New Le Carre Spin-Off: Somali Pirates in Hollywood Adaptation

Each new international "incident" around the globe continues to remind us how ineffectual and impotent the United Nations has become, in addressing regional or international conflicts. Piracy on the high seas--it almost sounds like a phrase from an historical novel about the 19th Century!--has once again become a very real issue, with the growth of international hijacking for ransom, originating from Somalia, on the East African horn Gulf of Aden. For the last 3 years or so, attempts to organize various individual nations or groups of nations to set up a policing force to prevent the illegal interception and capture of shipping vessels passing by in international waters, has so far failed to prevent these attacks from occurring. 

  

There has grown up a whole industry--virtual private navies--within Somalia to pursue this illegal activity. Somalia, as a nation, is in a state of chaos, with little or no reliable rule of law or enforcement, to prevent these piracies from flourishing. 

 

Pirates in small gunboats simply approach these huge craft, start firing on her crews, and board them and take control, holding them for ransoms from the controlling companies (and their insurance carriers). The ships are powerless to prevent these incursions, since their crews are unarmed, and only trained and authorized to run them, not to defend against attacks. 

 

Given the modest size of the pirates' modus, it would seem obvious that the simplest way to fend off this kind of approach would be to maintain an armed presence on board commercial vessels which must skirt this geographical area on their intended routes. Apparently, this is not feasible, perhaps given the number and variety of vessels traveling in this area, or for other reasons (cost, or liability?). 

 

Failing that, it would seem that a deliberate raid on the shore facilities of the pirates in Somalia could certainly be considered, even at the risk of violating Somalia's sovereign territory. A strategic--"surgical"--strike against these organized international criminals would seem to be a straightforward possible solution, and would effectively render them harmless. It's not as if we were dealing with an organized military; these are small bands of thugs, who, faced with an organized policing force, would be unlikely to put up much resistance. It wouldn't solve the underlying causes of their criminality, but it would put an end to the immediate problem. Why hasn't this simply been carried out?

 

Surely there must be an obvious reason. Maybe we aren't being told the whole story.                

Texting

Texting

  Carlotta entered the language when she was three.  Her short arms and legs grew out slowly like the flour bunny, and soon she was able to swim, kicking and turning over like a delighted seal.  She was given her coordinates at 9, and in no time was constructing her own platforms with ease. At 12 she was temporarily lost on the grid, but everyone was relieved to discover that she had just been elaborated into three new identities, each more complex than the one they’d replaced.  It wasn’t long after that that I ran into one of her surrogates on the street.  “Carlotta,” I joked, “how’s life out there on the edge of the data-stream?”  There was a faraway look in her eye.  “Can’t talk right now,” she replied, “I’m texting.” 

Jack Gilbert - It's Later Than You Think [Part II]

Perhaps the saddest elegy of all is the one fate writes of our own demise, anticipated, acknowledged, postponed, denied, rejected--finally, unavoidable. The full weight of what we cherished, were given to experience, to know, to accomplish, is served up as a conclusive summary--what we thought to say, or tried to, over and over again, over years of chances, is telescoped into relief--but, like the soldier on Bierce's Owl Creek Bridge, the release into emptiness leaves nothing but a false memory, another version of the story.

 

For the better part of his life, Jack Gilbert rejected the standard literary career, in favor of a kind of spiritual retreat, choosing a modest life, an attention to the detail of living privately, intimately, over the theatre of approbation and congeniality, of ambition and guile. One's tendency is to regard this renunciation as a virtuous sacrifice, but the benefits of aesthetic celibacy aren't what Gilbert was after. For a poet as committed to convulsive finalities and verdicts as Gilbert is, the drama of epitaphs is irresistable:

 

 

OVID IN TEARS

 

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.

They asked him what he meant by garden.

He explained about gardens. "In the cities,"

he said, "there are places walled off where color

and decorum are magnified into a civilization.

Like a beautiful woman," he said. How like

a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives

and said garden was just a figure of speech,

then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later

he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne

couldn't read but still made a world. About Hagia

Sophia and putting a round dome on a square

base after nine hundred years of failure.

The hand holding him slipped and he fell.

"White stone in the white sunlight," he said

as they picked him up. "not the great fires

built on the edge of the world." His voice grew

fainter as they carried him away. "Both the melody

and the symphony. The imperfect dancing

in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all." 

 

 

The concluding sentence is the title of the last collection. The imagined dialectic is typical, along with the elliptical phrases, and the occasional unexplained detail. God may be in the details, but we should guard against investing too much in the fleeting metaphor, the convenient simile, since these are transitory, like our bodies, and not to be trusted. 

 

Though Gilbert returns again and again to the sirens of eroticism, it is to preserve a commitment to a feeling, rather than as a memorial to the flesh, that stirs his classical turn of mind. 

 

 

DREAMING AT THE BALLET

 

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.

They will do anything it's true.

And the skin is beautifully cared for.

But they have no sense of it. They are

all manner and amazing technique.

I lie with them thinking of your

foolish excesses, of you panting

and sweating, and your eyes after.

 

 

ELEGY

 

The bird on the other side of the valley

sings cuckoo cuckoo and he sings back, inside,

knowing what it meant to the Elizabethans.

Hoping she is unfaithful now. Delicate

and beautiful, making love with the Devil

in his muggy bedroom behind the shabby office.

While he is explaining the slums were there

when he got the job. And the Buicks burning

by the roads in the dark. He was not the one

doing the judging, he says. Or the one pointing down

at the lakes of burning lead. He is feeding

her lemons. Holding shaved ice in his mouth

and sucking her nipples to help with the heat.

    

 

In the end, such performances are like elegies to the submission which love requires of each of us. Women and men give of each other, set aside embarrassment and jeopardy in the quest for a reason to trust, an excuse to feel, beyond the limits of bodies, the freedom of pure energy. The most difficult duty--the "gift that could not be refused" (the white elephant of "In Dispraise of Poetry")--demands of the artist total dedication, that one give up all the fruits of decadence and materiality, in exchange for the favor of the gods. The search for truth--since that is what the dedication means--will come down to an argument between the having of experience, and the understanding of it. The process of that argument will be difficult, will involve submitting to the tortuous maze of language, its false leads, dead-ends and charming diversions. 

 

 

AFTER LOVE

 

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.

Hearing the piano like a man moving

through the woods thinking by feeling.

The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,

step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,

but always returning to quiet, like the man

remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,

mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure

in the loss. In the yearning. The pain

going this way and that. Never again.

Never bodied again. Again the never.

Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.

A humming beauty in the silence.

The having been. Having had. And the man

knowing all of him will come to the end.

 

 

When I learned recently that Jack Gilbert was living nearby in Berkeley, in a care facility, I was urged by a friend of the poet to pay him a visit, to see whatever I might do to assist him in his present situation. Within a minute or so of meeting him, in a quiet corner room overlooking a balcony on a residential street, I realized that he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, well along. The poet's hair is white, and he is of slight build, with piercing blue eyes. As I spoke, there was a sense of dislocation, since he was unable to respond in a way that confirmed understanding, I had the distinct sense of talking either to someone in a coma, or to a ghost, of the shadow of a once-proud, once profoundly perceptive intelligence. "You don't know me," I began, "but someone thought you might need something. Is there anything I can get for you, any errand done, any contact, anything...?" He shook his head. Someone, he said slowly and uncertainly, would be coming soon, very soon, to take him away from that place. The intensity, I thought, of his mind was somehow still present, the fund of memory, that fine sensibility, survived somewhere beyond, behind the wall of incomprehension which was gradually, inexorably rising before his consciousness. But that is a commonplace of misapprehension, that the deterioration is a barrier, rather than a decay of the actual matter of being. Do I trespass on the privacy of suffering by reporting this encounter, or is it the occasion for a tribute to the heroism of defeat?

 

"I want pity from no one for a pain

I would share with no man"

    --quoted by Paul Blackburn, in a poem published near the end of his life (he died of cancer at age 44).             

               

It's like something I've thought of doing for a long time: a poem which would begin with the lines "I've waited all my life, to write this...." If only I could finish it.        

Jack Gilbert - It's Later Than You Think [Part I]

Jack Gilbert [1925-  ] is a poet I only recently had the experience of reading. After winning the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1962, at the age of 36--rather late in the game, as such things happen, even then, almost 50 years ago now--he went into a sort of self-imposed exile, steering clear of America, the American university system, the lecture and reading circuit, and spending large blocks of time in Europe, especially Greece.

  

In his formative years, Gilbert lived in San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the local poet heroes of the time (Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth). Once Gilbert had published his first book, Views of Jeopardy, and gained national notoriety, he threw over these associations, and left for Europe. The American poetry scene--perhaps specifically the California poetry and art scene, with all its laissez-faire accommodation of counter-culture permissiveness and joie de vivre--just wasn't severe and demanding enough for his taste. Intuitively, he sensed that there were deeper levels to his spirit, and that older, Old World settings were the place to cultivate his austere daemon. This spiritual renunciation of the New World had symbolic as well as aesthetic meaning to Gilbert.  

  

  

       

 

 

Gilbert sets great store in the effects that can be achieved through an internal dialectic between epicurean/dionysian indulgence on the one hand, and austerity and ascetic denial on the other. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've just finished reading his last collection--which almost certainly will be his last, unless there is further unpublished material (1)--The Dance Most of All [Knopf, 2009, 56pp], which I find to my surprise and delight is very unlike what I must have imagined it would be, based on his reputation. (Reputations are unreliable, and not to be trusted; it's almost always better to decide for oneself, after first-hand perusal, what something is worth.) Let me quote three brief poems to give an idea of what Gilbert's poems feel like:

 

 

WINTER IN THE NIGHT FIELDS

 

I was getting water tonight

off guard when I saw the moon

in my bucket and was tempted

by those Chinese poets

and their immaculate pain.

 

  

GETTING IT RIGHT

 

Lying in front of the house all

afternoon, trying to write a poem.

Falling asleep.

Waking up under the stars. 

  

  

IN DISPRAISE OF POETRY

 

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,

he gave him a beautiful white elephant.

The miracle beast deserved such ritual

that to care for him properly meant ruin.

Yet to care for him improperly was worse.

It appears the gift could not be refused.

 

 

These are somewhat untypical of the work generally, in that they don't engage in dialectics. Gilbert's poems are balanced between sharply etched, telling detail, and a renunciation of easy satisfactions or explanations. They seek simultaneously to summarize experience, while resisting pat or simplistic answers to dilemmas: loneliness, death, longing, regret. Gilbert's poems are not about music--no ballads or lullabies or sonnets or quatrains here. Just calm, measured meditations, solitary and introverted, arguments the self has with itself, filled with the pressure of long silence, or pent-up reservoirs of feeling. 

 

  

NOT EASILY

 

When we get beyond beauty and pleasure,

to the other side of the heart (but short

of the spirit), we are confused about what

to do next. It is too easy to say arriving

is enough. To pretend the music

of the mountain needs only to be heard.

That the dance is known by the dancing,

and the lasagne is realized by eating it.

Not in this place on the other side

of desire. We can swim in the Aegean,

but we can't take it home. A man finds

a melon by the road and continues up

the hill thinking it is the warm melon

that will remain after he has forgotten

the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells

himself this even as the idea of the taste

is replacing what the melon tasted like.    

  

    

This is a poetry suspicious of pleasure, or at least pessimistic of the possibility of keeping (or preserving such) pleasure alive, in poems or memories. Pretending and denying and forgetting, beyond our desire to define the essence, of wanting and having, in words. Of the kinds of objects in Gilbert's work, the highest good seems to be fidelity--fidelity to a loved one, to sensual experience, to memory. The poems are about realizing, or discovering, how to live in this intensity, in such a way that the value of the experience is not compromised, and the record of one's devotion to the search for it is earned, and not borrowed or purchased cheap. 

 

 

SUDDENLY ADULT

 

The train's stopping wakes me.

Weeds in the gully are white

with the year's first snow. 

A lighted train goes

slowly past absolutely empty.

Also going to Fukuoka.

I feel around in myself

to see if I mind. Maybe

I am lonely. It is hard

to know. It could be

hidden in familiarity. 

 

 

This kind of feeling around inside oneself reminds me a lot of the work of Robert Bly, and especially James Wright (and maybe even a bit of Franz). It involves the construction of sequences of syntactical pacing and spacing, so that the effect of certain kinds of realizations or disclosures acquires a dramatic power--so that even talking about seemingly bland occurrences may occasion a wry observation, a morsel of private wisdom.  

 

    

        
 

 

"Hidden in familiarity." Familiarity is like the thick skin of habit which must be peeled back or seen through, to get at the truth of our deeper emotion(s). But human consciousness is often opaque. Even when we think we've seen the "other side" of desire, or striving, or grief, there is still another level of awareness, another layer underneath. 

  

Gilbert was married twice. Once to a former student, Linda Gregg--now a well-recognized poet herself--and to a sculptor Michiko Nogami, who died of cancer at age 36. The celebration and disappointment of these relationships weighs heavily in Gilbert's poetry, as do his memories of Greece and Italy, and of Pittsburgh, where he grew up during the Depression Years.

  

  

SUMMER AT BLUE CREEK, NORTH CAROLINA

 

There was no water at my grandfather's

when I was a kid and would go for it

with two zinc buckets. Down the path,

past the cow by the foundation where

the fine people's house was before

they arranged to have it burned down.

To the neighbor's cool well. Would

come back with pails too heavy,

so my mouth pulled out of shape.

I see myself, but from the outside.

I keep trying to feel who I was,

and cannot. Hear clearly the sound

the bucket made hitting the sides

of the stone well going down,

but never the sound of me. 

        

  

This longing, to bring the sensibility as close to the lived experience--to the absolute presence of being in the world, unconscious and utterly forsaken to time--as is possible, is a constant concern. So the self is a vessel, merely, an astonished witness. Experience whets the soul's appetite, but only through discipline, through a voluntary deprivation, is attention honed to a sharpness. Is it thirst, or the taste of cold well water from a tin cup, or the memory of that thirst--that matters?       

  

These poems are incremental disagreements with expediency. Even language itself may seem an expedient, where feelings are concerned. 

  

 

End Part I

First Book First Look - Atsuro Riley's Romey's Order

 

 

 

Atsuro Riley was raised in the South Carolina low country, the child of an American serviceman father, and a Japanese mother (brought home from abroad). His first book, Romey's Order [2010], has just been published by University of Chicago Press. 

 

I first discovered Riley's work in Poetry (Chicago) Magazine. I've not been either a subscriber to, or a reader of Poetry for decades, but I happened upon a stray issue a year or so ago, and was intrigued that so unusual a writer should have been seriously taken up by what has become a very conservative and timid publication indeed, since the demise of its former editor Henry Rago (Editor-in-chief 1955-1969, ending with his death). In the decades since, the magazine has foundered about, not really finding an identity as such, or perhaps merely being content not to have any clear editorial policy at all. I mention this to emphasize the degree of my surprise at finding such work there in the first place, let alone being featured.

 

The most overtly unusual characteristic of Riley's poetry is its insistent, perhaps even dogged, use of alliteration and compound adjectival descriptives. These are employed in the service of a kind of synthetic-nativist, rural-local coloristic paintbrush, to evoke the sensual, potent flavors and odors of the humid, decaying South--the sweet-sour lush-rot of the Gothic post-bellum bog, the alluvial swirl and muck of back-country habitation, rustic isolation and grisly gnarl. Riley now lives in California, so (one suspects) the re-creation of this dense, inspiring context is conducted from memory, at a safe, discreet aesthetic distance.

 

The poems appearing in magazines over the last few years have all been presented as lyrically discrete instances. But in order to give the book some unity, one suspects--and to objectify the experience to which the poems, as a group, refer--he's adopted a persona, Romey, as the voice of the poems, a biographical conceit not likely to do much to strengthen a commitment to directness of address. Romey is, without doubt, close enough to Riley's identity--his own experience--to make such distancing unnecessary, at least insofar as the content of the poems matters. And, I would offer, it matters very much.  

  

Riley's poems are easy to quote, because they have a consistency of sound and feeling about them, which is unmistakable. 

 

BELL

 

 

The heard-tell how her baby'd burned downrivering and rippling.

 

Rill and wave of chicken/prayer/purlow murmuring back.        

  

Brackwater cove-woods by her marsh-yard oak-creaking and -crying.  

 

Mourn-cranes and cave-crow and crape-blinded windows keening black.

 

Raining: wrack.

 

The grieve-mother Malindy Jean porch-planking brunt and planging.

 

Breasting river (crossing-over) songs with cast-iron inside'em.

 

The live heft-fact scorch-skillet willow-strung low and hanging.

 

Her having shovel-hafts and oats to make it ring. 

 

  

A technical approach as doggedly monotonous as this entirely typical example is, may seem to try one's patience. There's an echo here of Hopkins's sprung-i-ness, Vachel Lindsay's chant, the auctioneer's stutter, an attempt to capture the faux-slangy, snake-slippery music of rural vernacular jargon, informal and lazy-sweet. As a performance-piece, it's tantalizingly clever, but as a repetitious style, it lacks variety. What's hopeful, at least for me, is the innocent delight and herbal pungency of it, which I find most effective in short spoon-fuls:

 

  

    DRIFT-RAFT

  

  

Some nights, blank nothing.

 

 

 

The ice-box, milk purling in the kitchen.

 

The eye-of-pine floorboards ticking, clicking, planking themselves cool.

 

  

This is an honest poem, without any additional echolalia, any descriptive superfluity. I think Oppen, or Williams, would have appreciated its directness, the simplicity of its invention, grounded in a lived experience. 

  

One thing I should mention which is slightly troubling in this book, typographically. Publishers are often in the peculiar habit of using double-spaced leading for poetry--even, on occasion, for prose--believing, perhaps, that giving this extra space allows the work to "breathe" or "stretch out" beyond the confining parameters of single-leading. But a problem arises, when the work may have been conceived, precisely, in double-leaded format. Reading Riley's book, true separation between lines and individual stanzas becomes indeterminate, since everything starts with double-leading, and stanzas are separated by what looks like triple-leading. Should there really be this much air between the words? I question this design, since it ambiguates the structure of his lines. For a poet whose work is so sensitive and expressive in its sounds, shouldn't its spacing and layout be equally sensitive and deliberate?

 

The best poems here incorporate a narrational flow, which gives the irrepressible word-conjuring a propulsive purpose, as here, from--

 

 

  

               DRILL     

 

 

     Mama talks in this one.

     Here's us, backing down our driveway's maze of red-dirt dog-legs, her at the wheel (with fresh-forged license) , me turned around navigating, the yard black-dark but flushed now (and now) and now with brake-lights, her Kool-tip flaring on every hard in-breath, river-reek and oil-scorch and marsh-gas mingling, our under-chassis (and rear axle, eyeteeth) chuttering due to roots and rain-ruts, our rust-crusting Rambler swerving and fishtailing and near-missing trees.

     At the mailbox, gears knock, gnaw, grind, find Forward eventually: we're missile-heading straight (more or less) for the LowCountry fairgrounds; here's us, late, loud, breaknecking her blue-ribbon hoard to the Fair.

     Everything is home-made.

     

 

 ...etc. (Note: I took out the double-spacing in this piece, and printed it as straight prose without line-breaks, which I think is how Riley must originally have typed it.) One wants to know more about these people, if for no other reason than to place them more accurately within the context they inhabit, to locate them socially and culturally inside the matrix of their relations, both familial and within larger structures.   

    

This work reminds one of Faulkner territory--perhaps Caldwell, Crews, Welty. None of them poets. Or might one suggest Charles Wright, or perhaps Penn Warren--who, come to think of it, was himself known to fall into an occasional alliterative rut now and again, or at least to coin earthy slang constructions as a kind of affectation. The best things about Atsuro Riley's verse are 1) its willingness to entertain all kinds of exotic, vivid textures and sensations, in a descriptive style that's a bit juiced-up with free word-play, but, importantly, fore-grounded from some direct experience, and 2) its attempt to make out of the qualities of a rural American childhood a poetic tapestry which is 9/10ths feeling and sensation, and only 1/10th moralizing and rationalizing. At the least, it doesn't make poems designed to convince you of something through their ponderous arguments and tedious reasoning. To portray and to describe to a reader, is nearly always better than to badger and harangue. 

 

The example of Yeats demonstrates how a poet can combine historical and folkloric material with personal implication, through a use of traditional lyric elements. The use of personae, along these lines, used to establish rich emotional contexts for the development of character and situation, can be one way to achieve this. If Riley's strengths as a poet are to grow, he should consider carefully the implications of putting fictional place-holders between himself and his material, since doing so implies a certain distancing--a made-up quality which I find unnecessary, and slightly distracting here, a premature step for him to at this point in his development as a writer, but with potential value further down the road. The use of personae, along these lines, might spur a richer emotional context for the development of character and situation, though a poetry of direct address, at this point in his career, would appear best to serve Riley's range of proclivities.    

      

The possibility of a strong regional, nativistic poetry, home-grown, rooted in its connection to the land and the people whose settled habitation has mouldered and festered and mutated into original etymologies of behavior and grammar, has been systematically thwarted over the last century and a half, by what some refer to as the so-called "official (verse) culture". Contrarily, the potential fruits of a deliberate cultivation might resemble something as impressive as Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, or Pound's The Seafarer, or as some of the work of Yeats--wherein an evocation of faux-historic expression spurs linguistic inventiveness and daring experiment. Riley's work hints at this, but hesitates just at the edge. That this possibility appears to be open to him, at this early stage, is reason enough for celebration.  

  

A poet who begins in naive lyricism, rather than with exercises in formal pyrotechnics, may have a better chance of self-realization and fulfillment. Of all of human genius, a native lyricism, like a skill with mathematics, or virtuosic mastery of an instrument, may be a simple gift. These poems of Riley's seem less about strategy, and more about the deep song of common people living lives close to the ground, among the the matter and music of indigenous consciousness--a refreshing exception to so much that passes for sophomoric ambition these days.  

    

Is it too much to imagine that a writer of Riley's skills might evolve, in due course, into a figure as compelling as Ransom or Peale Bishop? The best thing about Riley's poems is their promise--what they might become, with a little seasoning, with a little less persiflage and gratuitous word-play, with a little more careful listening and intuitive patience. 

 

Atsuro Riley's work will bear watching.                 

                 

Milhaud's Saudades - Exotic Longing & Desire

One of my favorite composers is the Frenchman Darius Milhaud [1892-1974]. Had I been a serious student of music, I would certainly have discovered that he was still at Mills College (Milhaud taught there between 1947 to 1971). But I was an English major (sigh) and didn't pursue this other side of my interests. I took piano lessons for a while as a child, then gave it up in frustration; but then, in my teens, I resumed on my own, struggling to play boogie-woogie, stride and jazz, eventually moving on to favorite classical keyboard pieces. Among which were those by the French Modernists, beginning with Chabrier and Debussy, and then Satie, Milhaud, Poulenc, Severac, Ibert, Faure, Ravel, etc. 

 

 

  

Like most classical enthusiasts, I became familiar with Milhaud's warhorses, the Creation du Monde, Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit, his Four Seasons, and so on. One could hardly not notice how bright, charming, and clever his mind was, his innovative orchestrations, his audacious combinations, and rapid modulations--all thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan! But the piece (or collection of pieces) that caught my attention was his Saudades do Brazil [1921], a suite of twelve pieces (dance numbers, in essence) originally composed for piano, and later orchestrated by the Composer. Milhaud had taken the rare opportunity offered by Paul Claudel (a French diplomat and poet [1868-1955]) to go to Rio de Janeiro, to be Claudel's diplomatic secretary at the French Consular Mission, a post that lasted two years. Milhaud's Saudades are a paean to, and an appropriation of Brazilian rhythms and melodic style, to modernist techniques (in particular, poly-tonality--which had been and would continue to be a signature aspect of Milhaud's compositions). 

 

 

 

  

Saudade is a Portuguese word with interesting meanings. Wikipedia has a whole article on it here, and it roughly translates as "the love that remains"--a recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. This nostalgic longing I take to signify Milhaud's sweet memories of Rio at the beginning of the outset of the Modern Age, his love of the lyrical charm of native Brazilian musical culture (familiar to those who know the work, for instance, of Villa-Lobos), a zesty, throbbing, energetic contrapuntal style. In the painting shown below [Saudade (1899), by Almeida Junior], a young woman laments an absent lover, reading perhaps, a letter from him.     

 

 

When the world was smaller--before the advance of transportation, commercial aviation and rapid communication--exotic fantasy and fascination with the faraway and unfamiliar was a major preoccupation, not just of the leisured classes, but of all levels of society. Stories about foreign places and the intriguing exploits of adventurers, exploration, souvenirs of difference, and examples of other, non-Western forms of literature and musical culture captured people's imaginations. As they still do today, but it's not quite the same. In 1920, a genuine original Brazilian dance ["Gavea" #6 of the Saudades do Brazil] inspired by the Bohemian quarter of Rio, must have seemed as exotic as a meterorite to Western audiences. Its sunny, suave, sexy, audacious syncopations sound as fresh and uncompromising (and sophisticated), today, as they were when they were written almost a century ago.        

Back in the 1970's, penniless and at loose ends, living in an efficiency apartment in Berkeley, I used to listen to these pieces on record. They seemed as strange and wonderful to me, then, as I imagine they must have to people who first heard them in the 1920's. Here's a poem I wrote then, one rainy, foggy night. My Stepfather, who had joined the merchant marine in his early twenties, sailed around the world, stopping in Rio and Buenos Aires for long periods of several months at a time--in the early 1920's. Imagining him there, was a special detail, which found its way into the poem.

 

 

   Poem

 

 

I'm not alone I'm just the only one awake

It is drizzling down on the heads of the sparrows

How odd to be sitting inside something you've made

Just sitting and talking

The four white walls bow to me

I get up to get a banana but they are too green yet

All the way from green Panama or someplace

On cool storage freighters

"Across the Sea" & "Just For Me"

Memories are floating up to the surface

As I gaze into the pool of melancholy

I think a little bit about my Stepfather

Sporting white bucks in Buenos Aires in 1925

And I think a little bit about figs

The kind I used to step on barefoot when I was a boy

I listen to the rain make corrugation sounds in the hollow drain pipe

The rhythm so strangely syncopated and other-worldly

Transported to a distance place

Far from here

Where the soft rain is making a mulch of the earth

And sleep is a kind of slow run towards Summer

 

The poem reads to me now as a kind of lullaby, lull - a - by, lulling by, a lull (or pause) that passes by the by, lulling you to sleep, perchance to dream. Milhaud's Saudades, though they're ostensibly dance numbers, with a kind of agitated rhythmic character, are lyrically mournful, as a Saudade would be. I like to think that when he wrote these, in the year after he'd returned to Europe, he was summoning from memory the exotic world he'd seen and heard and tasted in Brazil. 

  

Years later in his life, my Stepfather would play tango recordings on our turntable, and a misty expression would cloud his countenance. I'm not sure, but I suspect he may have had a romantic interlude which he was remembering, or perhaps it was just the atmosphere of a place and a time, long since evaporated. 

I'll have future posts about Milhaud and his music down the road.     

 

 

A Favorite Larry Poem

Larry Eigner's poetry often deals with the daily routines of living, the sights and sounds of ordinary experience, in a neighborhood, a house, in meditative reclusion. But he also spends a lot of "poetic" time imagining places and events. He learned how to launch himself mentally into space and project all kinds of amazing perspectives. 

 

In any given poem, you may find Larry zooming over a city, snaking up a brick wall, talking to a fetus, or hanging upside down from the ceiling. This sense of delight and fun in imaginative "what if's"--the playfulness of one who continued to have access to the unfettered spheres of childhood fantasy--is one of the great excitements of his work. In some interesting ways, Larry managed to stay young, to preserve his sense of play, and to summon fantastic manipulated contexts and structures, which most of us only experience rarely, or in dream-states.

  

 

 

When I was editing the chapbook My God / The Proverbial [Berkeley, 1975], Larry was sending me poems for consideration, and this one caught my attention immediately:

  

 

  

                                                                                                                 August 21 70   # 4 2 7                     

You ride for some hours                                              

                                stalagmites

                          clouds    cities

 

 

 

[presented here in distributed (proportional) kerning (non-equivalent) Georgia typeface].

 

 

Larry was never, naturally, able to drive a car, so for him, being a passenger was a perpetual fact of transportation. As children, we're freer to pay attention to the sights and events passing by, than we are as adults. I can distinctly recall, as a boy, being amazed at the phenomena of the world as my Stepfather drove us places. When I grew up and began to drive myself, I lost much of this sense. Once you begin navigating, that part of you which once saw the passing world goes dormant--you tend to see more as a navigator than as an observer. But Larry's apprehension of traveling in a car became, if anything, more imaginative as he grew older. Trips out were adventures, opportunities to let his imagination flow; returning from an outing, he would hold ideas and phrases, even whole poems, in his mind, until he could get them transcribed onto the paper. Travel was an exciting business for him. Movement through space was analogous, for Larry, to the spatial freedom of his poetic persona on the page. Flights of fancy mirrored imaginative movements in his poems. 

  

 

 

 

The poem I've quoted suggests several things. My first impression when I read it was that Larry was imagining seeing a tornado while driving on the highway. He must certainly have seen movies or pictures of tornadoes, and the quality of stretched out time--flat and featureless--which long drives cause us to experience, probably suggested such a vision. From there to "cloud / cities" is just another quick leap of mind. 

 

Stalagmites, of course, are those weird concretions in caves which are created when water laden with lime accretes over time, building from the bottom up, or from the top down (creating stalactites). Reading this very short poem--as short, really, as a haiku--there is a sense of meditative calm ("You ride for some hours") and without any prompting or addition, you simply conjure (or pretend to see) these strange shapes in the clouds, fantasizing stalactite structures, or tornedoes, or cloud cities floating as a prospect in the distance.

 

 

As is often the case with Larry's work, there's no rhetorical build-up or annunciation; such strategic employments are not an integral part of his repertory. Miraculous events and transformations are usually merely described through opposition, proximity or surprise--simile and metaphor occur gratuitously, rather than being openly set forth. This relaxes the poems, allows the reader to experience the sequential occurrences within the continuum of perceptual flow. In this case, Larry doesn't have to say "I was riding in a car, just calmly watching as the miles flew by, when I saw a fascinating cloud to the West, which changed into a magical city, a city on stilts!" You can imagine how Poe or Frank Baum or Fritz Leiber would do it, but Larry's poetic mode is a kind of mental short-hand for all the elaborate ways in which one might think to describe such an experience. 

 

 

There's something passive about it, too. This passivity is one of the hallmarks of his style, the way things happen to him, happen to his mind, so that the volitional side of his brain, the side that's making things, making words and poems happen, in space, on the page, is simply a recording device, patient, open to suggestion, the way people are said to be when going under hypnosis. In Larry's case, the passive side of his consciousness often seems to be on the ascendancy, while the active, expressive side of his mind is merely absorbing, watching, rather in the way a scientist might do, watching an experiment unfold. I've always thought this ability, or facility, or faculty, of being able to observe, without interference, is one of the great advantages of the rational mind. Some people possess this meditative, observational calm more than others. Larry acquired this facility as a boy, spending long hours of quiet on the porch of his parents' house in Swampscott. This is the same situational condition within which the passenger poem above occurs--passivity and perfect attention to both inner and outer states of consciousness. 

 

 

Not much may have seemed to be happening in Larry's life there in Swampscott. But there was. He was teaching himself to observe, not just what was happening in reality, but what was happening in his imagination. It's the same facility you see in the work of William Carlos Williams. Deliberate, accurate, fascinated observation. 

 

 

Sometimes just accurately reporting what you see, what you dream, is enough. Is more than enough. Is incredible.