‘After the ups and downs of the day Manufactured alone in this small room, Aching in more than one way, I press Seven buttons, and am at last in heaven. Who is to be praised like Graham Bell For the greatest, kindest imagining, For knowing that no song can please so well, So heal , as one voice saying two syllables in a tone not reproducible ? Thanks to an era that may blow us both Up any minute, my heart is lifted, I see the stars again , bless a world That has you in it, and that makes you mine Along a line so tenuous, vibrant, fine.’
Effluence, by Ruth Vanita, from The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets , ed JeetThayil, 2008. Reviewed at ,Post III
Congratulations to Jeet who made the 2012 Man Booker list with Narcopolis
I stopped at the gate of a rich city. I had everything the gods required; I was ready; the burdens of preparation had been long. And the moment was the right moment, the moment assigned to me. Why were you afraid ? The moment was the right moment; response must be ready. On my lips, the words trembled that were the right words. Trembled- And I knew that if I failed to answer quickly enough, I would be turned away.
Durham Cathedral engraving by William Miller after J M W Turner, published in Picturesque Views in England and Wales. From Drawings by J.M.W. Turner, engraved under the superintendence of Mr. Charles Heath with descriptive and historic illustrations by H.E. Lloyd. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1838. Rawlinson 297
Dhúisigh sí agus ní raibh a heireaball éisc ann níos mó ach istigh sa leaba léi bhí an dá rud fada fuar seo. Ba dhóigh leat gur gaid mhara iad nó slaimicí feola.
‘Mar mhagadh atá siad ní foláir, Oíche na Coda Móire. Tá leath na foirne as a meabhair le deoch is an leath eile acu róthugtha do jokeanna. Mar sin féin is leor an méid seo,’ is do chaith sí an dá rud amach as an seomra.
Ach seo í an chuid ná tuigeann sí — conas a thit sí féin ina ndiaidh ‘cocs-um-bo-head’. Cén bhaint a bhí ag an dá rud léi nó cén bhaint a bhí aici leosan?
An bhanaltra a thug an nod di is a chuir í i dtreo an eolais — ‘Cos í seo atá ceangailte díot agus ceann eile acu anseo thíos fút. Cos, cos eile, a haon, a dó.
Caithfidh tú foghlaim conas siúl leo.’
Ins na míosa fada a lean n’fheadar ar thit a croí de réir mar a thit trácht na coise uirthi, a háirsí?
Thank you to Gallery Press for allowing me to use this poem to celebrate Irish Women’s Poetry and translation on International Women’s Day 2012. The English translation of the poem is here.
Adrienne Cecile Rich has been nominated for the 2011 National Book Award , so no better time to link to her opus. Adrienne is 82 years old and a poet of force. I thought to add a poem and biography here to celebrate.
Adrienne Cecile Rich, pic from Google images/JWA
Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Cecile Rich.
First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.
There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.
I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.
First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed
the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.
This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
This poem is for lovers of poetry, for those who read women poets and wonder at the gender-imbalancein literary publication. I have decided to keep it simple and to add my favourite Rich , alongside a reading list. This site has always been about encouraging poetry writers and readers to research books that they enjoy and bringing the amazing words of women writers into view. We have a visibility issue which is deeply questionable in my view. There are now 62 Saturday Woman Poets published here since 2008.
Behold the lily repeating itself eternally Three lilies in one the divine bouquet, So many more bouquets a wedding and a deathbed All the weddings and funerals the same lily. Out of the lily my love the bridal dance, Out of the lily the funeral procession, Like a dragon with a thousand heads the lily Leaps out eternally to meet us. The wind carries the lily seeds Lilies sprout from the stones of the great boulevards Lilies burst from the smooth plastered walls And out of the sun that burns us. Like some eternal stalks the rays, The eye itself is a lily and its core is empty, Sight looks out through the white petals Where acid has eaten its way. by Ileana Mãlãncioiu.
This poem , by Ileana Mãlãncioiu, is taken from the Southword edition of After the Raising of Lazarus, translated by Dr. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
“This short post is related to what I do on the Poethead blog and I suppose to the area of women’s writing that has been a concern for a few years now.
Many of the poems that are a part of Poethead have found their way into my possession as gifts, or from the libraries and collections of people who bought (or ordered) the books when they were originally published. Quite a few of the books that I have been privileged to read are not obtainable from our local friendly bookshops, though they can often be had through Amazonor other such internet outlets.
The poems on the site were in the main transcribed from books by me, though not all of them are.
I started transcribing poetry as an exercise a few years ago because of something I had read in A.S. Byatt’sPossession. Roland Mitchell’s thoughts on the teaching methodologies of his superior regarding transcriptions stuck with me. I wanted to test how I would do if I were to know a poem through the copying of it. I soon learned that no matter how carefully one attempts a transcription, it is incredibly easy to mess up the simplest things and change the sense of the work completely. “
Lo, in my soul there lies a hidden lake, High in the mountains, fed by rain and snow, The sudden thundering avalanche divine, And the bright waters’ everlasting flow, Far from the highways’ dusty glare and heat. Dearer it is and holier, for Christ’s sake, Than his own windy lake in Palestine, For there the little boats put out to sea Without him, and no fisher hears his call, Yea, on the desolate shores of Galilee No man again shall see his shadow fall. Yet here the very voice of the one Light Haunts with sharp ecstasy each little wind That stirs still waters on a moonlit night, And sings through high trees growing in the mind, And makes a gentle rustling in the wheat. . . . Yea, in the white dawn on this happy shore, With the lake water washing at his feet, He stands alive and radiant evermore, Whose presence makes the very East wind kind, And turns to heaven the soul’s green-lit retreat.
by Eva Gore Booth.
( also published the OSG ‘The Whores will be busy’ poem elsewhere, and they were….)
‘You have to inhabit poetry if you want to make it.’ And what’s to ‘inhabit ‘ ? To be in the habit of, to wear words, sitting in the plainest light, in the silk of morning, in the shoe of night; a feeling bare and frondish is surprising air; familiar…rare. And whats ‘to make’ ? To be and to become words’ passing weather ; to serve a girl on terrible terms, embark on voyages over voices, evade the ego-hill, the misery-well, the siren-hiss of success, publish, success, success, success. And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry ? Oh , it’s the shared comedy of the worst blessed ; the sound leading the hand; a worldlife running from mind to mind through the washed rooms of the simple senses; one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic crosses we have to find.
from Anne Stevenson , Poems 1955-2005, Publ. Bloodaxe Books.
Carol of the Birds
by Anne Stevenson.
Feet that could be clawed, but are not …. Arms that might have flown, but did not… No-one said, ‘Let there be angels!’ but the birds whose choirs fling alleluias over the sea, Herring gulls, black backs carolling raucoucly While cormorants dry their wings on a rocky stable. Plovers that stoop to sanctify the land And scoop small, roundy mangers in the sand, Swaddle a saviour each in a speckled shell. A chaffinchy fife unreeling in the marsh Accompanies the tune a solo thrush Half sings, half talks in riffs of wordless words, As hymns flare up from tiny muscled throats, Robins and hidden wrens whose shiny notes Tinsel the precincts of the winter sun. What loftier organ than those pipes of beech, pillars resounding with the jackdaws’ speech, And poplars swayed with light like shaken bells? Wings that could be hands, but are not… Cries that might be pleas yet cannot Question or disinvent the stalker’s gun, Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air Before in the maze of space, you disappear, Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills.
from Anne Stevenson , Poems 1955-2005, Publ. Bloodaxe Books.
Chris Murray 