Hi Bob,
Your recommendation is good. I've printed off to read at leisure.
bw
James


>From: Bob Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Fwd: interestin...
>Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 13:59:58 +0000
>
>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.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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bw
James


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