Inger Christensen

Inger Christensen, considered one of Denmark’s greatest writers, died last year at the age of 73. Planning to study medicine, she soon withdrew from medical school for financial reasons. Medicine’s loss was poetry’s gain; Christensen published her first collection in 1962.

One of her most famous (at least in Europe) poems is the book length Alfabet, published in 1981, and translated into English by Susanna Nied and brought out by New Directions in 2000.

Beginning with a joyous affirmation in its first line –

“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”

revels in nature in its second and third lines–

“bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;
bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen”

and takes in more of the natural world -

“cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum”

then hints of something more -

“doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death”

The poem is constructed, albeit loosely, on the Fibonacci numeric sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two numbers preceding. Hence the fifth section has 8 lines, the total of the 5 and 3 line preceding sections.

“early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory's light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future”

Section 6 has, you guessed it, 13 lines. And we see/hear the joy of the first line give way to a hint of the poets’ fears.

“fisherbird herons exist, with their grey-blue arching
backs, with their black-feathered crests and their
bright-feathered tails they exist; in colonies
they exist, in the so-called Old World;
fish, too, exist, and ospreys, ptarmigans,
falcons, sweetgrass, and the fleeces of sheep;
fig trees and the products of fission exist;
errors exist, instrumental, systemic,
random; remote control exists, and birds;
and fruit trees exist, fruit there in the orchard where
apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist
in countries whose warmth will call forth the exact
colour of apricots in the flesh”

The 21 lines of Section 7 remind us of nature’s beauty while warning us of its imminent destruction -

“given limits exist, streets, oblivion
and grass and gourds and goats and gorse,
eagerness exists, given limits
branches exist, wind lifting them exists,
and the lone drawing made by the branches
of the tree called an oak tree exists,
of the tree called an ash tree, a birch tree,
a cedar tree, the drawing repeated
in the gravel garden path; weeping
exists as well, fireweed and mugwort,
hostages, greylag geese, greylags and their young;
and guns exist, an enigmatic back yard;
overgrown, sere, gemmed just with red currants,
guns exist; in the midst of the lit-up
chemical ghetto guns exist
with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision
guns and wailing women, full as
greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists;
the scene of the crime, drowsy, normal, abstract,
bathed in a whitewashed, godforsaken light,
this poisonous, white, crumbling poem”

The repetition, “constant echoing,” is neither clumsy nor annoying, resounding throughout the poem, reinforcing Christensen’s imagery, both simple (“apricots exist”) and stark (“Icarus, impotent Icarus exists”).

Regarding the poem’s structure, Christensen has explained: “It was by accident that I found out about the Fibonacci series. These numerical ratios exist in nature — the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a sunflower, are all based on this series. That’s what’s so amazing. The series itself and its peculiarities are more extraordinary than any poetry collection could be. A book of poetry becomes a metaphor for a mathematical series, rather than vice-versa”.

To experience Alfabet more fully visit Lyrikline to hear Christensen read sections of it in her native Danish.

Christensen also published a novel, Det malede værelse in 1976 ("The Painted Room: A Tale of Mantua", translated into English by Denise Newman; Harvill Press, 2000). It combines reality and imagination as three narrators respond to the effect of Camera degli Sposi (the Marriage Chamber), by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna for the Mantuan Duke Ludovico Gonzaga. In the end ...

...well nevermind.

Random Stuff

Some books read in 2009:


The Right Hand of Sleep – dark, redemptive story of a man caught in the first days of the Nazi terror;

Lowboy – a teenage schizophrenic is lost in the New York subway system. There is more to them than my lame one liner blurbs suggest. John Wray authored both.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic story is sad at the beginning and sad at the end; I am a big fan of McCarthy’s writing and wanted to read it before seeing the movie, being a big fan of Viggo Mortensen.

Horace, poems – Tim Atkins delivers the great Roman poet’s Odes. Or some of the Odes. This is Horace in a contemporary milieu and, as one back cover blurbist puts it, “this is Horace well dusted with a dose of 21st century British argo.” Although I enjoy Atkin’s homophonics, I still prefer the James Michie translation with the Latin on the facing page.

There were others, but I won’t bore you with them. Instead I will bore you with….. ta da!!!

Books on my night table:

Mont St Michel and Chartres - by Henry Adams; Travelogue,
History, Religion, Philosophy, (is that redundant with Religion?) Poetry.

The Collected Poems of Edgar Bowers – I discovered Bowers while researching Turner Cassity. He is a master of the “person poem” as the following, drawn from the details of the life of his Aunt Jennie, will attest.

MARY

The angel of self-discipline, her guardian
Since she first knew and had to go away
From home that spring and have her child with strangers,
Sustained her, till the vanished boy next door
And her ordeal seemed fiction, and the true
Her mother’s firm insistence she was the mother
And the neighbors’ acquiescence. So she taught school,
Walking a mile each way to ride the street car--
First books of the Aeneid known by heart,
French, and the French Club Wednesday afternoon;
Then summer replacement typist in an office,
Her sister’s family moving in with them,
Depression years and she the only earner.
Saturday, football games and opera broadcasts,
Sunday, staying at home to wash her hair,
The Business Women’s Circle Monday night,
And, for a treat, birthdays and holidays,
Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.
The young blond sister long since gone to college,
Nephew and nieces gone, her mother dead,
Instead of Caesar, having to teach first aid,
The students rowdy, she retired. The rent
For the empty rooms she gave to Thornwell Orphanage,
Unwed Mothers, Temperance, and Foster Parents
And never bought the car she meant to buy;
Too blind at last to do much more than sit
All day in the antique glider on the porch
Listening to cars pass up and down the street.
Each summer, on the grass behind the house--
Cape jasmine, with its scent of August nights
Humid and warm, the soft magnolia bloom
Marked lightly by a slow brown stain--she spread,
For airing, the same small intense collection,
Concert programs, worn trophies, years of yearbooks,
Letters from schoolgirl chums, bracelets of hair
And the same picture: black hair in a bun,
Puzzled eyes in an oval face as young
Or old as innocence, skirt to the ground,
And, seated on the high school steps, the class,
The ones to whom she would have said, “Seigneur,
Donnez-nous la force de supporter
La peine,” as an example easy to remember,
Formal imperative, object first person plural.

The Epistles of Horace – the David Ferry translations and, again, with the Latin facing.

A Treatise on Civil Power – Geoffrey Hill’s detractors refer to the “inaccessibility” of his poems. I will save Hill’s response to that charge for another time.

The Bldg Blog Book – Geoff Manaugh writes an endlessly interesting blog on, ostensibly, architecture, but it is much more. This is a book published last year of some of his posts. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com

Swann’s Way – It is both a great book that bears re-reading every 20 years or so and a great cure for insomnia.


Last, but by no means, least. Check out the feature on Jonathan Williams at the Jacket magazine site.
http://jacketmagazine.com/38/index.shmtl
(For some odd reason, Blogger could not turn this url into a link. I still have not figured it out)

Happy New Year

Kubla Khan

OR, A VISION IN A DREAM.
A FRAGMENT.

---

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me

That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

This has always been a favorite poem, or fragment of a poem. Its luxuriant language enthralled me at an early age. I memorized and recited it for anyone who would listen, usually my sisters, long before I thought about what it is “about”. And though I have read and thought about its meaning over the years, thinking about what it is “about” (what has an Abyssinian maid to do with Kubla Khan?) distracts from the visionary imagery and incantatory rhythm of the poem.

Much has been written of Coleridge’s fragment. Coleridge himself, in a note published along with the poem in 1816, alluded to a dream sleep, probably induced by opium, from which he (“The Author”) awoke with vivid memories and began to compose, confident he remembered the dream entire; alas, his composing was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock” who detained him “above an hour” after which time, his remembrance of the dream had passed away.

Richard Holmes, Coleridge’s most ardent biographer, calls Coleridge’s account of the incident “teasingly circumstantial” while noting the effect of it produces a “much larger allegory of creativity and its fatal interruption.” (“Coleridge, Darker Reflections, 1804-1834”, Pantheon Books, 1999).

The “Person from Porlock” has been alluded to by writers as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, Stevie Smith and Orhan Pamuk. Robert Frost is reported by Guy Davenport to have said, “The man from Porlock”, when Davenport went to Frost’s house in Cambridge to request he sign “the piece of paper that would release Ezra Pound from 13 years in a madhouse.” Faulkner, Hemingway, and Archibald MacLeish had signed it; Eliot had signed it twice, once in the wrong place and once in the right. Wallace Stevens had refused. Frost finally signed it, after muttering that “Eisenhower will never consent to this”. (see Davenport’s account in “Seeing Shelley Plain” in “The Geography of the Imagination”, North Point Press, 1981)

One of these days I will get around to making a cogent argument why anyone interested in literature should read Guy Davenport’s book of essays, but for now I will just say, if you haven’t read it, read it.

The Meeting....

‘The Meeting on the Turret Stairs’
Watercolour, 95.5 x 60.8 cm. (1864)

‘The Meeting on the Turret Stairs’ is one of the better-known works of Frederic William Burton. The theme comes from a medieval Danish ballad which describes how Hellelil fell in love with Hildebrand, Prince of Engelland, one of her twelve personal guards. Her father orders his seven sons to kill him.

They stood at the door with spear and shield:
‘Up Lord Hildebrand! out and yield!’
He kissed me then mine eyes above:-
‘Say never my name, thou darling love’
Out of the door Lord Hildebrand sprang;
Around his head the sword he swang.

Hildebrand kills her father and six brothers before Hellelil intercedes to save the youngest. Hildebrand dies of his wounds and Hellelil herself dies shortly afterwards.

Burton did not choose a violent episode and instead freely interpreted the story, placing their farewell on the turret stairs and leaving the reason for it to the imagination. His invention of the kiss on the woman's outstretched arm and the lack of eye contact adds to the poignancy of the painting.

Reproduced courtesy National Gallery of Ireland

Idyll in Voronezh...

In February 1936, Anna Akkmatova visited Osip Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, at Voronezh, in southwestern Russia, where the pair had been exiled following Mandelstam’s arrest for a poem, which has come to be known as, “The Stalin Epigram”. Both Mandelstam and Akhmatova had been hounded by the Bolsheviks since the revolution, unable to work, not allowed to publish, they both lived in abject poverty. The exile at Voronezh was temporary; Mandelstam was arrested again in 1938 and perished in a transit camp in Vladivostok that same year.

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,

the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses

he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.

He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.

He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

From “Osip Mandelstam Selected Poems”
Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin
Atheneum, 1983

Initially a description of Voronezh in winter, Akhmatova’s poem references the statue of Peter the Great and the defeat of the Tatars at Kulikovo in 1380, a landmark battle in Russian history. The winter idyll abruptly turns darkly prophetic as regards the fate of the “poet in disgrace.”

Voronezh

O.M.

And the whole town is encased in ice,

Trees, walls, snow, as if under glass.

Timidly, I walk on crystals,

Gaily painted sleds skid.

And over the Peter of Voronezh – crows,

Poplar trees, and the dome, light green,

Faded, dulled, in sunny haze,

And the battle of Kulikovo blows from the slopes

Of the mighty, victorious land.

And the poplars, like cups clashed together,

Roar over us, stronger and stronger,
As if our joy were toasted by

A thousand guests at a wedding feast.

But in the room of the poet in disgrace,

Fear and the Muse keep watch by turns,

And the night comes on

That knows no dawn.

March 4, 1936

From “The Complete Poems of Anna Akhamatova”
Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer
Zephyr Press, 1992

Another by Hopkins....

Binsey Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank

Not spared, not one

That dandled a sandalled

Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve or hew —

Hack and rack the growing green!

Since country is so tender

To touch, her being só slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her,

When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

Strokes of havoc unselve

The sweet especial scene,

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.

Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844 - 1889

Another reason to read aloud....

Avec Ardeur

Dear Ezra, who knows what cadence is.



I've been thinking—mean, cogitating:

Make a fuss
and be tedious.

I'm annoyed?
Yes; am. I avoid

"adore"
and "bore";

am, I
say, by

the word
(bore) bored.

I refuse
to use

"divine"
to mean

something
pleasing:

"terrific color"
for some horror.

Though flat
myself, I'd say that

"Atlas"
(pressed glass)

looks best
embossed.

I refuse
to use

"enchant,"
"dement";

even "fright-
ful plight"
(however justified)

or "frivol-
ous fool"
(however suitable)

I've escaped?
am still trapped

by these
word diseases.

Without pauses,
the phrases

lack lyric
force, unlike

Attic
Alcaic,

or freak
calico-Greek.

This is not verse
of course.

I'm sure of this;

Nothing mundane is divine,
Nothing divine is mundane.



- Marianne Moore

The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, 1951