. We leave the following Saturday for Maine for a few weeks where I hope to take all these drafts I've been working on and make something happen.

Saludos!

Mark