Interested in that, see this critique of my work -- also sound-based -- I
think I've sent it here before, but ....
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-daly-vauxhall-rb-cooley.shtml
On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 9:08 AM, Michael Heller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Tranströmer.I heard him read just once, at one of the early Poets House
> venues or NYU where I taught and was immediately taken by the clean
> precision, the almost conversational and yet insistent tone of the
> translations---I think they were Robin Fulton's---a tone that I could only
> intuit as being in the Swedish lines that Tranströmer read.Looking again at
> those translations, I sense that the poetry was always performing some
> balancing act between the poet's need to get down what he saw and felt, and
> a certain almost disbelief about whether literary composition could ever
> achieve the rendering of a personal vision.So many of Tranströmer's poems
> begin in observable data and end in an odd swerve into the surreal, almost
> an escape mechanism into an unplanned and unforeseen imaginative realm.He
> remarked to Fulton in an interview that the release of inner pressure
> sparked by a "very special kind of ignition" began the poem. Where it would
> go, no poet could ever be sure.Confidence then is an odd thing in poetry,
> not that the next word will be right, but that our loyalty to the process is
> itself a leap into the unknown.I think this is the nature of Tranströmer's
> fidelity to the poem, the willingness to leave (to surrender?) the known
> spaces of the world in order to find what is true simultaneously to both
> that "ignition" and to language itself:
>
> And the sea wind is in the dry pines further away, hurrying over the
> churchyard sand,
>
> past the leaning stones, the pilot's names.
>
> The dry sighing
>
> of great doors opening and great doors closing.
>
> (page 118 from "Baltics" of /Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems/ translated
> by Robin Fulton)
>
> ***
>
> --
> Home page: michaelhellerpoetry.com
>
> Recent books: Beckmann Variations& Other Poems (Shearsman, 2010); Eschaton
> (Talisman, 2009); Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the work of George Oppen
> (Salt, 2008); Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (Salt,
> 2005); Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2003). Available at
> bookstores, SPD and at Amazon.com
>
> Collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson: This Art Burning
> and other poetry, Benjamin (a music-theater work based on the life of
> Walter Benjamin), go to: http://www.efjcomposer.com/**
> efjcomposer/Welcome.html<http://www.efjcomposer.com/efjcomposer/Welcome.html> and for excerpts visit Ellen's Youtube videos at:
> http://www.youtube.com/user/**efjcomposer<http://www.youtube.com/user/efjcomposer>
>
> Michael Heller PennSound page: http://writing.upenn.edu/**
> pennsound/x/Heller.php <http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Heller.php>
>
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