I thought I would talk today about “occasional poems,” poems written—or sung—for a particular occasion—like a praise song, the act of celebration; or an elegy, memorializing loss or mutability, the transience of all worldly things. And the framing of the occasion, occasion as a pretext or context for a poem. Usually a lyric poem, so a shorter poem, not an epic, expressing something like a state of mind.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) the poet, artist, natural scientist & politician, but we’re thinking of him as a poet at the moment, said that occasional poems are the highest kind of poetry and, “All my poems are occasional poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” (Goethe to Eckermann)
In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Wallace Stevens wrote, “The poem is the cry of its occasion.”
Let’s keep that in mind.
I also wanted to read from Dante, I always want to read from Dante, but also because his poem The Divine Comedy opens on Good Friday, two days ago. In the year 1300, that is. That is, Dante, who was born in the year 1265, in Florence, Italy, set the poem, which he had not called The Divine Comedy, just The Comedy, in the year 1300, his 35th year, because it’s the apex of the arc of three score and ten, the seventy years of human life given to us in the Bible. One doesn’t think of it as an occasional poem but why not?
It begins:
Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una
selva oscura
che la diritta via
era smarrita
No, I’m not going to teach Italian today. But here’s a translation of these three lines:
In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood astray
Gone from the path direct….
La diritta via. This translation is by the Reverend Henry Francis Cary, one of the earliest English translators of The Divine Comedy. The first section of the poem, The Inferno, was published in 1805, the entirety in 1814 at Cary’s own expense. Cary titled the whole poem as The Vision. Esteemed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it went on to take its place among the great translations. And there have come into being more than 200 translations since then.
Writer and sound artist Caroline Bergvall has collated 47 translations of this, the opening stanza, from the British Library and made a spectacular sound piece called Via. Translators use different words for one word in a different tongue. For instance in Italian the word “via” means “street,” like Via Veneto, Veneto Street. But for “via,” translators use “path,” “road,” “way” and so on. Translators use different words and also make syntactical shifts. Different translators have their perspectives, their own felt mindsets, for rhythm, meaning, tone, gesture and so on, and act on them.
From Caroline Bergvall’s “Via” here are the first three minutes on soundcloud:
The Divine Comedy– Pt. 1 Inferno – Canto I – (1–3)
Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una
selva oscura
che la diritta via
era smarrita
1.Along the journey
of our life half way
I found myself again
in a dark wood
wherein the straight
road no longer lay
(Dale, 1996)
2.At the midpoint in
the journey of our life
I found myself astray
in a dark wood
For the straight path
had vanished.
(Creagh and
Hollander, 1989)
3.halfover the
wayfaring of our life,
Since missed the
right way, through a night-dark wood
Struggling, I found
myself.
(Musgrave, 1893)
4.Half way along the
road we have to go,
I found myself
obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I
knew I had lost the way.
(Sisson, 1980)
5.Halfway along the
journey of our life
I woke in wonder in a
sunless wood
For I had wandered
from the narrow way
(Zappulla, 1998)
6.halfwayon our
life’s journey, in a wood,
From the right path
I found myself
astray.
(Heaney, 1993)
7.Halfway through our
trek in life
I found myself in
this dark wood,
miles away from the
right road.
(Ellis, 1994)
8.Half-way upon the
journey of our life,
I found myself within
a gloomy wood,
By reason that the
path direct was lost.
(Pollock, 1854)
9.half-way upon the
journey of our life|
I roused to find
myself within a forest
In darkness, for the
straight way had been lost.
(Johnson, 1915)
10.In middle of the
journey of our days
I found that I was in
a darksome wood
the right road lost
and vanished in the maze
(Sibbald, 1884)
11.In midway of the
journey of our life
I found myself within
a darkling wood,
Because the rightful
pathway had been lost.
(Rossetti, 1865)
12.In our life’s
journey at its midway stage
I found myself within
a wood obscure
Where the right path
which guided me was lost
(Johnston, 1867)
13.In the middle of
the journey of our life
I came to myself
In a dark forest
The straightforward
way
Misplaced.
(Schwerner, 2000)
14.In the middle of
the journey of our life I came to
myself in a dark
wood,
for the straight road
was lost
(Durling, 1996)
Bergvall writes, at the close of her voiced piece, “The minutia of writing, of copying out, of shadowing the translators’ voicing of the medieval text, favoured an eery intimacy as much as a welcome distance. My task was mostly and rather simply, or so it seemed at first, to copy each first tercet as it appeared in each published version of the Inferno. To copy it accurately. Surprisingly, more than once, I had to go back to the books to double-check and amend an entry, a publication date, a spelling. Checking each line, each variation, once, twice. Increasingly, the project was about keeping count and making sure. That what I was copying was what was there. Not to inadvertently change what had been printed. To reproduce each translative gesture. To add my voice to this chorus, to this recitation, only by way of this task. Making copy explicitly as an act of copy. Understanding translation in its erratic seriality.”
Writers and translators choose certain words among others that would do just as well. Even if, even when you don’t exactly know the event, what the event is, you’re choosing words and writing them down in a certain order. Then you go back and sometimes change them around because writing is an act, an action that has meaning. Deep meaning. And sometimes you don’t even know what the meaning is until much later.
And speaking of words and meaning, I think about Denise Riley – you might know Denise Riley’s work, some of you – she is an extraordinary poet and philosopher from England. New York Review of Books recently published in one volume two of her books that had been published before now, a book of poetry, Say Something Back, and one a philosophical memoir, Time Lived Without Its Flow. These two stunning books were written on the occasion of her son’s death. Steve Dickison had the good sense to invite her to read at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in March. Maybe some of you watched? On Zoom. Because covid. Otherwise, it couldn’t have happened. The Poetry Center doesn’t have that kind of funding, to bring people over from England for a reading. Denise Riley and Jennifer Soong’s reading for the Poetry Center on Saturday March 20th, 2021, is now up on YouTube.
On a Poetry Society podcast from June 2019, Riley is talking about writing poetry and focusing on “giving the poem its own lead” even if you’re using an “arbitrary scheme,” “some indifferent scheme.” She is talking about her own work, but I felt it could have been mine. Or perhaps yours? She goes on to say that like a jigsaw puzzle you have “edge pieces” and then “the middle starts filling itself in with words that slowly somehow have come round to boxing your own preoccupations where they’re not meant to be” with your “hopes, intentions, compulsions.”
I’ll read one of her poems, a short lyric written on the occasion of the death of her son. Again, the book is called Say Something Back. The poem I’m going to read is “Under the answering sky.”
*
Under the answering sky
I can manage being alone,
can pace out convivial hope
across my managing ground.
Someone might call, later.
What do the dead make of us
that we’d flay ourselves trying
to hear them though they may
sigh at such close loneliness.
I would catch, not my echo,
but their guarantee that this
bright flat blue is a mouth
of the world speaking back.
There is no depth to that blue.
It won’t ‘bring the principle
Of darkness with it,’ but hums
In repose, as radiant static.
*
There is an epigraph in Denise Riley’s book by W. S. Graham, from “Implements in their Places.”
Do not think you have to say
Anything back. But you do
Say something back which I
Hear by the way I speak to you.
*
This saying and the answering back reminded me of my poem “Ongoing,” written on the occasion of the death of a dear friend. It’s in my book, Fate News, from Omnidawn, dedicated to that family friend. When someone dies or goes away, the conversation you are having with that person does not stop. Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for death” comes back around, inside out. My poem “Ongoing” began with the “edge piece,” one word, tumulus, in the last stanza, and worked its way forward, that is, backward. But I’m going to read it from the beginning.
ONGOING
Along the moraine in the Carolinian forest
maples had already begun to turn red
in those days people wrote memory
in books not sticks, singing sometimes
I live in the country, sometimes
I live in town or in a dream
like state, that’s tiger to you, a big
heat wave, many days remaining
until the end of this year, walking
the land, summer grass and spadesful
of earth, a rectangle, sun on it
just that
It’s just that
peridot is
your birthstone
but your
mystical Tibetan
birthstone dating
back over
a thousand
years is
diamond
αδάμας
unbreakable
diamond
cuts through
illusion, atoms
strong covalent bonding
no form
no fear
magma, eruption
compassion
And on that day
from your window
the steel heart
red ratchet and pawl
a fixed arc
chained to the hoist of
the working arm
horizontal jib
on the mast
in the sky
By far
the best
magnolias
seen through a
screen, so many
lasting
so long
carpels tough as nails
surviving ice ages
continental drift
Saffron
rose mallow
worn behind your
left ear
changing and preserving
wrapped in tiger skin
demon slayer
holds its color
even in the hottest
summer days
Sun in rips and starts
ascending ragas
for rippling
winnowing
retting
scutching
heckling
spinning sasheen
to wrap
and swaddle
Woven moonlight
pulled by hand from earth
linen from line
or Nile where
flax grew
exceedingly soft threads
irregular shapes
peculiar as tigers’ patterns
no two stripes alike
Hydrangea
blooms perseverance
breathing unfurling
a block print tiger
alert, incised
by a table
near a drum
on a carpet
revived from
the sealed cave
in Dunhuang
Fine-grained, watertight
catkins, wings, heart-shaped
leaves, silver shadow
will ignite from
the smallest spark
branches rest
during the night
birch bark fragments
found at the site
Did you plant
the ivory silk
lilac, its broad
panicles appearing
in early summer
its bark like
black cherry and
like the wolf willow
part of the olive
family tree?
Two
white-tailed deer
a large brown
moth, a cicada
shedding its skin
the impossibility
of repetition
of one
water lily
on the Credit River
Descending ostinato
in the seventh movement
glass harmonica
cues for the entrance
of a private
performance
morning ascending
catches on the figure of
a feather on an old t-shirt
a city
named for a reed
Tiger runs wild
waning crescent
28% or 29% visible
not many images
illuminated crescent edge
casts long shadows
seen from earth, the moon
getting closer to the sun
can’t be directed
Tumulus
barrow
kurgan
mound, bank
kneeling and arranging
tugging on your breath
hazel poles or stakes
no hill overlooking
the sea, placeholder
filled with treasure
The other morning, I came across this sentence: “A poem is the most efficient form of time travel.” From poet Kevin Young.
I’d better stop here.
David’s class, Sunday April 4, 2021
[written for a visit to his Sunday workshop]
