Janet Krauss' "The Lamppost," selected by the Wickford Art Association for their poetry/art event

The Lamppost

Nothing can go wrong tonight---

the lamppost keeps watch,

a yeoman of the guard

making sure we won't stumble,

lighting up the fresh snow

along the sidewalk, the stage

where the snowcapped posts

of the fence stand ready

to dance as the tree lifts

its white gloved branches

toward the light in silent song.
--Janet Krauss 

Janet Krauss' poem packs in much emotion in a few lines. Beginning with the opening line with its firm tone, "Nothing can go wrong tonight," we are made ready to receive the beauty of the world, not pain or sorrow. The lamppost has a role to play here--it is witness to the dance of nature mirroring the joy of the speaker whose inner life is shaped by the beauty around her. The poem invites us to be selective about what brings us happiness--snow capped fence posts ready to dance, the tree lifting its white gloved branches, fresh snow on the sidewalk, and the silent song behind these images. 

Note the quiet tread of the syllables--so many single syllable words like "watch," guard," "snow," "posts" at every line break--as if the words were walking the snow-covered page of the poem, leaving their prints! And on this wintery stage of the poem, the words are spoken in a single sentence. Will a fresh snowfall cover these words?

W.S. Merwin's unpunctuated lines

I am indeed intrigued by the flow of Merwin's poems. The lack of punctuation does not hinder us from reading his poems. In fact the absence of punctuation creates a natural flow of breath that is calming. Each poem feels like a wind that has gently swept around you.
How does he do this? If we look at his poem, "The Latest Thing," the main clause in the first line that runs to the middle of the second, is followed by two subordinate clauses, which ends I imagine with a colon, because what follows is a list. This is followed by a complete sentence. And there are no punctuation marks to indicate any of this, but the absence of punctuation does not hinder our understanding of the poem.
The opening lines are intriguing: In the cities the birds are forgotten /among other things but then one could say /that the cities are made of absences / of what disappeared..."
We catch are breath a little before the end of the poem in "one white note plays on to prevent memory",
then the final line, "naturally forgetting its own song".

Vijay Seshadri's "Imaginary Number"

I was pleasantly surprised when I heard last month that Vijay Sashadri won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book Three Sections. I have ordered the book and am waiting eagerly for it to arrive. In the meanwhile, I am reading some of his poems on the web. One poem that is included in Three Sections and was published a few years ago in Poetry, is "Imaginary Number." It reminds me of poems by Dickinson and Anna Swir, the ease with which they talked about the soul, as if it was their best friend out taking a walk or a child that was up to some mischief. "Imaginary Number" begins with a planetary devastation that leaves only a mountain standing, which therefore challenges the idea of comparisons--big/small, since the there is nothing to compare the mountain to, resulting in the soul feeling appeased. But the poet is not satisfied at voicing this profound philosophical truth that comparisons are relative, they create stress for human beings, and the disappearance of comparisons spells relief. The poet's insight occurs in the turn of the poem:

"The soul,

like the square root of minus 1,

is an impossibility that has its uses."

We are left contemplating the following questions: What is the square root of minus 1? Is the soul an impossibility? Is it an impossibility because it is intangible? Is the soul useless or useful? When does the soul become useful? What are the instances of its uselessness? 

 I like to think that poetry is refreshingly useless.  But poetry could have its uses--such as diverting you from suicide (as happens in The Hours when Laura upon reading Mrs. Dalloway changes her mind about committing suicide). The soul--unlike poetry--is intangible, impossible, has no this-ness, no substance, but keeps us together despite our near-devastating experience of being flung between our largeness and our smallness, between what-a-piece-of-work-is-man and a-tale-told-by-an-idiot-signifying-nothing.

Walt Whitman's Wheeling Eagles

I came across a poem of Whitman I had not read earlier, "The Dalliance of the Eagles." I had somehow missed it in my hurry to flip through the pages to "Song of Myself." Whitman captures the swift movement of eagles, the height of their soaring, and their descent. The lines are long, the verbs capturing the intricacies of the dance of these aerial bodies.  Today when I read this poem at Benner's Farm, I felt involved with the lines. The sparkling blue skies, the tall trees, sunlight streaming down, a slight chill in the air making us hug our coats around us tighter, and cattle lowing in the background--all these made this poem special. I kept peering up at the sky to spot an eagle. Perhaps Whitman's eagle would soar from the poem!

Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail
I heard Dunya read at the Dodge Festival in 2010 and found her poems stunning. She wrote about the war, about life in Iraq, about how writers met in coffee houses, about her love for language. She told us the amazing story of being separated from her lover during the war for 10 years and how they found each other, magically. And now reading her poem, "Tablets," published in the March issue of Poetry, I see once again the sparkle in the lines when she takes us to the heart of separation and longing. The land cries on the lap of the one that has left. Families want to hear more than what they are told. Language can only reveal so much, we are told in the poem. And Dunya's poem etches suffering and love in tablets so they will stand like edicts or landmarks on our path.

Mirabai

It's True I Went To The Market

My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One.
You claim by night, I claim by day.
Actually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him.
You say I gave too much; I say too little.
Actually, I put him on a scale before I bought him.
What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.
Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now.
Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.

[Translated by Robert Bly]

Mirabai

 

In this very interesting poem, Mira challenges the religious norms by using the language of business. She is a customer who buys Krishna, her god, her lover. What's more, she weighs him as she would vegetables or grain! And, of course, she has to pay quite a bit, including her body, to own him. In the final punch line, she is the one who makes him stick to his promise. Notice, throughout she asserts her agency. Her spiritual striving is not left to destiny. 

 

Akka Mahadevi

I have fallen in love

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who knows no death,
knows no decay and has no form;

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who has no middle, has
no end, has no parts and has no features;

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who knows no birth and
knows no fear.

I have fallen in love, O mother with the
Beautiful One, who is without any family,
without any country and without any peer;
Chenna Mallikarjuna, the Beautiful, is my husband.
Fling into the fire the husbands who are subject
to death and decay.

Akka Mahadevi 

(from www.poemhunter.com)

Akka Mahadevi, a major Kannada poet, is highly revered for her talent as well as her beliefs. True to the bhakti or devotional tradition, she expresses her love for Krishna (Mallikarjuna) using the language of human bonding. The divine husband is beyond form and substance, but is Real, compared to the flesh and blood men who are terribly wanting. The provocative final lines make us question if human love can ever reach the kind of ultimate intimacy she has with the Beautiful One, her divine husband.

What I find interesting in this poem is her address to the mother of the Beautiful One. The mother is as powerful as her son--a universal belief in the feminine energy at the center of divinity itself--but the mother is the intercessor, the ultimate arbiter.

Taslima Nasreen reads at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI1DsRSYw8E

Hear Taslima Nasreen read her translations of her original poems, "You Go Girl" and "A Letter to My Mother."  I did not expect the ending in the first poem. It was a thunderbolt. And the second one, an autobiographical one, was a melancholy tribute to her mother who died of cancer. Taslima Nasreen, exiled from her country, Bangladesh, was living for a while in Sweden and then in India. She writes that she is a poet, a woman, without land, religion, or family. She finds solace among like-minded people of any background. Writing is her companion.

We can react with anger at Taslima's poems because of their militant tone, or we can feel the urgency for us to be more compassionate human beings and treat each other with respect and dignity. Think about it: Why should a country feel so threatened by someone's poems as to exile them?  When I look at the fate of poets who are exiled by their governments, it is then that I realize the power poetry has to change repressive policies.

Kazi Nazrul Islam

The following poem is from www.museindia.com, 2008, Issue #22

1st Prize – Debjani Chatterjee: Tr.of Kazi Nazrul Islam (Bengali)

Excerpt of Nazrul Islam's original poem in Bengali

Poems translated from Bengali by Debjani Chatterjee


We Are Two Flowers On The Same Stalk

We are two flowers on the same stalk - Hindu and Muslim.
The Muslim is the jewel of its eye, the Hindu is its life.
In the lap of Mother Sky
we swing like sun and moon;
we are the same blood in the same throbbing vein beneath the same chest.
We breathe the same land’s air, we drink the same land’s water;
we are the fruits and flowers that bloom on the same mother’s breast.
On the same country’s soil we find our final rest:
some in burial grounds and some on funeral pyres.
We call our mother in the same tongue, we sing the same tune.
Not recognising each other in the night’s darkness, we come to blows;
but in the morning we shall know each other as brothers.
We will weep and embrace each other,
we will ask each other’s pardon.
On that day our Hindustan will smile with pride!

Commentary:

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), national poet of Bangladesh, advocated passionately the unity of Hindus and Muslims.  Although a Muslim, he wrote poems inspired by Goddess Kali. In this poem, “We are Two Flowers on the Same Stalk,” Kazi Nazrul uses cosmic and elemental images to describe the symbiotic connection between Hindus and Muslims. This poem, although bound by the historical time period of the partition of India and Pakistan, continues to ring true today.

Pramila Venkateswaran

Gopalakrishna Adiga's "Do Something, Brother"

Gopalakrishna Adiga (1918-1992), winner of the Sahitya Akademy Award, India’s highest literary honor given to a writer, is a prolific Kannada poet. “Do Something Brother,” translated into English by the famous A.K. Ramanjan, is an ironic poem where the narrator is rooting for all human beings engaged in the act of senseless destruction of nature. The repetition of the imperative, “do,” “find,” “break,” “crush” gathers in intensity as the poem moves along and reaches the penultimate moment of “do anything,” and the ultimate, “This is natural./This is the one thing needful.” The conversational tone of the narrator only makes the devastation caused by us all the more hard-hitting. This ultimate ironic play on the destruction of nature as natural points to the human being excoriated of his/her humanity. Note Adiga’s exhaustive listing of images of the natural world to show its vulnerability to our very presence on earth!