Uncanny Couplets

I recently purchased a lit mag called Cranky at Pegasus in downtown Berkeley and then proceeded to take it home and read through it cover to cover (at least as far as poetry was concerned), interview and book reviews included. With exception of the books written of in the reviews, I think it would be accurate to say I had never read any of the poets represented in Cranky before. I can't say enough how often I sit down to read a magazine and put it down. I feel sort of jaded a lot of the times when it comes to literary magazines. I can't help wondering if the fact that these poets in Cranky are, for me at least, working under the radar screen allows them to be more imaginative in the way they present subject matter, etc.

For me, though, the most satisfying moment came in a poem by Julie Doxsee called 'Unfold.'

Here's the couplet I'm talking about:

out to be the hungry noises
you would whisper into my


If only I knew more about grammar I could talk about that floating my without its other part. Of course, the other part comes at the beginning of the next line after the stanza break. But whenever a poet breaks a line on a word that normally serves to qualify another word, I, as the reader, am left in a state of uncanny fulfillment. Suddenly 'my' (or 'those,' 'these,' 'your,' etc., even 'the' or 'and') becomes a complete entity in and of itself, not just conjunction or pronoun but noun. This is especially accentuated here coming as 'my' does at the end of a couplet.

Splitting up the 'my' from what it qualifies serves another purpose, I think. Here's the next couplet:

mouth if the pretty
omissions died.

'Mouth if.' Hmmm. Suggesting that the mouth is not a sure thing at all and its existence is instead qualified by the action of another entity. Which echoes, it seems, the unwillingness of the 'my' to affix itself to the 'mouth.' Maybe for safety's sake, for self-preservation? I never thought about those 'yours' and 'thoses' and 'theses' at the end of lines as forming a protectorate of sorts. A way to shore up the speaker within the lyric, whatever that could mean. A way to remain undefined by additional entity.

Autobiography to Foundlings

I run from the house into the park
a grass pleasure. I'll pour out

tonight my talked-to and just allow moist
bechamel to slither my plate the tart

feast. Some linen that napkin thrumming
the notice surrenders to others.

How could I start that converse within window
sashes dressed those ghosts the stately elms?

So I rushed from the dinner onto the street. Oh
no you're right I didn't. I struggle in a little

cage of word orders passing creamed
corn the peppers and scallions.

The light of candles scalds air nearest flame-
pure wicks and wax trembling.

Don't say 'con-verse.' Just grow new
speech on elm trees the grass and emerald

blades these trivia cannot hold.
You have a nascent mouth.

La Femme Derelict, Part Two (Syntax as Texture)

I am kind of obsessed with the order we put words in and how received/taken for granted the standard format of the day is. When in reality it seems quite manufactured to me. About five years ago I was enjoying a period of relative calm after some rather intense life experiences and I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom reading an article in the Denver Quarterly about 'fractal poetry.' And so there I was, looking at sentences versus fragments and I felt there must be a way to show the work involved in either of those arrangements (of the fragment or the sentence, I mean). I think ruptured syntax within a sentence can do that job in such a way that it aids understanding of the intellectual and emotional state of the poem. (For a long time, I admit, I have been allergic to the word 'emotional' because I automatically think of 'overly emotional.' But I am slowly coming around.) Disjunctive to create meaning, as opposed to disjunction questioning the possibility of meaning at all.

So there I was in a period of calm and what I really wanted was to show rupture within that smoothness in language, not just to mirror my own state of internal affairs, but because that is a process that seems to mirror any form of human output. The product (sorry) is calm. It exists in some sort of 'finished' state. Someone has put words in an order and chosen that order. Disrupted syntax seems to call attention to that process of putting in order in a way that adherence to standard grammatical conventions does not. That's where texture comes in. Language as texture not chronology.

Loosening in and out of that disjunctive syntax can also serve as a way to shy away from any one form of grammar as base camp. That way (I hope) the new grammatical conventions don't become mere gimmicks and always serve instead to (again) shape the intellectual / emotional landscape of the poem. To keep the poem curious.

Paul Celan and the Diaper Rash

Speaking of autobiography in poetry. I've long been fascinated by a little translation problem in one of Celan's earlier poems that to me at least, seems to highlight the nature of one person experiencing one's own autobiography both on and off the page. I'm only going to look at one line of the poem, however, and then look at both the Hamburger and Felstiner translations and then try to discover if an alternative is necessary or possible.

Suffice it to say that Celan, of Jewish Romanian descent, lost his parents to deportation and a mass grave in the Ukraine. His first collection, Poppy and Memory, frequently references his mother and the poem I'm looking at is no exception. (The poem begins "Espenbaum, dein Laub blickt weiss ins Dunkel.")

The line I'm really interested in comes in three formats. The original: Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei.

The Michael Hamburger translation: My mother's heart was ripped by lead.

And the John Felstiner translation: My mother's heart was hurt by lead.

The problem I think this line of poetry presents is that it attempts to combine both singularity of motion (like lead, which in German can also signify munitions and therefore here can stand in for the bullet that killed Celan's mother, who has already been mentioned in the poem) with the plurality of motion necessary to produce a condition like that denoted by the German word 'wund.' Basically, that lead is not ripping the mother's heart, but constantly rubbing it, causing an abrasion. It's a sore that won't go away, that is perhaps intensified by memory.

Here's my literal translation of the line, "Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei."

The first three words indicate the genitive case and mean' the heart of my mother. 'ward' is a literary form of the past tense of 'to be.' 'Von Blei' just means 'from lead' but can also signify a bullet, munitions, etc. 'Wund' is the interesting word for me here and my first inclination is to translate it not as 'ripped' or 'hurt' but as 'raw,' as a condition caused by constant chafing.

When I was a nanny in Munich, for example, the mother of the twins I looked after said to me that ""sein Po ist ganz wund," to indicate that one of the children had diaper rash. (That just means 'his but is really raw,' or something like that.)

When I look 'wund' up in the German-English dictionary, I am told the word means 'sore.' Other words pop up through the examples listed, words like 'raw,' 'chafed,' etc. When I look up 'wund' in the German Duden, I find among other things, an allusion to a wound gotten from rubbing against skin.

My original temptation has always been to translate the line as "My mother's heart worn sore by lead," but I am not really sure if this is fixing the problem, either, if this highlights how a pretty singular motion like a bullet could produce a chafe.

What I really want to do is rewrite the line as "My mother's heart worn sore the bullet," because that's the syntax and juxtaposition I would use in a poem if I wrote it. Or actually, "My mother's heart worn raw the bullet," because the sounds of 'worn raw' seem to have the same angles as 'ward wund,' if one can speak of sounds having angles. Actually, I really go back and forth between sore and raw. Is it a sacrilege to rewrite Celan in my own image and call it translation? It seems like everyone and their brother does it to Hoelderlin. The process seems strangely thrilling.

(Of course, there's also something soft and repetitive about lead. Maybe Hamburger has it right, after all. It's the bullet that is multiple, the heart singular.)

Autobiography to a Talkative Person

You touch scanty. Oh you said me
walking behind in sound and wet

grass from drizzle. Look. I'll swab your soft
ear bent at my I'm you and surface

severed from voice instrument. Yes I'm her
has been surmised. Walked

thirty-two minutes in shoes to get here.
Confusing clatter the tone just bare and vast.

We could pour out tonight our swallowed and just
allow noise pounce. Could stand

a middle bridge and torch the mighty
syllables on either side.

La Femme Derelict, Part One

I have been having a lot of back and forth fits of poetic consciousness lately based on the fact that I have been definitely moving somewhat between the personal experimental poem as "all poetry is autobiographical" into the"okay, I am now dealing with bits and pieces of my autobiographical life" experimental lyric poem. Just the other day, I was trawling literary magazines looking for someplace where my work would "fit in" and of course I ran into the "no confessional" tagline a few times. It does seem rather likely that some sorts of daily experiences are more likely to be experienced by people who don't have those experiences as "confessional." But I would like to think it possible to write a poem from a spirit of intellectual curiosity that explores just how mundane sometimes stigmatized experience is. Of course, you could substitute daily, normal, regular, any number of words for mundane. Anything to indicate this experience is part of a texture of a human being who has created a human speaker. If the speaker is human I guess. Part of why I have this all on my mind is that someone once told me that certain experiences are cliche among poets and therefore not worth writing them. To be fair, he was being sympathetic. The second part is that after writing poem after poem that was somewhat cagey about how/if it could lead back to the instances of the poet's (that's me) life, I sat down and wrote a 300 page autobiographical novel about some of the most intense experiences of my life. Response has been really positive so far, but still, there is an all new kind of terror there, not the least of which is to be thought self-involved. More on that later.

Making A Mess Out of Literature

9106 is the house number where I grew up and where my parents still live. This is where I was always allowed to make a huge mess when I was a kid. Making a mess is actually a pretty good approach to life. The other day I was looking at a friend's chapbook and we started pulling it apart line by line in order to put it back together. Sometimes this seems like second nature and other times I couldn't be bothered. As if the the things not worth pulling apart aren't worth the trouble in the first place. But then there's also basking. I am not sure where that comes in. The whole critical mind thing and then the open-minded receptive mind that (in my case) reads without seizing and lets everything slip away. In a way it's like I've never read the text at all. Which seems antithetical to how I feel I'm supposed to be reading as a poet, but also weirdly okay in a mindfulness way. Holding things then letting them go.