Aside from agreeing that that sentence on confidence hits the mark Ione needs to trust self & language to produce each following word)(, I also am really pleased that Tanströmer received the Nobel. We dont always agree with awards, but this one seems fitting...
Doug
On 2011-10-06, at 10:08 AM, Michael Heller 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:
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> And the sea wind is in the dry pines further away, hurrying over the churchyard sand,
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> past the leaning stones, the pilot's names.
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> The dry sighing
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> of great doors opening and great doors closing.
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> (page 118 from "Baltics" of /Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems/ translated by Robin Fulton)
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> ***
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> --
> 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 and for excerpts visit Ellen's Youtube videos at: http://www.youtube.com/user/efjcomposer
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> Michael Heller PennSound page: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Heller.php
>
Douglas Barbour
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Why poetry? And why not, I asked,
my right brain humming sedition.
Phyllis Webb
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