Myth of Arrival

Being a Lansing boy I am always curious to see how other people view my city, especially in print. Usually they peppered their words with colorful images like: "sty," "furuncle," "gritty," and "this once floundering industrial town now fallen on harder times." Indeed.

My generation of poets cannot rhyme very well it seems and thus there appears to be a certain (how can I call it?) hesitation in writing epic couplets and odes to their cities or states as people did for fun before the invention of irony. This might be a shame if the homespun verse that resulted weren't so terribly funny. For example, my mother recently sent me a copy of this ode to Michigan a friend of hers found on eBay. Written over a hundred years ago in that quaint way that all pre-20th Century book titles seemed to be crafted; quick! sum up every idea your book might hold in a single run-on sentence. It simply reads: A Poem on Michigan: giving a statement, in part, of its Resources, Products, Scenery, Natural Advantages; Also Industries of the Larger Cities by J.Q. Faulk, East Cohoctah, Michigan, 1900.

I am not sure who J.Q. Faulk of East Cohoctah, Michigan, was, but I hope he lived a good life and sent copies of this poem to all his grandchildren at the holidays, because it, along with other Michigan related poems like "I'm a Michigan Man" and "O, Michigan, my Michigan," just help illustrate the point that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

For example, even though the book has a rabid-looking illustration of a wolverine on it, this is what Mr. Faulk says of our state beastie:

As for wolverine in this state,
There has none been seen here of late;
Though perhaps in an earlier day,
There were many near Keweenaw Bay.

True. True. Mr. Faulk goes on some ten pages of verse praising not just our state and its mitten shaped roundness, but many of the cities we have as well. Flint, Jackson, Grand Rapids, Detroit and even Ann Arbor all get their praises sung. Lansing, however, is the one city he can't think much to say about (typical). Of the mere three stanzas, the first two read as follows:

LANSING

Lansing, Well, the most we can relate
It is the Capitol of the state,
Though it is an near all round,
Manufacturing town.

And has schools of reform and scientific knowledge,
And is adjacent to the Agricultural College;
Where is conducted an experiment station,
To promote the interests of cultivation.

Lansing, well, if this is typical of poetry people have considered over the years of making our Offical State Poem (and thus to have an Offical State Poet), all I can do is thank the gods we go poem-less.

Yesterday Eduardo's FREE POETRY BOOK came in the mail. Oh, happy days! I hope he got the one I sent him (did you, my friend?) However, I still have a two foot stack of orphan poetry books sitting by the stairs looking mournful and lost, waiting to be sent out to someone like you.¹

So, ruth-e, Matthew, Charles and Lorna, I know deep in your heart you want a FREE POETRY BOOK. I can sense it. And unlike a holiday fruit cake, you can always give it without guilt to a friend if you don't like it.

1. Did I mention I have FREE POETRY BOOKS? Did I mention they are FREE + shipping/ handling? I did? Oops … [back]

To keep this in retrospect, in 1971, a year after I was born, Carole King's "It's Too Late" was on the Pop Charts, as well George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" and Three Dog Night's "Joy To The World." Movies, such as Brian's Song, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry and The French Connection, were in circulation. Idi Amin would come to power in Uganda in January. Lt. William Calley will be found guilty of murdering twenty-two Vietnamese civilians at My Lai 4 in March. In April “Papa Doc” Duvalier, dictator in Haiti for 14 years, dies. Between September-October the Third World Women’s Alliance is expanded to include non-Black Third World women. All of this was happening and in Buenos Aires Alejandra Pizarnik will publish her El infierno musical just a year before her death.

This is not the complete poem, however, just a splattering. A taste. Poverty being what it is I see I must head off to work. There are adult diapers to be changed. Staffing shortages.¹ Head nurses with short tempers. One cannot translate all day, I suppose.

1. We have been told never to use the term "working short" when someone calls in sick, we are simply "challenged." We have been "challenged" for a long time [back]

Here is the completed translation of Pizarnik's Árbol de Diana in all its 38-stanza glory. I removed the Spanish original that I had been trying to follow in earlier postings simply because of formating reasons. Due to different line breaks on the computer screen each poem varied in length as I posted them. Since it is easy enough to find The Tree of Diana on the Web, I simply resorted to the English, my own.

There are motifs that run through out this poem — a little traveler that sings and dies alone in the desert, words that kill, threads and fogs, the doubleness of a magical mirror and a sense of not being present in the moment. Bassnett (2002) writes of such themes:

Throughout her writing Pizarnik explored the power and powerlessness of women. In a short piece she wrote in 1968, she declares that the 'strongest parts of language are lonely, desolate women singing out through my voice, which I hear in the distance.' She was both a spokeswoman for other women in the world, and a humanbeing so disloacted that she could hear her own voice only with difficulty. 'We are just a few steps away from an eternity of silence,' she wrote in her diary in December, 1962 … Reading Pizarnik's work one has a sense of a woman battling melancholy and incipient madness … Hers is a poetry of resistance, not a poetry of despair, even though she eventually took her own life when she was only 36 years old. page 8

What I take away from Árbol de Diana is not so much a delight in language but a a pact with language, as if to say: "I do not like what restraints you have placed upon me but I will go with you by the hand to see what you do to me." In a similar tone, Robin Blaser tells of finding the poet Jack Spicer dying in the Alcoholic Ward of a San Francisco hospital and Spicer saying: "see what words have done to me." No, it wasn't words that killed Spicer, it was bourbon, scotch and rubbing alcohol. I have seen a tendency in our culture not to help but to romanticize the critically ill, to place on an isolated pedestal those about to die. The fact Alejandra Pizarnik died thirty years ago, lived her whole life in Buenos Aires and Paris, is not the point I am getting at. The culture I am talking about, of course, is this one right here, our smug, vainglorious, narcissistic poetic culture.

Árbol de Diana/ The Tree of Diana
Alejandra Pizarnik
translated by ZJC

1.
I have jumped from my body to the dawn.
I have left myself fixed to the light
I sang the grief of what is being born.

2.
These are the versions that are proffered to us:
a hole, a wall that shudders …

3.
only this thirst
silence
never stumbled upon

caution, my love
caution toward this quiet woman out in the dunes
this traveler with her empty glass
and all the shade of her shadow

4.
HOWEVER:
Who will surrender stop sinking his fist in
hunting for a forgotten tribute for the girl.
The cold will pay. The wind will pay. The rain
will pay. The thunder will pay.

5.
for only a minute in this unique, brief life
with open eyes,
only for a minute, to see
in my brain, small flowers
dancing like words in the mouth of the silent.

6.
she strips naked in the paradise
of her memory
she is ignorant of the ferocious destiny
of her visions
she is terrified of not knowing how to name
all that does not exist.

7.
She leaps with her shirt in flames
star to star.
From shade to shadow.
She is the one who dies a distant death
the one in love with the wind.

8.
Illuminated memory, vague gallery where
dwells the shadow of my hope. It is not
truth that will come. It is not truth that
will not come.

9.
These bones flaming at night,
these words like precious stones
in the living throat of a paralyzed bird,
this beloved green, beloved,
this warm lilac, warm,
this single, mysterious heart.

10.
a feeble wind
full of doubled faces
that I trim into the forms of objects to love.

11.
now
in this innocent hour
I and the one that I was, seated
in the threshold of my stare.

12.
no more candies metamorphosis of a silken girl
a sleepwalker in the fog's cornice

she will not wake up to find a breathing hand
or flower that opens to the wind.

13.
to explain with words this world
a boat that pulled away from myself, taking me away.

14.
The poem that I can not utter,
the one that I do not deserve.
Fear of being two
pathways in the mirror:
somebody dormant in me
eating me and drinking me.

15.
Extraordinary, to discourage myself
from the hour in which I was born.
Extraordinary, not to play out
the role of one who just arrived.

16.
you have constructed your house
you have feathered your birds
you have struck at the wind
with your own bones
you have finished alone
what nobody could begin.

17.
Days in which a distant word seizes me.
I go by those days like a sleepwalker,
transparent. The beautiful robot sings
to herself, enchanting herself, she tells
to cases and things: rigid thread nests
where I dance for myself, I cry for myself
in numerous funerals. (She is alive in her
burning mirror, her cold bonfire delay,
her mystical element, her fornication with
names growing alone, pale at night.)

18.
like a poem aware of
the silence of things
you speak to shut me out.

19.
yet I see the eyes
I know are in my inked eyeballs

20.
she says she does not understand about the panic of the death of love
she says she is afraid of the death of love
she says love is death is the panic
she says death is the panic is love
she says she doesn't understand

21.
I have been conceived so many
times, I have suffered doubly
in the memory of the here and there

22.
in the nighttime
a looking glass foe the little, dead girl
a looking glass of ash

23.
a glance into the sewers
can be a conjuring of the world
the defiance requires looking at a rose
until your eyes are destroyed

24.
these threads entomb shade
requiring them to give reason to their silence
these threads unify this gaze with wailing

25.
a hole in the nighttime
hurriedly invaded by the angel

26.
when the fortress of nighttime
lights up its beauty
we will play the looking glasses
until our countenances croon like idols

27.
a flicker of dawn on the flowers
abandoning me, intoxicated on nothingness and lilac
colored sunlight
intoxicated with torpor and predestination

28.
you move away from these names,
names that spin out the silence of things into thread

29.
Here we are alive with one hand upon our necks.
Those who were bringing forth the rains, weaving
words with the anguish of beggary already
knew that nothing is possible. That is why in
their devotions there was the babble of hands in
love with the fog.

30.
in this fascinating blizzard
in rain the requiem of wings
in this memory, these watery fingers of fog

31.
It is a ending of these eyes, a cursing not to
free them. They feed on clocks outside and
blooms born of deceit. With our eyes
shut as a tormented truly too large too
large to bear under we must play the mirrors
until undone words magically speak themselves.

32.
In the scourged meridian where the sleeping woman
eats up her midnight heart slowly.

33.
at times
maybe one time
I will depart without staying behind
I will depart like the one who turned away

34.
the little traveler
dying, explaining her own death
to the wise nostalgic animals
visiting her warm carcass

35.
Life, life of mine, let yourself fall, let yourself feel
agony, life of mine, let yourself be bound to fire,
to raw silences, to green rocks in nighttime's
house of , let yourself fall and feel this agony,
my life of mine.

36.
in the cage of time
the sleeper looks into her lonely eyes
wind bringing to her
the faint response of shaking leaves.

37.
far beyond any outlawed equator
there rests a mirror for our sad reflections.

38.
This apologetic song, my defense behind these poems:
this song that denies me, silences me.

(ATTENTION FRIENDS: ALWAYS CALL FIRST TO VERIFY VENUE)

There are always poetic things to do in Columbus, OH and Chicago, IL but what about here in the middle part of this mitten-like state? It is a good question so if you have any events that need a shout, drop me a line. Until then, here it is (ta-da!): Zachary's December Calendar of Third Coast Poetry Events …

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1

Chicago, IL Radio WHPK-FM, 88.5 Mhz. Poetry & Its Music International presents poetry and interviews with Richard Fammereé as heard throughout the South Side of Chicago, on the first and third Thursdays of the month at 3:00 PM featuring published poets, venue hosts, spoken word artists, and more.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6

Eastpointe, MI Open Mic Poetry Readings every Monday @ Wired Frog, 21145 Gratiot Ave. 810-498-9500.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6

Ann Arbor, MI A2Slam, as they apparently call themselves, will hold an open Slam at the Heidelberg. Their flyer reads: Qualifying Slam to Compete for Ann Arbor at iWPS in 2006. The feature poet is Roger Bonair-Agard.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8

Grand Rapids, MI Poetry Night @ The Moose Cafe, + (Free Massages!) 10:30 PM, Aquinas College.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8

Ann Arbor, MI 7 PM book signing party of In Drought Time; stories of small town and rural life presented through art and poetry at Shaman Drum Bookshop. The book blurb reads: The nineteen writers in the anthology include such well loved poets as: Thomas Lynch, Laura Kasischke, Richard Tillinghast, Keith Taylor, Jay Stielstra, and Marijo Grogan. Located at 311-315 South Street.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8

Ann Arbor, MI Poetry Reading! 7-9:30 pm, in Rackham Auditorium. This year’s 5 th annual event is brought to you by the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project and the Neutral Zone, 826michigan, and the Ann Arbor Book Festival with proceeds to benefit Washtenaw Literacy. Featured performers will be Roger Bonair-Agard, 1999 National Poetry Slam Champion and Patrick Rosal, author of “Uprock, Headspin, Scramble and Dive”. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for general public; $4 and $8 in advance. For advance tickets, call Jeff Kass @ 734-223-7443 .

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11

Lansing, MI Join the Nu Poets at Gregory's Ice and Smoke @ 7:30 PM. Doors open at 7:30 PM, 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM. Contact: Rina (!) 517 372 8466. and www.tncp.net.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13

Kalamzaoo, MI Poetry Slam! + Tracey's 35th B-day Bash and $50 Slam @ Kraftbrau Brewery, 402 East Kalamazoo Avenue. 8:30pm - $3. All part of K'zaoo's Slam Team.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13

St. Joseph, MI The Box Factory for the Arts, 1101 Broad Street, St. Joseph, MI. Their flier reads: "Join us for the Poetry Factory Open Mic every third Tuesday of the month. Admission is $4 for audience members, or free for readers. Please bring original poetry to read, as well as a published poem from someone else that you admire. If you are planning on reading, please arrive between 7:00 and 7:30 to sign up." Sponsored by The Poetry Factory. (269) 983-3688 &

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14

Lansing, MI 4 Against the Wall's First Book Signing (!) @ the Creole Gallery, 1218 Turner St. in Lansing's historic Old Town. The reading will begin at 7:30 pm. A donation is suggested (w/ a sliding scale from $3-$5). Refreshments are free. Parking is available on the street or in the large parking lot on the south side of the intersection of Turner St. and Grand River Avenue. (Turner Street is just 1 block east of the Grand River in Lansing's Old Town.)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20

Lansing, MI Open Mic hosted by: Tim Lane (!) Magdalena's Tea House, 2006 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing. $5 cover, sign up at door. (517) 487-1822.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28

Jackson, MI Poetry at the Center, The Cottage Retreat Center. 7:00 PM. Their flyer reads: Poetry at the Center is an important program of The Cottage Retreat Center as it relates to the mission of the retreat center to nurture the whole person by providing events that relate to body, mind and spirit. Offering poetry readings has the potential to bring healing and wholeness to all members of our community regardless of economic or social profiles. The fee for these monthly poetry gatherings is $4.00. Refreshments are served. Pre-registration is not necessary. For more information call: 517-796-5670

If you happen to be driving in Northern Michigan and need a good book shop, try some of these locales. They might not all still be in buisness, so if you know any gossip or know a book store I left out, please drop me a line. Thank you.

Bridge Street Book Shop. 407 Bridge Street, Charlevoix, 49720. 231-547-7323.

McLean & Eakin Booksellers. 307 E. Lake St. Petoskey, 49770. 231/347-1180. .

Leelanau Books. 109 North Main, Leland, 49654. 231-256-7111.

Booktique. 125 S Cedar St., Manistique, 906-341-8288.

Beatitudes Book Store. 421 River St., Manistee, 231-398-7961.

Diane J Phillips Book Seller. 2390 Old Mackinaw Rd., Cheboygan. 231-597-8290.

Log Mark Books. 334 N Main St., Cheboygan, 231-627-6531.

Beaver Boat-Tique. P. O. Box 98, 26150 Main Street, Beaver Island, 49782-0098. 231-448-2584.

The Island Bookstore. Main St. Centre, PO Box 1298, Mackinac Island, 888-421-READ. . Open May through October.

Horizon Books 243 E. Front St., Traverse City, 49684. 231-946-7290 or 800-587-2147.

Higher Self Bookstore. 328 E Front St. Traverse City. 49684. 231-941-5805.

Interlochen Bookstore. Interlochen Plaza, Interlochen, 231-276-6733.

Book Warehouse. 3639 Marketplace Circle, Traverse City, 49684. 231-941-3800.

Open Mind Books. 223 Ashmun St. Sault Ste Marie

North Wind Books. 437 Quincy Street, Hancock, 49930. 906-487-7217.

Second Story Bookstore. 213 E Hughitt St., Iron Mountain, 906-779-1360.

Saturn Booksellers. 133 W. Main St. Gaylord. 989-732-8899.

Canterbury Book Store. 908 Ludington St., Escanaba, 906-786-0751.

Snowbound Books. 118 N. Third St., Marquette, 49855. 906-228-4448.

Sweet Violets Feminist Bookstore. 413 North St. Marquette, 49855. 616-954-0550.

Chapter Two. 523 N 3rd St., Marquette, 906-226-0559.

Now, all of you who actually have a copy of a 1st edition, 1st printing of a Faber and Faber (1965) Ariel by Sylvia Plath or an autographed Ted Hughes edition of his Janos Csokits translations (reading: “To Janos / from Ted / April 1967” … at a mere $12,995) raise your hand.

I thought so.

The rest of us should get our walking boots on and head over to Jett W. Whitehead's Rare Books (1412 Center Ave. Bay City, MI. 989-892-0719) email: .

It might not be the only Modern Poetry Bookstore (flyer reads: First Editions! Chapbooks! Broadsides!) but it probably has the best selection in Michigan.

Some people say they have bits of verse or TV jingles that have stayed with them all their adult lives.

When I was a small child I spent two summers in Italy on archaeological digs with my parents at the Tuscan fortified farmhouse of Spinocchia, in the foothills between Sienna and Florence. Yes, I was too young to learn any Italian … except I could say, for some bizarre reason, cinquecento coppa creama, grazie ("500 cups of ice cream, thanks" — yes?) This phrase has stayed with me for the last twenty-five odd years.

Not that I have ever used this phrase that often.

All I can assume is the brain works in some mighty strange ways.

The Mexican poet, essayist and translator Octavio Paz wrote in Alejandra Pizarnik's introduction to Árbol de Diana, "[the book] does not conatin a single false detail."¹ These were, Paz demanded, Pizarnik's finest poems. That might be true.

What I find interesting about Árbol de Diana is that even though the sections are nebulous, fragmentary and perplex they flow in a direction the poet wished to take us. So much of modern flow of consciousness poetics seems to lack that; or to be kinder, many poets seem to forget they have an audience to attend to. Bassnett writes:

Octavio Paz has commented that the role of the writer and that of the translator are fundamentally different: the writer, he claims, fixes the signs of language into a form that is perfect and unchangeable. The task of the translator is then to free those fixed and frozen signs, to liberate them and allow them to reshape themselves in another language" (page 9-10)

I am laboring to follow Pizarnik's original path, her train of original thought, you might say.² I believe it is that originality that must make or break a poem. I do not agree that every combination of words creates meaning in the same way I do not agree that narration in poetry is a sign of the Bourgeoisie (but there has been much arguing that it has). To that I say: hahaho, little thinkers! Here is a poem that combines both, I believe. Perhaps. We shall see when we are done.

This is sections #19 through # 27. There are 38 sections all told in the poem. Translating is a slow art, even if I do not understand everything I am bringing into English. Still, the ride is interesting.

1. From the 2002 Introduction of: Exchanging lives: poems and translations. Susan Bassnett & Alejandra Pizarnik. Leeds: Peepal Tree, page 6. [back]
2. I do not believe every poem, especially work I have seen in the last ten years or so, started out with path, purpose or an original center (or perhaps I am too poor a reader to follow it). If working on Pizarnik's poetry has taught me anything it is that it is impossible to sabotage today's so-called "Plebeian Thinker" by today's so-called "Radical;" since yesterday's Rebel has now become today's Dominant Voice; since the title "Formalist," once an honor, is now used as a curse, as if to say, "You Vulgarian," (almost like L-word, "You Liberal," was a curse in the 1990s) — all of this — simply shows how fast styles and fads climax and then fade away [back]

Which famous, dead, white poet are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Here is something laboring under the burden of potential; Quizilla's Which Famous, Dead, White Poet Are You? allows you to pick from nine poets, all very Anglo, and very beloved by the Canon. You take a "test," tally your score and are told you are either Homer, ee cummings, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Bill Shakespeare, Sylvia "the oven" Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Lord Byron. This would be a neat quiz if there were a broader choice to select from.

My quiz results read as follows: You are Lord Byron! Quite the Ladies' man, Byron wrote during the early 19th century. He was born with a deformity, and much of his life was spent with a sense of urgency, trying to suck up as much life as he could to make up for his own insecurities. He was a bisexual and died very young of fever. Ah, to suck up life … through a straw, no doubt.

To my best knowledge, there have been only two full translations of Alejandra Pizarnik's Árbol de Diana; that is, Graziano (1987) and Bassnett (2002). Now I shall add my version of The Tree of Diana to the mix.

I am so much more comfortable with the ancient religions than I am with the modern ones. Pizarnik seems so too. It is the goddess Diana, the face on the other side of the mirror, the shadowy "other" she keeps searching for. The Encyclopedia Mythica has this to say about Diana:

Originally a goddess of fertility … [Diana] was worshipped mainly by women as the giver of fertility and easy births. Under Greek influence she was equated with Artemis and assumed many of her aspects. Her name is possibly derived from 'diviana' ("the shining one"). She is portrayed as a huntress accompanied by a deer. Diana was also the goddess of the Latin commonwealth.

Never mind how difficult this poem is to translate. Never mind the psychological borders one must cross in order to begin to understand what it is Pizarnik attempts to communicate. One must start by listening. Slavoj Zizek compares Pizarnik's poem with Plato's Theory of the Cave, concluding¹:

… Recall Nietzsche's complaint in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, 5): "Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?" Is this complaint about the difficulty of teaching people how to listen not ambiguous? Does it mean that it is difficult to learn to listen with one's eyes, or that it is simply difficult to learn to truly listen? In other words, if we follow Wagner's Tristan (who, while dying, shouts: "I see her /Isolde's/ voice"!) and accept, as one of the definitions of modern art, that one has to listen to it with eyes, does this mean that one can truly hear (hear the silence, the silent Message-Thing covered up by the chatter of words) only with one's eyes? Is, consequently, modern painting (as it is indicated already by Munch's Scream) not a "sound of silence", the visual rendering of the point at which words break down? And, incidentally, this is also how the critique of ideology (whose Platonic origins one should unabashedly admit) functions: it endeavors to smash our ears (hypnotized by the ideology's siren song) so that we can start to hear with our eyes (in the mode of theoria).

This is only the first eighteen stanzas of the poem. I will conclude the rest tomorrow when I have more time. Still, how ahead of her time was Pizarnik? Or perhaps I should say, how easy would she be able to slide into our conversations, our discourse, had we let her in? Compare all this with a quote from Gina Franco, who writes in her blog:

The kids are watching Labyrinth. Am noticing this little turn of phrase (gaze?) for the first time:

"Your eyes can be so cruel
Just as I can be so cruel"

What the eyes I. "I can't live within you."

Yes, I should conclude this as follows: what curious orbs, smash our ears so that the ancient primal force can be let in, so we can start to hear once again.

I should.

1. The translation of this on-line essay is not mine, so I did not bother to "clean" it up, rather I found the translation itself a curious tool in and of itself [back]

My brother Eli, his wife Mary and Baby Ivan have just left for the Detroit Airport. It is raining. I have left Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juilet Overture-Fantasy on endless CD playback. I love that music right now. It is dramatic, brassy, cocky, alive while so much of our 21st Century art tries to mute those emotions, to be demure, to be fragmented, to find so little joy in the song. Where does this writing lead us? Alejandra Pizarnik asks the reader. She answers: To blackness, to the sterile, to the fragmented.

But am I being fair? Fragments and sequences, however, are all around us. It mght be said when this life is all over I was much more a formalist in my tastes than anything else, perhaps. It is too early to know. I do not mind a rough ride, per se, but I do mind those who have nothing to say but say it extraordinarily taking up my time. Fragments, I suspect, have the tendancy to allow such brillance. I have stood corrected before, though. The wonderful Ruth Ellen Kocher writes in her introduction to Natural Bridge:

The concept of parts is a writer’s concept. We are all about piecing. And as much as we piece, and assemble, and put together, and weave, we dissect, we disassemble, we destroy, and obliterate. We cannot write without everything going to pieces and then, again, becoming whole. There is, at some point, a stasis, perhaps the type Frost referred to, maybe more than a ‘stay against confusion,’ an actual stasis within it, when we simply halt our process of building and tearing down, fragmenting and making whole, fraying to bits and reassembling—and at this moment of stasis, we find at least a moment of pause, of culmination, of finishing. Without some process of fragmentation, we cannot write or complete anything.

And here I am transalting Pizarnik, her Fundamental Stone, which is both fragmented and part of her larger Infernal Music (1971), written a year before she comitted suicide, would seem to prove me wrong. Elizabeth Zeiss-Banks, writing in Images of Melancholy and Mourning states:

Another image that arises in … Pizarnik’s compositions is that of a hostile object or person inhabiting the subject, a situation, which, as we will see below, is symptomatic of melancholy … These objects, (the melody, the wind), physically invade the subject’s body. The most dramatic example of this phenomenon appears in Piedra fundamental, where the poetic voice says: y he sabido dónde se aposenta aquello tan otro que es yo, que espera que me calle para tomar posesión de mí y drenar y barrenar los cimientos, los fundamentos….

Which I translated as: and I have known where that other which is me rests, which longs that I will be still so as to take custody of me and drain and drill my groundwork, my foundation, all that is hostile from within me, all that conspires to take custody of my wasteland … So how do I stand on all this? While I personally might hunger for poetry that is dramatic, brassy, cocky; at some level I am surprised the Language School of Poetics has not championed Pizarnik more. Her broken style, her obsession with where language in itself could take her, her humor, her poetic mania, all rival much that is being written today.

My brother, Eli, and myself at my folk's house, November 26.

This poem is part of the miscellaneous verse collected in the "1971-72″ section of Pizarnik's Obras Completas (page 243); though La Muerte y la Muchacha (Schubert) is dated November 1970, a couple of months after I was born. It is interesting that she was working with the concept of music and death as a combined force, a trigger for killing. She writes in a fragment of an ode to Janis Joplin: "you did well in dying/ for that reason I will speak to you,/ for that reason I will trust in a young monster" (page 242). Young monster, indeed.

How can three lines cause me so much stress, dither, pang? I have been struggling with this poem since Monday when I first discovered it. At first I thought the problem was me. My Spanish is, of course, muy malo. There was nothing I could do, it seemed, to render it into intelligible verse. Alejandra's line: debajo estoy yo seemed beyond my powers to comprehend. The, in the introduction to her translations Exchanging Lives Bassnett (2002) notes:

One of Pizarnik's poems [Solo un Nombre] is famously untranslatable, a name poem that is effectively her epitaph in three lines … Not only does her name resist translation, so also do the three words of the middle line. Should it read literally: "below am I" or conversationally "I am underneath" or more pompously "I lie below," which would bring in the double meaning of "lie"? None of these renderings is adequate, for the poem works because each word is so perfectly placed and sounds so right that no translator could do justice to the piece. (page 9)

This makes sense in context, the perplexity, flow, fermentation of Pizarnik's poetic philosophy being abundantly clear in these three lines. Martínez, writing in Salgado's anthology, comments: "the experience of fluidity came to be the hallmark of her life, one that estranged her from her own self and language and forever defeated her dream of an improbable grounding center" (page 296). Finally, I decided not to worry about this middle line. Stress, dither, pang will be my end, I think. Bassnett chooses to translate debajo estoy yo as "lying below." I do not think my line is perfect, but what is, after all?

Hey, you Lansing people, on Wednesday, December 14, we shall be having a book signing and release party for Four Against the Wall at Creole Gallery:

The Creole Gallery is host to a unique event: a book release reading and signing for “Four Against the Wall,” a collection of poems from four Lansing poets, published this month by iUniverse. This collection showcases not only the old and beloved work of Zachary Chartkoff, Sam Mills, Robert Rentschler and Ruelaine Stokes, but also a record of a spirited roundtable discussion between the poets on the state of poetry — and the oft-times remarkable poetry scene in Lansing — they have witnessed for over thirty years. Poet and former MSU professor F. Richard Thomas has written a forward to the book.

The work of these four poets, both together and separately, have delighted audiences over several decades in a city that is simultaneously factory town, university town, state capitol — and hothouse and sanctuary for poetry.

The poets will each read a selection of their poems from the book, beginning at 7:30 P.M. Copies of the book will be available for sale, and the authors will sign copies after the reading. Refreshments — wine and cheese, naturally — will be provided. The event is free and open to the public at the Creole Gallery, 1218 Turner Street in Old Town, Lansing. Ample free parking is available, both on the street and in the city parking lot on Grand River at the foot of Turner Street.

Oh, happy days!

The title poem from La última inocencia/ "The Last Innocence" (1956). Bassnett (2002) translates it as "Final Innocence." However, perhaps because I have been listening to the Last Exile, vol.2 soundtrack (2003) all day there is dread, tension, conflict in the word "Last." Last Exit to Brooklyn. Last Temptation of the Christ. Last Man Standing. Either way, I like the way it sounds.

The poem starts off by separating the total sense of "self-ness," wholeness, union, found in western civilization's concept of "boy and soul." Martínez (2003) writes:

For the author, meaning endlessly receded into the horizon, as it were, just as her sense of self relentlessly altered under the impact of potent drives that appeared to encompass both language and the unconscious … Thus, the experience of fluidity came to be the hallmark of her life, one that estranged her from her own self and language and forever defeated her dream of an improbable grounded center. (page 283).

I translated "partir" first as "uncoupling," then simply as "split," rather than "leaving," as Bassnett does. I do this for two reasons; "uncouple" has an intimate sense of estrangement, violence, being pulled apart to it, especially if we are talking about an idea so grounded in our philosophy as to suggest the rupture of the links between corpus and anima. Once uncoupled, then the self breaks into fragments. Thus, a word like "split" can be played out in both its literal definition, "to break, burst, or rip apart with force; rend," or its slang connotation, "to depart from; leave." Either way, it gives this short poem an air of sinister predestination to it: little traveler, Pizarnik seems to be saying to herself, we have no choice, let us begin!

This week I have been ill. Ill. So very, very ill.¹ The end result is that doing things like so-called "blogging" and so-called "thinking" have been a bit of a challenge.

And where were you with the home-made soup and extra tissues? Leaving me here with a crusty nose and blood shot eyes … Shame! Shame! Shame!

Actually, my real question is: should I be amused? suffused? bemused? confused? that my name is no longer at the top of my own blog's "search string-thingie" that allows me to see what words or phrases other people found my blog under?

Yes, for a while it looked like I was living an Onion.com joke: Zacharychartkoff.com Will Never Be Accused Of Having Too Little Information About Zachary Chartkoff … oh, haha! You wags!

But this is no longer the case. It turns out that my translation of Garcia Lorca's la monja gitana/ "the gypsy nun" is much more popular than myself. Imagine that! Especially in Ireland, where most of the hits originated from. All I can think is that there are several grateful Irish students somewhere saying, "Dude, not only did he post his own translation, but he, like, posted his own criticism as well! Dude, I cut and pasted that into my essay, like, there was no tomorrow. Dude, like, what a sucker!"

Sam sent me today's Rob Brezsny horoscope. It looks a little, after cut and paste, like this:

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): As you slip into astrological prime time, you'll be shedding inhibitions and becoming more forthright about being yourself. Secrets that were inaccessible to you until now will finally reveal themselves, spurring you to peak performances. Exciting insights you were too timid to own before will erupt, empowering you to express creativity that has been dormant. There's just one small downside: Your rise to the next level could attract the disapproval of people who prefer the safety of mediocrity. My advice? Tell them to go to hell — in the most tactful possible way, of course. (P.S. For inspiration, keep in mind this idea from Friedrich Nietzsche: "Those who were dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.")

But what about those who are not dancing? just too ill? When you are Ill. ILL! Yes, it's humourous little events like this that spur you onto peak performances … whatever those are. Binge and purge. Binge and purge.

1. Actually, I just like the way that sounds and if sung right, someone, somewhere, just might be able to set a wicked conga-line into motion [back]

The poem Canto from La última inocencia/ "The Last Innocence" (1956) would be considered a ditty if ditties were this dark, this wrapped up in death, catastrophe, torture. Martínez, writing in Salgado's anthology, analyzes Pizarnik's obsession concerning death:

As attested by her poetry, death haunted her in the image of a female in many guises inhabiting a forbidden garden, some mysterious forest, a perilous riverbank, or the other side of the mirror: symbols of powerful unconscious drives forever dismantling her identity and unsettling her sense of univocal self, while threatening to thrust her into the abyss of definitive silence. (page 283)

As you might be able to tell, something is lost in my translation. The rhyme the poet pulls off in "miedo/ tiempo," I was unable to carry through into English. Plus, I dropped "the" from the first two lines, simply rendering "el tiempo," "el miedo," as time and fear; "the time," "the fear" seemed clunky to my ear.

A few hours sleep and then more translations. Z. Nelly Martínez, writing in Salgado's anthology of Spanish American poets, notes that before Pizarnik committed suicide, she left behind, "a few words scribbled on a slate that same month, reiterating her desire to go nowhere 'but the bottom,' [which] sum up her lifelong aspiration as a human being and a writer" (page 283)¹ That might be true, I do not yet know enough about Pizarnik to comment. However, in this short poem, Origen, we witness a poetic philosophy that, from all accounts, Alejandra will return to. To continue with Martínez's quote:

The compulsion to head for the 'bottom' or 'abyss' points to her desire to surrender to nothingness in an ultimate experience of ecstasy and poetic fulfillment in which life and art would be fused, albeit at her own risk … (ibid.)

Here we have the poet declaring the need to save the wind by going back into the natural world and pain in order to join with Los pájaros queman el viento, "birds that burn the wind," the creative element. It will be interesting to see if this theme reappears and under what form it takes.

1. Salgado, María A. (ed.)Modern Spanish American poets. First series. Detroit: Gale (2003) [back]

I have finished translating Garcia Lorca for now. He is always a joy, but there are over a dozen collected works of his poetry in English and even as I labored with my beloved English-Spanish Dictionary, I wondered: does the world really need yet another translation of Federico? So I wandered out yesterday and went to the Michigan State University library and discovered Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentine poet, who needs to be read. Wikipedia has this to say about her:

[She was] born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents on April 29, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A year after entering the department of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published her first book of poetry, La tierra más ajena (1955) … From 1960 to 1964 [she] lived in Paris … Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia (1956) and Las adventuras perdidas (1958) … She died in Buenos Aires on September 25, 1972 of a self-induced overdose of seconal.

It is from La última inocencia/ "The Last Innocence" (1956) that I have begun working from. Looking over the Internet I discovered that while several poets speak highly of her and the Princeton University Library has a Special Collection of her letters, there is very little of her opus in circulation. Strange, considering the slender, psychological, surrealistic nature of her verse.

Of course, I am an amateur translator. I do not hold that my translations are the end-all or be-all of Pizarnik's work. What I can hope for, however, is that one day someone who is a master poeta del español will read this and say: "these poems need to be released from their cages." Until then, I welcome you along for the ride.

The last poem of the Gypsy Ballads, is a retelling of the biblical rape of Thamar by her half-brother, Amnón. This is a highly problematic poem, for what Garcia Lorca does here, I argue, is to present us with a sympathetic view of Amnón, that it was his overpowering sexual desire that caused him to rape Thamar. Federico is not the first or last person to argue that sexuality has a dark side, that it can and will take on a barbarous, even suicidal persona; however, by entering into the debate by claiming Amnón just couldn't "help himself," that Thamar's own beauty "forced" her half-brother to violate her, Lorca is simply presenting a tired old chestnut that has been used since time-immortal; in short, that there is no such thing as free will, that men are simply slaves to their own libidos. As the Swedish say in such a situation, "Skitsnack!" Loughran (1994) notes:

Thamar and Amnón. Daughter and son of King David, half brother and sister. Lorca's treatment of the well known incestuous rape from II Samuel is embellished with other events form the same book of the Bible: King David's espying Bathsheba from his palace walls at evening and subsequent adultery, the arrows shot at Uriah the Hittite from off the walls of Rabbah, the flight on muleback of Amnon's brothers from the house of Absalom, and the rendering of garments by David and his household upon learning the the divine retribution for his transgressions with regard to Bathsheba and Uriah had come to pass in the bedrooms of his own palace, as promised … The collage that Lorca presents us with the appearance of all being parts of the single, main event: the luring of Thamar by Amnón into his bed chambers by feigning an illness, the taking of her virginity, and his subsequent abandonment of her. 75. Bastions. The Spanish "cubos" can be translated as cubes, buckets or the rounded bastions/ buttresses that strengthen ancient fortress or city walls and provided advantageous places from which to shoot or hurl projectiles at the enemy. Metaphorically, Thamar is under siege. 105. Harp. King David was noted for his playing of the harp or lyre. (pages 71-72)

If we compare the imagery of Preciosa y el aire with this poem, we see certain repeating symbols, but such a difference! First is Garcia Lorca's use of a rose, both opened and closed, to represent female genitalia. The description of Preciosa's "blue rose," is coy to the point of being obscure. However, Thamar's rosa encerrada "locked up rose," is brutally forced open to the point it is dripping blood. In retrospect, there is now a sense of voyeurism to both poems the reader might feel uncomfortable in sharing.

There are also several questions Federico does not answer. For example, early in the poem Thamar is described as being naked on the rooftops, but when she visits her half-brother, she is wearing clothing of some sort. My dictionary simply translates camisa as "shirt," but it Havard calls it "gown," Loughran and Humphries, "blouse," and Kirkland simply uses "underthings." I chose the term "intimate things," partially because I am not sure what the true definition of the term is, and partially because (in context with the plot of the poem) it can refer to both Thamar's underwear and genitalia. Also, what are we to make with this last poem? It is sinister, toxic, apocalyptic in its views, both as a comment between siblings (and by default all of us) and as a closing remark on the book. What started as a dark fairy tale of Old Man Wind chasing a Gypsy Girl (but thwarted) turns into the literal rape of a girl at the hands of an intimate. What I find telling by others who bother any analysis on this poem is not that they are horrified by rape, but that the importance they place is that it is an incestuous rape. Havard (1990) writes: "Incest represents the ultimate sexual offense and was central to Freud's discussion of tribalism in Totem and Taboo" (160). Ultimate sexual offense? Or worse, in my opinion, is an attempt to simply distance the act via metaphor. Again, Loughran writes: "It is no mere coincidence here that Apollo, god of the sun, and Diana, goddess of the moon, were brother and sister in mythology … [and] throughout the piece there is a constant 'confusion' between the virginal moon (Diana) and Thamar and between the coming sun (Apollo) and Amnón" (xxvii). Perhaps the act of rape is masked by this approach but it makes the poem no less beastly in what it implies.

The last of the three poems based on a saint, San Gabriel (Sevilla), appears whimsical at first glance, but there is a sinister quality to the whimsy. Two figures parade their way through the poem, Gabriel, saint and archangel, who pays a visit to Annunciatión de los Reyes, a gypsy woman, to tell her she will give birth to a mythical son. It was, in fact, Gabriel in biblical stories that tells Mary of her Immaculate Conception. Garcia Lorca simply updates the fairy tale by relocating it to Seville and changing Mary into a poor gypsy woman. We find Annunciatión already pregnant when she makes her appearance, bien lunada "full as a half-moon." Loughran (1994) notes:

Saint Gabriel. Thanks to Ramsden we know that it is the Virgin of the Kings (not St. Gabriel) who is the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Seville. In this ballad she becomes Annunciatión of the Kings, who makes her entrance at the beginning of the second stanza and is appropriately renamed after the event in progress. Kings (Reyes) is a common gypsy surname. 33. The Giralda. No doubt Seville's most famous landmark, a mozarabric prayer tower crowned with a renaissance belfry and statue that serves as weather vane. It is attached to Seville's massive gothic cathedral. 69. Ladder. The saints and the purified ascended to heaven via Jacob's Ladder. 71. Everlastings. Flowering plants with small buds that retain their freshness in appearance indefinitely after being cut. For this reason it is a common grave-side flower and is used in making funeral wreaths in Spain. (page 38)

However, taken with the darker tones of how Spain treats its gypsies in Garcia Lorca's collection, by turning the Christ-figure into a gypsy child, Federico seems to have a more sinisterly ironic purpose behind the poem. After all, in such poems Romance de la Guardia Civil Espanola where the Virgin and Saint Joseph are set upon by Civil Guards and Muerte de Antonito el Camborio where a Christ-like figure is killed, Spain seems to be doing everything in its power to martyr the gypsies.