Monthly Archives: April 2011

April 8th – A Poem in the Stead of Killing My Coworkers

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A Poem in the Stead of Killing My Coworkers
Elliott batTzedek

All I want to say to everyone and everything is
Get the fuck away from me!

Hardly the stuff of poetry.
But why not? It is the most primal

human emotion, older than love,
more visceral than hunger.

It was Get the fuck away from me!, not estrus
not drought, not the invention of iron smelting, that

brought us migration, boats, weapons, and wheels.
And fire too, I suppose, for what denotes Respect

my personal space! more clearly than flames
and hot coals on the end of big stick?

This brain is on fire and this poem
is a big stick so don’t even consider

getting any closer.

Not today. Not until someone
cleans up this damn mess.

April 6th – Back to translating

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Shez’ “It is possible the tree remembers”


אֶפְשָׁר שֶׁהָעֵץ זוֹכֵר: יְלָדִים שָׁבְרוּ עֲנָפָיו
אֲנָשִׁים נָעֲצוּ בּוֹ נְעָצִים כְּלָבִים
הִשְׁתִּינוּ עָלָיו – אֲבָל רֹאשׁוֹ אֶל הַשָּׁמַיִם
לִטּוּף נִשְׁמַת הָאֱלֹהְים בֵּין עָלָיו


and my first, rough translation:

It is possible the tree remembers
Shez, translated by Elliott batTzedek


It is possible the tree remembers: children shattering his branches,
people tacking in tacks, dogs
peeing on him – and yet his head rising up to the heavens
God’s breath caressing his leaves

April 5th – found poem, New York Times

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Long Island barrier beach, Monday,
Found poem from New York Times 4/5/2011

remains of three more people
bringing number to eight
[not people but]
missing prostitutes.

Grim December, bodies of four
female prostitutes, a fifth
last Tuesday.

Authorities would not speculate
about the identities;
four, in their 20s, advertised
on Craigslist.

Eyewitnesses, phone records, budget hotels.

Police began last year the search for
Shannan Gilbert, 24, prostitute
who went missing last May.

None of the bodies were hers.

Melanie Englert, 34, driving from work, saw investigators
unloading big cardboard boxes, said “Oh boy, it’s
super shocking.

Brendan Byrne, 36, who lives near, texted
“They’re in our backyard. Literally.”

April 4th – Pain Poem #2

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It is not the body pain destroys
Elliott batTzedek


The pain that waits, crouching
around every corner, the pain
you once tried to fool by living
in a round house, the pain that comes
from no one place, that was waiting for you
inside you, when you were born

this is the pain that destroys you

Not your body

You

When it lunges, ensnarls you,
throws the rancid black hood over your head

you are done for

And you know it

But your body goes on, it drags you to the toilet
to the kitchen, to the door to let out the dog,
to the truck, to your mother’s, its mouth says
“It’s not a good day, but I’ll be okay”, its leg will carry
a bruise from the bench in the garage

which, when the pain retreats, you will discover
and wonder at, another incident, another fact,
another day rendered from you

Translating Shez’s “in the nights”

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Translating, round two, after help from Ann Ellen Dichter and Eugene Sotirescu. This is complex stuff, translating. Which I knew, but I just keep knowing more and more. In theory, I’ll have an entire manuscript of at least 48 poems by next year. In theory…

First, the Hebrew original:

בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַיָּלָה חוֹלֶמֶת עַל
נִמְרֹד גִּבּוֹר צַיִד
שֶׁתָּבוֹא כְּבָר לִתְקֹעַ חֵץ
בִּקְרָבַי
שֶׁתַּעֲמֹד פְּשׂוּק רַגְלַיִם מֵעַל
גּוּפָתִי הַדּוֹמֶמֶת
שֶׁתַּעֲרִיץ אֶת הַבָּשָׂר הַזֶה

Eugene’s translation:

at night the doe dreams of
nimrod the hunter hero
let him come already to stick an arrow
into my insides
let him stand with spread legs over
my still corpse
let him admire this flesh

Here’s my revised translation, based on his literal translation.

In the nights, the fawn dreams
of Nimrod, the mighty hunter
Let him come, press an arrow
into and into me
Let him stand, legs spread,
over my unmoving body
Let him lord over this flesh

a few notes about my translation:

I chose “fawn” rather than “doe” because in the Hebrew the word ayalah is both a girl’s name and the word for “doe.” I think the sense of human and animal intertwined is essential to the poem, so I chose “fawn,” which can be a woman’s name in English. It’s not common, and I’m not sure the double meanings carry anything close to the same strength of the Hebrew, but it’s a start.

I chose “press” rather than “stick” because the word in Hebrew can also mean the meteorological term “bar” as a measure of pressure. Press also, I think, carries an intimacy that I think is there in the poem.

I chose “into and into” rather than “to my insides” because of how Marcia Falk uses “b’kirbi” in her morning blessing and translates as “heart of hearts” or “innermost being.” I’m not sure “into and into” captures the sense of being in the deepest part of oneself, although the sense of the act being repeated night after night is important.

And I chose “lord over” rather than “admire” because the Hebrew root carries a sense of being a despot or tyrant and thus a strong sense of control. “Lord over” in English carries both the sense of being the lord of the manor and of the slang “to lord it over someone,” both of which meanings are relevant here.

Or at least that’s what I’m thinking today. When I hear from some of my other Hebrew speakers, words and emotional meanings could shift again radically.

April 3rd – Pain Poem #1

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Sue has been living through really awful pain and as one way of coping asked me to try to start writing about the pain, all of its varieties and intensities. Writing gives me something to do when I see her suffering and don’t have much else to do, so I’m trying to find words for experiences that are very much outside of spoken language.

Pain Poem #1

cells slamming into cells
honing every edge
to blades that cut each other
open and you must wait
20 minutes for the vicodin
to begin to block the pain but know
every cell in your body will be shredded
oozing cytosol in 2 minutes,
and you will have to feel
your body disintegrating for 1080 seconds,
and you begin to count:

one thousand one, one thousand two , one thousand three

April 2nd “I heard ‘pulse ox’ and then ‘coding’ and then

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I heard “pulse ox” and then “coding” and then
Elliott batTzedek

timelessness
no
a lack of time and then
all tubed-up in a bed with a view
of Santa Catalina a place where no one
loved me so I lay alone down to
117 pounds so close to my goal
of not being
trays of hospital fare untouched, hunger
just another part of a body
I no longer felt.

As I had not felt myself not breathing, steroids
for the asthma in the distant past
of September’s fat jeans.

On the overnight shift, the one reserved
for gay nurses, fat nurses, old nurses, he
found me awake and shaking, refused to measure
vital signs on someone clearly not vital but asked
if I would like my back rubbed, skin
no one had touched in all the months Orange County
had been digesting me.

Lotion warmed in his palms spread as wide and
venturesome as God’s hands shaping clay, pushing
flesh while seeking life spark, he hummed only
soft syllables until I fell asleep enough to wake
to the morning on which I ate.

I could find him, say what you did, the gay gossip network
that would be more powerful than the 26 years
slipped past if not for this
hard fact:

it was 1985 in Southern California—
all my sources are on the AIDs quilt
which is itself out of style
and packed away.

Let The Translating Begin!

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So, having finished my MFA in poetry, and taken a semester to rest, I’ll be going back to school in late June to work on the poetry in translation track of Drew’s MFA program. Yes, me, translating, even though I’ve pretty much utterly failed to succeed in learning any other language, ever, and the thought of coming up against things I can’t read makes me feel more than a little shaky. So why do it? Because the translators I’ve met through Drew are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, because what they have to say about poetry pushes my thinking to the limit, because what I’ll learn about language will increase exponentially in the process. Because I’m a slut for being in over my head.

I’m searching for a poet or project, and on the recommendation of a friend found the Israeli Jewish poet Jean Shez, who describes herself as a lesbian writing about lesbian love and child abuse from a feminist perspective. Instantly intriguing me, of course. I’ve found a few of her poems on the web, and am trying to slog through a couple to get a sense of her as a writer. Here’s my first attempt, still missing a couple key words that my usual go-to folks for Hebrew questions couldn’t answer. First in Hebrew, then my working translation. Stay tuned, as I’ll be posting updates every time I manage to make a little more sense of her poem.

בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַיָּלָה חוֹלֶמֶת עַל
נִמְרֹד גִּבּוֹר צַיִד
שֶׁתָּבוֹא כְּבָר לִתְקֹעַ חֵץ
בִּקְרָבַי
שֶׁתַּעֲמֹד פְּשׂוּק רַגְלַיִם מֵעַל
גּוּפָתִי הַדּוֹמֶמֶת
שֶׁתַּעֲרִיץ אֶת הַבָּשָׂר הַזֶה

In the evenings the fawn dreams
of Nimrad, the mighty hunter,
who will come to press an arrow
inside me
to straddle my unmoving body,
to lord over this meat

April 1st – On the difference between a good poem and a great poem

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(fess up time – I’ve been working on various drafts of this for a while now, but it finally solidified in re-visions this week, so I’m counting it as my first poem of the month)

(2nd fess up – it may actually be prose. or a lyric essay. or a prose poem. it feels like poetry, and that’s good enough for me.)

On the difference between a good poem and a great poem
Elliott batTzedek

A line, like the tightrope between the twin towers, the one with the Frenchman all mania and magic—the line between a poem that’s good and a poem that’s great.

Words teeter along the balancing point, the tipping point, the moment the puppet becomes a real boy, the moment form’s armor becomes living skin you find you must reach to touch, the clay at the moment it lumbers off golem, immense forehead branded with the single perfect letter that bestows a soul,

the moment a soul is bestowed upon words.

A soul you can almost measure in its depth and heft and opacity and there is a solid pleasure to be able to take the measure of a good poem, but then other times you find yourself inside a soul looking back out at yourself at your world and that is a great shock.

A great shock, too, to be driven over words so sharp that reading across them makes eyes bleed.

Great is not a question of good and then a little more so. Good poems raise and answer questions, as image or metaphor or objective correlative, but to raise a question and leave it hanging, knotted into a noose of words that makes you both hangman and hanged, to refuse questions that beg answers that beg for a question, to give the truth but not what it means, to have a how so urgent that the why is unnecessary,

to have these is to have words that justify the brain having ever evolved language.

Highly quotable lines, lines that make sense of the world, that get cited and copied and sent as email signature lines—hallmarks each and all of solid poetic goodness. Quotable lines, so much prettier than the pale quivering jelly that is a line from a great poem ripped from its shell.

Show, don’t tell, what any poem does to be good. But every rule can be shredded over the greater of poems that tell exactly whatever the hell they need to tell and show only the how of the why of the needing.

The poetic line, the sharpened distinction between a careful architecture rising toward the sky and the sky birthing from itself its self.

NaPoMo

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After too long away, I’m back at it, blogging, reading, and writing. For National Poetry Month I’m repeating last year’s poem-a-day challenge, out of which I harvested 7 or 8 really good poems. I’ve not written at all for several months (revised, yes, but not anything new), so the first week or so might be pretty rough, but no one ever promised the sprint section of a poetry marathon would be pretty. Just, well, sprinty.

If you’re also doing the challenge, let me know so we can cross-post, or so I can feature your work here. Go poets!