Editor’s Note, Issue 23

Readers:

Welcome to Issue # 23 of Plume.

You may recall—though probably not—that last time in this space I asked for readers’ comments on our new look. Much to my astonishment, I have received a good number of them—and all positive. Which gives me pause… and yet… there it is. Most have commented favorably on the clarity of the new form, its sparseness, and its ease of navigation. Also—Plume appears to work very nicely on mobile devices.

Precisely as I’d hoped. Many thanks to all who took a moment to write.

Our renovation of the Archive system, you may have noted, is well underway. For more on this, sign up for our Newsletter, now conveniently placed on the Menu in each issue. You can also now follow us on Twitter @PlumePoetry.

This month’s Reading Recommendations from David Cudar (complemented last month by Julie Sheehan’s) are missing this issue due to a family emergency. However, as noted—again in our Newsletter, Ron Slate has asked a number of poets and writers—including me, for some reason—to post their own summer reading lists. More on this in the Newsletter. You can find Ron’s ongoing installments of this compilation here.

Our cover art this month is from Jay Muhlin, whose work has appeared in various editorial publications worldwide. In 2008 Muhlin published his first long-term book project entitled Half Life: A Portrait of Lauren. The book documents the life and suicide of a close friend and the artist’s relationship to her. Jay was a visiting faculty member at Bennington College in 2011, and currently teaches a darkroom-based class at the College of New Jersey. Muhlin is an artist member of Vox Populi, and his studio is in Philadelphia, PA.

This month’s issue features new poems from Amy Beeder, Andrea Cohen, Brian Culhane, Elizabeth Arnold, Flávia Rocha, G.C. Waldrep, Ira Sadoff, Maureen McLane, Eric Pankey, Karl Krolow (translated by Stuart Friebert—and great thanks to Suhrkamp Verlag/Berlin for permission to use the Krolow texts), Katia Kapovich, and Sophie Cabot Black; our “Featured Selection” is from Mark Irwin, a translation of an extract from Alain Borer’s Hyle:The fundamental question of poetry.

New work received these last few weeks comes from, among others, Ruth Padel, Peter Balakian, Karen An-hwei Lee, Meighan Sharp, Juan Felipe Herrara, Jennifer Michael Hecht, J. Allyn Rosser, David Huddle, and Diane Wakoski.

Much gratitude, as always, and I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume

Natural History of the Soul

The song thrush hops, runs, stands,
the guide book says, with its head to one side

listening for worms

just as the lion knew to follow St. Jerome
calmly while they

walked through the priests

who are running for their lives
in Carpaccio’s painting in Venice,

birds opening their beaks

hoping to touch St. Francis who was a lover of views,
especially the one visible from his

home in high Assisi

until natural beauty failed him altogether
once he’d almost died

which turned him

utterly exclusively to concentrate on what can happen
mind-to-mind—body-to-body if you’re lucky.

Barring that

we can’t even hear an earthquake coming,
a volcano at the start

throwing its boulders up

the endless-seeming chimney to the hole
that can be the size of a human head

—as one man learned when he

crawled down
into the crater to see—

or three miles in circumference.

Elizabeth Arnold is the author of three books of poetry—The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Civilization (Flood Editions, 2006), and Effacement (Flood Editions, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Poetry, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Antioch Review, Tikkun, and Oxford University Press’s Literary Imagination. She is on the MFA faculty at the University of Maryland.

Hatfield

Such lovely matter, rain, abundant rain,

though Sweetwater overflowed and Otay broke

I filled your reservoirs as I was asked.

Yes twenty souls were lost, they say, or more;

still Hatfield was upbeat, knowing he’d arranged

the matter of such long-awaited rain Come

from out of nowhere with a digging stick,

his secret chemicals & elemental price

to fill the reservoirs as he was asked.

The rain was free, except his cost per inch.

Did San Diego never read a fairy tale?

Such weighty matter, that abundant rain—

On the Altiplano in a dry December, families

still bake the dough-boy, dough-girl. Seeded children

ask the rain to fill the furrows, reservoirs.

Their teeth are pumpkin seeds, their eyes are beans.

Clothe them in paper, offer them fire.

I filled your reservoir as I was asked

with lovely matter: rain, the banquet rain—

In 1916, the “Rainmaker” Charles Malloy Hatfield was hired to fill the reservoirs of drought-stricken San Diego by his method of releasing 23 secret chemicals into the air. It subsequently rained so heavily that the Otay and Lower Sweetwater dams overflowed or broke; the number of deaths attributed to that flooding is still a matter of dispute.

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico.

High Finance

You looked up and saw across the field

One who you thought also wanted, staring back

With an idea of increase, until both

Were trading in this for that, each sign

Ready to be agreed upon as if

With enough we will have covered the entire

Meadow with all possible. The uncertain

Is taken into account as each of us

Prepares for more than is necessary

To be near what is almost ours

And to watch for defect; even damage can be useful.

To have it all known, your business,

Is to persuade the world. Only

When you see others see you, do you know.

Sophie Cabot Black, whose poems appear frequently in the New Yorker and The Atlantic, is author of three collections of poetry: The Misunderstanding of Nature, The Descent, and The Exchange, forthcoming in May, 2013.

Calendar

Some people, after the day

has passed, scratch on X

inside that box, as if

the past were a treasure

map and the sweet spot

for digging just missed.

Others, more hurried, employ

a slash-and-yearn policy,

their single diagonal suggesting

a ladder that showed up

too late for actual scrambling.

At the edge of known

physics, theorists like to say

days and minutes don’t exist.

But calendars do: you can mass

produce them with snapshots

of aspirations in Lisbon and Madrid.

In a pinch, in winter, they make

fine logs for the fire; in summer,

fans for shadeless expanses.

The fans burn too. Days are

like that: elastic and highly flammable.

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review and elsewhere. Her most recent poetry collections are Kentucky Derby (Salmon, 2011) and Long Division (Salmon, 2009). Her fourth collection, Furs Not Mine, will be published by Four Way Books

Two Poems

Arête

1. A sharp mountain ridge 2. Excellence, valor, virtue

The Hemingway who wrote three stories in a crummy hotel
Is my kind of hero, squatting in litter of butts and shot glasses,
Perspiring mightily through the Madrid nights, sleeping
In sodden triumph on the scattered drafts worth keeping
For the train to Paris where, sober in the mountain passes,
He hears a steward announce morning coffee with a brass bell,

As he strikes phrases with practiced flick, keen to make plain
What ought to be told in American; and then sitting back
Alone, happy, happy with himself and his art and the sun
Coming up after such a night and the foul taxi to the station
And the lost ticket, running, running along a steaming track,
Shouting, Arrêtez you bastards! Stop the goddamn train!

Eurydice

Their legend is a look in the eyes of the one
Who stops and has to look back. That one.

We name him and we name her, in the story
Handed down—whose details always blur.

There’s something so appealing in his need.
The human desire to turn, if just once,

To see if the beloved comes. Making certain,
Just once, that the slurred footsteps are hers.

There is something so natural in his look back.
It reminds me of how, in turning to gaze

At a maple blazing with reds last October,
My eyes lost it in the split-second after,

As I turned back to the curving road ahead.
The present like a cold wheel in my hands.

Brian Culhane’s poetry has appeared widely in such journals as The New Republic, The Hudson Review, and The Paris Review. In 2007, he was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Prize; his winning manuscript, The King’s Question, was published by Graywolf Press in 2008.

Vita Nova

Born on the outskirts of the Romanian kingdom

in ’34, seven years before the war,

you saw the first bombs rain upon your shtetl

at 6 am, people falling under silver trickles

of fire, the bridge collapsing behind you

without a sound (your mother had covered your ears

with her hands). Those red shoes you wore, the yellow dress,

the new watch (a gift from your dad), and pearls of tears

were your good luck charms during the wartime mess.

When your father went missing you wrote on passing trains

the time, your name and the name of the village

you were being taken to. What did you write it with?

I’ve never asked you whether it was a rock,

a piece of chalk or a nail that left your message

on the green train cars. How did you manage?

Was it worth it? Sixty seven, to be precise, years later

is it still visible as your granddaughter

bites on her pen writing about you,

fishing for “something memorable” for a project due

tomorrow, that you were born in a kingdom whose king

was a little boy.

Katia Kapovich has published seven books of poetry in Russian and two in English, the latest Cossacks and Bandits (Salt, 2008). Her poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, Harvard Review, The Independent, Jacket, and many others. She is a co-editor of Fulcrum.

The Pair

Here’s how they climbed out of the nights’ custody.
Silent, with their eyes
Looking ahead.
They still sense the flood of stars in their hair
Like the veil of spiderwebs, all things wonderful
Around mouth and chin.

Morning with its rye distaff
Extrudes the sweet giddiness
From their blood.
And gentle sleep, which pestered them in the leaves,
Purified itself in the early bite of nettles,
Which hurts.

The sheaf of pain, the buried sorrow,
Grows more exact now
In the drifting cold.
The green wind tastes bitter to their palate –
Like the skin of plums, in the strong shakes of day
They find themselves in.

They move slowly in their strange limbs,
Without replies
Streaked by light.
And while sighs wend their way to the sky
A heart grown dumb must defend against ashes
And does not recognize itself.

Das Paar

So sind sie aus der Nächte Haft gestiegen.
Halten verschwiegen
Die Augen hin.
Sie fühlen noch die Sternenflut im Haare
Wie Spinnwebschleier, alles Wunderbare
Um Mund und Kinn.

Der Morgen treibt mit schmaler Roggenspindel
Den süßen Schwindel
Aus ihrem Blut.
Und zarter Schlaf, der sie im Laub gepeinigt,
Hat sich im frühen Nesselbiß gereinigt,
Der wehe tut.

Das Bündel Schmerzen , die vergrabene Trauer,
Wird nun genauer
Im kalten Wehn.
Der grüne Wind schmeckt ihrem Gaumen bitter
Wie Pflaumenhaut, im starken Taggezitter,
Drin sie sich sehn.

Sie rühren langsam sich in fremden Gliedern,
Ohne Erwidern
Gestriemt vom Licht.
Und während Seufzer sich zum Himmel kehren,
Muß das verstummte Herz der Asche wehren
Und kennt sich nicht.

Translated from the German by Stuart Friebert

Karl Krolow (1915-1998) was one of the giants of German Letters of the last century. He made his mark early and often, with poems, translations, and criticism, later adding prose to his staggering output, which includes more than thirty volumes of poems, among them several Selected tomes, each with a life and mind of its own. Ranging across many subjects and themes, in a variety of voices, at once abstract and detached, but so focused and concentrated that what is observed and spoken becomes intimate, even voyeuristic, but never without illuminating basic human wants, needs, and values. Krolow was fond of quoting Flaubert, who most wanted to write a book about nothing, which would wind up being about everything. That sums up Krolow’s own ways with words. As a critic, a judge of literary competitions, as president of The German Academy of Language and Literature (1972-1975), he was generous to a fault regarding the work of others. Almost no writer who lived during Krolow’s time was without his direct or indirect support.

Stuart Friebert, for whose first book of German poems Krolow wrote the afterword, had the great privilege of knowing and working with Krolow on a number of occasions. Enjoying “a lifetime right to translate” Krolow, he has published two volumes of Selected Poems (On Account Of: Selected Poems of Karl Krolow/The Field Translation Series; What’ll We Do With This Life?: Selected Poems by Karl Krolow, 1950-1990/Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press), and Bitter Oleander Press will publish a third volume, Puppets in the Wind, in 2014-15. The author of a dozen books of his own poems, and a number of stories, memoir pieces, essays, and anthologies, Friebert has published six other volumes: co-translations, from the Czech, Italian, Romanian, and Lithuanian.

Drink with Mountain, Remembered, Andalucían

The rosé from Spain

followed us west

as if hot on the scent

of tomato—

O brave New World

your fruits have gone incognito!

A rosé’s a rosé’s a rosé

with love apples.

You are moving west

beyond the Chinese coast

to the interior

of inner Mongolia. A threatened

horse rides again

the steppes unburdening

themselves below revived hooves.

The time of the emperor

is nigh. No inquisition

will be able to check

the future. Your local

grapes are delicious

picked off the vine

or bottled, thus.

This is the interval

between eras of fathers,

dictators fallen, the marble

fists crushed and not crushing.

But the future, its empress,

who can say what beast

she’ll ride to meet us?

Raise a glass, comrades—

all you who refuse

to forget the civil war.

Maureen N. McLane is the author of two collections of poetry, Same Life (FSG, 2008) and World Enough (FSG, 2010). Her newest book is My Poets, also from FSG.

Fragment

The past is a point of departure
But from there it is hard to parse the detour or destination.

Even dust is divisible.
Sand transmutes to transparency.

The distance one travels in a day,
What we call a journey, is as far as the space between words,

The distance between sawhorses that hold up a child’s casket.
In the dream I am myself but somehow vacant or vacated,

Late, or left behind, unable to fit the little I’ve brought again into the duffle.
Synonyms, not the words I need, at hand.

Evening river.
A ladder of fire extinguished one rung at a time:

The yellow of buckthorn berry, burry hatchings on goldleaf.
The tense of pain is the present.

Like a deer cornered by a pack of hounds, the now freezes.
Something has happened. Something is about to happen.

Although I cannot see beyond it, the window frames an exterior.
What if there were no frame,

No scale, no lens, no vantage point, merely a grid set down?
Although the sound is muted, I can see the actress speaks with a lisp.

Who are these storm-drenched castaways?
Where is this island forged from magma?

I imagine the soundtrack might offer a counterpoint to the narrative’s murk,
But the commercials come on at such a volume I can’t face it.

We all have failures over which to brood.
These acts, ritualized, have lost their savagery and are now symbolic,

And even the antecedents of the symbols have been forgotten.
How does one measure the year: the threshers unpaid? Spring floods?

Ice cutters on the river? Ice cluttered on the river?
The car won’t start?

What comfort to think that the great beast
Will be thrown into a lake of fire,

That a story, however picaresque, resolves on the final page,
As quaint as that may seem.

Sometimes I feel like one of those castaways—
Shipwrecked, stranded, marooned—

With a single blade, a length of rope, wishing I knew a few more poems by heart,
Knew how to start a fire, knew how to spin thread.

That river I mentioned, evening river I called it:
No way to map it except to map the history of its meanders.

We know the prophetic in retrospect,
Thus renumber the thousand stars

So that the lines connecting them
Equal hyena trampled by zebra or hero filching fire from the gods.

Luckily, nothing is impervious to interpretation—
Afterthoughts, premonitions, the slimmest hunches.

This morning, I recalled an old love, fondly, as one should,
Without the what-if. Recall is perhaps the wrong word.

Slightly out of focus, between the gaps and lacunae that riddle memory,
I saw her face, or rather a look she’d give me sometimes

That meant to me then bewildered affection,
As if already she could imagine her life beyond me.

One rarely recalls the looks on one’s own face.
In the mirror all one can do is pose,

Attempt a pose that looks unposed.
“Allegories,” Walter Benjamin writes, “are in the realm of thought

What ruins are in the realm of things.”
Things, unlike thoughts, are mute, but read as signs,

Shimmer and echo, replete in their articulations,
Or so it seems as the cedar waxwings worry the holly berries each year.

In Bruegel’s “Procession to Calvary,” starlings wheel
Above the crowds that gather at the gallows.

Hard to tell what all the day has in store for them,
Which is the good thief and which the bad.

The windmill perched upon a cliff,
(what could its function be at that height?)

Draws our eyes up to a single storm cloud.
My father would light a cigarette while one still smoked

In the ashtray, gray ash lengthening before it fell.
More often than not he had two or three cigarettes going at once.

I would watch the smoke go from slack and slumped
To thin and taut—improbable architecture of curlicues,

Tangles and arabesques—as it unraveled itself into nothing.
Hard to pick Jesus out amid that crowd.

A horse skull anchors the painting’s lower right corner.
I stand up too quickly, feel dizzy,

Hold onto the library bookshelf until I find my balance.
Or I turn a corner in a hurry and knock

Someone’s grocery bag from her hands.
I apologize sincerely and somehow she hears my words,

Hears them and makes sense of them
(that is, it seems, the miracle: that I am a body, not a ghost;

That I make embodied words, not ghost-sounds).
I make small talk as I kneel to pick up a head cauliflower,

Three limes, and a flat tin of minced clams.
Sometimes I step out into traffic

To hear the tires screech, the horns held.
Hard to recall a time when gravity did not welcome my next step.

Now, as then, sleep leans against the door like a dog waiting to be let in.
It is summer. The half-framed-in new construction seems transient:

Parched August straw in a back-draft,
Stick houses passing car might tumble.

The heat jangles where the road dips,
A mirage darkened with reflection.

Unwilled, the present leaks into the past, tinctures it.
A poem is not a séance and yet how quickly the shades crowd in

Expecting elegy and lamentation.
The moon subtracts zero from zero.

Like an invisible ink one heats to legibility,
The poem reiterates the spent, the long lost, what I tend to call

The nameless haunt of the irremediable,
Yet I go on naming it, nonetheless,

And inter it in words.
I forget just when I started relying on bad memory as an alibi.

Eric Pankey is the author of eight collections of poetry. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Antaeus, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, New Republic, The New Yorker, The Quarterly, Shenandoah, and many others publications. He is a winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent books of poetry are The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Trace (2013).

Two Poems

From the series HABITABLE ROOMS
translated by Idra Novey and the author

On Mamma Andersson’s paintings
III.
In the Waiting Room

Light poured
in the room like a rock
and water landscape

in the sunfall of a day like this,
without alternatives. You foresee
what’s about to happen, pale

and diagonally. The objects
exposed on an improvised plane,
behind glass—bird bones,

small instruments, fractured
but useful—left there
provisionally, too close—

one of them within reach
on the table, touching the vertex
of a yellow draft, only

half visible—the rest
left nocturne black, while the stream
of transparent light

leaks into the imminent gray:
the waiting room.

Da série QUARTOS HABITÁVEIS
Sobre telas de Mamma Andersson

III.
Na Sala de Espera

A claridade derramada
no quarto, como um rasgo—
paisagem de água e pedra

no sol de um dia igual a este,
sem alternativas. Você pressente
o que está para acontecer,

pálida e diagonal. Os objetos
expostos num plano improvisado,
atrás da vidraça—ossos de ave,

pequenos instrumentos fraturados,
úteis—provisoriamente
esquecidos ali, perto demais—

um deles ao seu alcance
sobre a mesinha, tocando o vértice
de um esboço amarelo, apenas

a metade visível—todo o resto
é preto noturno, enquanto o riacho
de luz transparente

atravessa a iminência parda
da sala de espera.

City of Bridges

Five stems down from the dead rose, the Mexican gardener told me when we bought the rosebush. An angular, clean cut. The scissors loose in my glove, unmarked, aseptic, smelling of rubber. The self-important stems fall to the ground, aborted from their yellow future.

The cats step outside for the first time. Inconceivable freedom. Never before have they had the possibility to kill, to vanish. The crows are reality, temperature, foliage. The bluebird on the windowsill on one of the first mornings, its long black beak, seems impossible. But it’s there.

Scratches on the wood as on an old document. Nails, cables, hooks, and shadows. The cabinets are too small to validate our desire for change. The heavy drawers in the kitchen once contained someone’s winter potatoes. Lead underneath layers of paint.

Look how we’ve grown, how our hair doesn’t get so wavy in the cold, how the porch is large enough for a pool in the summer. Photos, clippings, combinations. The green is greener, the red less shiny. To choose is to hide. To edit, to lie.

Tomorrow we’re headed to the park. To picnic: the intuition of a far away life in the open, a possibility. The woman who pushes a stroller past the deli department in the supermarket knows something I don’t. And the fruit will still be fresh tomorrow.

On the sidewalk, on a busy street, a mini-installation: a small hobby horse, tiny as a fairy, tied to a rusty ring near the curb, a souvenir transposed from another century. Two people exchange a look, say something about horses, cross the portal of time at the next green light.

Crossing a bridge, following along a stream, into a valley, taking trails to fields of grapes and chemistry, or stepping on the rough sand of a freezing stone landscape. Encrusted in the mountain, a waterfall hypnotizes, distracts its visitors. A thin child in a bathing suit builds a castle on the hot, soft sand.

Two rivers run through the city, as in the other city where we lived. But these two rivers sing. They make you listen. When we go back, some day, I may hear the lament of the rivers in the other city. There are trains, too, tracks to the East and West and deafening.

Moss on the trunks of pine trees, the forest is continually damp, suspended. The thin asphalt gleams of lost roads—all with the option of returning. The middle of nowhere has a precise scent, calculated in maps. It’s possible to hike the trail in exactly two hours and fifteen minutes. Transcendent, in the slender fog.

It was supposed to be raining, but the sun, bright, lights up the street, wind on the branches at the end of autumn, on bamboo trees that form a natural, permanent wall. Few things are permanent. The green will come back in a few months, vivid, beneath a more liquid and orange light.

Cidade das Pontes

Cinco galhos a partir da rosa morta. A jardineira mexicana me disse quando compramos a roseira. Um corte angular e rente. A tesoura meio solta na luva sem marcas de uso, asséptica, com cheiro de borracha. Os galhos túrgidos caem no chão, abortados do futuro amarelo.

Os gatos saíram pela primeira vez. Liberdade inconcebível. Nunca antes a possibilidade de matar, de sumir. Os corvos são a realidade, a temperatura, a folhagem. O azulão no parapeito da janela, numa das primeiras manhãs, o bico negro comprido, parece impossível. Mas está ali.

Os frisos na madeira como um documento antigo. Pregos, cabos, ganchos, sombras. Os armá rios pequenos demais para validar a nossa ansiedade por transformação. As gavetas pesadas na cozinha um dia estocaram batatas no inverno. Chumbo debaixo das camadas de tinta.

Veja como crescemos, como nossos cabelos estão menos ondulados no frio, como a varanda é grande o suficiente para uma piscina no verão. Fotos, recortes, combinações. O verde é mais verde, o vermelho, menos vivo. Escolher é ocultar. Editar é mentir.

Amanhã iremos ao parque. Como se faz um piquenique: a intuição de uma vida distante em aberto, como uma possibilidade. A mulher que empurra um carrinho de bebê na seção de frios do supermercado sabe de algo que eu não sei. E as frutas da estação continuarão frescas amanhã.

Na calçada, na rua movimentada, uma mini-instalação: um cavalinho de brinquedo, minúsculo como uma fada, amarrado a uma argola enferrujada fincada no meio-fio, souvenir transposto de um outro século. Duas pessoas se olham, dizem algo sobre cavalos, atravessam o portal do tempo, farol aberto.

Cruzar a ponte, acompanhar um córrego, descer um vale, seguir trilhas para um campo de uvas e química, ou pisar na areia grossa numa paisagem gelada de rochas. Incrustada na montanha, a cachoeira hipnotiza, desvia. Uma criança de shorts constrói um castelo na areia macia e quente.

Dois rios cortam a cidade, como cortavam a outra cidade onde morávamos. Mas estes rios cantam. Estes rios se fazem escutar. Quanto voltarmos, um dia, talvez eu escute as lamentações dos rios na outra cidade. Também há os trens, os trilhos ao leste, ao oeste, ensurdecedores.

Musgo nos troncos dos pinheiros, umidade constante na floresta, suspensa no ar. Brilho no asfalto fino das estradas perdidas—todas com opção de retorno. O meio do nada tem um cheiro preciso, calculado em mapas. Trilha percorrida em exatamente duas horas e quinze minutos. Transcendente, na névoa escassa.

Era para estar chovendo, mas o sol, radiante, ilumina a rua, vento nos galhos no fim do outono, nos arbustos de bambu que formam um muro natural, permanente. Poucas coisas são permanentes. O verde retornará daqui a alguns meses, vibrante, sob uma luz menos angular e alaranjada.

Flávia Rocha, a Brazilian poet, editor and journalist is the author of two poetry books, both published in Brazil: A Casa Azul ao Meio-dia/ The Blue House Around Noon (Travessa dos Editores, 2005) and Quartos Habitáveis (Confraria do Vento, 2011). She is the editor-in-chief of Rattapallax, a literary magazine based out of New York City featuring contemporary American and International poetry, fiction, nonfiction, music and film. She has edited anthologies of Brazilian poetry for magazines Rattapallax (U.S.A.), Poetry Wales (U.K.) and Papertiger (Australia), among others. Her translations from English into Portuguese of contemporary poetry often appear in literary magazines in Brazil. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian , selected by Patricia Smith for the National Poetry Series and a Best Book of 2012 by Cold Front Magazine and The Volta. She is also the author of The Next, Country (Alice James Books, 2008), a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award in poetry. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, in Poetry, the Paris Review, Slate, and elsewhere. Her most recent translation is Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions and Penguin UK, 2012). She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

The House of Wittgenstein

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

He never saw the malls of Petaluma, nor met the amazing cricketeer Montezuma. He never heard a laugh track. We’d like to see him stroke a cat wrapped in a kaftan. Let him find a mechanic for our mufflers. Or raise sandbags in Port-au-Prince for hours.

Only once did he eat a plantain and in his notebook describe the process as sloshing through the Everglades.

Otherwise he was a word hotel. His best friend was a hut in Norway.

Maybe he was smart enough for a table of twelve. He could play all twelve parts.

What’s to be done with a man who lives in his head? Ira, my friend, are you listening?

Ira Sadoff is the author of eight collections of poetry, including his most recent, True Faith, published this April by BOA Editions, and Grazing (U. of Illinois), a novel, O. Henry prize-winning short stories, and The Ira Sadoff Reader (a collection of stories, poems, and essays about contemporary poetry).

Exclusive Beautiful Grapheme War

1.
history means touch, bodies
falling     the compressed eye
grapheme’s small banquet
love knows, a long glass art
something broadcast    now
inside the body’s native
living symbol, its first porcelain
compressed, method enacts
its voice: guide, trail,
a beautiful descent     touch’s
heavy problem, magnetic
halting time like a machine
seems slow at first, breaks pace
the oracle always saying
tongue, ideogram, system
three-state lover’s red
imaginary orchard, exclusive
wayfaring children     loaf-cum-
prefecture     glass beehive
the body’s remains want little
another stem-cell applet
one language, one dead animal
fresh gun terror     another
pulsar almost no longer moves
ambient word-machines
make a new war music, yet
a more generous vigil slakes
the true body cut inside time

2.
rain, denied a certain symbol
makes one war (something
makes another)     beautiful texture
gun loaf / compressed dance
a magnetic method sees through
the body’s films     little hand
prefecture, red water language
how much experience makes one
almost word, almost body
pulsar music     sustains oracle
correct, a cut tongue inside
ligature     living like an ideogram
among experience, a grapheme
true but (made imaginary)
sequence, glass without tape’s
vivid sex banquet, porcelain
through touch or “yet”’s new
lesion-face     broadcast orchard
love’s cell-wall desert enacts
a dead state, falling bodies,
meteor inside saying’s complete
first hush     ambient descent
of the eye’s flesh-guide made
right, a more exclusive singularity
the body wants     nervous, raw
animal proof in a low place
outside counterpoint     (another
mean word flips music back)

3.
first, leave your native
system     exigence, ligature
a black tongue breaks
the body-state reads like
something rule no longer
wants     terror now language
apprehends     ambient,
falling     porcelain dollar
love’s blackish counterpoint
halting in its slow dance
a dead art, unlike music’s
new magnetic lesion
touch remains a problem:
the hand’s small machine
just guns the dead want
glass almost-bodies denied
a word’s true touch
along the trail of history
one animal, one ideogram
compressed     red vigil
of the body’s desert     flesh
heavy without its history
enacts a beautiful sequence,
exclusive, correct, complete
the wayfinding eye cut
inside the body’s meat-hood
its imaginary rest     fire’s
blood applet, red box, hive

4.
glass words made imaginary
like a cell’s water, yet art’s
vesture, ideogram, meteor gun
take the mind’s hushed sequence
inside the body’s desert
beautiful war experience the eye
completes     a wayfinding strut
films the orchard’s imaginary
flesh like porcelain, like fire
remaining true to its one
lover’s low magnetic dance or
hive’s plaqued counterpoint,
words made possible in time
of proof, language falling now
terror no longer wants music’s
one true ligature     sex’s
blurred method’s small machine
knows something: a long,
halting brush among the living
history, heavy without bodies,
love’s first native system
doubles its guns in a new place
making language possible,
flip-touch inside art’s broadcast
prefecture     another word
machine’s true body, its gloved
son among the dollar’s vivid
banquets     compressed, denied

G.C. Waldrep‘s most recent collection is Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, in collaboration with John Gallaher. Previous collections include Archicembalo, Disclamor, and Goldbeater’s Skin. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

FEATURED SELECTION: Extracts from: Hyle: The fundamental question of poetry
by Alain Borer, translated by Mark Irwin

By way of introduction to this month’s “Featured Selection,” first some thoughts from Mark Irwin, followed by the work itself, and some biographical material.

Introduction by Mark Irwin:

The Poetic Thought of Alain Borer

Perhaps the best introduction to Alain Borer’s view on poetry might be gleaned from a quote by Victor Hugo: “the true poet is not one involved with form and convention, but instead with “poetic matter” –or the hyle.” Aristotle referred to “hyle” as “matter” and it is from this notion that Borer develops an argument how “poetic matter” is related to form (morphos), but how it must always rise above form, for as Goethe says, “rules can be transmitted but not genius.”

It’s also worth remembering that “poetic matter” at its highest level often echoes one of Kant’s criteria for the sublime: it is “to be found in a formless object,” or “by occasion of its boundlessness” which paradoxically makes its “totality more present to thought” (Kant 135). I’m also reminded of what Aristotle demanded from poetry of the highest order: “the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary” (Aristotle 234). It is the imaginative and divine aspect of poetic matter with which Borer is fascinated, and certainly one finds evidence of this in his masterful works on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Borer says of his own critical work:

“Essential” since Plato, the concept of ”poetry” has exploded nowadays — including the retroactive doubt to have existed … For a long time it was possible to unify this concept, in spite of its different definitions, by the formal rules (prosody): now, after successive abruptions, the areas of definitions that had allowed unification have widened excessively, in more and more vast concentric circles, from prosody to prose (Baudelaire, in 1856), including all the language, then from language to real objects (Duchamp, in 1913), then from real to virtual (1991). The concept now remains in a gaseous state. Whoever gives his definition adds a blow of spray.”

Borer (a well-known specialist of Rimbaud, poet, novelist, and playwright) describes various tropes of thought in order to release the generic trope of “poetry”: poetry is not a literary genre, but a form of thought whose trope is the noème.

The noème, or what we call noema in English (from the Greek nous “mind”), is the content of thought, but it also applies to perception in thought. Somewhere I remember that Merleau-Ponty defined the notion of the noème as viewing a tree from six different angles!

According to Borer, “Good news: ‘poetry’ does exist, it is the noème as a form of thought that clarifies Aristotle’s concept of hyle, and it has been in use for two thousand years and in every culture.”

Alain Borer’s complete essay on this topic will appear in the Bibliothèque des Idées, along with works by Adorno, Aron, Benjamin, Bonnefoy, Debray, Friedrich, Kojève, Massignon, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Spengler, Starobinski, Wittgenstein, and others.

Mark Irwin, 9 March 2013
Denver, Colorado

Aristotle, Poetics, Ingram Bywater trans. New York: Random House, 1954.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. J.C. Meredith, trans. NY: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Extracts from: Hyle: The fundamental question of poetry
by Alain Borer

Hylé plutôt que morphos (Hyle rather than form)
“I want to make verse that is not constrained”
Theophile de Viau

From the beginning there was a problem with Aristotle’s cabinet, this huge piece of furniture that contains everything and continues to serve long after it’s obsolete. Although it contains many valuable pieces, it would break sooner or later along with much of its contents. This is why it’s important to consider what’s at stake in this fundamental idea and also to understand that Aristotle could only think within the framework of lexis—the notions of mimesis and mythos.

To see things clearly one must leave Aristotle (whose Poetics is no longer as useful, except for this idea) and keep what he called in another context “hyle” or “matter.” Let’s freely call hyle the poetic matter always in question, somewhat confusing in its history as opposed to the more accepted notion of “form” (morphos). Here hyle, the unknown, is not necessarily opposed to morphos, as in the dichotomy that distinguishes content (Gehalt) and form (Gestalt) as proposed by Walzel’s principle: their relationship is variable, depending on the various ideas of language and “poetry,” the latter whose design depends on the unknown. This issue, which receives various responses (how hyle informs or does not inform morphos), doesn’t call for opposing views but a new description concerning the levels of language, or the typology of discourse[…]

Always a head of his time, Fontenelle dealt extensively with poetry and said, “versification is not necessary for tragedy,” suggesting that versification is not necessary for any work of poetry!

Montaigne, a great lover of poetry, placed “the good, the excessive, and the divine” […] above rules and reason” which would become in essence the sustaining idea in Goethe: rules can be transmitted but not genius. We find a similar notion from Victor Hugo [5]: “the true poet is not one involved with form and convention, but instead with “poetic matter” –or the hyle.”

“Who would speak the wrongs of rhyme?” Verlaine asked in metered verse [6]. Who? But everyone spoke of this. Verlaine continues from Chenier: “Art is only verse, the heart alone is the poet.” Chenier himself was influenced by Jean Baptiste Dubos’ Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, published in 1719. Often reprinted it had marked a turning point in aesthetics, “poetic language makes the poet, not measure and rhyme.” One remembers Horace:

“Don’t play with fruitless verse which consume you
Or take love of rhyme for genius.”

(Corneille’s quarrel in the sonnet “Voiture”

To put it another way, hyle designates the “poetic content” in question and “morphos” the formal rules; the more stable condition would appear as the hylomorphic, that is to say it is characterized by heterogeneous content in a homogenous form.

One can say that Rimbaud creates a hyletic quarrel with Banville. “What the poet says about flowers…”

« Ne veux-tu pas, ne peux-tu pas
Connaître un peu ta botanique ? »

“Don’t you want to, can’t you not
Know a little about your botany?”

The area or era of stability seems to contain a bug: part of the definition is clear: morphos as form, but hyle as content is not and is in question with the agreement on morphos, which is why there is a history of “poetry.” Therefore a debate forms around “What is “poetic material”? What unifies (the consensual form) is more accepted by all parties, but the hyletic debate continues in the same way but is more frayed.

Hyle and the hieroglyph

« Tu vates eris »
“You will become a seer”

Rimbaud[7], 1869

Why did Aristotle think that eloquence does not belong to poetry? Even in verse, eloquence is not sacred. This is undoubtedly a special consideration to remember beyond any treatise on poetry, for the formal device that guaranteed “it” aims to cause a kind of achievement and form of completion. That is to say that the agreed form was constantly and everywhere associated with “noble content,” which can, it is believed, express, seize, or understand only what is imagined and specially formed:

poetry always held there its sacred character (this is the meaning of the hieroglyph): one finds in all cultures something of this order, for example the Latin word vates referred to a seer, or diviner, which applied to the poet makes him a direct interpreter of a god (what distinguished the priest) or the savant–his words–, which according to Jean Paulhan, reflect the very name of Hain-Tenys-Malagasy [8];

in the same way there was Orpheus’ mystical path[9]. The Orphic poems “inspired by the gods” were sacred, and their commentaries also formed a part of the Orphic ritual (spondees, dactyls, and incense smoke). Poetry at the time was untouchable and sacrosanct because related to the sublime, while prose was always considered demotic, related to current affaires, in terms of content and formal point of view, and was viewed in a negative way, not related to the sacred.

Nature is a temple (La Nature est un temple) and so is the poem that the poet creates, reproducing the sacred rules, and like the temple (templum is derived from temmein “to cut”), which cuts a rectangle in the sky, in the region of the divine, poem with fixed form or as Flaubert writes, “the alignment of words, black on white, this dark fold of lace that holds the infinite,” cutting on the blank page this ritual: “in this sacred zone the poet attempts a breathtaking marriage with the void […] and the metaphor of this experiment will produce the poem’s theme”10; it’s not only the formal rule but its preliminary framework, visual, and typographical, which was part of a sacred space where the state of the thing might be said to be stable.

You can recognize this pattern from Antiquity to Modernity and through the long corridor of the Middle Ages in which the two categories do little but change in name; what was then called ménestrandie, poetry and music mixed, distinct from the rhetoric of antiquity belongs to that side of the hieroglyph, of the sacred, while rhetoric belongs to the demotic and profane. Does poetry belong to the realm of teleology, which Nietzsche said lies within the human realm of possibility and not the natural realm of necessity? In essence therefore and not only in its history, but also as a condition of its possible existence, poetry finds its meaning through the notion of the elusive and infinitely contradictory hyle that we seek to characterize in the noème, or the essential content of thought.

Translated from the French
by Mark Irwin

[1] Poèmes à chanter des Yuan : 1260-1367 ; des Yuan : 1260-1367 ; des Ts’ing : 1644-1911…

[2] Le poète René Daillie réunit en son échoppe ces deux formes de « poésie » éloignées l’une de l’autre : les Hayn-Tenys et le pantoum malais ; les Hayns Tenys, dans La Nouvelle Revue Française, n°373, avril 1984 ; Quarante pantouns malais, La Nouvelle Revue Française, n°392, septembre 1985.

[3] Fontenelle : Discours sur l’Églogue…, Discours sur la Fable…, Discours sur la Poésie en général et sur l’Ode en particulier…, Discours préliminaire sur la Tragédie…, sans compter quelques discours à l’occasion de ses diverses tragédies…

[4] Paul Valéry, préface à l’Anthologie des poètes de la NRF, 1935.

[5] Victor Hugo, Les Rayons et les ombres (1840), Préface.

[6] Verlaine, « Art poétique », treizième pièce de Jadis et naguère, mais composée dix ans plus tôt, dès 1874.

[7] Arthur Rimbaud, L’Œuvre-vie, édition du centenaire, Arléa, 1991, p. référence

[8] Jean Paulhan, Les Hain-Tenys, Gallimard, 1938, p.12.

[9] Claude Calame, « The Authority of Orpheus, Poet and Bard : Between Oral Tradition and Written Practice », in Ph. Mitsis & Ch. Tsagalis (edd.), Allusion, Authority, and Truth. Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetorical Praxis, Berlin (De Gruyter) 2010 : 13-35.

[10] Laurent Fourcaut développe ce thème du temple dans Lecture de la poésie française moderne et contemporaine, Nathan, 1997, p.17.

[11] André Mary, La Fleur de la poésie française depuis les origines jusqu’à la fin du XV° siècle, Garnier, 1966, p.11.

[12] Baudelaire, Sur Victor Hugo : cf Jacques Charpier et Pierre Seghers, L’art poétique, Seghers, 1956, p.322.

[13] Peter Horn, « L’animal poétique », Europe, L’ardeur du poème, réflexions de poètes sur la poésie, mars 2002, p.23.

[14] Marina Tsvetaeva, « Ma réponse à Ossip Mandelstam », traduit du russe et annoté par Evelyne Amoursky, Po&sie, n°135, Belin, 1° trimestre 2011, p.53.

[15] Serge Doubrovsky écrivait de la critique : «… elle sait où elle va » (Pourquoi la Nouvelle critique, Denoël-Gonthier, 1966, p.256).

Alain Borer (France, 1949) is an internationally known specialist on the work of Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud in Abyssinia, W. Morrow, N.Y., 1991). The author of several collections of poetry, he is also a novelist (Koba, Seuil, Kessel Price 2002), an art critic (Beuys, The MIT Press, 1997), a playwright (Icare & I don’t, Seuil, Prix Apollinaire 2008), and a mixed genre writer (Le Ciel & la carte, Seuil, Mac Orlan Prize, 2010, and Prix de l’Académie française 2011). More information is available here.

Mark Irwin’s seventh collection of poetry, Large White House Speaking, just appeared from New Issues in spring of 2013. His last three books are Tall If (New Issues, 2008), Bright Hunger (BOA, 2004), and White City (BOA, 2000). Recognition for his work includes four Pushcart Prizes, two Colorado Book Awards, The Nation/Discovery Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He teaches in the Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California. Visit his website here.