I dreamt I saw the Temple of Concord
Outside a rural Canadian town.
Farmers stood round the temple
Wondering what to make of this…
Naturally the farmer was compensated
For the foreign structure on his land.
The temple, enclosed in clapboard,
A country church and farmers’ market.
But when I drive near that alien corn
I see the Temple of Concord glowing
Against the green, beautiful in snow,
Though no one else can seem to see it.
The poems of the old century hold their magic. “Cemetery in Snow” by Xavier Villaurrutia is such a poem. You can think about the poem several ways but because the subject is so singular it is trapped in the glass of its making. Shake it and the letters will settle back in some insensible way, burying the cemetery just so. The poem was probably not so much a matter of writing as of polishing glass, clarifying silence, making each different letter fall the same way.
Bright figures swim in a Roman bath
Sunk in shadows of an underworld
Neptune and seahorses mid ocean
A boy on a dolphin leaps into light
Mosaic land of impossible stone
Beings trapped in dimensionality
Beings detached from stone
Gods on the surface of a dream
Supine and recumbent statues
Extruded from swampland
Buried like mystery religion
And backward flowing skies
Tessellated spiral lines
Like nets between stars
Multitudinous motionlessness
Oceans of unweighted time
Clearing the silt of words
From the mirror of mind
Eroding the same earth
A mosaic of merchant civilization
Fish and sails wine and grain
Amphorae amphora repair
Open to the mouth of the Tiber
Fishhead man gulping the sea
Poet and translator George Szirtes said this:
“It is not the catharsis but the grace. The grace of the writing is the triumph of the imagination….”
So much poetry these days is lacking in gracefulness. I like to think of a poem as a sort of language ballet, a lithe duration of supple and subtle written gestures. Overture, theme, digression, return, apotheosis. But wouldn’t an insistence on gracefulness limit a poet’s compositional repertoire, her expressive discretion? Yes, and the sooner the better! Poetry is an aesthetic medium. It’s high time it got back to the Orphic mysteries, to a contemplative wrestling with the dark angel of hope and beauty (that elusive symbol of meaning).
Stravinsky wrote music for a graceful ballet – The Firebird.
The story of The Firebird is about Prince Ivan and his complex struggle with Kashchei the Immortal. Inside Kashchei’s magical kingdom, the prince falls in…
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As a reader, my imagination is stirred when a poem is written toward the Out There. When a poem is unburdened by the poet’s ego, trauma, diary, and blather, I’m granted possible entry to a peculiar mode of appreciation, of aesthetic impression. If the egoless poem happens to be written by a poet of subtle artistic consciousness, something special occurs: a conjuring of images both equivocal and ecstatic from the half-dreaming world. The world Out There — the stuff of worldly phenomena — takes on an unusual, quivering quality. What had been until the poem merely usual appearance and regular happening is now conjured into a sudden and glowing written thereness.
As a reader, my imagination is further stirred when a poem is written in such a manner that I’m allowed to make deep guesses about the poet. The poet in such poems is almost not there. His or…
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Years ago I’d visit Irving Layton in Montreal. We had lively poetry discussions while eating peaches and drinking red wine. One afternoon Leonard Cohen called from Los Angeles. “I’m with a talented young poet,” Irving said– winking my way. I bristled and tried not to show it. I sat browsing a book of poetry. I don’t remember the book. I think it was Canadian poet Bliss Carman. I overheard vague comments about the transparency of time… meetings in Greece… wives… Irving laughed so heartily I knew they were great friends.
Montreal was magical from the first when complete strangers, these two guys from Bogota of all places, helped us move into our apartment not far from the Westmount Public Library– birthplace of Canadian poetry. One of the guys was a documentary filmmaker. We saw a film he directed about the death of beauty. That night they were angels come out of the endless night of wind and snow. Later in the week I saw Mordecai Richler at the library, though I did not want to disturb him. A week after that I befriended an old man in a cafe who turned out to be poet Louis Dudek. I haunted Mile End, trying to feel like Leonard Cohen. I soon met Layton and enjoyed the company of screenplay writer Bruno Ramirez. At the time Bruno was friends with American poet James Merrill. Through another friend I met an Australian composer. We ended up drinking ouzo all night with the staff at a Greek restaurant. He was brilliant on their upright piano and Orpheus when he sang. Just before dawn we shared a cab home. There were thousands of gulls in Westmount Park. I asked the Haitian cab driver to approach slowly but they all flew up like snow, like music, like light…
Poetry of the highest quality almost never appears. When it does, we want to honor it with the deepest words from our startled minds. At such times, it’s so easy to slip into hyperbole. How to use language to speak about the finest language? To prevent adjectival deluge, the dictionary should be allowed to shrink, leaving three options, three markers: “mysterious,” “visionary,” “beautiful.”
Another way of speaking about the finest poems is to describe what they’re not. Having tried to write poems myself, I know the distance between an attempt at written art and the elusiveness of its realization. I know when I’ve encountered lines by another that are beyond the creative resources of my consciousness, lines exceeding whatever poetic talent I possess. Master poems are not ostensible poems.
Poetry of the highest quality is other than what you find when you look for poems to read these days…
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Ninety-one snakes on the road,
That’s like a flag of scales at half-mast,
Like rivulets that begin to rot,
Like vines that bleed and fossil skeletons,
A reptile uprising crushed by a reptile army;
That’s like cold and hungry children,
Warmongers rising from the dead,
Rage in city and country;
That’s like something crawling,
Like violence shedding its flesh,
Like forked tongues and silence of angels;
That’s like watching nature die,
Gill-man rising from a toxic lagoon,
A piscine horror on a bridge;
Ninety-one snakes on the road,
That’s like the Godhead in snakes.
Poetry is an empty vessel.
You fill it and it’s still empty.
Roman proverb
Here the earth absorbs the debt,
Soil removal unearths a deficit,
Deadweight tonnage weighs on the ruins
Accounting for actual total loss
Or assemblages of waves on the Tiber
Or slave labor or any diffusion.
Concerning these open-sided containers
Transactions are void, transhipments nullified,
All transit reduced to terminus
And the archaeology of commerce,
Save for the temples of worship
And the living theatre of the people.
Salvatore Ala 