patrickkanouse.com Blog

An Awesome 8 Years

Today is Gina’s and my eight-year anniversary. And what a great eight years it has been. I find the words to describe how lucky I am elusive. All I know is that this amazing woman said, “Yes,” to my proposal (yes to a poet…what was she thinking!?). I’m not sure how I got so lucky. I only know that I did…and am.

The Quieted Self

Reading Jared Carter’s essay titled “The Lyric Temper,” a particular idea came through very forcefully:

I have learned the necessity of silencing my own thoughts in order to hear the brushing of their wings as they pass overhead.

Or, to change the metaphor—only when the wind dies down can the bee or the butterfly land on the blossom. Genuine lyricism comes only after the self has been quieted. Not put to sleep, or—least of all—”put on hold,” in that ugly, modern phrase. Rather, shifted into another dimension. Allowed to drift, and to become something rich and strange.

Earlier today, I was watching the tree outside my window as the wind, a wind that came and went. The sun was setting, but the windows faces south, and I saw only the effects of the sunset on the leaves, the fence, etc. I just watched this scene. Focused on it. The sounds of Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel were playing. I sat and watched. Something akin to what I’ve always considered meditation to be, I drifted beyond that particular moment, but the moment was still very there. Yet, somehow, it had moved from just observing to contemplating. Hence, Carter’s statement seems most true, the erasure of self. The Buddha finds peace by denying the self (our desires, our pains, our hopes, etc.). It seems that when we let ourselves, mentally at least, to wander freely, we often allow the artistic to appear.

Just letting the mind go, ceasing to attempt to control and direct it, this abnegation of the self opens opportunities for art. Carter here lands on a provocative statement about art, about how the lyric comes about.

Oh, by the way, the rest of the essay is well worth reading.

First Road Trip

While cleaning out a bunch of stuff for our garage sale several months ago, I was hoping to come across the journal I kept of my first road trip. Fortunately, I did find it, and it was, well, what you’d expect of a 10-year old kid, but a kid enthralled with the adventure of taking a road trip.I have very find memories of that journey with my Aunt Mart, Uncle Ernie, and cousin Karole.

In reading Andrew O’Hagan’s recent article in The London Review of Books titled “A Car of One’s Own”, O’Hagan touches on some of the thrills and reasons why people, and Americans in particular, love cars. I’ll quote a bit here:

Behind all this stands the culture of driving and the fact of traffic. We love driving and we hate it, we praise it and we slate it, but our relationship with cars is a lively element in our relationship with ourselves and other people. The downturn in the industry chills us, but mainly because – and we don’t feel this way about pharmaceuticals or petrochemicals – it makes us imagine we might have to stop being who we are.

The first long drive I took after I passed my test was a kind of baptism: I put down the windows and let all life’s unreasonable demarcations fly behind the car, enjoying the illusion that I now had a friend who cared for my freedom.

In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car. There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It may seem to give you back your existential mojo.

Driving was always a covert means, more explicit in the States, of discovering the outer limits of your own character in the act of transit.

I identify with a great many of these notions. Road trips still give me a thrill in a unique way that I’ve never experienced doing anything else. The idea of a warm evening, rock music, windows down, bright sun, and on the road is delicious even to think of. While learning to drive and obtaining a driver’s license in other countries may be important, I do not get the sense (and I could be wrong) that it is quite the right of passage as in the U.S. Why? For me, it began the active exploration of myself. It got me into trouble, but it was one of the most freeing experiences I have ever had.

And I cannot help but think that my love for road trips began so many years ago in 1982. We traveled far. One moment is particularly memorable to me and it captures fully the whole sense of travel and road trips for me: Uncle Ernie drove just a little bit through North Carolina so we could say we had been to North Carolina.

What’s the Difference? Part 2

So in my last post, I contemplated why I found Zbigniew Herbert boring but Eugenio Montale (both in translation) interesting. Here’s a poem by Eugenio Montale titled “Wind and Flags”:

The gust that lifted the bitter scent
of the sea to the valley’s twists and turns
and struck you, ruffling your hair,
brief tangle on the pale sky;

the squall that glued your dress to you
and shaped you swiftly in its image,
how it’s come back, now you’re gone, to these rocks
the mountain shoulders over the abyss;

and how, now the drunken rage is spent,
the soft breath finds the garden again,
that lulled you, stretched in your hammock
among the trees, on your flights without wings.

Alas, time never orders its grains
the same way twice. And there’s hope in this:
for, if it happens, along with nature
our fable will go up in a flash.

Flow that doesn’t quicken – and now brings alive
a group of dwellings laid out to the eye
on the flank of a hill,
bedecked with banners and festoons.

The world exists…Amazement halts
the heart that surrenders to straying ghosts,
heralds of evening: and won’t believe
starved men are celebrating.

I find much to admire in this poem: it’s supple shifts of tone, its striking imagery (”ruffling your hair;/brief tangle on the pale sky”). The abstractions in Montale create interest despite the fact that I’m reading this in translation. I find similar effects in 20th-century Greek poetry.

W.S. Graham frequently commented in his letters that he strove to push language (specifically English in his case) into new territories, to attempt to create new limits of meaning (putting nouns into verbs, a common technique of Shakespeare, for example). I think a similar concept can be gained by using imagery to push boundaries of meaning. The extension of meaning still happens within the context of language (think of Hart Crane’s “adagio of islands” – its mix of musical terminology with a physical landscape to create an impression of languid islands or of a leisurely sail through islands…both ideas work together to create the overall impression). I agree with Graham’s desire to see poetry push language to achieve effects outside of normal speech (even those poets who which to use every day speech still create effects with imagery, rhymes, etc. – think Robert Frost here). Translations of Herbert fail to give me that sense in English (though I fully imagine that those effects are apparent in the original Polish). Translations of Montale tend to become, in English, poems that succeed in adding to the language.

What’s the Difference? Part 1

I recently completed Zbigniew Herbert’s collected poems (translated by Alissa Valles). According to the vast majority of criticism and other commentaries I have read, Herbert is consider a substantial 20th-century poet. Alas, I found the work mostly boring, which I am sure will bother some people. After some consideration, I must admit that I find other “giants” of Eastern European poetry rather boring: Milosz, Brodsky, Seifert, Szymborska (the earlier 20th-century Russian poets seem to be an exception: Mayakovsky, Akhamtova, Pasternak). Now I could say that it’s just the fact that it is poetry in translation, but that cannot be all of it for modern Greek and Italian poetry I find remarkable in translation (Seferis, Cavafy, Elytis, Montale, Ungaretti) in addition to the earlier Russian poets and other poets in translation.

So what is it? I’ve been re-reading a bit of Montale and Elytis, and it seems to me to be the type of poetry it is. Montale and Elytis seem to be more, well, abstract and symbolist while Herbert and Seifert seem too literal and too concrete. Hence, Herbert in translation (and let’s be fair, I’m only reading them in translation and this should not, in the end, indicate any valuation of their poetry in their native language) comes off as prosy and flat. Montale, however, leaps off the page in imaginative fireworks. The abstraction and symbolism become the main focus of the poetry and carry my interest. I’d rather read Milosz’s Captive Mind than most of his poetry (and Milosz I find most agreeable of the Eastern European poets I mention here).

Here’s some of a Herbert poem titled “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination”:

Mr. Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination
the piano at the top of the Alps
played false concerts for him

he didn’t appreciate labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with loathing

he lived in a house with no basement
without mirrors of dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were not his home

he would rarely soar
on the wings of metaphor
and then he fell like Icarus
into the embrace of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death

he loved
the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth

At first blush, this may seem abstract and contradictory to my statements, what with its “without mirrors of dialectics,” but I do not find a spark in this language. It remains flat on the page and fails, interestingly, to elicit an imaginative response. In a future post, I’ll look at a Montale poem and comment further on these ideas.