Myth of Arrival

There is a lot of talk in Peace Corps, that bureaucratic dinosaur, of not getting involved with the politics of the country you are in. It is another paradox of our government since simply being in certain countries as a single American becomes a politic act regardless of your beliefs. Still, Washington DC has an amazing ability of issuing tenets and then look the other way. The summer of 1995 in Yerevan was curious. Due to the closing of the countries sole nuclear power plant ¹there were only a few hours of electricity available a day. It was also the summer when the Health Minister went on TV to say Armenians could not get AIDS because, "our too blood pure" and blamed those suffering from the disease as a result of having "Turkish blood." Nationalistic pride ran high and even I, unable to understand a lot of the language, could sense there was tension in the capitol city.

One night a bunch of us volunteers decided to go the US Embassy to catch a film in English. We were suppose to be back to our host families before dark but being contrary due to our "American blood" we stayed out until much later. The US Embassy is down the street from the Parliament Building with its high fence and guards. What greeted us in the dusk was a large crowd of grim looking people. They stood at the gates and young-looking soldiers stood between them and the building. We wound our way through the throng while nobody did anything. The next day President Levon Ter-Petrossian went on TV denouncing the riot of the night before. Arrests had been made. What is the role of a witness in situations like this? They talk about the work you do in Peace Corps as "the hardest job you'll ever love" but I think bearing witness much harder.

Tongue tied in a city under curfew:
one dusk was very much like another
except when it was filled with people. Few
hundred, perhaps, milled in the street. Soldier-
school-boys surrounded Parliament. Summer
amok; the five of us crept, hand in hand,
through the mute crowd. No shouting, no laughter,
no cry. The President would soon demand
the quick arrest of all "renegades." Brand
protests "riots." Tongue tied in a city
under curfew we walked through that unplanned,
silent, "riot;" what else in this story
can you see? The three men beaten helpless
and shot? Is that your role as a witness?

1. built on an earthquake fault line in the heart of the country's farming district, the decommissioned nuclear power plant Metsamor (or Medzamor, meaning, "Fortress") is a sister of the Chernobyl plant with all the same problems) [back]

What this black and white snapshot of Armenia's capital city, Yerevan, and the legendary Mount Ararat in the background fails to evoke is the glorious purple haze ¹ that separates the two and at time it feels as if all one needs to do is walk outside the citylimits and find oneself in the foothills of the mountain. Of course, that is impossible. Ararat is in Turkey and the boarder is closed.

To illustrate just how ignorant I was of the country I was to spend two years in, I was unaware you could see the mountain from almost every street in the city. My Peace Corps group landed one dark May night in 1995. The city was under a blackout and we were shuttled from the tarmac to our hotel without being able to see anything besides the nebulous forms of the buildings as we passed by in the autobus. The next morning, after breakfast, I went out to the ex-Republic Square to look about. I nearly fell over in amazement when my brain registered there was a giant mountain filling up the skyline. Perhaps this is what glaciers look like right before they roll over you; a vast wall of rock going straight up into snow and mist. Even now I get a dim thrill of recalling just how shocking that first meeting of that mountain was.

What Mount Ararat is famous for and what makes it a national treasure for the Armenians is that in the Bible myth it is where Noah lands his Ark after the destruction of the world by flood. Thus the Armenians claim direct kinship with Noah, his family and all the generations that followed. The mountain is an image on all their money, sung about in their songs and probably the favorite still-life of painters attempting to capture that certain Armenian-ness one feels but cannot put into words. I certainly have a hard time putting it into words.

The summer of 1995 I spent in the capital city, learning the language (somewhat) and trying to ease out of culture shock. About half way through the summer thin clouds of smoke could be seen coming from the foot of the mountain. A friend told me that was smoke from burning Kurdish rebel villages. The Turkish government was pushing the nomadic Kurds out with a slash and burn program. It reminded me that even though the Armenians claim the mountain as their own many different people live and die in its shadows. What a common story that runs through so many people's mythologies — this destruction of a culture by an oppressive government — a heritage stolen — a destiny robbed — a great sacrifice by ancestors for the current generation. I do not know anyone Kurdish, I do not know anyone who escaped from that massacre in 1995, but I wonder if they told their stories whether it would be the same?

the view from this apartment, these stanzas,
includes this: all this yerevan skyline
with its satellite dishes, antennas,
then that outlandish moisture, all alpine
purple, that causes the great mountain, shrine
to the ark, to loom over everything.
the old man next to me says how divine
it is. what? the dead, praise god, returning
to mount ararat. i'm not sure. smoking
purple rises up, a myth, from the peak's
base. all day turkish troops looting, burning
kurdish camps and so much of this myth speaks
of ghosts trying to return to fortune
denied; a land, a people, a mountain.

1. I didn't want to use this term because the opening guitar riffs of Jimi Hendrix song of the same name immediately drift into my mind … but why let that stop me? It certainly is a purple-like haze that separates the city and mountain, rock and roll be damned! [back]

she wants to write,
all bodies look good
by candlelight, the mood is right,
pen in margins, pen all night.

Melanie Faith

The delight of having friends who are poets is they always surprise you with their wonderful work and new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. My friend Melanie goes under the pen name of Writergal76 recently introduced me to dithyramb poetry, Ancient Greek praise to glorious Dionysus! I had never heard of this form before, but I am very grateful to have been shown it. She wrote a very interesting dithyramb herself, the above lines being a sliver of it. One poetic phrase she used was, a ten karat bling. That got me thinking about our use of pop culture and I wrote to her the following:

I am always amused by pop cultural references that subliminally trickle down through our work. I cannot recall ever making a conscious decision to use "bling, bling" in my poetry too but it certainly does shows up now and then. Ah pop culture! It is everywhere and I keep thinking I might be the most out of touch white guy in America. Still, since I am running with this idea for a second, an interesting poem-cycle might be to dig through the lingo of different decades of popular music. You could have an Old School hip hop poem. I am sure someone has compiled a dictionary of Run DMC-speak, you could have odes to "Sucker MCs" and refer to everything bad as "illin'" … then go back 10 years and use Disco mummery … well, there are entire languages out there in one form or another waiting to be tapped into.

Right. It's an idea. Anyway, speaking of pop culture entering into poetry, tomorrow I will be off-line and gone for a long weekend. It's road time to the Dodge Poetry Festival! Quote:

Nearly 20,000 people are expected to welcome the 11th biennial Dodge Poetry Festival back to Waterloo Village. The Festival will return to a completely new Concert Tent, more spacious satellite performance tents, and expanded free parking facilities in the restored 19th-century canal-lock and riverside village. Join more than 60 poets ―including Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Taha Muhammad Ali, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Mark Doty, Jorie Graham, Linda Gregg, Tony Hoagland, Linda Hogan, Kurtis Lamkin, Andrew Motion, Taslima Nasreen, Grace Paley, Linda Pastan, Gerald Stern, Sekou Sundiata, Brian Turner, and Ko Un―and dozens of accomplished musicians and storytellers for four days of poetry and music beside the Musconetcong River and among the Village’s lawns, trees, and historic buildings.

If anyone is also going please drop me a line before 7 p.m. Thursday (when I take off … yes, all night driving) and we can finally meet in that large crowd. I will take photos and get gossip and tell you all about it when I get back!

When did Grand Rapids become the poetry mecca of Michigan? Well, at least this October. Grand Valley State University will be bring Sharon Olds and Sonia Sanchez and I just found out that The Grand Rapids Community College will be bringing Sherman Alexie for a lecture (October 18)!! Their "Diversity Lecture Series XII" will feature Alexie this October and Nikki Giovanni on February 7, 2007!

Quote, Free and open to the public, however due to limited space, seating will be on a first come basis. All lectures begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Grand Rapids Community College Applied Technology Center Banquet Rooms (corner of Fountain Street and Ransom Avenue). A book signing will follow each lecture. For information, please call (616) 234-3390.

Isn't life grand?

  

[Armenian] is a rich language, and would amply repay anyone the trouble of learning it. — Lord Byron.

One of my odd claims to fame is that for about thirteen months I taught English conversation at the Lord Byron English School in Gyumri, Armenia (1995 - 96). The inside of the school was amazing. Remember, Gyumri was the city that was destroyed in that terrible 1988 earthquake. Everyone I knew (including myself) lived in little metal and concrete huts; sometimes eight to ten members of a family in one hut. There was no electricity. I hand pumped my water from a well in the neighborhood. So imagine my surprise on the first day of school upon entering and not only finding an institution that looked like it had been airlifted straight out of a Boston or London suburb but an entire library in English devoted to Lord Byron himself.

In a way, it had been. It was a gift from British government to help with reconstruction because of Byron's Armenian ties. What those were requires a little explanation for those who are not versed in Armenian history. Toward the end of his life Byron went into voluntary exile to Europe. He drifted about and one of his stomping grounds was the city of Venice, Italy. An article from Poets and Writers, Inc. explains further:

Few know that while living in Venice, Byron rowed out alone in his gondola every day to the monastery of St. Lazarus of the Armenians to spend hours poring over rare books in the library and conversing with the friendly Armenian fathers. The monastery, founded in 1789, is an authentic corner of the Eastern Church where the monks follow the rules of the Benedictine Order and celebrate mass in Armenian. Impressed by the unaffected devotion and intellectual accomplishments of the Armenian monks, Byron took up the study of the Armenian language, helped compile an Armenian grammar textbook, and translated two of St. Paul's epistles into English. The head of the monastery recorded him as being "a quick, sociable young man with burning eyes."

I love that description! Anyway, it soon turned out that my students had no idea who Lord Byron was. It became apparent one day when I told them I had once been in London, where "Mr. Byron" (as they called him) once lived. After class one boy came up to me and said, "you see Mr. Byron? you tell him he very nice man."

Byron, though, must have been more versed in learning Armenian than I because I never really mastered the tongue. Which is a pity because fragments of Armenian, or Hayeren as it is properly called, float around in my head all the time. I thought trying to learn Spanish would drive them away, but now I am simply mixing more languages up than ever.

My Peace Corps group (A3) arrived in Yerevan, the capital city, for a three month training in the summer of 1995. We stayed with host families and attempted to learn. Since everything was so foreign to me then things that might have raised an eyebrow before I took at face value at the time. One of my language teachers, let us call her Armanoush, in class one day out of frustration at my incredibly slow learning speed snapped at me, "I am sure if you had found yourself a girlfriend by this time you'd at least remember the parts of the body!" I do not even think the quip registered in my brain. Later, much later, a fellow volunteer reminded me about our exasperated instructor Armanoush. I think that's what started this poem. The whole idea of different approaches to learning. That and the fact that everyone needs to know certain words when they travel. Like the verb "to kiss" and the translation of the word erotic and maybe, "where is the toilet?" which in Armenian is, "vorter e zook'aran?"

It is all in the tongues, they say. But this
was not the way I wanted to learn. There
was so much they didn't teach us. To kiss
(verb) is "hamphure'l." They said, "an affair
always helps language skills." Perhaps. Take care,
then, of your homework. Shun dictionaries
that do not teach you body parts and their
lewd-slang words. Get yourself study-buddies.
Put in the hours. They say that the ease
of a language comes when it's pure rhythmic
on the tongue. Know then that the subtleties
just to say "sirata'rph," erotic
(adjective), are far beyond this patterned
tongue on tongue; it's something not taught but learned.

Oh yes, Mr. Byron? if you're out there? you very nice man.