This was sent to me, I thought, as I read further into it, it become more
and more interesting... whaddya think?
>NEGOTIATING THE DARKNESS
>Article in New York Times on January 14, 2002
>By MARY KARR
>
>
>The events of Sept. 11 nailed home many of my basic convictions, including
>the notion that lyric poetry
>dispenses more relief - if not actual salvation – during catastrophic times
>than perhaps any art form.
>
>After the disaster, we did what perhaps most families did. We prayed in
>gratitude and fury and desperate petition. We watched hours of news. And we
>read poetry. I probably faxed
>more copies of poems - and received more faxes from other devoted readers -
>in the following weeks than I had in years, though as a professor at
>Syracuse University, I essentially butter my biscuit with the reading of
>poetry.
>
>The diverse crowd of readers I swapped poems with encompassed colleagues,
>secretaries and administrators; but also The New York Times's conservative
>columnist William Safire; the poet Sharon Olds; my agent, Amanda Urban; my
>godson's parents in England; neighbors; the novelists Salman Rushdie and
>Don DeLillo; and my insurance-selling sister.
>
>The first poems I turned to were those of fury. The political satires the
>Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert lobbed against Soviet oppression dispensed a
>particularly warming fire. In "The Monster of Mr. Cogito" (translated by
>John and Bogdana Carpenter), he poses as a chivalrous figure fighting not a
>dragon but an invisible enemy, "The shimmering of nothingness." Mr.
>Cogito's monster very much resembles the one behind the World Trade Center
>attack:
>
>it is difficult to describe
>escapes definition
>it is like
>an immense depression
>spread out over the country
>it can't be pierced
>with a pen
>with an argument
>or a
>spear.
>
>
>We only know the monster by "it's suffocating weight/and the death it sends
>down." The fury I felt at the invisible enemy was embodied in the
>hilarious, almost Quixote-esque figure of Mr. Cogito walking out at dawn:
>
>carefully equipped
>with a long sharp object
>he calls to
>the monster
>on the empty streets
>he offends the monster
>provokes the monster . . .
>he calls -
>come out
>contemptible coward
>
>But just as we still stare helpless into our television screens, hoping for
>some glimpse of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, so this eager knight peers
>into fog, seeing only "the huge snout of nothingness."
>
>European poets like Herbert who endured war have resounded the loudest and
>longest in these months. Asked to read for The New Yorker's benefit shortly
>after the attacks, I struggled with whether or not to include the Holocaust
>survivor Paul Celan's agonized poem about the digging in mass graves
>(translated from German by Michael Hamburger). It was somber and furious
>with the God whose universe contained the graves' possibility:
>
>There was earth inside them, and
>they dug.
>They dug and
>they dug, so their day
>went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God,
>
>who, so they heard, wanted all this,
>who, so they heard, knew all this.
>They dug and heard
>nothing more;
>they did not grow wise, invented no song,
>thought up for themselves no language.
>They dug.
>
>The cadence of the poem drummed out the relentless dirge of a people's
>grief, but was it perhaps too dark? The digging at ground zero was only
>blocks away, and perhaps the poem would fall on the audience like another
>blow.
>
>The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, ultimately persuaded me to
>read it. He reminded me that its conclusion suggests not just digging
>toward the lost, but also a collective digging into history, how one person
>in despair and loneliness digs toward the salvation of someone else. The
>poem concludes with a moment of awakening, the sound of a ring striking
>metal as one human being reaches another.
>
>On one, o none, o no one, o you:
>Where did the way lead
>when it led nowhere?
>O you dig, and I dig, and I dig towards you,
>and on our
>finger the ring awakes.
>
>Poetry is about such instantaneous connection - one person groping from a
>dark place to meet with another in an instant that strikes fire.
>
>After the benefit, strangers wrote in gratitude for the Celan poem, though
>I regretted not being able to include Whitman's long passage from "I Sing
>the Body Electric," which describes the body in its various attitudes of
>beauty and in this section winds up with firefighters, whose recent courage
>we as a country have been so star-struck by.
>
>
>But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in
>his face,
>It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the
>joints of his hips and wrists,
>It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of
>his waist and knees, dress does not hide him. . . .
>The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of
>masculine muscle through clean- setting trousers and
>waist-straps,
>The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell
>strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
>The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the
>curved neck and the counting. . . .
>Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with the wrestlers, march
>in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.
>
>Memoir has permitted me to relay to readers the yards of intricate
>information I could never roll into a lyric poem, but prose never works in
>a reader's mind with poetry's instant infusion of feeling.
>
>Poetry is economical. And for the gravely pained, swift relief is of the
>essence. A poem's brevity touches most readers when the mental focus
>required by a lengthy prose work just won't do. The poet Philip Larkin once
>wrote that the reader puts the penny of attention into the poem's slot and
>immediately gets a feeling as payoff.
>
>A short poem is also, arguably, the most portable art form. Maybe pianists
>can recall whole concertos note by note, or painters can evoke in their
>minds the most subtle brush strokes. From a great novel a few sentences
>might linger, a character or scene. But those are abbreviations, not the
>novel itself.
>
>Only lyric poetry yields the artwork in its entirety, anytime, anywhere.
>And it arrives in common language – the same tool we use to get gas pumped
>into a dry tank. While standing in a bank teller's long line, I can rerun a
>whole sonnet in my head and enjoy a rush of tenderness that sometimes
>disperses my impatience as if a wand had been waved. The act plugs me into
>the great invisible company of Shakespeare or Dickinson.
>
>It's strange that an act so solitary - reciting a silent poem - can invoke
>that sense of being drawn into the human community. Long works of prose are
>rabbit holes that let me vanish from this world into alternate realms. But
>lyric poetry's alchemy yields for me a strange and sudden kinship with the
>actual world and its citizens.
>
>Since the bombings, I've turned perhaps most often to the work of the
>90-year-old Polish exile and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. In "On Prayer,"
>translated here by former poet laureate Robert Hass, Mr. Milosz bestows a
>way to pray onto even the most faithless.
>
>You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
>All I know
>is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
>And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
>Above
>landscapes the color of ripe gold
>Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
>That bridge
>leads to the shore of Reversal
>Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
>
>Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
>Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
>Feels
>compassion for those tangled in the flesh
>And knows that if there is no others shore
>We will walk
>that aerial bridge all the same.
>
>James Joyce once said that everyone starts out as a poet, then realizes
>it's too hard. For those of us with the hubris to keep writing verses that
>will seldom reach the exalted status the great works do (much less buy
>dinner or cover a mortgage), there's a great joy in the absurdity of one's
>enterprise. It's the joy derived from true wonder at poetry's redemptive
>quality, like taking your Little League
>slugger bat into the cathedral of Yankee Stadium.
>
>Here I stand, bat cocked, ready for whatever impossible pitch history
>flings. It may be a presumptuously comic posture, but the cathedral itself
>offers me the constant consolations of magnificence.
>
>
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
|