dublinka

Oxfam have launched a new poetry calander for 2007. The poems are juxtaposed by the work of 12 artists from the Blue Leaf gallery including this painting by Leonard Sexton.

This years selection is much more interesting than 2006. The launch included an emotional reading by Mary Melvin Geoghegan of her poem Peter's Twenty Fifth Birthday and two quirky sparkle eyed poems from Anne Deane and Mary O'Donnell. Caitríona O Reilly's Ovum was in her own words, a jokey sort of poem, although we can take that with a pinch of salt. It includes the great ending:

as that double o in spermatozoon,
which enters by its own locomotion-
the flagellum, its tiny whip and scourge.

You can get a copy of the calendar from the wonderful staff at Oxfam Books Parliament Street Dublin.

I’ve been really enjoying Eva Bourke’s The Latitude of Naples. It contains a lot of interesting poems, but I’ll focus only on three here.

In Praise of Round Things, is an attack on ratiocination as much as a homage to the curve. Or so it would seem on first impression. But reading closely we discover that the orrery of the Great Earl and the great ear of the observatory and the astronomical clock at Strasbourg with its one small cogwheel are among subjects of Bourkes praise. This is not an attack on anything, it seems, but rather a homage to what the poet loves. And she loves lots of things listing: seasons returning, the apple’s round cheek, boreens, watery notation of the concert pitch A, Cezanne’s blue apples, Parmigianino’s self portrait (currently in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and green domes of cathedrals among many other things in her dazzling spiral praise. What a beautiful paean. It catches the ear, the eye, the mind, and the tongue all at once.

Burke has also translated Rilke’s Late Autumn in Venice (Spätherbst in Venedig), a poem which frequently seems to attract such efforts. Lets look at the last three lines of the poem and then compare them to some other translations:

First here’s the original:

mit einer Flotte, welche ruderschlagend
sich drängt und jäh, mit allen Flaggen tagend,
den großen Wind hat, strahlend und fatal.

Now Bourke’s version

with a fleet which moving countless oars
jostles, hoists bright flags, all at once,
has the great wind, radiant and fatal

Here’s an online attempt by Delmore Schwartz.

The fragrance of pitch, pennants aloft,
the butt of oars, all sails unfurled,
the fleet awaits the great wind,
radiant and deadly.

And a penguin modern poets translation by J. B. Leishman

by an armada, oaringly outpressing,
and suddenly, with flare of flags, possessing
the great wind, radiant and invincible.

And finally Google:

with a fleet, which stroke-end pushes itself and suddenly, meeting with all flags, which has large wind, radiating and fatal.

It’s interesting to watch the meaning drift. Schwartz has mysteriously slipped up on replacing fatal with deadly and flag with pennant. Google, looses with stroke-end pushes itself, and Leishman has sunk with invincible and the marble mouthed oaringly outpressing. Bourke’s version too has its idiosyncrasies. She draws light from the radiant wind to the flags for example, but it is the wind which is most important in these three lines, and on the whole her lines catch this elemental and ominous force better than the other versions. Not that it's a competion, but such discernment is important.

Boy in the Garden, gets into my all time favourite lists. Set in Boston, it’s an evening mediation on sorrow, loss and death. The action takes place at a reading, but what’s amazing about it is that such is Bourkes craft that very soon you find yourself there, listening to the words of others, looking out a window, feeling the night air.

We had been talking of war,
That in war time lies multiply and breed new lies
And word become worthless as inflationary coins.

...

but I also knew that this would stay with me always:
the poet, tired from study, resting his head on a cushion of words,
the other mourning his lost young life,
the visitor from the cave of shadows retreating,
the boy mysterious and solitary as Adam in the garden.

Without quoting the whole lot it’s difficult to get across the brilliance of such a poem. I closed my eyes several days after reading the poem, and remembered not the poem, but the place. In fact, I remembered the other poets, I remembered the night air, and I remembered the boy in the garden. This poem is too special not to memorise.

Corinne Anne Marbrow has composed The Sleeper’s Den. It possesses a curious Victorian sensiblity. As such it kind of reminds me of I Watched the Heavens by Caroline Clive. See for yourself.

The night-rain falls upon the roof
with scant regard for careless sleepers.
Each heavy beat is muffled mirth
At life beneath these rafters.
But for the sleeper in her den
It's dreams not rain that bind her,
And nature’s mirth, for all it’s worth
Is the element that’s kinder.

I'm not a fan of the word Poetess. It sounds, mmm, unpoetic. But nevertheless, this beautiful poster Called The poetess Lady Sagami by Tosa Mitsuoki is available from here at a very reasonable price. To hell with the authentic art object!

Artaud's little visit to Ireland, led to him sending this postcard. I found it lying between the pages of two blogs. Now I'm going to be a little lazy here and set you a task. Find out what he was doing there. Best answer mailed to me, will win a little prize. Have fun ;)

Poet and translator, Anatoly Kudriavitsky recently launched a new book called A Night in the Nabokov Hotel; a bilingual translation of 20 Russian poets, many of whom he new personally. Now if like me you agree that the Russians as a nation are unsurpassed in their poetry, then you're probably quite excited by the possibility of reading this anthology. The poems I heard on the night were fantastic but unfortunately the book sold out at the reading before yours truly could manage to get his hands on one. Nevertheless I did get my hands on Shadow of Time, an earlier collection by the author. It contains the poem Pseudoaluminium and the Big Plans, which also appears in A Night in the Nabokov Hotel. The poem has been lauded in Russia as an outstanding anti-war poem, although on the night, Kurdiavitsky quipped that he hadn't realised it was one. It opens with the line:

The bigger the house,
the smaller the occupants of the house.

and ends with the lines

They hope it contains much
pseudoaluminium,
the raw material of super-high-speed bombers
and portrait frames.

In doing so the poem reminds us of the link between war and economy. Of the complicity of society and even perhaps aesthetics, in the production of terror and neocolonial enterprise. The picture frame is empty. There is, nothing to put in it. Despite its brilliance, its owners are without face, without soul even. Elsewhere in the poem he speaks of skyscrapers. He is speaking overtly of international bankers and the technocrats who crank the wheels of oppression, but implicitly of the greater occidental middle class. The poem further states that even though the devil (or war) gradually loses its prestige, the process of exploitation continues. Not just in the big plans, but in the little plans. In the extraction of the raw material for picture frames. The victims are without face. Obliterated. They will not make the portrait frames.

Kurdiavitsky also made one further interesting comment at the reading. He spoke of the difficulty of translation. And even though a man of many tongues, he wondered whether his translation of the poem, into his mother languageRussian from the English, quite conveyed what he meant. It is an interesting comment. Because in a sense, it removes the debate of the difficulties and complexities of the merits of a given translation from the mind of the poet who has produced the work. Even though the mind of the poet holds the concepts and ideas of the poem, it can not readily switch them into and between languages. He acts as an intermediary between languages. And he, like a translator, is not necessarily assured of the correctness of his translation. It's a startling admission. It tells us something about the tyranny of language over the human mind. And it tells us something of that accessible subterranean world that lies beneath expression.

A recent run of Cryano, featuring everyone's favourite big nosed poet, Cyrano de Bergerac, came to an end in the Project theatre Dublin yesterday. It was a terrible production. One actor thought he was playing Joey from friends. Yet another thought he was playing a plank. He succeeded. Kelly Campbell tried to keep it going to no avail. All seemed tired. The script by Veroinca Coburn, excised lots of good stuff from Edmund Rostand, and replaced it by below power Dublin gags. If it ain't broke, lets see what we can do. The set seemed like an afterthought or else had gone on holiday. I just thought I'd warn you. It's probably on tour.

If you don't like the Bardflys, why not?

Anyone who enjoys Apollinaire, will love reading Apollinaire on art, a selection of his essays and reviews, translated from the French by Susan Sulieman and spanning the years 1902-1918. I've been reading it on and off for a while now, and it has given me a wonderful insight into the formulation of the aesthetic sensibility, which later give us so many wonderful poems. Apollinaire touches presciently on numerous interesting characters. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, are just the tip of a very large iceberg. Nearly every salon show in Paris (Salon of Women painters, Salon des Indépendents, the humorists' salons etc)comes under his scrutiny. He also talks about generally about the artworld, it's denizens, and the various movements and submovements that raged in that era. The Theft of the Mona Lisa, futurism and the criticism of poets are other examples of topics. Of the later poets who wrote art criticism, Apollinaire states "They have not made up their minds to admire everything new. They are trying to distinguish the good from the bad so that energies liberated by the good should not be lost". In doing so, Apollinaire was defending the rights of poets, to express opinions on art, in both technical and wider matters. This cheered me up a little, as of late I've grown tired of hearing poets come on Late Review style shows, stumbling like embarassed schoolchildren, when it comes to a review of something outside of theatre, television or poetry. Afraid to say what they think.

The Welsh poet, Idris Davies, was the source of inspiration for the Byrds song The Bells of Rhymney on their 1965 debut album Mr Tambourine Man. Originally the lament, which mimics the structure of Oranges and Lemons, was set to music by Pete Seeger, afterwhich it soon entered the folk cannon. Despite, or perhaps because of being one of that eras great elegies, it quixotically compelled the flower children of the age to dance effervescent the moment they heard it.

Is there hope for the future?
Say the brown bells of Merthyr
Who made the mine owner?
Say the black bells of Rhondda
And who killed the miner?
Say the grim bells of Blaina

Variously a coalminer, teacher and friend of Dylan Thomas, Davies work has aged well. Witness the following poem Rhymney in his own handwriting. It just makes you hungry for more.