Martin how fine a birthday wish, & I join you in wishing Harriet the
best.
Hoping I can still be going strong when I get there....
Doug
On 18-Apr-09, at 4:37 AM, Martin Walker wrote:
> "Bullied by words the poet struggles to escape. He picks up a stone
> and is
> silent.[..] Until the next seizure. When he becomes so word-stoned
> that
> hundreds of butterflies leap out of his mouth and he pins them all
> into his
> notebook." When Harriet Zinnes (a long-time member of poetryetc)
> wrote these
> words in her book of prose poetry *Entropisms* (1978) she was in the
> full
> bloom of her poetic career - she had published a first big
> collection in
> 1966 (*An Eye For An I*), then *I Wanted To See Something Flying*
> (1976),
> *My, Haven't The Flowers Been* (1995) and another *Drawing On The
> Wall*
> (2002) - which also reprised in a different order the poems in the
> wonderful
> chapbook *Plunge* (2001) issued by Randolph Healey's Wild Honey
> Press, my
> personal introduction to her work and the volume I take off the
> shelf most
> often when I wish to dive into her poems again, then *Whither
> Nonstopping*
> (2005), in which her line is stripped down, with an almost sibylline
> note.
> Her poetry is always marked by observation of the paths & vagaries of
> perception, wit or quizzical mockery, inconsolable curiosity, elegy
> - as in
> "Viewer" (from DOTW): "Ah, great bird/ Staring from a tablet/ In
> ivory /
> Worked by a Byzantine craftsman. // Still, not even the eye in
> movement./ A
> center, a shadow along the lines of stone,/ That circular stoppage
> without
> time. // In time, now, as you, also silent, / Stare with two eyes/
> So soon
> to be closed." Impossible not to think of Goethe's "Warte nur,
> balde/ Ruhest
> du auch" here - and as with Goethe, the sound and the sense are
> inextricably
> fused. (I tried once to translate a few of her poems into German -
> she hated
> it, "that doesn't sound like me" she said.) Always the stress on
> (and in)
> the Now - and the feeling for absence or limitation, the deferral of
> finality. In her early mid-60s poem "Shoebox" she was already
> writing "Here
> I am/ an old woman/ living in a shoe/ my heartbeat,and all my toes/
> and that
> sunk-in feeling through and through", but in the very next poem
> *Cybele* she
> calls out "(All the old curses)/ The infant waxeth green/Tell us
> tell us
> tell us." That old woman, that green infant - the scope and riches
> of whose
> work I cannot begin to adumbrate in a brief e-mail - is now, today,
> ninety
> (90) years young. I don't know if she is/will be reading these words
> any
> time soon, but I wish her many happy, green returns of the heartbeat
> we hear
> in her poems, those "stones" of which she wrote a week or two ago
> "Even the
> stone I pick up/ holds the burden of ages." - Tell us, Harriet, tell
> us,
> with your Ahs and Ohs.
> Martin
> P.S. A new volume is coming out any day now - *LIGHT LIGHT OR THE
> CURVATURE
> OF THE EARTH*
>
> Wenn die ganze Zivilisation zum Teufel ginge - ich würde es nicht
> bedauern;
> nur um die Musik tät' es mir leid.
> Leo Tolstoy
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
A little planet blues, for the
deathwatch.
A season of rictus riffs.
Dennis Lee
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