""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""
Very well put, Michael. It's the unknown nature of the fidelity to the
process (or the words, the images, the mechanisms, the "psychopoetics" if
you will) that has spurred me to utilize stream of consciousness and a
renewed reliance on intuition when I write. It's freeing to admit that we
are always on the brink of the unknown, and even more freeing to embrace and
appreciate that emotion. Loyalty as such is an interesting and problematic
concept: loyalty to what, and to what degree? What is
close/right/new/deep/free/true/stark *enough*? I'm supposed to be writing an
essay on loyalty in translation (of poetry, as it happens), and it's
comprehending the nature and the degree that's holding me back somewhat.
I'll get there.
KS
On 6 October 2011 19:08, 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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