Poetry

On a recent episode of the NYTimes Modern Love podcast, actor Andrew Garfield reads Chris Huntington's wonderful essay Learning to Measure Time In Love and Loss (both gift links).

Not only is the essay terrific and Garfield's performance excellent, but during it, he breaks down and the moment is rather extraordinary for how uncommon it is in today's culture and media. Some actors would have asked for the piece to be edited to be seamless — some podcasts would have done it without being asked — but offering it up whole was the correct decision and I urge you to listen to it.

In the opening, before he reads the essay, Garfield unknowingly quotes Stanley Kunitz's The Testing-Tree when he says, "The heart lives by breaking." The full quote is, "In a murderous time, the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking." It's a wonderful line that's grown in meaning for me as I've aged. (Kunitz's book, Passing Through, is one of the many books in my bathroom. I've always kept books in my bathrooms. In more recent times, they're an excellent encouragement to not take my phone with me. You're just sitting there. Read a poem!)

You can read Kunitz's The Testing-Tree here.

Garfield mentions that Huntington's essay brings Rilke to mind. Specifically, Robert Bly's translation of The Man Watching:

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

I know little of Garfield, but that he was in The Social Network and was one of the Spidermans, but the few interviews I've heard with him have shown him to be thoughtful and intelligent. His thoughts on grief are particularly admirable. If you enjoyed the above, you might appreciate his interview with Marc Maron from a few years ago.

Santa Monica

Back home
I dream of the water
beyond the break
and wake older
angry at borders
that keep me foreign
and dry.

Did my wretched ancestors
who walked inward
abandoning shorelines
and settling centered
fear the power
tides gift me?

And will my absence
pull from both coasts
to my landlocked city
salt water so deep
as to drown
their evil
guiding star?

— July, 2017, Toronto

Your Call Pulses Through Me With A Glorious Dynamism

I've felt this wave before,
in Havana and Piles, too. 
You were with me, then,
and the water senses your absence.
I lay back and conspire with the tide.
The sunlit Santa Monica sky turns black and star-pricked.
I drift, whispering your name,
until I feel your faint but unmistakable touch.

— December, 2017, Santa Monica

lyrikline is an international website for poetry. They've got an excellent search engine for their growing list of poets in english and in translation (more than 1600 poets so far).

Head on over and listen to some Ron Padgett, or John Giorno, then let yourself discover poets from Iran, Vietnam, or Cyprus.

Lots to explore here.

Here's the site's official description:

"lyrikline is an international website for experiencing the diversity of contemporary poetry. Here you can listen to the melodies, sounds, and rhythms of international poetry, recited by the authors themselves, and read the poems both in their original languages and various translations."

Perhaps you've read Ron Padgett's Love Poem. If not, it's below. Or you can listen to him reading it.

Love Poem

We have plenty of matches in our house.
We keep them on hand always.
Currently our favorite brand is Ohio Blue Tip,
though we used to prefer Diamond brand.
That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches.
They are excellently packaged, sturdy
little boxes with dark and light blue and white labels
with words lettered in the shape of a megaphone,
as if to say even louder to the world,
“Here is the most beautiful match in the world,
its one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem capped
by a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious
and stubbornly ready to burst into flame,
lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love,
for the first time, and it was never really the same
after that. All this will we give you.”
That is what you gave me, I
become the cigarette and you the match, or I
the match and you the cigarette, blazing
with kisses that smoulder toward heaven.

It's available in the Collected Poems of Ron Padgett, which unfortunately is out of print, and many people I'm sure are familiar with an early draft of it from the film Paterson:

But did you know that in the 60s, Saul Bass designed the packaging for the Ohio Match Co.?

Photos by the always wonderful Present & Correct.

I used to own a great many books. More books than is reasonable for a person to own. You can see some of them in the photo above. Just under 1900 titles. In 2022 and 2023, I sold the vast majority of them, keeping just a small shelf worth.

I thought it would be interesting to occasionally do a post about one of the keepers and write a bit about how it came to be mine and why I've kept it.

The first title is Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. I believe I purchased this copy from Iliad Books in North Hollywood, though it might have been The Last Bookstore in DTLA. Either way it was definitely in 2010, during my first trip to California.

I'd gone because a film director had read Chimera, a screenplay I wrote in 2008. He called and said he wanted to meet and talk about me writing a sequel to a hit film he'd made in 1990. (A film I'd seen in the theatre when it came out and that most people of my generation will have seen. Yes, I'm purposely being vague.) He told me he lived in Venice Beach and that I should head down.

I took the month of May off and flew down, staying in an AirBnB a few blocks from the director's house. To quickly answer the questions you're probably asking: nothing came of Chimera, my script that he'd read, and I never worked with him on a sequel to his film — or any other film for that matter. In short: he stiffed me. I spoke with him the day before I left Toronto — "Oh, yes, great, great. Looking forward to meeting you, Lincoln." — and then he avoided my calls for the entire month I was there.

I've been asked a number of times if I'm bitter about the experience, but the truth is that I'm thankful for him having called, as he motivated me to head to Los Angeles, something I probably should have done as a teenager or in my early 20s, instead of going to film school. I fell in love with the place and lived there for three and a half years spread out over the next ten. In all that time, I never did come face to face with that director, but I did make some great and lasting friendships.

As to the book of Japanese poetry:

For as long as I can remember, I've lived an unrequited life. This means I'm often thinking about someone from my past. I chanced upon the Rexroth book and opened to a random page:

In the empty mountains
The leaves of the bamboo grass
Rustle in the wind.
I think of a girl
Who is not there.

Nice. I flip again:

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.

Very nice. Once more:

Others may forget you, but not I.
I am haunted by your beautiful ghost.

Sold!

If memory serves, it costs me $8.

Though I have most of my favorites from the book memorized, the thin trade paperback often accompanies me when I travel. I had it with me in Spain in 2017 when I was sending my own poems out to my Burning the Days mailing list. All those miles means it's pretty beat. It was dog-eared when I got it. It's water-stained now. I'll replace it with a hardcover first edition if I ever find one in person. (They pop up all the time online but I hate paying for $30 shipping on a $20 item.)

There is a sequel with the inventive title One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, but I can't recommend it. Rexroth also did two volumes of poems translated from Chinese. Again, they don't strike the same chord as this original Japanese collection.

One Hundred Poems From the Japanese is still in print. It's published by the stellar New Directions and you can purchase it from Bookshop.org, Abe Books, or Amazon (Canada, US, UK), or maybe get your local book store to special order you a copy.

Landays (pronounced land-eyes) are 22 syllable, two-line poems composed primarily by Pashtun women who live on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are passed on orally and are anonymous, as these women are usually illiterate and poetry for women — not to mention education — is forbidden by the Taliban. The Harvard Review says, "The landay is a vibrant, clandestine, and ancient tradition."

Eliza Griswold, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, has translated many landays and collected them in a book published by FSG: I Am the Beggar of the World.

Here are a few landays from the book:

May God make you into a riverbank flower
so I may smell you when I gather water.

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

Leave your sword and fetch your gun.
Away to the mountains, the Americans have come.

Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

Two years ago the Talibs favored boys and left the girls alone.
A woman then was worth her weight in stone.

You can read more on landays on the Poetry Foundation's page on the form, which was written by Griswold and is excellent.

Griswold also wrote this piece for the BBC: The 22 Syllables That Can Get You Killed, and spoke with PBS NewsHour about the artform (6m30):

Landays: Poetry of Afghan Women

Poetry Magazine, June 2013

Years ago, I had a small stroke that caused me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life and with my work. Invitations to my next birthday party went out with a photo and readings of two poems, one by James Wright and one by David Whyte.

In the years since, a number of the guests to that party have told me how much they enjoyed the poems. Here they are, along with the photo:

Robert Pattinson reads a poem by James Wright

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Everything Is Waiting for You written and read by David Whyte

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I’d taken the photo post-stroke, while bathing in a client’s bathtub in Beverly Glen, her dog Bailey watching from the sidelines. For some reason, the framing of it reminded me of Alex Colville's work, so I later tinted it in his style.

Outside that bathroom, not far away, the Skirball Fire was having its way with Bel Air, the neighborhood that was literally across the street from where I was staying. I'd spent the morning feeding the chickens and cats and walking the dogs as ash fell from the sky. I'd become consumed by chaos and worry about when it would be our time to evacuate the neighborhood. (If everyone flees simultaneously, no one gets anywhere, so you wait until instructed.)

My client was incommunicado, so I'd taken it upon myself to load her SUV with what I assumed were her prized possessions, leaving just enough room for me and the pets. Thankfully, on the morning when the street's more experienced residents had predicted we'd have to leave, the wind changed and we were able to stay put. Though the fire continued to blaze, the flames never crossed that street; the ash never returned. I drew a bath to celebrate and re-center myself.

Unpredictably, with a glowing reference from that Beverly Glen client (neighbors conveyed my preparedness, which they witnessed through their windows), I started getting job offers from people living in danger zones with their pets. A year later I got calls from a couple in Malibu, and would have accepted the gig had I not already been booked in Santa Monica. While there, the Woolsey Fire scorched that beach-side town. I heard numerous horror stories from fleeing residents who'd moved into the Santa Monica Fairmont Miramar, where I'm a regular at the main bar. They literally had nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Then, I booked a 4+ month gig in Vanuatu during cyclone season which I completed without incident. Less than a month after I left, Cyclone Harold ripped through much of the South Pacific archipelago, including the property I'd been living on, sparing my clients and their staff and their buildings — which had been built to withstand cyclones — but laying waste to much of the greenery.

Today, I'm reminded of this bathroom photo and these poems and that birthday invitation, because someone shared The Poetry Atlas on Metafilter and used the Wright poem as an example. Want to know, exactly, where the hammock swings that the narrator is wasting their life in? The Poetry Atlas will tell you.

The second poem is by David Whyte, who's written and spoken many wonderful things. If you appreciated the line, "Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity," you will enjoy his book, Consolations, which has many such pieces of wisdom. One of my favourites is "Beauty is the harvest of presence."

(In my mind, I always link that line to one by Tom Stoppard: "Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late." Perhaps you also have lines or definitions that are forever-conflated? Do I digress? So be it. I digress.)

In What to Remember When Waking, Whyte tells the story of an ancient Irish tribe who no longer wish to fight — he describes them as "no longer wanting to have that conversation." So, when next they're confronted with battle, "they turn sideways into the light and disappear into the originality of it all."

Considering the "conversations" we're having, and reflecting on whether they're helping us be the person we want to be, living the life we want to live, can lead to some of life's great awakenings. Am I wasting my life in the right way?

After that stroke, I sold Good Music, my Toronto record shop, to a competitor, and made a promise to myself that I would no longer do things solely for money. I no longer wanted to have that conversation. Rather, I wanted to live a time-rich life. If that doesn't sound easy, I can assure you that it's absolutely harder than it sounds — for the most part, I've managed to do that while living in some interesting places, despite threats of fire, cyclone, or comfortable hammock.

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) and his poems Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil).

The definitive online edition of this masterpiece of French literature, the site contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together with multiple English translations.

Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The definitive online edition of this masterwork of French literature, Fleursdumal.org contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together with multiple English translations — most of which are exclusive to this site and are now available in digital form for the first time ever.

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Groundbreaking NY Poet and performer John Giorno -- creator of Dial-A-Poem (call now: +1-641-793-8122!) and Giorno Poetry Systems, landlord to Wm. S. Burroughs, star of Andy Warhol's Sleep – died today, aged 82. 

I cannot tell you how many times I've listened to his performance of Eating the Sky. Literally, hundreds:

Update, August 4, 2020: Giorno's autobiography, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment, was released. Of course, it's wonderful. What a life!

I first saw this Dominique Christina performance of her poem, Karma, about five years back. Still powerful.