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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

On a June Morning, I Would Head for Your Scent

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This is the third themed liturgical weaving I’ve done, taking lines from many different poets and using them to create a new piece designed to be read aloud as part of the morning prayer service in the Feminist, non-Zionist havurah I co-lead. Done right, poetry makes damn fine prayer, and this way of reading with single voices and group response is, honestly, something I learned from the Episcopalians and wow does it work in a group.

On a June Morning, I Would Head for Your Scent

a mosaic with words from Genesis, Basho, Mary Oliver, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Susan Windle, Ben Johnson, Li-Young Lee, Antonio Machado, Joan Larkin, Jane Hirshfield, Carl Sandburg, Sharon Olds, John Ciardi, Anne Marie Macari, Carol Burbank, and inspiration from Robert Bly and Alicia Ostriker
woven by Elliott batTzedek

ALL:
On a June morning,
any June morning

READER:
On a June morning,
any June morning,
moving about in my garden
in a breezy time of day,
I keep watch for You,
I follow silver slug lines,
sniffing for Your trail,
I call out “Where are You?”

READER
And a bee
staggers out
of the peony.

READER:
There is a dark hum among the roses,
a murmuring of innumerable bees,
and to the murmur of bees—
a witchcraft—I yield
to my desire for You.

ALL:
On a June morning,
any June morning

READER:
If I were a bee and You
a flower,
I would head for Your scent,
oh my beloved,
I would land on Your petals
held wide apart,
flinging myself down wildly,
tumbling to the bottom of Your cup.
There such sustenance,
You feeding me because only I
can ripen all this fertile exuberance,
food for those not yet born.

READER:
Would You let me go, pantaloons heavy
with gold and sunlight?
Or would You close Your petals,
dissolving me slowly
into Your heart?

ALL:
On a June morning,
any June morning

READER:
And if You were the bee,
would You come to me,
fill Your small body
from this place, my source,
and moan in happiness?

READER:
We are alike, You and I,
each created as the image of the other.
We fly from blossom to sweet
impossible blossom,
bartering pollen for nectar,
making honey from the roses,
honey from the rosemary, honey from the clover,
honey from the peach blossoms,
honey from the red and willing bee balm.

READER:
What honey would You make
from me?

READER:
What honey could I make of You?

ALL:
Can we make honey from our failures?
Honey from our bitterness,
honey from the bare fields
of our hearts?

READER:
Rough, this world is,
yet our soft tongues cut it open,
and the sanity of honey pours out between,
where meaning lives,

READER:
where honey, that gold soup
made of sex and light,
flows shining proof enough of the need
of each of ten thousand flights.

READER:
Every June morning
I pause to listen
for what I live to hear.
I watch the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings,
and, delirious with desire
I dance directions to my heart.

ALL:
I know that You will come-
it is Your duty
to find things to love
to bind Yourself to this world.

Philadelphia Cunt

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I was at a writing workshop yesterday called “Fatty Girls, Imaginary Cocks, and Vaginas Like Bookstores” at the Split This Rock poetry festival. I think I’ll have several new poems coming out of their writing prompts. Here’s the first, as I wrote it in the workshop, all associate, sound-based flow of ideas. Look for rewrites soon. And—Yo, Philly friends—if I’m missing something significant, let me know!

Philadelphia Cunt

Conshohocken Cunt
Connawingo Cunt
Schuykill Cunt
Sure-kill Cunt
Cynwyd Cunt
Bryn Mawr Cunt
Tulpehoken Cunt
McCallum Cunt
Mount Airy Cunt
Chestnut Hill Cunt
Chestnut Cunt
Walnut Cunt
Spruce Cunt
Pine Cunt
Market Cunt
Cherry Cunt
Arch Cunt
Vine Cunt
Broad Cunt
Catherine Cunt
Delaware Cunt
Columbus Cunt
Cornerstore Cunt
Chubby’s Cunt
Cheese Steak Cunt
Scrapple Cunt
Hoagie Cunt
Water Ice Cunt
Pignoli Cunt
Cannoli Cunt
Cannoli Cunt
Cannoli Cunt

How does a poem mean?

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from Chapter One, John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

For “what does a poem mean?” is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is “how does the poem mean?” Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:

O body swayed to music, o quickening glance,
How shall I I tell the dancer from the dance?

What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself. The dance is the dancer and the dancer is the dance. Or put in another way: where is the “dance” when no one is dancing it? and what man [sic] is a “dancer” except when he is dancing?

[…]

So for poetry. The concern is not to arrive at a definition and to close the book, but to arrive at an experience. There will never be a complete system for “understanding” or for “judging” poetry. Understanding and critical judgment are admirable goals, but neither can take place until the poem has been experienced, and even then there is always some part of every good work of art that can never be fully explained or categorized.

[…]

Any teaching of the poem by any other method owes the poem an apology. What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? The apology must at least be made. It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.

New Work Up

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I’ve started a new set of pages for my craft essays and poetry reviews, accessed through a new tab at the top of this page. First up are two essays using Scott McCloud’s theory of transitions from Understanding Comics to consider how poems are sequenced in collections. If you like comics or syntax, you’ll probably be as geekily thrilled as I was when I wrote them. Heather McHugh and Ellen Bryant Voigt also make big appearances in these works. No surprise there, after this fall.

More coming to this area soon.

We met in a strange world

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…We met in a strange world, in a frenzy.
A spiral of ups and downs.
Didn’t I feel the lit orb, inside and out?
Later, I returned to the calcium
of loneliness, the fine shell spotted and cracked,
and the delicate thing ticking inside.

from “Certain Sparrow” Anne Marie Macari, She Heads into the Wilderness

On the Omer and counting

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A piece I wrote several years ago, “For the Sake of the Innocent Fifty”, has been brought back to my mind this week because so many members of my Jewish tribe continue to believe and say such racist, horrible things about Palestinians as a people. Arguing the facts of 61 years of dispossession is never enough to break through the carefully constructed Zionist cover story, so sometimes, when I have the time and inclination, I try instead to argue from our own story, from the stories we’ve constructed and carried with us for thousands of years as Torah and commentary.

This piece, about counting and morality, was written for Shavuot in 2006: For the Sake of the Innocent Fifty

A Hand

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A Hand
Jane Hirshfield

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb. Nor is it palm and knuckles, not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow, not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins. A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines with their infinite dramas, nor what it has written, not on the page, not on the ecstatic body. Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— not sponge of rising yeast-bread, not rotor pin’s smoothness, not ink. The maple’s green hands do not cup the proliferant rain. What empties itself falls into the place that is open. A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

Manly Sappho

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quotations from various ancient sources about Sappho, as listed in Willis Barnstone’s translation Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho

[She was called] “manly Sappho,” either because she was famous as a poet, an art in which men are known, or else because she has been defamed for being of that tribe [of homosexuals].
from Porphyrio, in Horace’s Epistles 1.19.28

The manly Sappho tames the muse of Archilochos through her prosody….
from Horace Epode