Richard Jeffrey Newman

I was, actu­ally, hop­ing to post this yes­ter­day, before the chang­ing of the year, which hap­pened some time between 6 and 7 PM, but I was very busy and didn’t get a chance to do it. So let me take this oppor­tu­nity to wish all the Ira­ni­ans I know, fam­ily and friends, and even those I don’t know, soleh noh mob­o­rak (Happy New Year!).

And just like the title says: It is, truly, an aus­pi­cious day offi­cially to announce my new book of trans­la­tions, The Teller of Tales: Sto­ries from Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh, which has been pub­lished by Junc­tion Press. I will be launch­ing the book on Sat­ur­day, March 26^th at Per­sian Arts Festival’s 5^th Annual Arts Fes­ti­val. The book is not yet up on the publisher’s web­site or Ama­zon, but you can order it from Small Press Dis­tri­b­u­tion.

If you’d like to read a sam­ple from the book, Eklek­so­graphia pub­lished Zah­hak: We’d Need to Hear his Mother’s Story; you can read an early ver­sion of the story of Kayu­mars and Hushang in the Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture issue of Arte East Quar­terly that I edited a few years ago; and you can read the story of Jamshid, which includes the ori­gins of Norouz in the Norouz post I wrote last year.

We cel­e­brated last night at my wife’s aunt’s house, which was lovely, and I actu­ally thought I might be cel­e­brat­ing tonight at the United Nations. Last Fri­day, I actu­ally received a per­sonal invi­ta­tion from the Iran­ian mis­sion to the UN to attend an event that the woman to whom I spoke, Zahra, said would be tak­ing place this evening. In 2009, the UN declared Norouz part of humanity’s Intan­gi­ble Cul­tural Her­itage, and the event to which Zahra called to invite me, she said, would include rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all the coun­tries that cel­e­brate it. (The ones listed on the UN site are Azer­bai­jan, India, Iran, Kyr­gyzs­tan, Pak­istan, Turkey and Uzbek­istan, though there might be more.) The invi­ta­tion never arrived, and I have been won­der­ing all week if per­haps Zahra changed her mind and decided not to invite me, though it’s also pos­si­ble, since I can­not find the event on the UN’s cal­en­dar for today, that it was can­celed. I am dis­ap­pointed mostly for my son, for whom it would have been a very cool expe­ri­ence to cel­e­brate Norouz at the UN.

Writ­ten in the 10^th cen­tury by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi (NPR did a fea­ture on him not too long ago), the Shah­nameh (Book of Kings) is the national epic of Iran, telling the nation’s story by recount­ing the tales of its kings, from the first, myth­i­cal king Kayu­mars to Yazdegerd III, who ruled Iran just before the Mus­lim Arab con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury. One of the best loved sto­ries in the Shah­nameh was given the title The Tragedy of Sohrab and Ros­tam by Jerome W. Clin­ton when he pub­lished his trans­la­tion of it in 1987. Ros­tam is a Hercules-like char­ac­ter whose role through­out the epic is to defend Iran and its kings; Sohrab is Rostam’s son, con­ceived with Tah­mine, a princess from one of Iran’s vas­sal king­doms. When Sohrab reaches puberty and dis­cov­ers who his father is, he decides that Ros­tam, the great­est war­rior in the world, should be the ruler of Iran, not Kay Kavus, the king who right­fully sat on the throne at the time. Sohrab sets off with a dual mis­sion, to find his father and to depose Kay Kavus.

Despite his youth, Sohrab is, like his father, a peer­less war­rior and when the Per­sians real­ize that none among them will be able to defeat him, they sum­mon Ros­tam. Ros­tam does not know he has a son and, in what is the most puz­zling aspect of the story, refuses to iden­tify him­self each of the sev­eral times that Sohrab asks who he is. The two war­riors fight three times and, in the end, Ros­tam is vic­to­ri­ous. As Sohrab lies dying, the true iden­ti­ties of the fight­ers are revealed and the story ends on a note of bit­ter sadness.

Matthew Arnold was so moved by this story, that he wrote his own ver­sion, “Sohrab and Rus­tum,” that is rec­og­nized by schol­ars to be an impor­tant turn­ing point in his career as a poet. There are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between Arnold’s ver­sion and the orig­i­nal, though, due largely to the fact that Arnold’s source was most like an inac­cu­rate sum­mary of the tale than an actual translation.

The pro­logue with which Fer­dowsi frames the story of Sohrab and Ros­tam is a med­i­ta­tion on fate. The idea of the just nature of death comes from a form of Zoroas­tri­an­ism which saw death as part of a realm that exists out­side this world, that peo­ple do not have access to, and that con­tains all events that are inher­ent in time and can­not be avoided. Thus, since death comes to every­one, it always comes at the proper time and is, by def­i­n­i­tion, fair and just. This ver­sion of the pro­logue is from Clinton’s trans­la­tion, which I men­tioned above:

What if a wind springs up quite sud­denly,
And casts a green unripened fruit to earth.
Shall we call this a tyrant’s act, or just?
Shall we con­sider it as right, or wrong?
If death is just, how can this not be so?
Why then lament and wail at what is just?
Your soul knows noth­ing of this mys­tery;
You can­not see what lies beyond this veil.
Though all descend to face that greedy door,
For none has it revealed its secrets twice.
Per­haps he’ll like the place he goes to bet­ter,
And in that other house he may find peace.
Death’s breath is like a fiercely rag­ing fire
That has no fear of either young or old.
Here in this place of pass­ing, not delay,
Should death cinch tight the sad­dle on its steed,
Know this, that it is just, and not unjust.
There’s no dis­put­ing jus­tice when it comes.
Destruc­tion knows both youth and age as one,
For noth­ing that exists will long endure.
If you can fill your heart with faith’s pure light,
Silence befits you best, since you’re His slave.
You do not under­stand God’s mys­ter­ies,
Unless your soul is part­ners with some div.
Strive here within the world as you pass through,
And in the end bear virtue in your heart.
Now I’ll relate the story of Sohrab,
And how he came to bat­tle with his father.

From an arti­cle called “The Secrets of Khameini’s Life,” writ­ten by Iran­ian film­maker Mohsen Makhmal­baf. Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Ruler, cares deeply about poetry and what I find inter­est­ing in this brief pro­file is the account of how poetry and pol­i­tics mix at the high­est ech­e­lons of Iran’s author­i­tar­ian, theo­cratic régime. Makhmal­baf, who has been liv­ing in exile in France, has become the Iran­ian opposition’s main spokesman abroad since the dis­puted pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in 2009. He posted the arti­cle to his web­site on Mon­day, Decem­ber 28, 2009. The Eng­lish trans­la­tion from which I have taken this excerpt about Khameini’s inter­est in poetry is from Homylafayette’s blog:

Khamenei’s inter­est in poetry began at a young age and has been main­tained till today. He spent long hours at the poetry asso­ci­a­tion of Mash­had. He has writ­ten some poems. He is delighted when poets write poetry about him and expresses his sat­is­fac­tion through gifts to the poets. Sabze­vari and Ali Moallem, who are among the fawn­ing Mus­lim poets, are con­stantly cor­re­spond­ing with him. It is through them that he is informed of the prob­lems of artists affil­i­ated with the régime. At the start of his Lead­er­ship, he received the poet Mir Shakak, who was a manic depres­sive, sev­eral times. Khamenei became very proud of him­self when Mir Shakak upon say­ing good­bye would say, ‘Seyed zat ziad’ (Mean­ing ‘the honor is great’, which is a col­lo­quial prayer). Khamenei invites poets to his House­hold sev­eral times a year so that they may recite poems in his presence.

At the begin­ning of his pres­i­dency, he asked Akha­van Saless, whom he knew very well, to write a flat­ter­ing poem for the rev­o­lu­tion. Akha­van Saless (NB Mehdi Akha­van Saless, also known as M. Omid) responded, ‘We artists are above the gov­ern­ment, not with it.’ Khamenei was so incensed by this answer that he ordered that he stop being paid. (NB Akha­van Saless worked at the Acad­emy of Artists and Writ­ers). Akha­van Saless became unem­ployed after that. Gheysar Amin­pour has referred to this event in his arti­cle on Akhavan.

Khamenei intensely dis­liked Sham­lou (NB Ahmad Sham­lou, one of the most promi­nent Iran­ian poets of the last cen­tury) and referred to him with hatred. But he never dared arrest and pun­ish him, because he feared taint­ing his own name in his­tory. He has read much about kings who mis­treated poets. In his speeches, he has often cited Lenin’s phrase that if an ide­ol­ogy is not sup­ported by art it will die. He loves poetry so much that if he had not become active in reli­gion and pol­i­tics, he would prob­a­bly have turned to poetry and lit­er­a­ture. How­ever, because of his busy sched­ule, he some­times makes glar­ing mis­takes [in this regard]. Despite claim­ing to be knowl­edge­able about verse, when a young poet recited a poem in his pres­ence, he asked him, ‘Is this poem by you?’ To which the poet responded, ‘No, it is by Sohrab Sepehri.’ (Any school­child knows Sepehri’s work).

This past Tues­day I had the unex­pected plea­sure of attend­ing a poetry din­ner given at the Roger Smith Hotel in honor of the Scot­tish poet Brian John­stone. Every­one who attended, I was told, would be expected to pay for their din­ner with a poem and, indeed, most if not all the peo­ple there were video­taped read­ing the poem they’d brought, most in Eng­lish, but some in other lan­guages as well:

You can see me, actu­ally, in the back­ground of a cou­ple of these brief snip­pets. In lit­er­ary terms, the high­light of the evening, of course, was get­ting to hear Brian read from his new book, The Book of Belong­ing. Here is “Tak­ing a Letter:”

Tak­ing a Letter

The best upper sets do it.
Cole Porter

Miss­ing from work, she explained it away
as a fam­ily affair. To the fam­ily, work was to blame,
wartime post­ing her south, her stenog­ra­phy skills
just what the doc­tor ordered.

But not what he said, prob­ing so deep
that it hurt, blam­ing the thing
on the war, the bad faith it’d induced. But love
had induced her to do it, just like it said in the song.

Friends all said it was wrong, against every code,
but still booked a hos­pi­tal bed, kept her hid­den
when truth swelled the lie. All those let­ters
she’d taken, bar one, left unread.

The short­hand for gone was for good; for adopted
it was for best. The let­ter made it all plain: she won’t see
that baby again. It’s back to pound­ing the keys.
The bell rings — the line ends. Understood??

I also had the plea­sure of meet­ing Eliz­a­beth Tor­res, a found­ing edi­tor of Red Door Mag­a­zine, which you should def­i­nitely check out. It was one of Elizabeth’s four seats at the table that I was invited at the last minute to fill, since the other per­son she was going to invite was unable to make it. Eliz­a­beth is the woman read­ing two peo­ple before me; the woman after her, whose name I am sorry not to remem­ber, was also part of her group; and there were two oth­ers, David Vane­gas, also of Red Door, and a young writer from Argentina named Gabriella. We had a lovely train ride back to Queens, where we all live.

I’d orig­i­nally planned to read one of my more openly polit­i­cal poems becuase I was in the mood, given what’s been hap­pen­ing in Egypt, but I ended up read­ing a poem called “Going Some­where Else,” which I have never read in pub­lic before. I decided to read it because in talk­ing to Brian about the sum­mer I spent in Scot­land in 1985 study­ing con­tem­po­rary Scot­tish lit­er­a­ture at Edin­burgh Uni­ver­sity as part of the Scot­tish Uni­ver­si­ties Inter­na­tional Sum­mer School–and it was just lovely to remem­ber the poets and nov­el­ists I read that sum­mer with some­one who knows the lit­er­a­ture much bet­ter than I do – I learned that Brian knows one of the men who was one of my tutors while I was there, Gavin Wal­lace. Gavin made a big impres­sion on me for a num­ber of rea­sons, not least of which was the fact that he was the first male teacher I’d ever met who openly espoused the impor­tance of read­ing the lit­er­a­ture we were study­ing using a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive. In any event, I decided to read “Going Some­where Else” because of this con­nec­tion, and it turned out to be a good choice. After I was done, Brian turned to me and said, “I never in a mil­lion years would have thought that I’d come to Amer­ica for the first time in my life, to New York City, to a poetry din­ner like this at the Roger Smith Hotel, where I know prac­ti­cally no one, and hear a poem about the Pent­land Hills, where I did my court­ing when I was younger.” Then he turned to his wife, who was sit­ting next to him and said, “That was before I met you, dear.” In any event, here is the poem, which is also the only poem I have ever suc­cess­fully writ­ten in a syl­labic meter:

Going Some­where Else

Sug­gest­ing trees, a voice floats.
The boy is look­ing. Over
his shoul­der, we see the road

run past a barbed wire fence,
but lan­guage I put between
his lips turns his thoughts to the

river, and we turn with him.
A cym­bal crash places rocks
he climbs down to just inside

the line where shadow becomes
sun­light. Still play­ing, the man
with the flute rises, gestures

for the oth­ers to fol­low.
At the back of the the­ater,
hooded fig­ures lock the doors.

A sud­den blue-green spot­light
focused stage left. Time has passed.
Books fall from the sky, snowflakes

the young man catches on his
tongue, and he his smil­ing,
but the woman whose rhythms

fill the melody’s empty
spaces lifts her hands: Noth­ing
dri­ving the song now but the

need each note cre­ates in us
for the next one, and the next,
till the orches­tra fades and,

cen­ter stage, I sit alone,
sketch­ing at this piano
the hills I once imagined

walk­ing with you, twi­light hills
at once famil­iar and strange,
as from the top of the Pentlands

Edin­burgh is all cities
and one city. Hills where my
com­pan­ions — them­selves composed

partly of parts of me — are
unaware, that with these notes
they do not hear, on these keys

that are not mine, I give them
lives they have never lived.

Last night, Vangile Mak­wakwa of Speak2BFree inter­viewed me on her Blog Talk Radio show. It was an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Please check it out.

Shortly after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iran, Par­tow Nuri­ala was forced by the gov­ern­ment to stop teach­ing phi­los­o­phy at Tehran Uni­ver­sity, where she also worked as a social worker. She sub­se­quently founded Dama­vand Pub­li­ca­tions, one of the first inde­pen­dent woman-run presses in Iran. Three years later, the gov­ern­ment shut the press down, an ironic devel­op­ment since it was dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion in Iran that the ban on her first book of poetry, A Share of the Years, which had been imposed by the Pahlavi régime in 1972 was lifted. In 1986, Par­tow came to the United States with her two young chil­dren. Since 1988, she has worked in the Los Ange­les County Supe­rior Court as a deputy jury com­mis­sioner, though she still has an active lit­er­ary career. Her pub­li­ca­tions include four books of poems, lit­er­ary and movie reviews, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries and a play. “I Am Human” was pub­lished in the anthol­ogy Strange Times, My Dear and was trans­lated by Zara Hush­mand.¹

I Am Human

Bow your form
in sight of the earth.
Hide your face
from the light
of the sun and moon,
for you are a woman.

Bury your body’s blos­som­ing
in the pit of time.
Con­sign the rene­gade strands of your hair
to the ashes in the wood stove,
and the fiery power of your hands
to scrub­bing and sweep­ing the home
for you are a woman.

Kill your word’s wit:
ruin it
with silence.
Feel shame for your desires
and grant your enchanted soul
to the patience of the wind
for you are a woman.

Deny your­self,
that your lord
may ride in you
at his plea­sure,
for you are a woman.

I cry
I cry
in a land where igno­rant kind­ness
cuts deeper
than the cru­elty of knowl­edge.
I weep for my birth
as a woman.

I fight
I fight
in a land where
the zeal of man­li­ness
bel­lows in the field
between home and grave.
I fight my birth
as a woman.

I keep my eyes wide open
so as not to sink
under the weight
of this dream that oth­ers
have dreamed for me,
and I rip apart
this shirt of fear
they have sewn to cover
my naked thought,
for I am a woman.

I make love to the god of war
to bury
the ancient sword of his anger.
I make war on the dark god
that the light of my name
may shine,
for I am a woman.

With love in one hand,
labor in the other,
I fash­ion the world
on the ground of my glo­ri­ous bril­liance,
and into a bed
of clouds I tuck
the scent of my smile,
that the sweet smelling rain
may bring to blos­som
all the loves of the world,
for I am a woman.

My chil­dren I bring
to the feast of light,
my men
to the feast of aware­ness,
for I am a woman.

I am the earth’s steady purity,
the endur­ing glory of time,
for I am human.

1. Apolo­gies to the poet and the trans­la­tor for the inac­cu­rate line breaks. I don’t know how to make Word­Press show them as they are sup­posed to appear. [↩]

Forugh Far­rokhzad was the most sig­nif­i­cant female Iran­ian poet of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, cor­re­spond­ing most closely, in terms of Amer­i­can poetry, to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sex­ton. Her poems are polit­i­cal, fem­i­nist, sex­ual, erotic, break­ing almost every taboo that existed for women in the 1950s and 60s in her coun­try. For her com­mit­ment to her art and her vision, she earned the scorn of her soci­ety and her fam­ily. She was com­mit­ted to a men­tal insti­tu­tion and had her only bio­log­i­cal child removed from her cus­tody. Today, she is rec­og­nized for the great artist that she was, both in and out of Iran. A selec­tion of her work has been beau­ti­fully trans­lated by Sholeh Wolpe in the book Sin, pub­lished by The Uni­ver­sity of Arkansas Press. This poem, Grief, is from her book Asir (Cap­tive), which was pub­lished in 1955:

Grief

Like the disheveled locks of a woman
the Karun river spreads itself
on the naked shoul­ders of the shore.
The sun is gone, and the night’s hot breath
wafts over the water’s beat­ing heart.

Far in the dis­tance the river’s south­ern shore
is love-drunk in moonlight’s embrace.
The night with its mil­lion bril­liant blood­shot eyes
spies on beds of inno­cent lovers.

The cane field is fast asleep. A bird
shrieks from amid its dark­ness,
and the moon­beams rush to see
what fear has dri­ven it to such despair.

On the river’s skin, palm shad­ows
trem­ble at the sen­sual touch of the breeze,
and inside the silent secret deep of night,
frogs sing their loud frog songs.

In this rap­tur­ous night’s bliss
the dis­tant dream of your hands draws near,
your scent rushes in like a wave, your eyes
glim­mer on the water’s face, then go dark.

My piti­ful heart, eager and hope­ful,
fell cap­tive to the hands of your love.
You sailed away on your own river, left this land–
O snapped branch of my passion’s storm.

“For me, imag­i­na­tion is syn­ony­mous with dis­cov­ery. To imag­ine, to dis­cover, to carry our bit of light to the liv­ing penum­bra where all the infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, forms, and num­bers exist. I do not believe in cre­ation but in dis­cov­ery, and I don’t believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walk­ing the road. The imag­i­na­tion is a spir­i­tual appa­ra­tus, a lumi­nous explorer of the world it dis­cov­ers. The imag­i­na­tion fixes and gives clear life to frag­ments of the invis­i­ble real­ity where man is stirring.

…

The mis­sion of the poet is just that — to give life (ani­mar), in the exact sense of the word: to give soul. Because I am a true poet, and will remain so until my death, I will never stop fla­gel­lat­ing myself with the dis­ci­plines, and never give up hope that some­day by body will run with green or yel­low blood. Any­thing is bet­ter than to remain seated in the win­dow look­ing out on the same land­scape. The light of any poet is con­tra­dic­tion. I haven’t tried to force my posi­tion on any­one — that would be unwor­thy of poetry. Poetry doesn’t need skilled prac­ti­tion­ers, she needs lovers, and she lays down bram­bles and shards of glass for the hands that search for her with love.”

–Fed­erico Gar­cía Lorca, quoted in Harper’s, Sep­tem­ber 2004

Nader Nader­pour was born in 1929 in Tehran. He stud­ied lit­er­a­ture at the Sor­bonne in Paris dur­ing the 1950s and in Rome in the 1960s. He began pub­lish­ing his poems in the 1940s and is counted among the lead­ers of the Mod­ern Poetry move­ment in Iran, where he helped estab­lish the Asso­ci­a­tion of Writ­ers of Iran in 1968. Before he fled his coun­try in 1980, he worked for the Depart­ment of Arts and Cul­ture and Iran­ian National Radio and Tele­vi­sion; he also edited sev­eral lit­er­ary mag­a­zines. The Islamic Repub­lic of Iran banned pub­li­ca­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of all Naderpour’s works after he left the country.

In France, where he first lived after going into exile, he was elected to the Author’s Asso­ci­a­tion,  and then, in 1986, he moved to the United States, where he lived until his death in 2000. All told, Nader­pour is the author of ten vol­umes of poetry, and his work has been trans­lated into Eng­lish, French, Ger­man and Ital­ian. In 1993, he was awarded a Hellman/Hammett Grant by Human Rights Watch and he is said to have been a can­di­date for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This gor­geous love poem, which Nader­pour ded­i­cated to his wife Jaleh, was trans­lated by Nilo­u­far Talebi and is included in her vol­ume Belong­ing: New Poetry by Ira­ni­ans Around the World, which is also my source for the brief biog­ra­phy of Nader­pour above.

Con­ver­sa­tion in the Dark

To my dear Jaleh

Mid nights, when I’m ill and awake
And no light is vis­i­ble even from a pin­hole
And the soft song of your deep­est breaths
Accom­pa­nies the tre­ble and bass of my heart
To the con­stant tick­ing of the clock,
Then I see that even if my thoughts are alone,
My heart, in the hol­low of my chest is not.

Softly, I bend my head over your bed­side
And lightly kiss your lashes, joined in sleep.
You feel the weight of this kiss on your eye and smile.
I kiss you cheek warm
And although the clamor of your laugh­ter echoes in my ear,
In the dark waves of night,
Your laugh­ing face does not manifest.

Qui­etly, I strike a match
To illu­mi­nate your face,
But soon, the red sul­fu­ric spark,
Ris­ing and falling upon my two black­ened fin­gers,
Dies in the twist and turn of its dance
And again, dense dark­ness
Set­tles in our lit­tle bed­cham­ber.
I tell myself: Aside from that brief instant–
The moment I glimpsed your dear face
–My eye does not have for­tune enough to see.

Like a child fear­ing dark­ness,
I pave a path to your embrace
And pet­ri­fied of some­thing I can’t name,
I steal this whis­per in your ear:
Kinder than all the world’s kind­liest crea­tures!
Oh friend, sweet­heart, mother, com­pan­ion on this voy­age!
Scream away so even stone-hearted death
Does not undo us in the promised moment!
For we both know that in a riotous
World of swarm­ing crowds,
And of all that avails on the end­less hori­zon,
If we have a des­tiny, it is our loneliness.

And this house, smaller than a boat, sails us–
The dis­tressed – into the sea of exile.
But on the alarm­ing hori­zon of the sea,
Night pre­vails
And reveals no path in dark­ness
To tomorrow.

Last Fri­day night, I read at Good­bye Blue Mon­day, a really cool bar in the Bush­wick sec­tion of Brook­lyn, as part of the The Stain of Poetry: Read­ing Series. Not only was it the first time I’d been to a read­ing that I wasn’t run­ning in a very long time – so I could sit back and just lis­ten – but it was the first time I’d read from my own work in at least as long. I was more ner­vous than I thought I would be, and I could feel – though the audi­ence might not have noticed – the awk­ward­nesses where I not-quite-stumbled because the poems I was read­ing were no longer as famil­iar to me as they once were. I was dis­ap­pointed that my wife was not there, since I read a poem I wrote for her, but she had to stay home with our son, who stead­fastly refuses to go to poetry read­ings any­more. “I already know what they’re going to say,” he told us, when we asked if he would make an excep­tion that night. “‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m happy’ or ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m sad.’ It’s boring!”

The first time we took him to a read­ing, he had no objec­tion to going – he was, after all, only three or four years old – but he was adamantly opposed to my being one of the peo­ple who read. I’d asked him if I could read one of the short poems that I’d writ­ten for him and that he loved to hear me recite, and he said no, absolutely not. I have, unfortunately, lost almost all of those poem. They – most were lim­er­icks – were either casu­al­ties of one of the com­puter virus infec­tions that on a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent occa­sions forced me to wipe hard drive clean when I was using Win­dows or per­haps they were lost when I moved all my files over to the iMac that I use now. Either way, this is the only poem I remember:

The boy in the tree looked down
and said to him­self with a frown,
“I’ve climbed up this high,
but I still don’t know why!“
So he stayed till he knew, then climbed down.

So I assured my son I would not read any of our poems, and we went to the The Poetry Project, where the read­ing was tak­ing place; but when it was my turn and he heard my name called my son turned to his mother and asked where I was going. “To read his poems,” she answered. As soon as she said that, my son started not just cry­ing, but scream­ing, at the top of his lungs, and noth­ing my wife did could quiet him. He was so loud that she had to take him out of the build­ing; clos­ing the door to the room where the read­ing was being held and walk­ing to the other end of the hall was not enough.

I fin­ished my poems more quickly than I would have liked and rushed out­side. When my son saw me, he started cry­ing even harder, and it didn’t mat­ter how many times I reas­sured him that I didn’t read any of our poems, the tears just kept com­ing. He cried in my arms, the strength of his sobs shak­ing his small body, while I car­ried him to the car; he cried as my wife buck­led him into his car seat, and he cried right through all of the strate­gies we’d used in the past to get him to stop cry­ing. Only when I began to recite the poems I’d made for him, start­ing with the one I quoted above, did he get quiet, and then when I said them a sec­ond time, he started to smile. By the third time, he was laugh­ing with me the way he usu­ally did. Then, he fell asleep, exhausted from all the cry­ing he’d done.

The only way I have been able to make sense of my son’s reac­tion is that, for him, poetry, not just his poems, but poetry as a whole, had been “ours,” some­thing pri­vate, and the idea of me read­ing my poems in pub­lic made him feel like I was giv­ing some­thing away that we would not be able to get back. Only when he real­ized that “our” poems  still belonged to him, because I was still able to recite them the way I’d always done, did he real­ize that my giv­ing a read­ing did not mean he’d lost them.

Iron­i­cally, but per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, my son began not only to write poetry when he was in first grade, but to pub­lish and per­form his work as well. Two years in a row, when he was in first and sec­ond grade, poems he wrote were selected for pub­li­ca­tion in the anthol­ogy pro­duced by CCNY’s annual Spring Poetry Fes­ti­val, which is also a lit­er­ary com­pe­ti­tion, and he per­formed those poem in front of quite a large audi­ence when the winner’s were announced. He’s given me per­mis­sion to share two of the poems that he wrote when he was in sec­ond grade. (What can I say? I am a proud father, and I think these are very good.)

Hulk

The mas­sive thing that will never come down,
the ter­ri­ble thing that will make you frown.

It’s the mas­ter and it’s the beat. It’s the thing that has big feet.

Mus­cle and strength, strength and mus­cle,
if you want to escape it, you’d bet­ter hustle.

Peo­ple dead and peo­ple cun­ning;
peo­ple stunned and peo­ple running.

It is green and it is mean;
it’s a mean, green killing machine.

It’s the hulk and when it’s palm
shrinks, it’s a lit­tle more calm.

Truth

Truth can be
almost anything.

Truth can be
words.

When I think of any
word light­en­ing flashes
like electricity.

Inside my mind,
truth is family.

My son, rea­son­ably, was quite proud of this work and of the fact that he’d given his own poetry read­ing, but when I reminded him about this expe­ri­ence, try­ing one more time to per­suade him to come with me and his mother to my read­ing last Fri­day night, he said, “Yeah, I know, but that’s my work. I don’t like hear­ing other peo­ple read their poetry to me. When I go to one of your read­ings, where you’re the only one who reads, at least it’s you, some­one I care about. Why do I want to hear about the lives of peo­ple I don’t really care about?” and he repeated what he’d told us ear­lier: “It’s always ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m happy’ or ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m sad.’”

Later, my wife said, “I didn’t want to say any­thing in front of him, but, you know, I agree. Your poems at least always have some polit­i­cal mean­ing or at least leave me with some­thing to think about, because they’re not just about your own feel­ings; it’s about a sig­nif­i­cance beyond who you are. When I go to read­ings with you, though, and I lis­ten to other poets, I almost always find myself ask­ing, ‘Who cares?’”

Okay, so she’s my wife, and she’s biased, but the truth is that I find myself hav­ing the same reac­tion – Why should I care? – to an awful lot of the poetry I read and lis­ten to these days. I will not say that this is a good thing or a bad thing. My own pref­er­ence is for a polit­i­cally and per­son­ally engaged, mostly nar­ra­tive poetry that pays a lot of atten­tion to form and music, and that bias, of course, col­ors my responses to what I read, aes­thetic and oth­er­wise; but even beyond my bias, the poetry of any given time is what it is; peo­ple write what they write; and I have no doubt that it would not mat­ter which his­tor­i­cal period you picked: most of the poetry writ­ten at that time would very likely elicit more of a yawn than a yawp.

My point here, in other words, is not to com­plain about the sorry state of Amer­i­can poetry, as so many have done, using my son’s take on poetry read­ings – which is some­thing many oth­ers have said, though in more devel­oped ways – as a star­ing off point. Not only is it sim­ply not true that Amer­i­can poetry is, as a whole, as self-indulgently self-involved as that descrip­tion would have it, but I just don’t have in me the pre­sump­tu­ous­ness it would take to make that kind of pro­nounce­ment. Rather, what I’m inter­ested in here try­ing to under­stand why, of the five other poets with whom I read last night, three left me feel­ing exactly as my son described, “‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m happy’ or ‘Some­thing hap­pened and now I’m sad.’ Why should I care?”

I need to insert here the obvi­ous caveat that hear­ing a poet read is not the same as read­ing her or his work, and so what I have to say needs to be under­stood in that light. A poetry read­ing, after all, is a per­for­mance, and a bad per­for­mance can turn into a dis­as­ter what, on the page, is an oth­er­wise suc­cess­ful poem. Nei­ther is hear­ing a poet read for ten min­utes a sound basis on which to judge his or her work as a whole. I am respond­ing in this post to a poetry read­ing, and I think it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that going to a poetry read­ing is a qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from read­ing a book of poems, and, even more than that, that we go to those dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, that they fill dif­fer­ent needs, per­sonal, cul­tural, and even political.

There were six of us who read last week: Douglas Allen, Mac­gre­gor Card, Kathy Fagan, myself, Chris Salerno and Rob Schlegel. I’m not going to say very much about Kathy Fagan, whose poems I liked a lot, and whose book, Lip, I intend to buy – here’s a review–because I think our work is prob­a­bly more sim­i­lar than it is dif­fer­ent, and it is the effect on me of those poets whose work was unlike mine that I want to write about here.

The first reader was Dou­glas Allen, whose poems were the only ones that evening of which I did not like a sin­gle one. They were too self-consciously clever and detached, and there just wasn’t enough sub­stance – intel­lec­tual, lin­guis­tic or emo­tional – to hold my interest. I copied down a part of one of his poems, which I will write here as a sen­tence, since I have no idea where the line breaks are sup­posed to fall: “Portable emo­tions for those in soci­ety who lack emo­tional porta­bil­ity.” In a dif­fer­ent poem, another, sim­i­larly apho­ris­tic pas­sage ended with the words “is not even an even even.” It’s not just that I don’t know what either of those phrases means; indeed, I imag­ine I am not sup­posed to know imme­di­ately what they mean, that they are sup­posed to invite me through their clev­er­ness to con­tem­plate what they might mean – it’s that noth­ing about them com­pels in me even slight­est inter­est in fig­ur­ing that mean­ing out.

To make mat­ters worst – and here is where the per­for­mance aspect of read­ings comes into play – the expres­sion on Allen’s face, at least from the angle where I was sit­ting, and the tone of his voice as he read his poems, reminded me of the mock­ing and ironic supe­ri­or­ity with which the come­dian Daniel Tosh deliv­ers his mate­r­ial. I don’t find Tosh par­tic­u­larly funny, but I rec­og­nize the genre of com­edy in which he works, and I can appre­ci­ate it when it is well done, even if it usu­ally doesn’t make me laugh out loud. I don’t know whether Allen’s deliv­ery got in the way of his poetry for me, or whether there really was no poetry in the work that I could appre­ci­ate, but I was sym­pa­thetic to the guy who was sit­ting in front of me, with whom I’d been talk­ing about art and poetry before the read­ing began, who walked out about half way through Allen’s read­ing with a look that said, “Sorry, I can’t take this anymore.”

If I hadn’t been one of the sched­uled read­ers, I too might have walked out, though I am glad I did not, because I encoun­tered dur­ing the rest of the evening poets who, while they did not always move me as per­form­ers, intrigued me enough that I was sorry I did not have enough money on me to buy their books. I am talk­ing here about Mac­gre­gor Card, Chris Salerno and Rob Schlegel. Nei­ther Salerno nor Schlegel – I will talk about Card below – read his work any affect, which made it very dif­fi­cult for me to fol­low, but here, for exam­ple, are some lines that caught my ear from Salerno’s poem “Parks, Recre­ation,” which is in his new book, Min­i­mum Heroic:

I’m wrong. This bot­tle was left here
by kids. They are more

afraid of you than you are of them,
and lay flat as a banner

for sol­diers fly­ing over.

The idea that peo­ple are afraid of chil­dren in the way that oth­ers are afraid of, say, snakes – which is the sit­u­a­tion in which I have most com­monly heard the more-afraid-of-you line – cou­pled with the image of chil­dren as “a ban­ner for sol­diers,” which makes them, at one and the same time, a tar­get and an emblem cheer­ing the sol­diers on into what they are fight­ing for, brings together all kinds of anx­i­eties in con­nec­tions that are worth con­tem­plat­ing and that com­ment in poten­tially impor­tant ways on the his­tor­i­cal moment in which we in the United States are liv­ing. That kind of con­tem­pla­tion, how­ever, resem­bles for me more the kind of atten­tive­ness that I bring to a paint­ing than, say, a piece of music, which is what a poem at a read­ing is. Music, in fact, is the pri­mary thing I lis­ten for in the poems I hear at a read­ing, and when I looked up “Parks, Recre­ation,” I under­stood imme­di­ately why the five lines I quoted above were the only ones I remember. The rest of the poem feels tacked on, and it feels that way mostly because the music of the last eleven lines is so much less tightly woven, so much less inter­est­ing son­i­cally and syn­tac­ti­cally than the first nine. Indeed, “for sol­diers fly­ing over” feels to me, musi­cally any­way, like the point at which the poem should end:

Parks, Recre­ation

Except for clear­ing the land by fire,
not much is legal.

To cre­ate ten­sion, debris lay
on one third of an acre.

I’m wrong. This bot­tle was left here
by kids. They are more

afraid of you than you are of them,
and lay flat as a banner

for sol­diers fly­ing over.
We put our blan­ket down in the fog.

Our kite holds a mir­ror to nature.
We’re dead. Our days are

pressed into slides. I must be com­ing
down with something–

you are stand­ing right there
in the clearing:

tight white head­band, racket
between your thighs.

When I’m wrong, a blush
awak­ens in the sky.

My point, how­ever, is not to rewrite Chris Salerno’s poem for him, but rather to say that the way he read his poems made them sound to me as musi­cally unin­ter­est­ing as the last eleven lines of “Parks, Recre­ation,” which made it very dif­fi­cult to attend to what I think, extrap­o­lat­ing from the first nine lines of “Parks, Recre­ation” is prob­a­bly a vision worth pay­ing atten­tion to.

I had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence lis­ten­ing to Rob Schlegel, whose affect­less read­ing left me even colder than Salerno’s, though I also caught in Schlegel’s work – his book, The Lesser Fields, won the 2009 Col­orado Prize for Poetry – moments of inter­est that made me want to know more. I’ve only been able to find two of the book’s poems online, one of which – the more mem­o­rable of the two – I am pretty sure that he read. I am not sure about the other one, which I find quite for­get­table. Iron­i­cally, though, it is the for­get­table poem, the one I don’t think he read, that recalls for me the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to him:

Lives of Method

Day fol­low­ing day
And the con­tents add up.

These it is
That clash — then widen

The field of questions—

That which law
And spirit leaven.

Speak the world in mul­ti­tudes
And stay in it.

Would that every loss
Reveal its science.

That every prayer
Con­ceal its source.

With the excep­tion of the last four lines, noth­ing in this poem inter­ests me, not seman­ti­cally, not syn­tac­ti­cally, not rhyth­mi­cally, not musi­cally, and even the last four lines don’t add very much, in terms of form or con­tent, to the ways in which those sen­ti­ments have been expressed before. My point is not that every poem in a book needs to sing with an unas­sail­able orig­i­nal­ity. There are poems in my own book that, when I read them now, I think, “Eh. It served its pur­pose in the book, but it’s really pretty for­get­table.” Rather, as with my expe­ri­ence of Chris Salerno’s read­ing, Schlegel’s per­for­mance of his own poems leached from them what­ever inter­est I might have found, leav­ing me feel­ing about all of the work he read the way I feel about “Lives of Method.” Yet, when I read “Allies,” the sec­ond poem from The Lesser Fields that I was able to find online, which I am pretty sure was among the poems Schlegel per­formed – when, in other words, I was able to hear the poem’s voice “for myself,” with­out the inter­fer­ence of Schlegel’s per­for­mance – I found it to be sub­tle, star­tling and unset­tlingly dark. He was, all of a sud­den, a poet whose work I wanted know more about::

Allies

Until some­one steals my coat
I am the younger brother
of each pas­sen­ger on the train.

I pol­ish their black shoes
and offer to clean the mir­rors in every restroom.

At night I sleep and my sib­lings
try to see the pass­ing fields
by look­ing out their windows

but the dark glass only reveals
their own reflections

so they think
if they could lighten their hair, they would.

If they could change their names
they would try that too.

Granted, “Allies” is the kind of poem towards which my bias leans, while “Lives of Method” is not, but I think it is worth pay­ing atten­tion when the way in which a poet reads from her or his work makes a poem that you would oth­er­wise like into a poem that you do not; and even if “Allies” was not among the poems Schlegel read, my point is still the same. His per­for­mance left me feel­ing like each work that he read had more in com­mon with “Lives of Method” than it did with “Allies,” and clearly that was a mis­per­cep­tion of his work that it would be worth correcting.

Mac­gre­gor Card, the last of the four poets I want to write about, is the author of Duties of an Eng­lish For­eign Sec­re­tary, which was selected for Fence’s Mod­ern Poets Series prize in 2009. Card’s poetry is dia­met­ri­cally opposed to mine in terms of how he han­dles mean­ing – which is to say his work is very much about dis­rupt­ing mean­ing, or at least, since it would be wrong to say that his poems do not have mean­ing, dis­rupt­ing con­ven­tional approaches to how mean­ing in poems is made, specif­i­cally by dis­rupt­ing nar­ra­tive. At the same time, how­ever, the atten­tion he pays to the for­mal qual­i­ties of his verse reveals him to be a kin­dred spirit. I wish I’d had the pres­ence of mind to write down the titles of the poems he read on Fri­day night, espe­cially the first one, which con­tained an absolutely mar­velous jazz riff on the let­ter F and, if I remem­ber cor­rectly, the word “fend,” but I became so absorbed in his per­for­mance that, frankly, I for­got, and then, later, when I chat­ted with him for a brief while, I for­got to ask him. So, instead, I will offer as an exam­ple of what I mean by his atten­tion to form and musi­cal­ity this excerpt from the title poem of his col­lec­tion. (I think he read this poem, but I am not sure.) This is the first stro­phe of “Duties of an Eng­lish For­eign Secretary:”

Moon, refrig­er­ate the weep­ing child
and guard his stony brook.
There is no thing between the woods
like music of the band
and I’ve got friends in Lon­don, no I’ve
got friends in Lon­don,
lawyer in their hearth or bil­lion starry heath
in the lan­guage of mine
that they laugh at
del­phini­ums rev up the fire,
really look at them go
lead into the throat
a snow­field gas,
a Crimean slo­gan,
in Eng­land or in sum,
no papers go off bang to pad the fog.

Read these lines aloud and the smooth­ness with which they roll of the tongue makes it easy to miss the degree to which they have been care­fully crafted. The first four lines, for exam­ple, fall almost per­fectly into tra­di­tional bal­lad meter. The sec­ond and fourth lines may not rhyme, but the allit­er­a­tion of brook and band knits the lines together in a way anal­o­gous to what a rhyme would accom­plish, and the asso­nance con­nect­ing brook and wood only inten­si­fies the music. Then, note the play of L and H sounds in the next six lines or so, and then the long O sounds in the next four lines. I could go on. The pat­tern­ing of sounds here cre­ates its own mean­ing, weaves the words together syl­la­ble by syl­la­ble, mor­pheme by mor­pheme, into a melody that is so lovely to lis­ten to that I don’t really care that I don’t under­stand what the words actu­ally mean or that Card intends their resis­tance of an easy nar­ra­tive sig­nif­i­cance to cre­ate anx­i­ety about mean­ing even as I try to make mean­ing of them.

At the same time, though, as much as Card’s music makes his verse enjoy­able inde­pen­dently of what it might mean, the music is also part and par­cel of that mean­ing. The poem’s address to the moon is a kind of satir­i­cal cri­tique of the roman­tic poem in which the moon, say, is asked to bear wit­ness to the lonely man or woman walk­ing in the woods, weep­ing because her or his beloved is else­where, or dead, or dying, or unfaith­ful, and Card’s music, while not fit­ting into any fixed poetic form, nonethe­less recalls in its lyri­cal nature the music of the per­fectly rhyming bal­lads in which such sen­ti­men­tal feel­ings were often expressed. More to the point, pre­cisely because Card’s music is so explic­itly an explo­ration of lan­guage that can be expe­ri­enced apart from mean­ing, his poetry at a read­ing gives me some­thing to lis­ten to, to engage with imag­i­na­tively, in a way that the work of the other three poets did not – and of course it doesn’t hurt that Card is a very good reader of his own work.

That explo­ration of lan­guage is what I go to poetry read­ings to hear, whether it is the kind of musical/formal explo­ration in which Card engages or the kind of explo­ration into mean­ing that hap­pens in a sub­stan­tive nar­ra­tive or lyric poem; it is also that explo­ration, even when it is not entirely suc­cess­ful, that lifts poetry beyond the nar­row con­fines of my son’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, because when a poet explores lan­guage as lan­guage, he or she makes some­thing hap­pen in the lan­guage and that event, that process, is quite dis­tinct from any auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal con­tent the poem might con­tain. What hap­pens might be located in the mate­r­ial nature of lan­guage, the mor­phemes, phonemes, syn­tac­ti­cal struc­tures and more that together make up the way lan­guage sounds; or it might be located in mean­ing, in the mak­ing of con­nec­tions through nar­ra­tive and metaphor between and among the poet’s self, the world beyond that self and the capac­ity of lan­guage to give that world, that self and those con­nec­tions a form that oth­ers can comprehend.

What hap­pens when you hear or read this kind of poetry is that the lan­guage, what is hap­pen­ing in the lan­guage, enters you, changes you and the way you see the world, changes you irrev­o­ca­bly, in ways you might not even real­ize. Mere hap­pi­ness or sad­ness, whether on the part of the poet or the audi­ence, is entirely beside the point.