Aimé Césaire

Five Poems

from:


Soleil cou coupé
[the unexpurgated first edition]
(Paris: K éditeur, 1948)

as translated by

A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman

for:


Solar Throat Slashed
[the unexpurgated 1948 edition]
(Wesleyan University Press, [scheduled for May 2011])
[available for pre-order now!]

The glade today happily presents five poems by Aimé Césaire, as translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman from the great Martinican poet’s unexpurgated 1948 first edition of Soleil cou coupe (front cover pictured above). These translations are previously unpublished and will appear in Solar Throat Slashed (Wesleyan University Press, announced for May 2011, front cover also pictured above), the first full edition in English of Césaire’s book.

The backstory here is that in the years after Soleil cou coupe was published Césaire greatly re-worked his book, eliminating 31 poems entirely and cutting text, to varying degrees, in another 29, leaving only 12 poems untouched. As such, many individual poems, in whole and in part, have been for decades hard to find, particularly in English.

I posted here in the glade about the Arnold/Eshleman translation of Soleil cou coupe in early January, after reading several poems from it published at alligatorzine and Bookslut. Since then, additional translations have appeared at the Poems and Poetics blog, Guernica Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and New American Writing 28 (please click on each journal title to read the Césaire work) . I continue to exclaim, the same as ten months ago, “Absolument-Alléluia!” and “Oui-Oui-Oui!” for these poems. As Eshleman writes:

Solar Throat Slashed is Aimé Césaire’s most fulgurating collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is a crisscrossing intersection in which metaphoric traceries create historically-aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite.

Eshleman’s first adjective here – fulgurating – seems to me just about exactly right. A charge, a strong and sudden blast of energy, hits me in the mind and spirit when I read the translations from Césaire’s book linked to above, and those presented below.

In this regard, consider please, in the poems below, the staggering questions that begin “Scalp,” the series of similes that explode in the middle of “Totem,” the variety of tom-toms that drum throughout “Ex-Voto For A Shipwreck,” the super-enthusiasm of “Ode To Guinea,” and the awesome listing, at the last third of “Antipodal Dwelling,” of the materials that make up the poet’s self-home.

Ready for the energy? Here then are five poems – bolts of word-lightning – by Aimé Césaire, translated by Arnold and Eshleman, from Solar Throat Slashed:

SCALP

It is midnight

the sorcerers have not yet come

the mountains have not melted

have I sufficiently told the earth

not to set itself up in fear of sunstroke?

Shall I tighten my throat with a cord made from the ivy of my mutterings?

fish gatherers of water and its receptacle

it is above your heads that I speak

like the stars in the honey drool from my bad dreams and the earth it has birthed beneath us

It is true that I left my fingernails full in the flesh of the cyclone amongst the brawl of huge cockchafers

even to making spurt a new yellow semen

throwing myself under its belly to measure

my rutting

Now

by the hard blood of rape

between two criminals

I know the hour

he who dies

he who leaves

But one but I

enclosed in the tuft that benumbs me

and by the grace of dogs

beneath the innocent and liana-unpleating wind

a hero of the hunt helmeted with a golden bird

+(+)+

TOTEM

From far to near from near to far the circumciseds’ sistrum and a sun outside principles drinking in the glory
of my chest a big slug of red wine and flies

how from tier to tier from distress to heritage would the totem not leap its tepidity of hearth and treason
to the top of the office complex?

like the salty inadvertence of your destructive tongue

like the wine of your venom

like your porpoise back laughter in the silver of the shipwreck

like the green mouse born of the beautiful captive water of your eyelids

like the flight of gazelles of fine salt of snow over the wild heads of the women and of the abyss

like the broad stamens of your lips in the continent’s blue net

like the rifle crack of the minute in the tightened woof of time

like the gorse chevelure that stubbornly grows in the off-season of your marine eyes

quadriga horses stamp the savanna of my vast open speech

from white to fawn

there are sobs silence the red sea and the night

+(+)+

EX-VOTO FOR A SHIPWRECK

Hélé helélé the King is a great king

let his majesty deign to look up my anus to see if it contains diamonds

let his majesty deign to explore my mouth to see how many carats it contains

laugh tom-tom

laugh tom-tom

I carry the king’s litter

I roll out the king’s carpet

I am the king’s carpet

I carry the king’s scrofula

I am the king’s parasol

laugh laugh tom-toms of the kraals

tom-toms of the mines laughing beneath their cape

sacred tom-toms laughing about your rat and hyena teeth under the very nose of the missionaries

tom-toms of salvation who don’t give a damn about all the salvation armies

tom-toms of the forest

                tom-toms of the desert

               black still virginal muttered by each stone

unbeknownst to the disaster—my fever

weep tom-tom

weep tom-tom

soft tom-tom

soft tom-tom

burned down to the impetuous silence of our shoreless tears

soft tom-tom

            softer still substantial ear

(red ears—ears—distantly the rapid fatigue)

soft tom-tom

roll soft no faster than a log for distant ears

        without utterance without purpose without star

the pure carbon duration of our endless major pangs

roll roll deep roll soft tom-toms speechless deliriums

russet lions without manes processions of thirst stench of the backwaters at night

tom-toms that protect my three souls my brain my heart my liver

harsh tom-toms that maintain on high my dwelling

of water of wind of iodine of stars

over the blasted rock of my black head

and you brother tom-tom for whom sometimes all day long I keep a word now hot now cool in my mouth
like the little-known taste of vengeance

tom-toms of kalahari

tom-toms of Good Hope capping the cape with your threats

O tom-tom of Zululand

Tom-tom of Shaka

tom tom tom

tom tom tom

King our mountains are mares in heat caught in the full convulsion of bad blood

King our plains are rivers vexed by the rotting provisions drifting in from the sea and from your caravels

King our stones are lamps burning with a dragon widow hope

King our trees are the unfurled shape taken by a flame too big for our hearts too weak for a dungeon

Laugh laugh then tom-toms of Kaffirland

like the scorpion’s beautiful question mark

drawn in pollen on the canvas of the sky and of our brains at midnight

like the shiver of a sea reptile charmed by the anticipation of bad weather

of the little upside-down laugh of the sea in the sunken ship’s gorgeous portholes

+(+)+

ODE TO GUINEA

And by the sun installing under my skin a factory of power and eagles

and by the wind upon my salt-tooth power complicating its best-known passings

and by the black along my muscles in sweet sap effronteries rising

and by the woman supine like a mountain unsealed and sucked by lianas

and by the woman with the little-known cadastre where day and night play mora for spring water

and precious metals

and by the fire of the woman in whom I seek the road of ferns and Fouta Jallon

and by the closed woman opening upon nostalgia

then

peoples of the ponds

cover with ponds the fields of your long skies

into the low copse cast your prophets

and put their birds out to the wet nurse of the reds surely

let us die and at the hour when on the dial of the subduers

the sun slashes the eared seal’s breast

oh amazons

by the wailing of the bow

by the glory of my nights

by my loins spurting more than ever

by the brown odor of a morning agitated in my nostrils

from the depth of a delirium without trembling

                        I HAIL YOU

Guinea whose rains from the curdled summits of volcanoes

shatter a cattle sacrifice for a thousand hungers

and thirsts of unnatural children

Guinea wood and plant beautiful wild and climbing

rubbed stone from which never sparks a female light

Guinea with tendrils if

all the gin drunk hotter than the plaited blood of the gulfs

I had a begging bowl to decant as from the trees the fruitful blood of your women

by my feet hail Guinea

the forest

hail the alley open on all sides

Guinea oh! the cries

like the bodies of escapees falling virginal in the posthumous camp of the forest

Guinea oh! the cries

like rock salt needles

Guinea oh! the cries

trade wind or monsoon

Guinea of your cry of your hand of your patience

there remain for us always some arbitrary lands

and when killed near Ophir leaving me mute forever

out of my teeth out of my skin let there be made

a ferocious fetish guardian of the evil eye

as your solstice shakes me strikes me and devours me

with each step you take Guinea

mute after all from an astral depth of medusas

+(+)+

ANTIPODAL DWELLING

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth

hair first worry stone

when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself

when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one

when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces

when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body

when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body

when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones

when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert

(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches

entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires

entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood

of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots

entangling

a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)

a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind

firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect

dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking

dwelling made of rumpled perfumes

dwelling made of spangled sleep

dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards

strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian

pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude

roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with

prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky

dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands

dwelling made of red cheetah eyes

dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand

the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

+(+)+

Aimé Césaire
(26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008)

+(+)+
+++(+)+++
+(+)+

Extra Innings!

More Baseball Poems,
All Newly Published,
and All About, or Inspired by . . .

The 2010 San Francisco Giants!

Well, not only could this be the season (as last week’s blog post – click here – suggested), it was the season of a lifetime! The Giants won the World Series, for the first time since moving to San Francisco in 1958. A delirious downtown to civic center “ticker-tape” parade took place –

Cody Ross, Giants outfielder
(riding in the parade, Wednesday, November 3, 2010)

– and also pretty special, at least for poetry-reader me, is that the following chapbook appeared –

Adios, Pelota!
edited by John Sakkis, designed by Andrew Kenower
([no place]: [no publisher], 2010)
[5.5" x 8.5"]

– a 36 page collection or anthology of 22 poems (by 21 Bay Area poets) that are about or were inspired by the 2010 Giants. The chap states, on its colophon page, that it is

In celebration of the San Francisco Giants defeating the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series, printed at the start of Game 1 2010 World Series, San Francisco Giants vs. Texas Rangers, October 27, 2010.

The colophon also states, “Go Giants!” and how great that the poets here in the Bay Area, or some of them, caught the vibe this post-season!

And how grand (slam, natch) that the chap was put together so quick, in the few days between the end of the National League playoffs and when the World Series began (some of the poems make reference to those games)!

And how perfect that the chap’s printed with black ink on orange paper, exactly correct given the Giant’s colors!

And how cool that the chap’s title, Adios, Pelota! – in English, “Goodbye, ball!” – is the phrase often used by Giant’s radio announcer Jon Miller when a Latin-born player hits a home run. That phrase here is especially apt because just days before the chap was published Juan Uribe, the Giant’s infielder from the Dominican Republic, had hit an eighth-inning home run that provided the winning margin in the game against the Phillies that sent San Franciso to the World Series).

I can’t single out all the poems I like in Adios, Pelota!, but let me give a big cheer to Larry Kearney, whose untitled poem works in the name of Whitey Lockman and Sal Maglie, two Giants players from their New York (i.e., pre-San Francisco era), and includes the delicious poem-ending lines:

the ground rolls out
like birthday cake.

That sounds like a hell of a celebratory way for a game, or season, to end.

And permit me to give a big cheer as well to Kevin Killian, who nicely brings into his poem “Devotion” some of the more worrisome aspects of the Giants’ season (including “how little / how insanely little” pitcher Barry Zito gave back compared to the money he pocketed) before he celebrates the “new beard energy puffed” that hit the team. Killian wonders how that energy came about, and answers the question allusively, by setting out Willie Mays’ 1961 statement,

“I don’t compare ‘em, I just catch ‘em.”

That quote, I think, both reflects Mays’ beautiful in-the-moment-no-time-for analysis mind-set and suggests that explanations for what the 2010 Giants did are neither possible nor desirable.

“The Catch”
Game 1 of the 1954 World Series
Willie Mays

Speaking of great catches, Jackqueline Frost’s untitled minimal poem, spread across two orange pages of Adios, Pelota!, looks in its entirety something like this –

                  hal•le•                                                        lu•jah

– and also deserves big applause for how it captures and expresses a fan’s kind-of-divine joy in the team’s wins. I found it completely convincing and fun. I’d like next year to hear a full stadium take up those syllables, with the indicated break, as a post-win chant!

I also like Zack Tuck’s “Dear Nate Schierholtz,” an epsitolary prose poem about going to his first major league game and deciding that the Giant’s reserve outfielder named in the poem’s title “would by my guy, my player . . . .” Maybe the best phrase in the poem is one about those who are “holding nets in hopeful expectancy of opal fire,” which concerns, I do believe, the people in kayaks, canoes, and other boats who wait for home run balls in McCovey Cove, that part of San Francisco Bay on the other side of the right field wall at AT&T Park (see photo immediately below). I like the idea of splash hits – as home runs in the water are called at the park – as “opal fire.” It suggests the special forces that have to align if one is to get a ball in the cove.

McCovey Cove
“holding nets in hopeful expectancy of opal fire”

For my bat ‘n ball ‘n glove, the best poem about baseball itself in Adios, Pelota is “Left Field,” by Keith Shein. The poem focuses on Pat Burrell, the Giants left-fielder, who is a power hitter who when he connects almost always pulls the ball to left.

Pat Burrell, at the plate, July 2010

The first lines of Shein’s poem focus on Burrell at the plate, particularly on what happens with he swings and misses. As it turns out, Burrell had a particularly miserable World Series, tying a major league record by striking out nine times in five games. As such, I hereby swear on Cooperstown itself that Shein gets this exactly right:

When Burrell is at bat,
his eyes narrow as if piecing
a puzzle. After a swing

and miss, he stares at his bat,
then, with a snap of elbows,
pushes it away, like a man

freeing cuffs from a jacket.
Arms straight, he glares.
To let the bat know

that its business is with
the ball, to let his hands
know they need to say back,
to let the fence know that
he has its measure. Left field.

Shein’s stanza break between “swing / and miss” brings in a whole lot of air, yes, similar to that found between the bat and pitched ball which the hitter has failed to meet? In addition to getting down the details here of what Burrell does at the plate, I like the focus in these lines on the batter’s failure, which is so much a part of the game (see the discussion last week -- click here -- about “Casey at the Bat”). Stein’s poem, however, pivots away from failure in its final seven lines, evoking instead the remembered sound of the home runs to left field that Burrell did hit in 2010 (a total of 18, a number of which put the Giants ahead):

The shots echo out there even

when the bleachers stand empty,
when the roaring ceases,
and the seats tip up like tight

pairs of lips, when the litter is swept
and the lights are off, when even
the gulls are gone.

That very last phrase may require a bit of local knowledge: after every game AT&T Park gets heavily worked over by gulls scavenging good scraps left in the stands. The image Shein presents in these closing seven lines – the empty, quiet, cleaned out, dark, even-the-birds-are-done stadium, with the sound of the well-hit ball resonating in the ethereal ears of the mind – is very poignant, very moving, and exactly the way to end this wondrous season, and this post!

“when the bleachers stand empty”

+(+)+
+++(+)+++
+(+)+

Baseball Poems (Batter Up!)

Extra-Special “This Could Be The Season” World Series Post!

“Casey at the Bat” (1888)
Ernest C. “Big Dog” Thayer
(+)
“The crowd at the ball game” (1923)
William Carlos “Doc” Williams
(+)
“Baseball & Writing” (1961)
Marianne “Smoothie” Moore
(+)
“Great Catch” (1974)
Thomas “TC” Clark
(+)
“As the pop foul descends . . .” (1995)
Ron “LongPoem” Silliman

Baseball and me have always been close. This season – here in my hometown, the place I was born, the city with which I share initials (“SF” natch!) – has been a special thrill. This particular Giant’s team – “castoffs and misfits” – has repeatedly left me heart-attacked and joy-teared. I love it, and while the World Series continues (San Francisco is up 3 games to 1 as I post this) I will always cherish this one, no matter how it turns out.

To celebrate this season I write today about baseball poems. I do so also to make-up in some small way to the gods of poetry, given that in recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of time watching and thinking about the Giants, instead of reading poems. However, I must insist that I’ve always loved baseball poems. In fact, my very first (!) post here in the glade concerned two of them: Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriated transcript of the longest (time-wise) nine inning major league game ever, and Yo-Yo’s With Money, the transcribed you-are-there (at Yankee Stadium) wild dialogue of Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff (click here to see, if you please).

Among the many other baseball poems out there (click here for a web page that lists a few dozen), I spotlight today four that are to me perennial pennant winners. The first might be a cliche, but I insist a classic still: Ernest Thayer’s 1888 “Casey at the Bat.” Wikipedia claims the poem has had “a profound effect on American popular culture,” and I say, I think that’s right. When the U.S. post office in 1996 issued a set of folk hero stamps, Mighty Casey was enshrined with Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Pecos Bill.

“Casey at the Bat,” I do believe, was the first time I was really swept away by, totally caught up in, a poem. Yes, these days I flip for the surrealist verse of Lamantia, and – to give but another example here – swoon for the beautiful mysteries and questions of Armantrout – but to this day I still cheer for Thayer. True, its rhyming couplets – arranged in thirteen quatrains – can get stilted, and maybe the whole thing ain’t nothin’ but humorous doggerel. But the narrative momentum is undeniable, and the way names of players are used throughout is genre-defining.

Also genre-defining in “Casey” – and more than that too – is the way the poem focuses on a series of moments, each individual pitch in the apocryphal at-bat gets its due, and indeed at points individual moments within and between each pitch are spotlighted. It’s a classic of intensification-of-a-moment-by-words, a key element of much great poetry. And maybe that’s a tie between the game and words/poems, in that intensified moments in or of time are also what baseball, abstracted out, brings to those who watch and dig the game.

Of course, the greatest great thing in Thayer’s poem is the ending, in which contrary to one’s expectations and hopes, failure reigns. The twist is a “surprise” the first time it’s heard – do you remember when that was, for you?! – and is a perfectly correct way to end the quintessential baseball poem, given that the sport considers a great player to be one who gets a hit three out of every ten times at bat; in other words, who strikes or otherwise makes an out, a la mighty Casey, the vast majority of the time.

Thayer’s final quatrain holds its conclusion to the final line, indeed, its final clause, and the brilliance and impact of that moment of failure is heightened by the lines that precede it, which anaphorically (with “somewhere” being the key repeated word) and unforgettably establish scenes of delight and fun that contrast with, and set up, the disappoint to come:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

I gotta believe that “Casey at the Bat” remains a gateway poem, at least for young boys, opening minds to what words can do when carefully chosen and arranged. Thayer’s work, I think, permits those who hear and read it to (er, um) strike out from their imagination into the great field of poetic language.

(+)

Next up is “The crowd at the ball game” by William Carlos Williams. It’s poem XXVI in Spring and All (1923) and before going any further, how great is it that the work appears in that book, given the fresh start associations between the opening of the two respective seasons?

Spring and All
(Contact Editions, 1923)

Here’s how the poem begins:

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty
the eternal—

Doc Williams’ poem – it has eighteen additional couplets, and you can read it by clicking here – has generated much discussion, including in recent years. Some suggest it concerns the growing diversity of baseball fans, others find in it a criticism of the herd mentality of crowds, and still others interpret the work (and I think rightly) as ambiguous and not just about watching baseball. Professor Al Filreis’ two hundred words on the poem (click here) seems to most concisely catch all this, and more (click to go). Personally, I love the celebration, in the opening lines quoted above, of the precision of seeing, the equating of that with beauty. Doc’s diagnosis there is a home run.

(+)

Marianne Moore was supremely into baseball. In 1968, late in life, after having attended games for years, she tossed out the baseball to open the season at Yankee Stadium (see photo above). Moore also once said she’d have given much to have invented the intricate stitch pattern found on the baseball. Now that’s something only a poet could think, I do believe.

Moore’s “Baseball & Writing” (click here to read) is a well-recognized classic baseball poem, and one that has been much discussed (see in particular the 20 page analysis (pdf) linked-to here). The poem, in the words of Elaine Oswald and Robert L. Gale, “celebrat[es] her beloved Yankees but mainly compar[es] two painful arts.” It was first published in the New Yorker on December 6, 1961, and here’s the poem’s opening stanza:

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement -
a fever in the victim -
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited? Might it be I?

The mid-stanza “fever” here, via the grammar of Moore’s lines, and the rhetorical questions that end the stanza, seem to point to the players, and the poet as “the victim” who burns with fervor and intensity. But if the poet/spectator might indeed get or be excited, doesn’t that mean that the spectator of the poem, the reader, can too? I say yes indeed to that, and love that Moore tips her tricorn hat here to the ecstatic frenzy that can be brought on not only by playing in a ballgame, but by watching one and writing or reading a poem about one too!

After its opening stanza Moore’s poem, in a nimble, quick-shift mode, covers a lot of ground, incorporating the names of almost twenty individual Yankees from the early 1960s, including the well-known (Mickey Mantle), those perhaps known only to hardcore fans (for example, Tom Tresh, who she wisely suggests not be traded given that he won the top rookie award the year after she published the poem), and true obscuros (Rowland Sheldon, for example).

On my scorecard, Moore’s most marvelous set of lines are those at the start of the fourth of the poem’s seven stanzas. The lines begin with a fresh set of metaphors about a player nicknamed for the way he sometimes resembled a Hindu spiritualist, and then quickly shift to at-the-game action, including an out-of-here moment, then finish with a couple assessments by the poet:

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
He is no feather. “Strike! . . . Strike two!”
Fouled back. A blur.
It’s gone. You would infer
that the bat had eyes.
He put the wood to that one.

The agility of these lines, their surprise and the speed, is of the sort I enjoy immensely in Moore. She’s Jennie Finch quick, elegant and sure-handed as Omar Vizquel.

(+)

The next baseball poem in the line-up here today is “Great Catch” by Tom Clark. It’s included in his 1974 collection Blue (Black Sparrow Press, 1974). That book, while having only about ten poems (out of more than 60) about the sport, features a cover that has to be among the all-time tippy-top poetry-baseball images, the great (and at the time very young phenom) pitcher Vida Blue, striding right at you:

“Great Catch” concerns a particular pitch, fly ball, and catch at a particular major league game. From the players named and circumstances detailed in the poem, a little googling shows that the game that gave rise to Clark’s poem was played between the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland Athletics on July 16, 1973, at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, before a crowd of 43,571, of which Clark presumably was one. According to the box score, the Athletics lost the game 7-5, but the final score’s not at all germane to the poem, which focuses entirely and beautifully on a play made in the field by Joe Rudi, a great and under-rated player for the Athletics. Here’s Clark’s poem:

With one away
in the seventh
and Terry Crowley on base
Pina threw
a side arm curve
down and in
to Earl Williams
who golfed it
high ’n deep
to left

Joe Rudi
pedaled back
to the warning path
sidewise, watching
the towering drive
as it peaked
and began to fall

With hand propped
against the wall he
crouched, and leaped
and hung
                   motionless
in a bath of light
his glove
a foot above the top
              speared it!

—and he fell back down
into the sound

This poem has dang fine compression, yet lots of details and plenty of action. I count eleven verbs spread through the lines, and with each one – think intensification of the moments – serves to shift the focus of the action. It’s very cinematic, and the sparing use of the indents (just two lines) works nicely to emphasize the particular wonder of, the attention keyed by, the spectators (and thus by us readers) on the particularly superb athletic prowess of Rudi in in the outfield, at and above the wall. I also like the sensuousness of both “bath of light” (the outfield wall becomes a big tub) and especially the final couplet

—and he fell back down
into the sound

which marvelously conveys how the roar of the crowd – no doubt very loud with 43,000 plus in the house – surrounds the outfielder as he lands after his jumping catch. The near-rhyme of “down” and “sound” suggests the connection between Rudi and the fans that must have vibed through the stadium at that very moment. I give “TC” a standing O for this poem.

the illustration that accompanies “Great Catch” in Tom Clark’s Blue
“... hung / motionless [ . . . ] his glove / a foot above the top / speared it!”

(+)

Although great plays in the field happen often enough in major league games, a more common experience is something that involves those who watch in the stands: the foul ball. According to those who’ve counted, anywhere from twenty-eight to forty balls per game are fouled into the crowd. These out-of-play batted balls are sometimes scary (the screaming liner) but mostly entertaining as hell. Most who attend games enjoy the thought of possibly catching or snagging a foul as a souvenir.

The odds of getting a foul ball are slim, one in a thousand, typically, although it varies depending on where one sits. Getting one isn’t easy even when it seems to come right at you, and if the ball gets loose, watch out, it can be quite a scene.

How “quite a scene” can it be? Well, here’s the first paragraph of section XXXVII of Ron Silliman’s prose-poem You, which is a part of his longpoem The Alphabet. With regard to what can happen with a foul ball into the stands, it’ll give you a most excellent idea:

     As the pop foul descends from the heavens into the crowd, hands and gloves
     shoot skyward, bodies thrusting themselves up, straining, grasping, parody
     of a scene on Iwo Jima, while below others cringe & cower, popcorn, beers,
     sodas, spilling in all directions, the sculptural effect complete (at least half of
     the participants seem to have their eyes shut), a phenomenon that repeats in
     smaller and less hysterical numbers again and again as the loose ball bounces
     untouched from section to section until a boy with an oversized blue glove
     smothers it against his chest.

Now, neither the other six paragraphs of this section, nor anything else in the fifty plus page You, specifically concerns baseball. So I admit I’m stretching – like McCovey used to do at first, natch – to identify the excerpt above as a baseball poem, since it in fact is one part of one section of the poem, or something like that.

But say hey, this one deserves throwing out the rule book, and (er, um) singling it out as a poem. The (er, um again, but this is actually correct) single sentence – thirteen clauses, ninety-four words – slows down a classic in-the-stands action scene, breaking it into a series of richly observed and reported moments . This folks, is an instance of old-school new precisionism! The secret to it, I think, are its eleven verbs. They keep the action going, a word-rally that goes and goes. This is a most excellent prose-poem of the ol’ ballgame.

Speaking of poetry and baseball, Silliman about a month ago was featured on a Fact-Simile Poet-Card. These wondrously fun cards – so far this year nine different ones have been issued, click here to see – are modeled on the Topps and other baseball cards that surely are familiar to many. The Fact-Simile cards picture the poet on the front, while on the back is, of course, a poem (Silliman’s has a fourteen line excerpt, a kind of sonnet, from Revelator, a newer longpoem of his).

Silliman’s Fact-Simile card front is particularly sweet. It features both a larger color photo and an inset, circular black and white portrait. This happens to mimic almost exactly the look of the baseball cards issued in 1963 by Topps. It’s a classic design, because it sets up poetic echoes between the two photos. Check out the similar look of Ron “LongPoem” Silliman’s Fact-Simile card, and the 1963 Topps cards of two players who I hope in the name of the-myth-that-is-Abner-Doubleday you’ll recognize right away:

(+)

After Mantle and, especially, Mays, I can say no more. Except, “Play Ball!” and “Read Poetry!”

+(+)+

[“Extra Innings,” a supplement to this post which takes a look at Adios, Pelota -- a chapbook of baseball poems published immediately after, and in celebration of, the Giants winning the National League pennant -- can be read by clicking here. Here’s a quick scouting report: great baseball poems, with the final poem discussed -- “Left Field” by Keith Shein -- being an especially solid line-drive!]

+(+)+
+++(+)+++
+(+)+

¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

View
Series III, No. 2 (June 1943)
[9" x 12"]
[Featuring “Five Poems” by Philip Lamantia]

All right, and let’s go! For the third time in the short history of this here glade, it’s Philip Lamantia Day, the anniversary of his birth (October 23, 1927), and thus an occasion to remember and celebrate the poet who died in 2005 and whose poetry – which I’ve read for decades – forever inspires.

On the two most recent anniversaries of Philip’s birth, I’ve respectively (1) surveyed about a dozen poems, by an equal number of poets, written for, to, after, and/or about Lamantia, and (2) told about a few of the many things I learned from him. This year, I take a more bibliographic bent, and take a look, an enthusiastic one, at Lamantia’s first big-time appearance in print, the publication of “Five Poems” in the June, 1943 (Series III, No. 2) issue of View.

View, edited by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler and published between 1940 and 1947, was an important American magazine. As curator and critic Michael Duncan explains, in a note published in ArtForum in January, 2003:

With a penchant for the unexpected and an unerring eye for quality, View mixed fiction and poetry with features on Max Ernst, Pavel Tchelitchew, Man Ray, Fernand Leger, and Isamu Noguchi, all of whose commissions graced its covers. View was the first little magazine to publish translations of work by Raymond Roussel, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The 1945 Marcel Duchamp issue was the first monograph on the artist . . . .

View also put an American spin on the Surrealist sensibility. Aztec and Native American poetry were featured, as well as Joseph Cornell’s worshipful paean to Hedy Lamarr. The magazine was formative for associate editor Parker Tyler – perhaps the most underrated critic in American letters. His later books on Tchelitchew, Florine Stettheimer, Hollywood film, and experimental cinema all had their seeds in View essays.

Most important, View was a quiet yet crucial force kindling kindling underground American culture. Touchstones of the decade to come like Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Philip Lamantia, Paul Goodman, and Marshall McLuhan all published in the magazine. Its brand of poetic Surrealism in particular seems to have spilled over to the West Coast Beats. In the mid-‘50s, Los Angeles artist George Herms remembers excitedly perusing a pile of Views in Wallace Berman’s living room on Crater Lane.

Lamantia first saw View in 1942. He was 14 years old. His poetic energy – already ignited while in junior high school, where he wrote imitations of Poe and The Rubáiyát – had just been super-charged by back-to-back museum exhibitions in San Francisco (where he was born and raised) of paintings by Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Via the museum and public libraries, Lamantia read what he could on and of surrealism, including issues of View, VVV (another, more purely surrealist magazine), and plenty of poetry.

In early 1943, Lamantia sent a typewritten, single-spaced, and just over one page letter to View editor Charles Henri Ford. Lamantia begins, “Not to have this fact seem to important, in relation to my poetry, I state nevertheless that I am fifteen years old.” He then states that his recent verse “can be considered surrealist,” explaining why via references to such things as dreams and the indigenous realm of fantasy, and precursors and practitioners such as Rimbaud and Breton. “The words seem to lose their history,” Lamantia asserts about his poetry, “and they become free . . . .”

Lamantia then writes, “I am sending you several of my most recent, and I believe my best, poems that you may possibly want to use in View.” Lamantia explains that he does “not spring from the leisure class, in fact far from it, and therefore . . . have not as much time and energy to devote to my poetry as I would like to have.” His high school work and other matters take up his time, he says, but otherwise he confines all energy for poetry. Lamantia expresses his dedication and the desire to share his writing – necessary and beautiful impulses in all creative artists – in a most direct and fervent way:

If I am serious about any one thing, in its entirety, it is poetry. But I must be heard! I must be heard as soon as possible, for conditions as they are I will perhaps have to limit my attention to poetry in the future. But I will never stop writing it!

Lamantia in his letter also questions in some detail an editorial in the then current issue of View, asking Ford if it represents a leaning away from surrealism. He then returns to his own poetry, stating he has been previously published only in a high school anthology, and asking directly if there is a chance his work could be included in the June issue of View.

If Ford replied in writing, it has been lost to time. But we know what happened: the June View included five poems by Lamantia. The poems appear a single large (9" x 12") blue page, part of a bound-in center section of the magazine that also includes eight poems by e.e. cummings. Other contributors to the issue include Benjamin Peret (a long essay on magic and poetry, translated into English), Leon Kochnitsky (on artist Leonor Fini), Kenneth Burke (on literary theory / philosophy), Étiemble (on 16th century paintings) and Harold Rosenberg (on a new book by Wallace Stevens and a new translation of Rilke). The magazine’s cover – imaged at the head of the post – is a classic: a Man Ray solarized photo-print showing a broken chair (how does it stay upright with a leg missing?!), a piece of driftwood that somehow looks strangely human, and a pair of ballet slippers.

For Lamantia, it’s hard to imagine a nicer nation-wide debut in print. And the poems! As editors Ford and Tyler simply put it in the magazine’s Table of Contents, “View considers Philip Lamantia a discovery.” Or as Kenneth Rexroth later wrote of Lamantia, “I have never known anyone else who started out, without preliminaries, with no five-finger exercises or scales, as an achieved poet.” Here is the page, imaged from the magazine (click on it, then click again to give it a nice, clear read:

Of the five Lamantia poems in the June, 1943 View, the two most often re-published are “I Am Coming” and “There Are Many Pathways To The Garden.” Both are classics of youthful surrealism, charged imagery, cinematic energy, gothic tones, and emotional peaks. Here’s the first of these, in the full resplendency of its three stanza, sixteen line glory:

I Am Coming

I am following her to the wavering moon,
to the bridge on the far waterfront
to valleys of beautiful arson,
to flowers dead in a mirror of love,
to men eating wild minutes from a clock,
to hands playing in celestial pockets,
and to that dark room beside the castle
of youthful voices, singing to the moon.

When the sun comes up she will live at a sky
covered with sparrow’s blood
and wrapped in robes of lost decay.

But I am coming to the moon,
and she will be there in a musical night,
in a night of burning laughter,
burning like a road of my brain
pouring its arm into the lunar lake.

Just about every line there just about begs for a response in the form of a visual image or collage. The wavering moon. A bridge by the long waterfront. Valleys of beautiful arson. Flowers dead in a mirror of love. And I could post such images for you, and do the same for the rest in the poem as well. Plus add a soundtrack: youthful voices singing to the moon, a musical night, burning laughter, and much else, including the steady rhythm laid down by the anaphoric openings of the second through sixth lines. Yes, all that could be done, and I swear – I swear on the chance encounter a sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table – that I could do it here and now for you, dear readers.

But I will do nothing of the sort! For once here in the glade, the words – Lamantia’s words, those that he set free at age fifteen – will remain unfettered by interpretation or the analytic. It’s the anniversary of Philip’s birth – he’d be 83 today – and as such we should especially try to enjoy and celebrate his work au naturel, just as it came into this world. And so I shall, and – if so inclined – may you do so too. Just remember, if you please:

¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

+(+)+

Additional ¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!! information:

After his initial appearance in View, Lamantia – while still a teenager, in the four years spanning 1943 and 1946 – published poetry in two other issues of that magazine, as well as in VVV (which also published a long letter he wrote to Andre Breton), two issues of Hemispheres (a bilingual French-English journal edited by Yvan Goll), the first two issues of Circle (a west coast avant-garde magazine edited by George Leite in Berkeley), James Laughlin’s New Directions Annual # 9, an anthology-tribute to Henry Miller, and his own first book, Erotic Poems (Berkeley, Bern Porter, 1946). To date, the most complete collection of Lamantia’s early surrealist poetry is Touch of the Marvelous – A New Edition (Four Seasons Foundation: Bolinas, 1974).

Lamantia after his teens went on to write and publish poetry, off and on, for another approximately sixty years. Currently, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia is in preparation, edited by Nancy Peters (Lamantia’s widow, a long-time editor at and currently co-owner of City Lights Books), Garrett Caples and Andrew Joron. The University of California Press will publish the volume, I believe in 2012. The book will include all poems previously collected in Lamantia’s books, plus many rare and difficult to find works. Among the latter will be his very first published poem, the one printed in the high school anthology that Lamantia mentions in his letter to Charles Henri Ford. That poem – titled “Ages In The Wind” – had been lost, including to Lamantia, for more than half a century until – after approximately a decade of searching and using tips given by Philip before his death – your lucky fool of a glade-keeper found a published copy (joy! joy! poetry-reading joy!) about two years ago.

Philip Lamantia
circa 1943 - age fifiteen

¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

+(+)+
+++(+)+++
+(+)+

(The not-at-all) Simple

(Sandra) Simonds

(in San Francisco, with new poems!)

Sandra Simonds
Made From Scratch
(no place: no publisher, no date)
[self-published by the poet, 2010]
[5.75" x 8.625" | unpaginated (14 poems on 24 pages)]

About a week ago – on Saturday night, October 9, 2010, – I got myself out of the house to hear Sandra Simonds give a short (approximately 20 minute) reading, done as part of one of several dozen (yes, several dozen!) “LitCrawl” events staged that evening at various venues on or about Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Simonds’ reading took place very close to – just six city blocks – from where I live. Who’d have thunk that Simonds – who lives in Tallahassee, Florida, more than 2,600 miles away – would read less than a mile from my home? And do so just two or three days after I’d received her newest chapbook (Made from Scratch, imaged above) in the mail? And just a few months after I – ever-slow on the uptake – had finally read and fallen deeply for the poetry in Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), her first (and so far only) perfect bound collection?

What a confluence: poetry that excites, including some that’s new, seemingly delivered from afar to just about my front door via the person and voice of the poet. I call this sort of manifestation of poetry energy magnificent and marvelous. Praise be the spring Hippocrene!

The Hippocrene Spring
Mount Helicon, Greece

Unfortunately, I had no camera or other recording device, and so cannot post photos, video, or audio from the reading. Nor did I take notes. But I do remember, to say the least, a few poems Simonds recited, and as it turns out they are in the new chap, as well as on-line, and I’ll discuss two of these below. These relatively new poems happen to concern, or arise from, being a new mother and having a child, and as I think you will see they bring a remarkable – fresh and complex – approach to that subject.

But before I get into the new, I’d like to tell a bit about why I was excited to hear Simonds read. As said above, earlier this year I read Warsaw Bikini, published two years ago and which collects three dozen poems, and that’s really what got me going about her writing. A few excerpts from those poems will serve, I think, to show some of what I find so interesting about Simonds’ poetry.

The first poem in Warsaw Bikini is titled “I Serengetti You” and it begins in media res, and goes in a way that made me stop and read the first stanza again, and then do so again and again, so startling are the images, the language, and the energy. Here it is, a single compound if starting in mid-stride sentence spread over seven lines:

                               like a banshee, a leprechaun, a geek
in the shuffling feet of trick neurons
                                                      limbic, I skipped
                                              town with your checkbook
rode limber sleuths through suburban felts on the flushed cheek,
                              from gill to aorta, renal to fallopian tube
                                              twirling like Mendel’s string bean.

If this is a “Song of Myself” - and I read it as such, although as in Whitman the I, the persona of the poem, should be considered as expansive, a “one” that contains multitudes – then Simonds presents herself here as a – well, what? It’s a rich mix that’s hard to pin down in prose. Intriguing and rollicking, I would say, and a tad dangerous, a magic messenger impulse at the edge emotion cross-species internal organ thought-science spirit-creature a mindful woman with mind full of mystery adventure and yes of course don’t forget Mendel’s string bean twirling. In short, these are words of a poet for whom I will enthusiastically turn the pages, and go forth wheresoever she may write me to come.

If I were to put Simonds’ lively confidence, humor and self-awareness into a small capsule of lines, then I think it would be these, lifted – probably decontextualized too – from “One Billion And One, My New Favorite Number,” another Warsaw Bikini poem:

                  . . . The moon has
her little ways, so why can’t I?

“. . . The moon has / her little ways, so why can’t I?”

I can’t think of any good answer for why Simond’s shouldn’t have her little ways, and the spirit of those ways continually enlivens her poetry. This is a spirit with much openness, confidence and weird-wonderfulness, of the kind that just sings in the following lines from yet another great Warsaw Bikini poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Papiers”:

                            . . . What’s next, century?
Give it to me. I am ready to climb your Rockies,

to wrap the Vitamin A liver in aluminum foil
and wear the snow paw of the polar bear
so no one else can touch it.

This desire and demand for whatever time and events may bring delights with its surprising combinations (how about that image in the first line after the double-space from the world of cooking and nutrition!?). Especially mind-stopping and heart-blowing in this regard– as my illustration below above reflects – is Simonds’ that final statement here of what she is ready to do, an assertion that’s full of magic and a special sense of uniqueness and purpose:

“. . . and wear the snow paw of the polar bear / so no one else can touch it.”

But there is in Simonds’ poetry another dominant energy, one very different than the kind reflected in these excerpts so far presented. This other energy similarly stems from an acute awareness and sensitivity, but is situated in anxiety, depression, doubt, deep concern, and almost despair, both about herself and the world at large. This is perhaps a necessary flip-side to Simonds’ almost wild openness and confidence, and while it often is disturbing or sad, it equally engages our readerly attention.

Consider, for example, the poem “The America You Learn From (A Poem For Grocery Workers).” In its first section Simonds describes, more than once, doing a “jig”and imagines herself as a kind of Houdini, cuffed-chained-and-straitjacketed beneath San Francisco Bay who via the undulations of her “jellyfish brain” regurgitates the keys that will permit escape.

However, this more-or-less celebratory and confident tone explicitly and emphatically shifts in the poem’s second section, as Simonds first castigates and questions herself, then takes a brutally honest inventory of where she’s at and what she sees. It’s extremely powerful, and here it is in its entirety:

                      Enough!
        What am I talking about? I have no house.
                      I am entirely minimum wage. I am one
hundred percent punch in
        and out, sandbags under the eyes
        live from cage to cage – the ocean tides wet my
                      dog leash long esophagus
        hooked to the neck of the moon howls
        hey Missy England, it’s all the rage and
                      —thumbs up, Abu Gharib

“live from cage to cage – the ocean tides wet my / dog leash long esophagus /
hooked to the neck of the moon howls / hey Missy England, it’s all the rage and /
—thumbs up, Abu Gharib”

These lines, this poetry, disturbs, or should, with its depiction of a tied down and trapped, limiting, jumbled, and cruel world, personally and geo-politically.

Equally disturbing and sobering, and showing even more clearly the self-critical perspective that is a part of Simonds’ poetry, are the following lines, which comprise the first half of “Parable That Takes Place In Little Nathaniel’s Closet”:

Just when you throw up
your hands

and say “I’m really a horrible
person,” there’s an-

other selfsame self that
assures you you are in-
deed more horrible
than previously suspected.

How dis-
proportionate!

This excerpt, in addition to what it says, also shows that Simonds can flat-out write poetry. Look first at the opening couplet:

Just when you throw up
your hands

The phrase in its entirety describes an universal gesture of frustration, one perfectly appropriate to the self-criticism that follows. But before the phrase is completed, Simonds via how or where she breaks the line brings in rather directly a sickening emesis “you throw up” that sets up and underscores the nauseating self-critical observations that follow.

And with regard to the writing consider as well the hyphenated (and double-spaced) “an // other” that straddles the second and third stanzas. By that clever move Simonds shows, right there on the page, the separate parts of the self that’s central to her poem. Simonds makes her point again about the double or multi-faceted self via the almost back-to-back repetition in “selfsame self” (emphasis added) and then does it again, in the next line, through her odd-looking (but grammatically correct) repetition “you you.”

Another neat piece of poetry takes place in the next linebreak, which also features a split word: “in- / deed” permits Simonds to suggest that sometimes it’s an action (“deed”) that reveals our awfulness to ourselves.

And how about the line-break (and split word) in the concluding couplet in the excerpt above? “How dis-” it begins, and each time I see that I expect the hyphenated word to conclude with “gusting!” or “appointing!,” either of which– an expression of revulsion or frustration – would be an understandable reaction to either the thought that we are actually more horrible than we think, or the idea that we actually think that kind of thought about ourselves.

But Simonds here does not go for the obvious but instead surprises with the more analytical but entirely accurate “dis- / proportionate.” The term suggests I think the distance she feels, that we all feel, between our limits and failures and expectations, and at the same time (via the linebreak and thus the standalone “proportionate”) also suggests that the feeling of horribleness is exactly attuned to an inner state.

The final half of “Parable That Takes Place In Little Nathaniel’s Closet” comprises five couplets, and massively reinforce the sense of hyper lack of self-esteem and associated discomfort that lacerates through the opening lines. The concluding ten lines present a nightmarish vision in which yet another figure from one’s interior – “a nuisance ghost / dressed up as grandpapa” – gets recognized as yet another “you,” one who before receding announces “‘you see you’re worse than me.’” Here, the self-critical self-doubt and condemnation repeatedly mirrors itself, and with no alternative in sight, the emotional and mental state depicted has never had a more convincing, haunting, and disturbing presentation.

“. . . ‘you see you’re worse than me.’”

+(+)+

I walked into Simonds’ reading two Saturdays ago with all the above in mind, and as you can imagine, my excitement was extreme. As I mentioned at the top of this post, I’d just received her new chap, Made from Scratch, and the thought of fresh poems, new to my eyes, excited me even more. I went to the reading alone, and singleton in social scenes that I can be, began reading the book in the noisy wine bar while waiting for the reading to begin.

Made from Scratch is a heck of a rich title, ain’t it? Words scrawled on (scratched into) paper, I think of, maybe even Sumerians centuries ago, writing with sticks in dried mud. Or Made from Scratch as in created with but a small amount of cash, and/or quickly. Or arising from a wound. And/or, of course, the title suggests there is nothing in it that is pre-prepared or canned; everything’s fresh. Yes, I think it’s all that, and probably more.

Because Made from Scratch may not be, probably will not be, widely available given that it was published and distributed by Simonds herself (it’s not listed on her website; she kindly sent me one after I offered to buy a copy). Presumably, some of its poems will be included in Simonds’ next full-length collection, Mother Was A Tragic Girl, to be published in 2012 by Cleveland State Press.

In the meantime, the poems I discuss below – those which hit me especially deep when I heard her read them Saturday before last, and/or when I read them in the chap itself over the last two weeks – are all available on-line (links are given here, although sometimes in slightly different versions than now published).

“The Battle of Horseshoe Bend” is one of the more memorable poems in the chap, and it is, in its own way, one of several that concern having a child. I write “in its own way” because Simonds says in the poem’s first line that she “was going to write a poem about giving birth” but a few stanzas later says that instead the poem is about something else. However, despite that disavowal, there is plenty about giving birth in the poem, including almost immediately a mention of “merconium, vernix” – and you do know those terms, yes?–

“merconium,

vernix”

– and can you please tell when you last saw those terms back-to-back, or at all, in a poem? Until someone proves me wrong, I’ll answer “never” or “most probably never” and that’s fairly incredible given the universality of these human phenomena. There’s also here “the flushed cheek of labor, how hard it is / to piss afterwards / how hard it is just to walk / to the bathroom.”) which seem to me other very salient details not often mentioned in poetry. Simonds’ poem, to me, ought to win an award just for bringing these terms into it.

But – and remember, “The Battle of Horseshoe Bend” is a poem about birth that Simonds “was going to write” – there’s also plenty else that comes into the poem, including cubix zirconium, “the cyclonic energy of / Andrew Jackson,” “government cheese, rent, debt,” “steam off the Georgia swamp on my / to work at 6am, where the egret transfixes the grass,” and the Sand Grain Plantation. The final line asserts that we’ve just read a “Poem that will never exist” and I suppose it doesn’t, but of course it does. Click here, if you please, to give it a read.

(+)

Another poem read by Simonds from Made from Scratch (its the final one in the chap) again concerns having a child – actually, it reaches back to the moment of conception – and is evocatively titled, “Landscape Made From Egg and Sperm.” It’s 50 lines long, set in Yosemite, addressed directly to her son (“. . . you / were conceived here, Ezekial, fifty / feet off the Trail of / Broken Ankles”), and was published in Poetry this past summer (please click here to read).

Here are the poem’s final twenty-one lines, an excerpt that begins with a tremendous speculative meditation on the inception of a life, and then opens into an equally, maybe even more tremendous meditation on what such an inception may, or may not, signify:

                    I imagine the second
                    before you took, before
                    the cells began to split,
                    before that flint
                     was struck, before the dna
                    began to twist,
                               that a colorless emptiness
                                      suddenly inverted
                    and told the world that, he too,
                                      once had a mother.

                                     But there is
                                      no nest of leaves. Nothing
                    stops. The clock in the glacier
                      still ticks above us
                          and on our skin
              there were enormous ants, the segments
                                       of their bodies
                                       like black droplets of paint
                                       pushed very close
                                       against each other
                      but still not touching, yet
                                       taking their work with them—
                                       taking away their dirt world .

Simonds briefly discusses and then recites “Landscape Made From Egg and Sperm” on a recent Poetry podcast (click here, start the audio, then jump to 8:00 minutes in). She comments:

. . . the idea behind the poem is that we make these children and they’re everything to us and yet in the grand scheme of things nothing. It’s unfair to see them as the extreme special exception yet at the same time it’s unfair not to. So when you have children you are put into this sort of terrifying position.

I believe this ambivalence, the dichotomy between the frightening difficulty of coming to terms with that which is everything and nothing, must be particularly acute for a new mother. Simonds’ courage here, in the telling of her feeling, is inspiring. This is not at all a simple binky, lullaby, and skylarks singing view. I’ll never forget – these images locked in as soon as she read them aloud two Saturdays ago – the key phrases in the poem’s final lines, which provide incredible mental pictures of the big and little wheels that turn in our world even as the miracle of life takes place between us:

“The clock in the glacier / still ticks above us . . . ”

“there were enormous ants, the segments / of their bodies / like black droplets of paint”

(+)

Another poem from Made from Scratch read here in San Francisco by Simonds, “Solipsism As Maternal Instinct,” also – as its title directly suggests – concerns having a child. This poem is also available on line in an earlier, and slightly different, version (click here).

The idea in the poem’s title is provocative: motherhood involves an inherent or unavoidable tendency to believe that the care, concern, and love of and given to one’s child, or maybe even the mother’s mind, is the only thing that can be certain to exist, and that all the rest, the external world and others, is unknowable and possibly an illusion. Here again I can well imagine how this might happen, even while acknowledging I can’t really ever say.

The poem itself, in the first four of its five sections, presents a kind of yin and yang of the experience of Simonds in the months after giving birth. “For a while, everyone loved me” she begins, and then Simonds describes her confidence, her certainty in her beauty and the joy in her body, how she “nursed my child in public” and “It was like my body / was one big eye, opening and shutting.” That last image, in particular is incredible, a snapshot of a fully expansive flesh-and-blood consciousness.

But the euphoria does not last. The come-down, the change – it takes place about two-thirds through the poem – still kicks my gut, just as it did when I first heard Simonds read it, and just as it does every time I’ve read it since. It stuns the most in the fourth stanza, which begins with a simple statement regarding a physical change and then things rapidly get a lot worse:

            Then my milk dried up. My husband
              failed his paternity
              test and left. (We have not seen him since
              July 18, 2009 so if anyone
                 knows where he is, please
              email me. $200 reward.) Then all my friends
                     followed suit, like Annie who
                                who left a note on my doorstep
                              that said “Can you
                   please return my DVD of Beaches
                                and those onesies I gave
                                you. I’m pregnant again.”

Of course, I don’t really know how much of this is actually true, particularly the (going old school here) Peyton Place like or (even older school) Faulkner-ish details of the presumed father discovering he’s not, then abandoning the relationship. The specificity of the parenthetical facts – the date it all went down – suggest that it’s all real, and the request for help and posted reward there are either the saddest things I’ve read in a poem in a good long time or a twisted stab of humor (or maybe both). The rest of the other details in the stanza above, concerning the friend who asks for things back also seems very real. The sense of a mother isolated, with nothing else, is profound.

The final stanza first presents and then concerns an image of Simonds’ child playing in exersaucer, a modern day baby walker and activity center, in which the infant/toddler stands in the center of ring atop which are plenty of on-board toys, often with sound effects:

              My son jumps up and down in the second-
                        hand exersaucer that I’ve set up in
                                   the living room.
                                                               The air is composed
                                of beaks and hooves, squawks,
                                                neighs, unraveling DNA.
              “You’re brilliant,” these plastic
              farm animals say, their primary colors
                                made in God’s image.

Simonds’ focus here on, the return of her focus to, the child corresponds to, is further proof of, the “solipsism = maternal instinct” equation of the poem’s title. Against all the desolation, mom’s reality is found watching, and thinking of, her son.

But you know what? I myself find a reality, an inspired one, in this final image. No doubt my response is not the equal of Simonds as mother, but still I insist it is strong. While the isolation presented in the first excerpt above is profound, so too is the affirmation and optimism in this final stanza.

The shift here from desolation to a kind of ebullience seems a perfect example of a key quality of Simond’s poetry, which Andrew Joron (in the afterword to this year’s updated edition of The Sun At Night, his terrific survey of transformations of surrealism in American poetry over the last approximately half-century) describes as a “fierce and rampant negativity that suddenly veers sideways to display a pataphysics of redemption, wickedly wise.”

I certainly felt a kind of redemption, along with affirmation and much else, when I heard Simonds read her final stanza aloud. It may seem goofy, but I too feel in the described sounds of her kid’s toys the same can-it-be, yes-it-is message of brilliance that she hears. This possibility or vision of affirmation and hope may seem simple, but against the emptiness that preceded it, and because of the freshness of the image – the sounds of “plastic / farm animals” on an “exersaucer” who ever thought of that, come on?!! – I find it complex, utterly convincing, and unforgettable. A well known tradition asserts that “a little child shall lead [us],” and here I say it’s true, at least as presented by the creative and skilled hand of Simonds in this poem.

“‘You’re brilliant,’ these plastic / farm animals say . . .”

+(+)+
+++(+)+++
+(+)+