'In the present tense'
Mary MacRae reviews Marilyn Hacker’s Desesperanto
(W.W. Norton, £16.95)
The poems in this volume speak of loss, pain, grief, separation, betrayal, in a dazzling variety of strict forms, both traditional and invented. They are narratives of the self and of others, concerning public events as well as the seemingly smaller events of the quotidian. And they are dialogues, with friends, lovers or ex-lovers, the self, and, above all, with other writers, particularly poets. The book is dedicated to Mavis Gallant; many of the poems are also addressed to poets or refer to them – Hayden Carruth, Marie Ponsot, Muriel Rukeyser – “Books are clannish; I wasn’t sans famille / opening that one”, the poet reflects in a Paris bookshop. A community of poets and readers is implied and addressed. The title itself of this volume, Desesperanto, seems to suggest both despair and hope, as well as a universal language that might be, in part, the language of poetry.
The volume is in three sections but seems to have been conceived as a whole, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The poems cast light – or shade – over one another, as the poet’s voice records the passage of time, the struggle against despair, and an arrival, however tentative, at some kind of equilibrium. Prefacing the three named sections is a long poem, Elegy for a Soldier, in memory of the poet June Jordan who died in 2002. This poem is in two parts, the first written in syllabics, the second in Sapphic stanzas, and is both a public elegy for a politically committed poet who was determined to fight oppression, and a personal expression of loss for a fellow-poet and friend:
Whom do I address when I
address you, larger than life as you
always were, not alive now?
Words are not you, poems are not you,
ashes on the Pacific
tide, you least of all. I talk to myself
to keep the line open.
The second section of the poem finds poetry to put against despair. Now Jordan’s courage and political passion are stressed:
… what’s yours are a thousand poems
alive on paper,
in the present tense of a thousand students’
active gaze at printed pages and blank ones
which you gave permission to blacken into
outrage and passion.
and the poem ends by naming and celebrating poets who
have spoken up for the oppressed:
To each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs,
Palestinians, immigrants, its women.
From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish,
Kavanagh, Sháhid
(who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir,
cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”),
Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor,
and you, June Jordan.
The emphatic trochees and dactyls of these Sapphic stanzas finely establish the strength, the intellectual and emotional muscularity of the ‘citizen soldier’ poet, and flow seamlessly into the more public register of the final two stanzas.
In the last issue of Magma, Marilyn Hacker observed that non-iambic meters - Sapphics or Alcaics – “oblige the poet to wrench the language out of the ‘melody’ into which it tends to fall”. These very difficult forms, used in this volume with exceptional virtuosity, can also manage a packed narrative such as the elegy for Karig Sára, A Farewell to the Finland Woman, with economy and tact; give us a poem which is a perfect and witty recipe for an omelette, as well as a memorial to a lost past and friends who have died; and, in the poem entitled Grief allow a restrained and formal expression
of suffering:
Grief walks miles beside the polluted river,
grief counts days sucked into the winter solstice,
grief receives exuberant schoolyard voices
as flung despisals.
These poems also exemplify the more general point about writing in strict forms that Hacker makes in the same interview: “Thinking, not ‘about’ but ‘in’ a chosen meter or rhythm, the exigencies of repetitions of words or echoing vowel/consonant combinations of rhyme, bring the language’s possibilities into play, bring choices…which would not have been suggested by more linear thinking.” So although many of the poems record painful experiences, the complex forms and the musicality of sound and movement seem to work in opposition to despair. The voice of the poem is personal but also seems to speak for humanity; the fact that it belongs to one individual is, after all, what validates it, gives it authenticity. We hear some of the non-linear thinking that she refers to in Again, for Hayden from the final section of the book. This is a syllabic poem with a pattern of end and mid-line rhymes, addressed to Hayden Carruth. The poet is seized by fear at five in the morning; switching on the light she takes a book by Carruth from the pile on the bedside table: “Montaigne, Flaubert, Gallant, Rich // and Carruth” and is transported to quite other territory:
I’ve my own
words, but I read yours: snow, stone,
log, stars, to push back despair.
I read bear. I read mountain.
I read thaw
when there’s rarely enough snow
in this city to warrant
that event – but fear’s soft paw
might lift, might
follow the lingering night
off in silence, while named birds
cry their own words and take flight.
Again, in the very beautiful elegy for Muriel Rukeyser, the taut syntax twists and turns through thirty-three lines rhyming in ‘k’ sounds, so that the poet’s feelings of loss and grief are embodied in a most exuberant music:
Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milksilk
whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six
o’clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block,
cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk,
cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack
of butter, blueberry jam that’s almost black,
instead of tannin seeping into the cracks
of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out…
That poem comes from the first section of the book, Vendanges, in which the poet creates narratives about herself and about others, many of which treat of contrasts between a lost past and the present. One of the most poignant of the personal narratives in this section
is Days of 1999 which seems to concern itself with the loss of a loving relationship, a mutual commitment. On a bright August day, coming from a rose garden hidden behind a Paris street, the poet catches herself thinking that if she lived alone she could live there. She rejects the thought, “because I wanted just to choose / and I had chosen…../to honor choice”, oblivious of the fact that
a choice I never made was made for me
in another mind, another country
I thought I had some claim to, which I knew
not at all…
At the end of the poem, in the present, on a rainy day in Spring, she remembers that word “alone”:
the afternoon’s word resonates alone
as a sky, mother-and-fatherless
in its gray and quotidian distress
blurts the repeated questions of the rain.
The middle section of the book, Itinerants, is a sequence of sonnets focusing on streets and squares in Paris, lives seen against the backdrop of particular places. We are shown solitude and isolation: an elderly widow living alone, the poet alone on a cold and rainy Easter weekend while her friends are out of town, and the marginalized, living inconspicuously – drug-users in a hostel, the “discreet shutters of the women’s bar”, “the curtains of the creaky balcony / smelling of female exile, exhaled prayer” of the synagogue. But the city can also offer consolation, low-key, as on the Quai de
Valmy, “as the clouds suddenly break and the sky comes clear / with a January afternoon’s brief clarity”, or in more fantastic mode in Nulle part with a dare to “embark / on the last train’s last car hurtling through the dark / tunnel irregularly blazed with flares / alizarin, viridian”, the music of this picked up and extended when the mysterious companion “disappears - / avid flesh, mercurial avatar / desire or imagination sends?”
Again, in the final section of the book, Paris offers consolation and companionship; in Explication de texte which ‘dialogues’ with Apollinaire, the poet sees two homeless people she recognises, “the tiny sans-abri / and her more substantial friend”:
They’ve been on the street together
for over a decade
while others jettisoned other
partners and promises made.
Bickering all the way
but punctual at their labors
weekday and holiday
they are my long-term neighbors
with Mme de Sévigné.
The poet celebrates companionship that “illumines nights” spent discussing and arguing in a café, as well as evenings alone, eating supper, drinking wine and listening to music:
Paris, elegant gray
godmother, consolation,
heartbroken lullaby,
smell of the métro station,
you won’t abandon me.
In A Sunday After Easter we see the poet, who has been roaming the borders of her neighbourhood, “diminished”, sitting in a café with some children and their adults. She wants “to find some left turn into
dream / or story, the next chapter, memory / not saturated with regret, into / a vision as unlikely…” – and a riderless mare enters the scene, not quite real, not quite surreal. Between two extraordinary interpolated passages of vision-like description, she imagines being
again “the child who knew departure would be sweet”, revisits the bars of her girlhood as she listens to the loudspeaker music and watches one of the children crying to leave. After another vision of the mysterious mare, “unseen beast nourished on unlikely fruits”, the
poet ends equivocally:
And what is riderless in me departs
around the corner, into the next street,
into the afternoon, holding its light
later in each day’s cloud-leaded sky.
Or stays, doglike, between the wrought-iron feet
of the small table, ears at the alert,
actively silent, having learned to wait.
Every detail in this long poem counts for more than appears at first, and the poem as a whole ‘talks to’ many of the others in the volume. These are poems to listen to intently, to read and re-read; poems to live with.
(W.W. Norton, £16.95)
The poems in this volume speak of loss, pain, grief, separation, betrayal, in a dazzling variety of strict forms, both traditional and invented. They are narratives of the self and of others, concerning public events as well as the seemingly smaller events of the quotidian. And they are dialogues, with friends, lovers or ex-lovers, the self, and, above all, with other writers, particularly poets. The book is dedicated to Mavis Gallant; many of the poems are also addressed to poets or refer to them – Hayden Carruth, Marie Ponsot, Muriel Rukeyser – “Books are clannish; I wasn’t sans famille / opening that one”, the poet reflects in a Paris bookshop. A community of poets and readers is implied and addressed. The title itself of this volume, Desesperanto, seems to suggest both despair and hope, as well as a universal language that might be, in part, the language of poetry.
The volume is in three sections but seems to have been conceived as a whole, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The poems cast light – or shade – over one another, as the poet’s voice records the passage of time, the struggle against despair, and an arrival, however tentative, at some kind of equilibrium. Prefacing the three named sections is a long poem, Elegy for a Soldier, in memory of the poet June Jordan who died in 2002. This poem is in two parts, the first written in syllabics, the second in Sapphic stanzas, and is both a public elegy for a politically committed poet who was determined to fight oppression, and a personal expression of loss for a fellow-poet and friend:
Whom do I address when I
address you, larger than life as you
always were, not alive now?
Words are not you, poems are not you,
ashes on the Pacific
tide, you least of all. I talk to myself
to keep the line open.
The second section of the poem finds poetry to put against despair. Now Jordan’s courage and political passion are stressed:
… what’s yours are a thousand poems
alive on paper,
in the present tense of a thousand students’
active gaze at printed pages and blank ones
which you gave permission to blacken into
outrage and passion.
and the poem ends by naming and celebrating poets who
have spoken up for the oppressed:
To each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs,
Palestinians, immigrants, its women.
From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish,
Kavanagh, Sháhid
(who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir,
cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”),
Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor,
and you, June Jordan.
The emphatic trochees and dactyls of these Sapphic stanzas finely establish the strength, the intellectual and emotional muscularity of the ‘citizen soldier’ poet, and flow seamlessly into the more public register of the final two stanzas.
In the last issue of Magma, Marilyn Hacker observed that non-iambic meters - Sapphics or Alcaics – “oblige the poet to wrench the language out of the ‘melody’ into which it tends to fall”. These very difficult forms, used in this volume with exceptional virtuosity, can also manage a packed narrative such as the elegy for Karig Sára, A Farewell to the Finland Woman, with economy and tact; give us a poem which is a perfect and witty recipe for an omelette, as well as a memorial to a lost past and friends who have died; and, in the poem entitled Grief allow a restrained and formal expression
of suffering:
Grief walks miles beside the polluted river,
grief counts days sucked into the winter solstice,
grief receives exuberant schoolyard voices
as flung despisals.
These poems also exemplify the more general point about writing in strict forms that Hacker makes in the same interview: “Thinking, not ‘about’ but ‘in’ a chosen meter or rhythm, the exigencies of repetitions of words or echoing vowel/consonant combinations of rhyme, bring the language’s possibilities into play, bring choices…which would not have been suggested by more linear thinking.” So although many of the poems record painful experiences, the complex forms and the musicality of sound and movement seem to work in opposition to despair. The voice of the poem is personal but also seems to speak for humanity; the fact that it belongs to one individual is, after all, what validates it, gives it authenticity. We hear some of the non-linear thinking that she refers to in Again, for Hayden from the final section of the book. This is a syllabic poem with a pattern of end and mid-line rhymes, addressed to Hayden Carruth. The poet is seized by fear at five in the morning; switching on the light she takes a book by Carruth from the pile on the bedside table: “Montaigne, Flaubert, Gallant, Rich // and Carruth” and is transported to quite other territory:
I’ve my own
words, but I read yours: snow, stone,
log, stars, to push back despair.
I read bear. I read mountain.
I read thaw
when there’s rarely enough snow
in this city to warrant
that event – but fear’s soft paw
might lift, might
follow the lingering night
off in silence, while named birds
cry their own words and take flight.
Again, in the very beautiful elegy for Muriel Rukeyser, the taut syntax twists and turns through thirty-three lines rhyming in ‘k’ sounds, so that the poet’s feelings of loss and grief are embodied in a most exuberant music:
Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milksilk
whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six
o’clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block,
cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk,
cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack
of butter, blueberry jam that’s almost black,
instead of tannin seeping into the cracks
of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out…
That poem comes from the first section of the book, Vendanges, in which the poet creates narratives about herself and about others, many of which treat of contrasts between a lost past and the present. One of the most poignant of the personal narratives in this section
is Days of 1999 which seems to concern itself with the loss of a loving relationship, a mutual commitment. On a bright August day, coming from a rose garden hidden behind a Paris street, the poet catches herself thinking that if she lived alone she could live there. She rejects the thought, “because I wanted just to choose / and I had chosen…../to honor choice”, oblivious of the fact that
a choice I never made was made for me
in another mind, another country
I thought I had some claim to, which I knew
not at all…
At the end of the poem, in the present, on a rainy day in Spring, she remembers that word “alone”:
the afternoon’s word resonates alone
as a sky, mother-and-fatherless
in its gray and quotidian distress
blurts the repeated questions of the rain.
The middle section of the book, Itinerants, is a sequence of sonnets focusing on streets and squares in Paris, lives seen against the backdrop of particular places. We are shown solitude and isolation: an elderly widow living alone, the poet alone on a cold and rainy Easter weekend while her friends are out of town, and the marginalized, living inconspicuously – drug-users in a hostel, the “discreet shutters of the women’s bar”, “the curtains of the creaky balcony / smelling of female exile, exhaled prayer” of the synagogue. But the city can also offer consolation, low-key, as on the Quai de
Valmy, “as the clouds suddenly break and the sky comes clear / with a January afternoon’s brief clarity”, or in more fantastic mode in Nulle part with a dare to “embark / on the last train’s last car hurtling through the dark / tunnel irregularly blazed with flares / alizarin, viridian”, the music of this picked up and extended when the mysterious companion “disappears - / avid flesh, mercurial avatar / desire or imagination sends?”
Again, in the final section of the book, Paris offers consolation and companionship; in Explication de texte which ‘dialogues’ with Apollinaire, the poet sees two homeless people she recognises, “the tiny sans-abri / and her more substantial friend”:
They’ve been on the street together
for over a decade
while others jettisoned other
partners and promises made.
Bickering all the way
but punctual at their labors
weekday and holiday
they are my long-term neighbors
with Mme de Sévigné.
The poet celebrates companionship that “illumines nights” spent discussing and arguing in a café, as well as evenings alone, eating supper, drinking wine and listening to music:
Paris, elegant gray
godmother, consolation,
heartbroken lullaby,
smell of the métro station,
you won’t abandon me.
In A Sunday After Easter we see the poet, who has been roaming the borders of her neighbourhood, “diminished”, sitting in a café with some children and their adults. She wants “to find some left turn into
dream / or story, the next chapter, memory / not saturated with regret, into / a vision as unlikely…” – and a riderless mare enters the scene, not quite real, not quite surreal. Between two extraordinary interpolated passages of vision-like description, she imagines being
again “the child who knew departure would be sweet”, revisits the bars of her girlhood as she listens to the loudspeaker music and watches one of the children crying to leave. After another vision of the mysterious mare, “unseen beast nourished on unlikely fruits”, the
poet ends equivocally:
And what is riderless in me departs
around the corner, into the next street,
into the afternoon, holding its light
later in each day’s cloud-leaded sky.
Or stays, doglike, between the wrought-iron feet
of the small table, ears at the alert,
actively silent, having learned to wait.
Every detail in this long poem counts for more than appears at first, and the poem as a whole ‘talks to’ many of the others in the volume. These are poems to listen to intently, to read and re-read; poems to live with.
Page(s) 63-66
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