Every verse is a child of love, A destitute bastard slip, A firstling – the winds above – Left by the road asleep. Heart has a gulf, and a bridge, Heart has a bless, and a grief. Who is his father? A liege? Maybe a liege, or a thief. by Marina Tsvetaeva
I Know the Truth I know the truth – forget all other truths! No need for anyone on earth to struggle. Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night: what will you say, poets, lovers, generals? The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew, the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet. And soon all of us will sleep beneath the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.
“I know the truth” Tsvetaeva (1915). Translation by Elaine Feinstein.
The above link is to Tsvetaeva’s Wikipediapage. This week news reports and statements suggest that Anna Politkovskaya‘s killer is now behind bars. Whilst researching and reminding myself of the small things that I did at the time of her death in 2006, like reading and connecting with the IWMF and publishing about violence against women writers and journalists, I came across some articles about poems, music and protests from those people effected by Politkovskaya’s writing. Interestingly Tsvetaeva’s work was read at the public protests and organically wound into musical tributes. I thought to publish two poems here as a type of memorial to two Russian women writers today.
This post is related to yesterday’s introduction to Jacket 2, which is linked here. Jacket2 and writers like Afilreis use social-media and Twitter to disseminate serious poetics. I started to write about Hannah Weiner as an addendum to a wider article on Jacket 2 last week, but thought that I would do some more reading before concentrating on her work alone.
I really (really) like theBook of Revelations by Hannah Weiner , further to that I admire how J2 have presented the piece. The book was composed in 1989 and has been amassed into a virtual edition on the J2 site , by Marta L. Werner. There are seven hyperlinks running alongside the introduction to the text, which I link here.
“save all the surprises for you tonight we can expect anarchy in one moment I will tell you forty nine people cannot stand the beginning was a little bore expect little help from midgets in some sense all words travel there must be no suspicion dont ally yourself with imps”
Hannah Weiner , The Book Of Revelations
To create section 1 (from “forthcoming and absolutely” to “no one can eliminate a particle”), Rosenthal placed a steel straight edge on the page in sequenced parallels and grasped at the paper in the lower corner with her right hand, bearing down on the steel with her left and pulling upward to form straight rips with a slightly textured edge; to create section 2 (from “read more about it in the papers” to “absence of time between 5 and 7”), she used an X-Acto #2 fine point blade to slice concentric or nested angles or rectangles.”
I also thought, being in a generous type of sunlit-mood (at time of writing) to add a piece of the audio archive from PennSound !
Everyone has their own tastes in poetry, and this blog is intended mostly to expand out the experience of poetry through linking and integrating online resources.
I often wonder at the definition of Outsider Poetry just a little bit, and have made allusions to the poetry of diaspora before now on this blog. Of course the poetry of alienation/diaspora, be it in the wake of cataclysm, war or economic circumstance is more than just that. The exilic condition forms a thread in world literature that we recognise historically in the poems of the dispossessed, that are so beautifully edited and collected in An Duanaire , for instance.
Blogs and websites dedicated to the dissemination of the poetry of nomadics, meanderings and exile are (and have been) online for a while, even if they comprise a marginalia. The PENs, Arvon, and UBUWEB amongst others consistently and brilliantly bring forward the voice of the diasporist. For instance, there are manifestos dedicated to the art of poetics grounded in the experience of the writer/artist available on multiple sites, and of course on theInternational PENsite, (TLRC)
My first experience of reading a diasporist manifesto was in 1995, when I bought The First Diasporist Manifesto by RB Kitaj, I was intrigued by his approach to his art and by the manifesto which served as the invisible architecture that underpinned his Tate retrospective. I thought to excerpt a short paragraph here to illustrate the condition, from the artist’s point of view.
‘Nationalism seems awful; it’s track record stinks, but patriotism doesn’t seem half bad. ————On the other hand, if people want their homelands, why not? Partitioned homelands seem better to me than killing each other. My own homeland, America , and my little one , England, offer such strong appearances of peace and freedom that the really odd and peaceful practice of painting spins out my own Diasporic days and years until I can’t sense any other way to go.’ ( By RB Kitaj)
The subject is evidently too great for this blog, thus I have decided to divide the topic into two, (possibly) three sections. I am not going to look at alienation yet, as the issue is highly complex and comprises but one element of outsider art. The fact that alienation is oft met with physical violence further complicates any advance on the problem. The danger for the reader is always to associate diasporism with alienation, when it is but one cause of dispossession and it’s related consequences for the narrative arts, including the translator’s art.
The subtext of this post is how far do we think outsider art is from our experience of reading books of poetics, I believe that the area dedicated to the translation and rights of the poets is no longer a marginalia. I see this on blogs and in debate, unfortunately this is not reflected in what publishers are producing, save in speciality areas such as the poetry societies. The fact that authors have noted that translation merits little in prize-awards , as recently mentioned in relation to the Booker Prize, suggests that the marginalisation occurs at the budgeting level, rather than at the level of popularity displayed by submissions to contests and online anthologies.
We are familiar, as mentioned above, with the poetry of exile – the exilic condition , from sources like An Duanaire, or even Ulysses , that novel is an exile’s song, a recreation of Dublin city in its minutiae by James Joyce, its quite an example of alienation poetry also !
I am adding in here an excerpt from Notes Towards a Nomadics Poetics, Pierre Jorisblog:
The days of anything static – form, content, state – are over. The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. All revolutions have done just that: those that tried to deal with the state as much as those that tried to deal with the state of poetry.
The death of Mallika Sengupta, poet, academic, feminist, and polemicist has been announced.
“Sengupta has consistently refused to be squeamish about mixing her activism with her art. As she tells poet, critic and translator Sanjukta Dasgupta in the interview included in this edition, “Ideology ruins poetry, but not always. Rather every poet has to face this challenge at some period of her life… I think a good poet can always insert ideology into poetry without destroying aesthetic conditions.”
I am adding in here some poems by Mallika Sengupta alongside some words by Poet Yashodhara Raychaudhuri,
“Mallika Sengupta’s voice has been one of the most prominent among the new breed of feminist poets of the 80s. Bengali poetry has seen its Kavita Singhas and Debarati Mitras of the 50s and 60s who have had minority status in poetry as women. Their voices were bold but were seen as exceptions among a mostly male bastion. Mallika belonged to a generation of educated, highly sophisticated young poets who were busy trying to erase the marks of their womenhood from the body of their poetry, and is in the company of at least 4-5 more woman poets. However, she made her mark early on with her discovery of a very strong and confident voice. and that way mallika’s diction was dramatic, and paradoxically ” masculine”, if one is allowed to use the word. Her selection of themes were conscious, depending on the theoretical basis of her sociological studies, and she was mature at the outset . However there was an evolution in her voice. Her poetry was initially full of imagery and play of language. But she developed her skills to write in a radically different way, she left subtlety for directness and immediate communication. Sometimes her poetry was criticised for its posterlike quality. Both KHana and “the husband’s black hands” belong to the same genre.
Mallika uses strong imageries here, and mostly categorical statements. the issues she wants to address are of the prime importance here. the second poem is more of a personalized experience , mediated through a clinical third eye precision. the social situation is always the first priority for Mallika, and “personal is political” here.
Mallikas Bangla renderings had very meticulously drafted metered phrases which are lost in translation. She knows where to stop, and how much to tell. the reader is taken on a stormy ride with her, with her relentless criticism of the status quo, the situation as it is.”
By Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri
Condolences to Albert Ashok and members of PEN West bengal who are feeling her absence most acutely at the moment, you have lost a wonderful activist, writer and person.
Mallika Sengupta RIP
WOMEN.COM
Today, on our Computer Day Come let’s place our hand on the women.com button This very own history of women From illiteracy to women.com. Once upon a time from this woman You snatched the chance of reading the Vedas All of you said women were just housewives Men had the right to Sanskrit Women’s language, the language of the Sudras was different. After a thousand years when the girl Prepared herself for a girls’ school Bethune and Vidyasagar stood by her All of you said Women who read and write Are bound to become widows.
The moment she tucks in the mosquito net and goes to bed, her husband’s black hands fumble after the snakes and frogs of her body: “You’re hurting me! Let go!” In anger, those black hands twist her breasts. He says, “Listen here, Sweta, don’t be coy. If ever I find even the evening star gesturing to you, or making eyes, I’ll see that you fall into a hellish pit.” Sweta’s white thighs swing back and forth in space clinging to the back, her husband’s black back.
“Looked after only by the four womb-walls, if anything curved in the ruined city his last hour it was his human hands, bituminous, while all laws were aimed at him, returning to the metre of a star: like a century about to be over, a river trying to film itself, detaching its voice from itself, he qualified the air of his own dying, his brain in folds like the semi-open rose of grief. His eyes recorded calm and keen this exercise, deep-seated, promising-avenues, they keep their …kingdom: it is I who am only just left in flight, exiled into an outline of time, I court his speech, not him. This great estrangement has the destination of a …rhyme. The trees of his heart breathe regular, in my dream. “
from, The Making of a Sonnet, a Norton Anthology. Eds ,Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland. Published 2008.
Dedicated to the Irish Magdalene Women, whose government chose to ignore their plight at the UN Committee on Torture 23/05/2011.
“Some of the issues that are raised and looked at in the Ryan report and that have been raised in relation to the Magdalene laundriesrelate to a very distant, far-off time,” said Mr Aylward in his initial response to the committee’s questions and observations.”
(Seán Aylward, Irish Govt Rep to the UN Committee on Torture 2011).
I have alluded before now on this blog to four women writers in particular who embraced the mystic, or quasi-mystic traditions, their names are familiar to regular readers, Marguerite of Porete, Barbro Karlén, Mirjam Tuominen andSimone Weil. I wrote about some of Weil’s themes last week here.
These women writers wrote from the prison of the body and of the intellect in a manner that is unrivalled, and should be celebrated but instead it is mostly apocryphal in its hiddenness.
I have often wondered at the shape and constitution of apocryphon, given that nothing that is ever part of the collective consciousness of humanity can be entirely obliterated and indeed often tends to re-emerge in a surprising manner. To take an example from art history for instance, wherein the pattern-books that constituted the architectural language of cathedrals often led to a generalised iconography. Popular sentiment refused the destruction or partial obliteration of some iconographies, thus the new and the old were cast together in a tension not always apparent to the eyes of the participant in ceremony of religious worship, but nonetheless present.
It is impossible to completely obliterate what was in essence an integral part of our societies, though there are faces hacked from statuary or black-marks on books or public records that tend to add poignancy to choices that were made. Most often an incorporation occurred, wherein that which had been cast away became transformed and emerged differently.
Literary incorporation is no different to art-historical, what Marguerite of Porete wrote ( before her inquisition and eventual murder) in Le Miroir des simples ames aneaties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour has been consciously referenced by John Moriarty in What the Curlew Said, and subconsciously tapped into in Joyce’s Anna Livia soliquoy from Finnegan’s Wake. What comes from an identical archetype source, in this case dissolution, does not disappear because it inconveniences those who do not have time to read with attention. This includes ignoring the voicing of women’s experiences, including those our society would rather forget, Vis our history of the sexual repression of women.
“Being completely free and in command of her sea of peace the soul is nonetheless drowned and loses herself through God- with him and in him. She loses her identity, as does the water from a river-like the Ouse or the Meuse- when it flows into the sea. It has done it’s work and can relax in the arms of the sea, and the same is true of the soul. Her work is over and she can lose herself in what she has totally become: Love. love is the bridegroom of her happiness enveloping her wholly in his love and making her part of that which is. This is a wonder to her and she has become a wonder. Love is her only delight and pleasure.”
Marguerite Porete , from Le Miroir des simples ames aneaties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour
Mirjam Tuominen wrote of war and of torture but her name is eclipsed by those of her post WWII contemporaries, as Weil’s is eclipsed by Paschal’s. The experience of the anchorite, the woman tithed, or the female prisoner of torture is absent from the literary canon by stint of the greatness we perceive in the male voice, though both wrote on the same theme but from a differing perspective. I have dedicated this post to the Irish Magdalene women , who were incarcerated by their society in the hope that they will use their voices again to tell of what happened to them in the institutions, in their own voices.
It interests me that we often reject and neglect the voices of the societally victimised and instead favour the putting of words into their mouths by the mostly male artistic and political establishment. I expect they like to add insult to injury by attempting to rationalise crimes through a relentless and gendered tone of empty propriety.
Edit : 06/02/2013
Why is imprisonment and denial of motherhood hidden, why are the words of the victims of an Irish version of Purdah ignored , traduced or treated with political ignorance ? The depth of current Governmental ignorance is a cause for deep shame.
TheGriffinPoetryPrize has been making excellent use of Social media, including Twitter to publicise this year’s prize list and as little of note happens in the Irish Sunday papers, I thought to add in by way of my blog their link to the Paris Review interview with PaulMuldoon. Poetry readers familiar with this site will know that it is a rare occurrence for me to link to the Paris Review interviews , but that I think they are always worthwhile.
Paul Muldoon came to Tara in 2008 to celebrate our unique heritage, along with Susan Mc Keown and Seamus Heaney , this was a protest, a lament and an attempt to support those campaigners who had fought through Ireland’s courts and the EU about radical fast-track planning. One Irish newspaper of note reported the TurnatTara as ‘Heaney celebrates Heritage Week’ ! One expects this type of bilge as a matter of course in an undifferentiated mass-media that distrusts ideas. But I digress –
I said it once this week but it bears repeating , radical censorship is unnecessary in Ireland, a media group-think can just marginalise to sustain intellectual poverty, and what better way than to push trash-culture, ego-driven self publicity and other ephemera of failure ??Heaney, Mc Keown and Muldoon : Singers at Tara
Simone Weil was an outsider, this she clearly stated in her personal letters and essays which are gathered in fragments or in small volumes, such as in Waiting for God. Those meagre fragments that have been published are not really readily accessible save on the curriculums of theological colleges (in modular forms) and presented in a contextualised and safe manner. I do not think that her writings on mysticism have been done justice in contemporary thought.
Weil’s themes are of her intellectual alienation from Catholicism (and her desire of it), poverty, philosophy, war, struggle, and totalitarianism ,
“A collective body is the guardian of dogma and dogma is the object of contemplation for love, faith and intelligence, three strictly individual faculties. Hence almost since the beginning the individual has been ill at ease in Christianity and this uneasiness has notably been one of intelligence, this cannot be denied” (I: 314)
and yet, in further essays on education, philosophy and the need for frontline nurses, Weil rejects civil law as aberrant and only necessary to prevent religious totalitarianism. Her dividedness is a mark of her deep and enduring thought on education and its uses, which can be reduced to the cultivation of attention. Here, Weil’s thoughts could be placed alongside other catholic women thinkers but her refusal of baptism puts paid to that. Her ideas culminate in the magnificent and difficult poetic work, Necessity.
I question why the work of Weil is not put on a par with her contemporary Paschal, or any comparative writer of religious mysticism. I can only imagine that her desire to be an outsider has been readily and promptly answered by those guardians of her letters (thoughts) in their failure to categorise her sufficiently in the annals of the catholic thinking which she so desired and yet so readily and completely rejected,
“Nearly all our troubles come to us from not having known how to stay in our room,” said another sage, Paschal, I think, thereby calling to mind in the cell of recollection all those crazed people who seek happiness in movement and in a prostitution I might call fraternal, if I wanted to use the fine language of my century. ” ( I:314)
I suppose it is difficult if one approaches the writings of a female mystic and powerful writer to safely categorise and apply a workable label to her when her outsider status was so firmly delineated by writing that does not really achieve for the reader a comfort-zone that can be safely and inalienably tagged as pedestrian. She presents a difficulty for those guardians of dogma who would rather not approach the questions of the post war-time era in a manner that may jolt sensitivities in those areas of agnosticism, anarchism, and mysticism discussed by Weil in her letters. There are many such neglects in contemporary thought on issues of philosophy and religion, though mostly they (or their invisibilites) apply alone to women writers of depth and clarity, such as the great Simone Weil. I am excerpting Le Personne Et La Sacré by Simone Weil, in which she develops her ideas regarding the individual cultivation of attention as the most necessary of those approaches to study and whilst I may not agree with her ideas on dogma and justice, I find her constant and integral struggle with the problems of developing the intellect to be almost pressing when so much of post-modernism is directed toward the degradation of the intelligence in favour of willful and negligent consumption,
Le Personne et la Sacré : by Simone Weil
“Beauty is the supreme mystery in this world. It is a brilliance that attracts attention but gives it no motive to stay. Beauty is always promising and never gives anything; it creates a hunger but has in it no food for the part of the soul that tries here below to be satisfied; it has food only for the part of the soul that contemplates. It creates desire, and it makes it clearly felt that there is nothing in it [beauty] to be desired, because one insists above all that nothing about it change. If one does not seek out measures by which to escape from the delicious torment inflicted by it, desire is little by little transformed into love and a seed of the faculty of disinterested and pure attention is created.”
My Index of Women Poets evolved from an idea to catalogue published Poethead posts in The Saturday Woman Poet Category (and tags) directly to a special page and thereby increase the visibility and searchability of women poets. I thought to edit the category and to create an index for poets, their translators, and in some cases their editors. Thus both Poethead indices have organically evolved, which will explain their roughness in design.
The Nomadics blog is a wonderful resource for writers, it is concentrated in translations, essays, performance and polemics. Interested readers may take the link as a starting point in their reading. I recommend that they explore the blog wholly, as there are some wonderful links to external sites as well as links to Joris’ own poetic and translation works. The following excerpts are from ‘Poems and Poetics, from Notes towards a NomadicsManifesto ‘ ( External links are attached to the quotes/excerpts below here).
NOTES TOWARDS A NOMADIC POETICS
“A nomadic poetics is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, morphing,moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refuelling halts are called poases, they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on. The sufi poets spoke of mawqif – we will come back to this.”
“A nomadic poetics needs mindfulness . In & of the drift (dérive) there is no at- home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting. The fallacy would be to think of language as at-home-ness while “all else” drifts, because for language to be accurate to the condition of nomadicty, it too has to be drifting, to be “on the way” as Celan puts it. “
A Nomad Poetics: Essays, published by & still readily available from Wesleyan University Press. Its relevance to our ongoing project on “outsider poetry” should be apparent.”
nomads-by-choice in the welfare of settled rings” Allen Fisher, ‘Dispossession & Cure’.
It breaks apart as water will not do when I pull , hard, away from me, the corners bunched in my two hands to steer a true and regulated course.
I plunge the needle through and through, dipping, tacking, coming up again. The ripple of thread that follows pins, out of its depth , a shallow hem.
I smooth the waves and calm the folds. Then, to ensure an even flow, I cast a line which runs from hook to hook and pulls the net in overlapping pleats.
Which brings me to the point where I am hanging a lake, by one shore, in my room, to swell and billow between the light and opaque , unruffled dark.
I step in. The room closes round me and scarcely puckers when I move my limbs. I step out. The path is darkened where I walk, my shadow steaming off in all this sun. from : The New Irish Poets , Edited by Selina Guinness . Bloodaxe Books 2004
Chris Murray 