William Everson, The Poet Is Dead

The Poet is Dead

A memorial for Robinson Jeffers

In the evening the dusk
Stipples with light. The long shore
Gathers darkness in on itself
And goes cold. From the lap of silence
All the tide-crest’s pivotal immensity
Lifts into the land.

*

Keith Gottschalk, Beginning of a Beginning

Cape Town poet, Keith Gottschalk, has a series of poems about space exploration. It started, I recall, with poems about the Soviet space programme, but has broadened beyond that.

Here’s a poem celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s orbit around the earth:

Review: Die Beginsel van Stof, Breytenbach

Breyten Breytenbach, Die Beginsel van Stof, Human & Rousseau, 2011

(originally published in Die Burger, 4 March 2011, translated by Willem de Vries. Afrikaans version online at Boekeblok.)

I was 14 in 1980 when my Afrikaans teacher lent me two banned books wrapped in brown paper: Brink’s Kennis van die Aand and Breytenbach’s Om te Vlieg. We were out on national school boycotts, becoming politicised and teachers who cared did what they could.

Of course the explicit sex in Brink was any teenage boy’s fantasy, and the book’s politics also took away the breath. But the Breytenbach book is the one that stayed with me, just as any fantastical dream stays with one. After the giggling at swear words, what remained of that book still remains: the complete otherness of the book. Om te Vlieg showed what was possible in a book, and what was possible in that book, what Breytenbach did in that book, has remained a hallmark of especially his Afrikaans work, specifically his poetry.

Rethabile Masilo, six poems

For a long time I have wanted to place some of Rethabile Masilo’s poems at Groundwork. It’s taken too long, but here now are six poems by him.

Originally from Lesotho, Masilo lives in France. I was first introduced to his blog in 2007 when he requested permission to use one of my own poems at Poéfrika. Since then, and via correspondence (alas, as these go, not frequently enough), we have discussed things literary and other shared fondnesses, reggae especially.

I like his poetry mainly for its tone: there’s a world-weariness in it, but it is never without hope. I hope that soon we’ll see a volume by him.

Poem for Troy Davis*

The sun that is rising
comes into view at last;
how stunning, the way it leans
like a moon above marshes
that fleeing slaves –
yelped at by dogs and sought
by glimmering lamp –
must have tramped!
Sometimes I just walk
across town and back again,
considering it: your mother
has come here each morning
to tend to her plot, like,
through the years all along
she’s known how this
should not have happened.
And each day she takes
a look in the mirror at
the hole the sun left when
it rose, as without a word
the world turns and turns.

She took herself

Like a coat from
behind a door
she took herself,
past dawn half asleep
she walked away
past neon lights
that wink at streets.

And now below his
window whores laugh
as if they know
that she’s gone,
whores all of them,
as he lies there
next to himself.

And when sleep does
claim him at last,
he withdraws into
a separate shell,
the hard chamber
where he and all
his alcohol do well.

White canes bend at two places, like fingers

Cities through fingertips inebriate me.
Everywhere I travel lies this pavement
defining the town with a kerb that may
or may not curve to where I go. Patient,
I like to try and see it with my cane,
slightly slanted in the hand. Not a stick,
a pen I use to trace my life again
as I walk and tap or touch stone or brick
or granite at my feet. No need to prove
God or splendour. If you don’t listen well
to night you may miss the bat that moves
with rubber wing, and flickers round walls
in a feeding frenzy. For the glory
of everything belongs truly to the night,
which holds day as dead retinas carry
light, to watch life with previous sight.

(first published in Orbis 143, Spring 2008)

The Weapon
for Nelson Mandela

As you took up arms, ntate,
we stood by and admired your guns
and your uniform, while you prepared
to mount the country to kill railways
and post-offices, we nodded agreement,
we acknowledged how the continent
was a pistol facing earthward, with the trigger
right at Nigeria’s oily wars of religion between
once-peaceful regions, the left hand now hacking
and being hacked by the right.
From out in the cold you made sense
of lives the way a bullet never can,
our poetry on the shore, washed up on the rocks;
doves came and sat on the eaves.
We thought it was a mistake – I am prepared to die,
but it was in your voice, carried to our door
by the choice of words, joined by others
from village to village, where cold and hot
scuffle for the light of dawn, east and west,
the chill of night when the wind is still
and stars are out. Somalia’s hammer
is just now falling into place on land and sea
where ghosts whimper your name, on the island
where no one is, save webbed gulls and dolphins
that know your tribe, and seek us among
painful rocks. From then on the smell
of gun-powder would be with the world. Yes,
and we rubbed the struggle into our hair,
our jeans, our black mining boots, walked
to the freedom of our lives, leaving a thin curl
of smoke rising from South-Africa’s
muzzle, into crisp, morning air.

The Prophet Seekers

Today I know we’re going to unbury the dead
to get this over with before it engulfs us.
We’ll wake Motuba up, Fischer,
rouse Biko and Lumumba, Hani,
put their hands on a stack of bibles or not,
and let the questions begin. To hell, then,
if we can’t bring the child to the tree
on which their bodies were hanged,
arcs stopped dead like broken pendulums,
the mechanism smashed, time strangled.

Here is my body to light the night;
as the flame goes higher and higher,
take please my name off your certificates,
you can display my culture in glass cases,
libraries, to learn how to build a pyramid;
through the season of our discontent
our children have always faced their history,
as all children must, one day or another,
nineteen sixty, nineteen seventy-six.
And this century is only at its start.

We’ll take our kids to the prophet’s tomb
whose engravings and marks scar our face
as hieroglyphs are necessarily Egyptian,
and we’ll sprout roots, shoots, stronger limbs,
standing here on this path to the minster,
swinging fists at the heavens to question
their political stance in the face of all this,
like Dennis Brutus when death stopped him,
ready to get at last to the bottom of it. We
are gonna have to see this thing through.

The Grotto of Chehrabad**

There’s a point between water and fire
where lies my dream, where a woman without fear
navigates the continent on her way
to the sea, a sparkle in the eye as she goes,
a tempest caught in her dress,
driving her into voyages across time.
I’m a salt man, and I watch her stoop
as with the grace of a goddess she scoops water
and lifts her cup of love,
raising the chalice that keeps us alive,
that contains all the fire and water,
all of it, and the rage of our winter,
knowing that my siblings and I live in
this hollowed out cavern we call heaven.

(first published in The Mom Egg, #7, 2009)

———————–

Notes

* Troy Davis

** Chehrabad Saltman

Review: Bodyhood, Leon de Kock

Leon de Kock, Bodyhood, Umuzi, 2010

(Afrikaans original at Boekeblok)

With its eye-catching cover designed by Michiel Botha, Bodyhood is Leon de Kock’s third collection of poetry. As the back cover describes, the themes of the poetry revolve, among other things, around the body and being, love and its loss, and desire. There are also poems about eating and poems about raging jealousy.

Derek Walcott, White Egrets, #2

Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such
desert indifference, such “who-the-hell-are-you?” calm,
they rise and stride away leisurely from your touch,
waiting for you only. To be cradled in one arm,
belly turned upward to be stroked by a brush
tugging burrs from their fur, eyes slitted
in ecstacy. The January sun spreads its balm
on earth’s upturned belly, shadows that have always fitted
their shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.
Accept it. Watch how spray will burst
like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,
trying to fasten on everything it moved from,
how salted things only increase its thirst.

(from White Egrets, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010)

Derek Walcott, ‘Pastoral’

In the mute roar of autumn, in the shrill
treble of the aspens, the basso of the holm-oaks,
in the silvery wandering aria of the Schuylkill,
the poplars choiring with a quillion strokes,
find love for what is not your land, a blazing country
in eastern Pennsylvania with the DVD going
in the rented burgundy Jeep, in the inexhaustible bounty
of fall with the image of Eakins’ gentleman rowing
in his slim skiff whenever the trees divide
to reveal a river’s serene surprise, flowing
through the snow-flecked birches where Indian hunters glide.
The country has caught fire from the single spark
of a prophesying preacher, its embers glowing,
its clouds are smoke in the onrushing dark
a holocaust crackles in this golden oven
in which tribes were consumed, a debt still owing,
while a white country spire insists on heaven.

(from White Egrets, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010)

W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, #2

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

(from, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber & Faber, 1977, 1978, 1986)

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)