Sergey Gandlevsky – Stanzas, The Use of Poetry

Stanzas
—In Memory of My Mother

I.

Speak. But what do you want to say? Perhaps
How the barge moved along the city river, trailing sunset,
How all June until the solstice
Summer stretched on its tiptoes to the light,
How breath of linden blew through sultry squares
And how thunder rolled from all directions that July?
You once believed that speech needs an underlying cause
And a grave occasion. But that’s a lie.

II.

Listen: the grocery store reeks of watermelon rot,
An empty crate clatters at a back door around the corner.
From the suburbs, a breeze carries the echo of a handcar
And buries the asphalt in archive leaves.
Drop the Rubik’s Cube to the ground – it’s not worth the trouble.
When all plans fail, eat grapes in the rain,
Sit in the silent yard. Just look with your own eyes.
This is what you’ll recall among the crags and crevices of hell-

III.

So get going. Yet a naked branch – the upas
Of school texts – stubbornly touches the window
Just as it did long ago, at night, especially during rain,
Feeling the pane that mama washed.
Though I remember very little from school
I can still see each grain of sand pouring through
The narrow glass neck, an unforgettable rustle.
A primitive instrument, but what a throat for sorrow!

IV.

Strike spitefully on the floor your ever-wobbly tripod,
Haggard charlatan, not hiding your crookedness,
So that a clear specter of water streams out, smells of ozone
Under the leaking roof of a state-owned house.
The chair jolts you with static electricity,
So speak again, as if tortured, sans schools and manifestoes,
If this hopeless time and god-forsaken place
Instill in you, a total deadbeat, such love.

V.

The widower, forty-seven year old Aizenstadt
Now roams the kitchen, can’t cop his usual downer.
Is there reason to smile at this, my friend? I think not.
Even if his funeral-black boxers hang down to his knees.
In this world, where one needs spirits to be happy,
Behind empty crates the guys who’ve seen better days
Raise a toast to Sergey Esenin or Andy Chenier,
Squander their latest check on drink by tradition.

VI.

After death I’ll go to the outskirts of the city I love,
Lift my snout to sky, throw back my antlers-
Taken by sadness, I’ll trumpet into autumn space
What human words could not express.
How the barge sailed into the wake of sunsetting day,
How iron time on my left wrist sang like a starling,
How the secret door was unlocked with a house key.
Speak. There’s nothing else you can do with this affliction.

[1987]

————————————————–

The Use of Poetry

A prize for poetry can baffle its recipient – when a private thing, a personal predilection that’s almost a whim, is rewarded. It’s as if an inveterate mushroom-hunter or lover of ice fishing were given a prize. It’s customary to think that there are all kinds of whims but poetry is a serious and hardly useless pastime. Yet in the last twenty years, many (and certainly the best) Russain poets have recoiled from the word “use.” Like little children, poets demand that they be loved for no other reason than that they exist.

Society is correct to treat poetry with seriousness, but poetry is also correct to hold onto the bulwark of its own uselessness.

It’s good to sit in the hot sun on the grass and look at a river. But the supposition that the sun, the plants, and the water have the goal and purpose of giving us pleasure hardly enters the healthy mind; about the meaning of nature we can only guess – each person is remitted a certain amount of imagination, intelligence, and temperatment. Such is poetry; its ulimate direct aspirations are unclear and mysterious; the impressions that it produces are only the indirect consequences of its existence.

We can hope that poetry will help us, but we cannot demand help from it. Poetry is a gift, not a salary. Only when we finally take into account, when we get used to the idea that the natural responsibility of poetry is to be poetry, it is conceivable, I think, to fold down your fingers and estimate whether poetry has an earthly task. Not insisting especially on anything, I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First. Occupied primarily by words and by himself, the poet day in and day out writes his ideal self-portrait, personifies on the page a dream about himself. The tactical allegory “lyrical hero” we should understand in its original meaning – the poet “heroizes” himself, displays the most vivid attributes of his personality, subdued in daily life by routine conflict. A constant contact with the ideal twin disciplines the author, helps him not to give up. The author feels that the gap is too wide between himself and the lyrical hero – it’s disasterous for both: the devastation responds as muteness in the best instance, and in the worst, idle chatter.

But the moral return from creativity is known not only to those who write; readers feel it as well.

Poetry relates to reality like a finished manuscript to a rough draft. Art didn’t invent the drama of life. The drama is in the nature of things, but things obscure it. Poetry focuses life to a sharp clarity, and the main celebratory foundation of existence becomes visible from everyday babble. Poetry is the subjunctive mood of life, to remember how we would be, if we were not…. In short, poetry is in a position to better our morals.

Second. Everyone knows that life is not sugar; loneliness is perhaps the most bitter of its burdens. A person often cannot share his despondency, his sudden thoughts, his good moods, but he opens a book, and he’s somehow not alone. It turns out that total strangers were already here, were thinking, were happy or angry like he was, and for the same reason that he is. Suddenly, these people are no longer strange to him. That revealed spiritual likeness bothers the teenager’s feelings of his own exclusivity, but soon enough we become adults and have it up to here with our own exclusivity. In other words, art is also a communication. And poetry is the best means of communication, because it’s the most emotional.

And third. Coffee boils over on the stove just as if it’s trying to put its head through a sweater; the Russian word “train” [poezd] is already preparation for “delay” [opozdanie]; after a twenty-year intermission, the old forgotten poet appears in public in a sport coat, buttoned enthusiastically in the wrong hole. This is all the costly small change of the world, in which we for some reason awaken once and for the last time. It is shameful to be hard of hearing and half-blind. If only inattention to our small creativity, not to say anything about apathy toward Creation, or the ailment of mechanical existence offended us more than profanity! Poetry can help us to value life. Even when a poet curses the universe, he has nevertheless noticed it; it has genuinely disturbed him. “Keen observation,” Mandelstam said, “is the virtue of the lyrical poet.” I dare to add that keen observation is a kind of gratefulness. Poetry, in the end, is always the artless gratitude to the world for the fact of existence. [1997]

————————————–

“Stanzas” and ‘The Use of Poetry” both from: Sergey Gandlevsky, A Kindred Orphanhood (transl. Philip Metres), 2003, Zephyr Press, Brookline, MA. Thank you to Sergey Gandlevsky for granting permission to publish these at Groundwork. Spasibo.

(Here are some audio files of Gandlevsky reading.)

Koninkryk van reën

I’m preparing some folders for Dropbox and came across this 1st draft Afrikaans translation of ‘Kingdom of Rain’ from This Carting Life (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005; English version here). I can’t remember translating it; perhaps someone else translated it? (Please drop me a note.)

Koninkryk van reën

from these I am growing no nearer
to what secret eluded the children
– Derek Walcott, ‘Sainte Lucie’

Iewers in ‘n donker dekade
staan my pa sonder werk,
en onbekend aan my broer en ek,
beneweld in ‘n Boland winter en ‘n skool vakansie.
Soos die kwik daal, maak hy, my pa
‘n fles koffie, koop pastei en ons tjoef
Du Toit’s Kloof pas op in sy ou ‘57 Ford’
en daar wil hy die berge – onder koue wolk,
bruin en blou rotswande nat in die reën –
hy wil dit alles oop, om sy kinders binne te laat
al maak hy verskoning – my streng en grimmige
vreeswekkende pa – al vra hy verskoning vir sy bestaan
sy houplek op die daad verklaar
aan die boswagter of opsigter in staatsgewaad,
altyd net daar om die volgende draai
of aan slaap in ‘n jeep by ‘n aftrek-plek:
‘Nee meneer, ons ry maar net. Ja meneer, dis my kar.’

By die hoogste punt van die pas
stop ons om te eet, en hy, my pa,
my streng en grimmige, vreeswekkende pa,
my pa vir wie ek lief is en sy donker vel,
hy dryf hierdie heelal oop wat hy vreemd genoeg
ons eie maak, wat nie meer myne is nie:
‘n slim ou grys bobbejaan, weggesteek
teen sout-en-peper klip, wat ons dophou;
‘n onuitstaanbare edel roofvoël
selde te sien, en wat nou nes toe vlieg soos die weer draai.

En daar, dink ek, daar is ons nader
aan my pa se God, die wind huilend
en wolke wat oor ons druis, en ons
verruk en klein in die groot kar wat in die wind rond wieg.

Stilte. ‘n Skielike stil punt
as die heelal huiwer, asem skep
en genade binnehaal. En dan
die sneeu wat soos donsveer val
as die wêreld ons
ons vlugtige, blink koninkryk gee,
onkenbaar deur die boswagter. En vir minute
staan daar ‘n kar met drie stom insittendes
staan ons daar op ‘n bergspits, buite
die vinnige verduistering van ons grootword;
te kortstondig om die duister jare te verlig
toe ek sou leer:

hoe die skerp, skoon boerplek van krap en forel
waar ons in die somer swem
nou, in winter, ‘n donker, bruin rotsgedruis;
hoe berg en denneboom en fynbos
of die muis-gedrewe valke van my veld;
die laaste, mosterd-droeë duiwelsnuif
wat my pa deur die lug gooi
om soos ‘n rook-bom teen die grond te plof;
en een keer, ook êrens een somer,
‘n praterige piet-my-vrou;
of die mirakele rondomtalie van waterhondjies
oor ‘n tee-kleurige water-poel
wiegend tussen bruin klip en varing-groen varings;
my eerste en enigste uil,
groot en geheimsinnig
diep binne ‘n dennebos,
groot uil onkenbaar aan ons
totdat jy wegvlieg, ontroer deur ons stemme;
hoe ek ook ontroer sou word, en sou leer
dat hierdie boom en hierdie voël, hierdie wêreld
die aarde en hierdie kind se tuiste
alreeds buite sy besitting val.

En hoe, êrens noord deur die droeë
Boesmanland met sy swart klippe,
oor ‘n bult in die pad, die skielike groen
soos die vreemde en bekende sisklanke
in Keimoes en Kakamas.
En die keelklank was die gorrelende water
oor rotse by Augrabies.
Die Garieb oor rotse by Augrabies,
by Augrabies waar die hek toeslaan
en die hekwag styf-lip soos ‘n sinode:
‘Die nie-blanke kant is vol’
terwyl hy ‘n kar vol
bruingebrande wit jeug deurwink
wat na ons lag, na my pa, my vader
my stille pa wat êrens ver-langs verstaar
en die kind wat hierdie heim-sweer ver verby metafoor aanleer.
En hoe, soos ‘n bobbejaan, die reg en staat
sy fok-jou-stert aan ons sou wys
en weg drentel.

Meeting the British, Paul Muldoon

Meeting the British

We met the British in the dead of winter.
The sky was lavender

and the snow lavender-blue.
I could hear, far below,

the sound of two streams coming together
(both were frozen over)

and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French

across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-

kerchief: C’est la lavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.

They gave us six fishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

– Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British (Faber&Faber, 1987)

For Michael Jackson

For Michael Jackson

When God touches you there
you soar
in amplified magnificence
or fall into recoil

into a ball of epic self-pity
empty of blessing
shucked of benediction
but the only drug, ugly, beatific.

———————

This was written 10 days ago after reading Peter Conrad’s overview of Jackson’s life, “Who stole the soul of the boy from Indiana”,  at The Guardian, cribbing “epic self-pity” from the article.

Fiona Zerbst, Four Poems

FIONA ZERBST’s fourth volume of poetry, Oleander, is due soon from Modjaji Books, and will be launched alongside volumes from Sindiwe Magona,  Joan Metelerkamp and Helen Moffett. Here are four poems from Oleander:

Moths

At night, they bloom to light, like buds that burst
for air. As if they had no wings, they startle
into glass. That muffled knock
again, again, again –
they are like stars that break against the darkness,
break like vases,
brown containers,
tiny insect vessels of a great hope; longing
for the light; even dying for it.

Hart Crane, 1899-1932

Prodigal, shucking off the first-class hell
of being you in bar and cheap hotel,
you leapt. The S.S. Orizaba churned
on anyway; propellers flensed and burned
the waters battering towards New York.
A fellow passenger, who saw you leap
and thrash, watched only for your body’s cork
to float up. As she shudders into sleep,

the juddering vessel, droning, is the bell
that sounds your verses, amplifies your voice,
American Rimbaud. Given the choice,
would you have gulped the broken world as well
in sober hopelessness? Your sailor’s voice
must first be lost in fatal tides to tell.

Politics

India’s alarming Pakistan.
America is rumbling, after oil
and vengeance. And I’m fumbling with one
completely dud, half-burnt mosquito coil.

It’s winter. Still, those insects will attack.
Lights go out and houses in the street
begin to flicker. Candles offer heat
as much as arguments do, and looking back

it seems as if we’ve argued far too much.
The world’s an angry red; the smudgy blue
of dawn-lit ash is arty, but the hue
is cold-cut bloodless; flesh you dare not touch.

We stutter with the paper’s platitudes.
A drive into the country’s dull and sad.
Not even death can end the bloody feuds
that families have and so I’m very glad

we don’t have kids, my grandfather’s dead
and nobody but you and I can suffer pain.
Last night, in a clumsy leap from bed,
I smeared a big mosquito as a stain,

against a wall. I wiped the dry remains
away this morning. Commas of our blood
were brown, unreadable. And later, floods
came swollen, breaking on a white-flat plain:

a natural disaster. Sheep and cows
went under, surging to a muddy end.
You held my hand. A multitude of ‘nows’
came crowding back. Of course I won’t pretend

you haven’t stung me, gutted me, deprived
my life of air. I’m grateful all the same.
All’s fair in love, war, etc. Your game
remains apolitical, hopelessly contrived

yet pure. The Middle East is poised for war.
Relief’s been sent for victims of the flood.
Food and candles. Fresh-donated blood.
You reach me, wordless, as I cross the floor.

In praise of loss

Lose
Until the loss
Feels right.

Lose at cards.
Fold.
Refuse to play.

Don’t respond
To provocations,
Words.

Don’t invest.
Be certain
That it doesn’t matter.

Hold yourself
Aloof; lose
The men you know

To other women.
Fold.
Refuse to play.

It’s no shame
To spare your neck.
Let it in,

The knowledge
Of this loss
That is dying, living.

© Fiona Zerbst, 2009
© Modjaji Books, 2009

(Thank you to Fiona Zerbst and Modjaji Books for granting permission to have the poems appear at Groundwork. See below for details of the launch and a sample from Moffett’s book, Strange Fruit.)

Helen Moffett, Four Poems

THE FOLLOWING poems are from Helen Moffett’s forthcoming debut volume of poetry, Strange Fruit, published by Modjaji Books (manifesto). Strange Fruit will be launched, together with three other volumes of poetry, at the Cape Town Book Fair on Sunday, 14 June at 5.30 to 6.30 pm at the DALRO space in the Exhibition Hall. Thank you to Helen Moffett and to Colleen Higgs of Modjaji Books for granting permission to publish the poems. Copyright remains with the author and the publisher.

Gathering waterblommetjies

A wintergreen afternoon in the Overberg:
the bust of a woman on a shelf of dam-water
her frizzed halo electrified by four o’ clock sun –
one hand holds a plastic bag aloft
the other threshes, garnering from
the raft of slippery porpoise blooms
upon which she rests her stolid breasts.

Mined

Loving me must be like visiting the Balkans.
I’m told it’s lovely there; seen the pictures
of pastoral valleys, dappled woods
secluded inlets of blue dispersing islands;
all dotted with bridges, quaint villages
and monasteries of antique masonry
speaking eloquently of culture and craft.
But a flak jacket and tin hat are advised;
over some innocent hill you’ll find,
without warning, a site where violation
has soaked into the earth, something
has been razed, horror still haunts,
with shrapnel and tank-traps in the lulling grass.

And the history – the history: no matter
how hard you try, you’ll never quite grasp
why one sniping shot triggers a world war.

Amphibian

The penis is an amphibious creature;
mostly it lives on dry land,
but given the chance, it slips
joyously back into a moister
environment, where it grows
gills of glee, glides in this
primordial clime, this balmy
tropical sea, swimming
in ambergris and musk,
slithering through humid clasp
and pulse, leaping
higher, diving deeper:
in its element.

Envy

This is my lot: to see pregnant women,
mothers with babies everywhere,
families, parents with orbiting children,
the parade never seems to stop.
So envy and I are very old friends:
I have the upper hand – mostly –
although the odd shaft runs me through.

But the clammy agony subsides in the end,
I don’t go careening down the street,
screaming, hissing, stabbing at eyes with nails:
instead, I attend baby showers and christenings
armed with thoughtful gifts and tasteful hats;
I congratulate, dispense adorable booties,
make casseroles and allowances too.

This is my dubious gift, the compensatory coin
the bad fairy left behind when cursing me:
the capacity to contain without spilling
the viridian bile. Others are quite safe from it,
especially you, poor forked thing, a man –
wombless, childless: you have nothing I want.

© Helen Moffett, 2009
© Modjaji Books, 2009

Scott Coykendall, Five Poems

Cull

The wounded hen crowds her face into the corner between
the plastic tub — bursting with grain pellets — and the naked stud.
Her bare back is slick with gore and the smear
of yesterday’s ointment. She beats the air with one white
wing to fend off my glove, its fist full of medicine. Winter
has finally slouched out of the North and they, none of them,
will scratch bare earth for months.
Sweet Old Bob, the big white cock, bullies
a clutch of hens into the opposite corner. Another
clutch flies up to the chorale perches
and turn their yellow eyes on us. Blood crusts
the hard horns of their mouths.

Maybe they need protein. Maybe they are bored with this cell.
For days, they have marked this hen — who my daughter named
Pretty Girl last summer — for some difference: opening a wound,
then pecking, probing at the bright blood, until she staggers
with infection and blood loss. In this fashion, they adore her.
She is celebrity, solstice, celebration. Even the stinking ointment
cannot secure her peace.

She’s easy to catch. I cradle her to my chest, careful to keep the pulpy
side away from my jacket, and carry her out into the sharp air. The sun
is already setting. Cannibalism cannot start here.

In the garden where she and her sisters ravaged the summer pea
crop, where I picked prickly handfuls of metallic Japanese Beetles
to feed them through the wire, I suck cold air through my teeth and
wrench her neck. This is for
her.

——————

The Migration

After the office meeting, men of the nearby subdivision loiter
in the conference room discussing potato guns in casual pants
and v-necks. Plastic eagles, rubber snakes: all the best ways
to drive geese from their lakeshore. They are fed up with shit
on their wide lawns. They are fed up with racket.
Their water quality is plummeting.

I am new in the office. New to offices. But I want to
interrupt—flap my arms, describe Squaw Creek sanctuary
where I saw clouds of geese, 500,000 strong, over 7,000 acres
of marsh. A million ducks thrown in too. Squabbles
breaking out among the young. Lifelong mates finding old
friends. And over all, a vast galaxy of feather and bone —

hollow as whistles. They’ve come from the Arctic Circle,
where young were born and fledged in a matter of weeks.
Now that the rivers are straight and the other marshes
are drained, the subdivisions look awfully good.
Some are tumored with lead shot. Some are sick or injured
or old. Their friends delay.

Along the edges of the marsh, gawkers like me gather.
Shutters blink open and closed. People watch. Bald Eagles
watch. Coyotes and hawks and owls watch as geese pinch
themselves onto the water. The geese are through complaining
about shit on the land, racket, fouled water. They have
someplace to be.

(first appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Fall 2006)
———————

Penny

Years later, I remember the anti-sound from across
the kitchen. Music, dish clatter, and the bellow
of the vacuum cleaner sucked into my daughter’s dark
face. It was silence enough to turn my head.

After that, the three long steps and my left hand sweeping
her ankles. Three savage blows to the diaper from my right: Love!
Love! Live! Just like that, The End lay wet and winking
on the floor and my little girl, wailing her fear of me, fled
to her anxious mother and would not look at me.

Alone, I pushed my knees into the floor. My stomach shivered
and slithered into my mouth. My fists, palsied, still ached
to keep the life in her.

(first appeared in Centripetal, n.d.)
—————-

February in New Hampshire

is snow
coiled round bare birches, drifted
in a maple crotch, sugaring white pines.
Snow on the radio, after the avalanche
drowns a skier. Experts list the shapes
of snow: keys, plates, ball bearings…
Imagine this lethal clutter, the junk-drawer
crashing down the mountain.

The woods exhale
plumes of snow. White floods the meadow.
Snow softens granite. Snow, burnt black
where it meets the road. Mountains
of snow on the town common. Piled
into dragons, rolled into men. Snow
is coming. Wave your arms, kick. Snow
is still coming down. These angels
disappear.

——————

Trumpet Lessons

Because my daughter’s new trumpet is bright as winter sunrise,
she forgives its flatulence. Sitting on the edge of her bed, toes
pointed to the floor, glowering at the funhouse reflection of her face
on the bell, she blows the same near note
One Two Three times.
And again.
And again.

This is not an anecdote where the parents cram socks into their ears
and pray for time to speed up. Nor do they imagine genius.
In this story, the father sneaks a pile of jazz CDs into the child’s dark
room hoping Miles
Davis or Chet Baker will turn on the lights,
then he creeps downstairs to his half-finished
poem, the note he’s been trying
to hit.

© Scott Coykendall, 2009

(Thank you to Scott Coykendall for granting permission for Groundwork to publish the poems. Copyright remains with Scott Coykendall)

Housing targets – Kelwyn Sole

Housing targets

Somewhere in our past
we believed in the future

that a better world
would discover foundation
under our feet, and we
would forever be singing,
in its kitchen.

Bricks pile up in a field.
Whether they will be enough
no one knows. How
they fit together
is anybody’s guess.

Men with darkening skins
scribbled on by weather
wait for their instructions.

From time to time
limousines miraculously appear:
there is always a somebody
in a suit willing to smile
and shake their hands

who lays the first stone.

Then the camera lights
and racing engines
turn around, shrink back
from where they came.

Those left behind
stare at their own hands
afterwards, puzzled
at precisely what
has been transacted, why
they are still being offered
bonds

squint
between gnarled fingers
pace out the hopeful distances:
- there will be a flower bowl.
- my bed is going here.

As for now the doorknobs
have no doors.

Their windows peer out
at no sky.

– Kelwyn Sole, Love that is Night (Gecko Poetry, 1998)

Ken Barris, Six Poems

An artist

The skin on her knuckles, in the webbed
groin between finger and finger, is cracked
and dry. These are hands that have painted
endless images, now blurred into one; grime
of every colour stains her fingertips. Her nails,
pigment half-moons, show permanent damage.

There is copper in her laughter, unburnished,
streaked with age, but little humour. It does leak
out sometimes without warning, dribbles away
like the smoke of her strong fags. Now she studies
a painting: a winter ground of trees proudly
naked in their bark, and many dark birds.

——————

Goat Himself

Goat stares and chews,
knowing his eyes
are the yellow of Satan.
He’s read it many times -

bored with the truth
he rams his reflection
in a farmhouse window,
shattering the glass.

In falling shards
Goat multiplies,
all jagged edge
and goblin eyes.

They Feed They Lion – Philip Levine

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.