I’ve been reading a lot the last month. Most recently finished Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis. These are books having to do with Jews in Italy in the 1930s, a period I’m writing about. Also strongly recommend The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia, Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt, and Please by Jericho Brown.
My wife, Suzanne, and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which we go to rarely, because it’s so expensive, but like a lot. Also, I smiled a lot.
How is place important to your poetry?
I think the world, the world I find myself in, is poetic primarily, and my ideas poetic secondarily, in relationship to the world I find myself in. I guess I would say that good poems give us the world, this world, and that’s as true of Sylvia Plath’s poems as it is of William Carlos Williams’s.
What’s your favorite poem?
“Song of Myself.”
Which of your own poems is your favorite?
They’re all my favorites. I don’t think I could make a selected poems. But the one I read the most these days is “Trailing Clouds of Glory,” because of its pertinence to the current immigration debate.
* * * * *
Trailing Clouds of Glory
Even though I’m an immigrant,
the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
a few desultory orgies, a billboard
of the snub-nosed electric car of the future—
the inside is exactly the same as the outside,
down to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
So why the angel with the flaming sword
bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
and the men with the binoculars,
elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
peering into the desert? There is a border,
but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension
before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train
to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across
from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them—
delicate and archaic and Mayan—
and obviously undocumented to the bone.
They didn’t seem anxious. The mother was
laughing and squabbling with the daughter
over a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a
video game together. The boy, maybe three,
disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face,
the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother
after thirty hours of labor—the head squashed,
the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous
with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel
and into the cold room of harsh sounds.
He looked right at me with his bleared eyes.
He had a voice like Richard Burton’s.
He had an impressive command of the major English texts. I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth, he said. The child, he said, is father of the man.
I recently had so much fun rereading this novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). The Master and Margarita was completed in 1937 but wasn’t published in any form until 1967. The full, unexpurgated version appeared in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protest and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the novel, the Devil and his retinue (including a black cat that walks on two legs) arrive in Moscow literally to decapitate the unbelieving head of a writer’s association and to wreak havoc on the literary elite. The so-called Master is the aspiring poet who starts out as a willing tool of the government-controlled literary organization but undergoes a transformation after being admitted to an insane asylum. The book is full of quasi-realistic caricatures of self-important bureaucrats and greedy opportunists. It is wickedly funny, replete with brilliant details, and totally uncategorizable. It can be read on so many levels: as Bildungsroman, as love story, as historical fiction, slapstick comedy, moral parable, social satire, a foray into Magic Realism, a philosophical allegory partially inspired by Gogol and Dostoevsky—you name it.
In French, in her original handwriting, opposite English translation by Susan Sellers, and a wonderful interview in which Cixous discusses her process. I feel simpatico with her temperament and methods—capturing bits of memory, dream, dialogue—and I like the way she talks about the creation of a text from these fragments: “It’s a kind of building, which is very mobile, supple, where I try to bring into interaction those different notes. Then sometimes I develop them. Sometimes they have been just the first germs of something which is going to develop into a large chapter; but sometimes they remain exactly in the way they happened, like drops, and in a very lapidary way…..”
Michael Blumenthal’s No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012. Wilkes-Barre: Etruscan Press. 2012. Review by Stephen Massimilla
In No Hurry, Michael Blumenthal reaffirms that powerful poetry can be accessible and complex at once. The poet is in the autumn of life, in “no hurry”: careful not overlook everyday pleasures or even to skirt painful realities. As a wisdom poet, he rejects quick fixes. Though he pays homage to such heroes as Tennyson, Yeats, James, Bishop, and Larkin, Blumenthal also eschews bookish allusions and tonal affectation. As in the past, Blumenthal addresses us as “friends,” as if we were being given access to the poet’s complex conversations with himself.
Blumenthal continually reminds us that honesty is a complicated challenge. The speaker of the first poem in the collection takes an unflinching look into a dominatrix’s chamber in the Atelier Rhinegold, a room from which a client can exit into “a world / made whole again for a fee, / a kindly universe where there’s a cure / for every unlived fantasy a life provides.” Only a skeptical and courageous writer could even begin to treat—or at least diagnose—the conditions of life in our frustrating, ailing world, given that even a temporary “cure” provided “for a fee” is a masochistic fantasy. By opening his book with such an unexpected “exit,” Blumenthal signals that he will not favor factitious comedic endings. In “The Rabbi Prepares a Wedding Poem,” Blumenthal identifies the rabbi as “duty bound to all that can be recited / from a podium,” which precludes even mentioning the “dangerous” facts. In another poem, the poet suggests that it is better to admit that even the nightingale must at times sing “alone” and “in praise of deceitfulness” and “impossible love” (“Because Marriage Is Not for Romantics”). The tone here is both down-to-earth and wistful, both biting and tinged with unfulfilled longing.
Indeed, much of what Blumenthal reveals can be communicated only through his complex tone. Notice how the speaker of “Background Music” undercuts what the opening line—“If you are lucky in love”—would lead us to expect: “If you are lucky in love / someone will become the background music / to your own life // listened to but not actually heard….” What an effectively indirect way of suggesting that the speaker is culpable of having overlooked his loved one’s needs, “as if the music were playing in another room.” An alternative to oblique self-indictment could have involved ignoring or denying his own self-absorption, or perhaps confessing his perceived failings outright; but, as we are warned in the villanelle “Le Choix,” the choice between dying and lying “is always painful, and unclear.” When it comes to questions of frankness and deception, sexual desire and love, one’s own needs and another’s, there is no easy shortcut to bearable honesty.
Besides the earned honesty and tonal mastery of his poetry itself, what in this troubled world does the poet give us to celebrate? I’m tempted to say that Blumenthal would not entirely disagree with Rilke about the poet’s duty to praise and bless whatever he can—provided, Blumenthal might add, that this praise is often drowned in bitterness. “I know that wherever we find beauty needs to be praised,” the poet asserts early on, only then to tell us that one “beauty” in question was a young Jewish woman being admired by the Nazi soldier who was pushing her into the gas chamber (“A Photo of Terezin”). If “Grace may not be merited, / friends, but nonetheless deserves to be praised,” how confidently are we to sing the world’s praises in the midst of injustice? (“Blessed”). And in a book that refers to the global economic downturn and all kinds of personal losses, only Blumenthal could coin phrases like “the blessed burdens of our disenfranchisements” and “the sense of our own sinfulness.” (“Not the Soul”). In “The Human Condition,” the poet’s “bethren of the mid-range,” those likewise facing aging and death, are, Blumenthal suggests, still free to celebrate “birdsong and the wild graffiti / of the everyday,” along with the blessings of the “next” life. That next life (like this life), after all, is “there for the asking like the garbage, / just waiting to be taken away.” For a seasoned Jewish writer with a distrust of claims to the romantic and the transcendent, what could be more “everyday” than this birdsong graffiti and that afterlife garbage?
Given the complex uniqueness of his oeuvre and voice, Blumenthal not only helps us to face bitter realities: he also practices kindness and compassion, and he can be hysterically funny. Imparted with music as buoyant and lovely as it is turbulent, what comes through, in spite of everything, is the poet’s bigheartedness and unabashed willingness to investigate. In a moving tribute, Blumenthal expresses gratitude for all he has learned from his various relatives in and through their struggles, strategies, and sufferings (“Genetics”); and he is both touching and wittily satiric in his honorary dirge to a pigeon that perished because it was perhaps “as bored of false praise as I was” (“The Pigeon”). Most appositely, Blumenthal adopts a tone at once quirky, enchantingly lyrical, and profound in his praise of “moles,” those scribblers persistently digging, mining the subconscious dark of the writer’s mind (“Moles”). The unhurried product of that pursuit is a productively troubling book, a multifaceted statement of courage, of moral and aesthetic purpose. It is in this spirit that, at the end of “Self-Help,” the poet urges us to speak out so that:
the books that once gave us so much bad feeling
toward our happier selves can go on doing their work
I am enjoying this Cold War political thriller set in Eastern Europe in the 1960s. Perfect escape reading, terrifically conceived, except that Steinhauer’s protagonist’s country is never named or identified, and his city is always called simply “the capital”—very annoying not to be grounded in a real nation with historically specific places, language, details (which Steinhauer can certainly handle, since he lives in Budapest).
“Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I’ve said, No, this isn’t going to work, forget it.”
“I like the idea of poetry, but you know, when you write prose, I think you have to be careful not to make it consciously poetic. It’s got to have some sharpness to it, and that’s the way I like to write now. I like to write in a way that, I don’t know, maybe that will frighten people a bit?”
A book I reread every year and which I teach is David Markson’s Reader’s Block. First of a tetralogy, this book takes on mortality, anti-Semitism, and the form of the novel, disabusing us of the notion of the artist as “hero” by revealing the flaws and the failures of both the artists and the world they live in. Written in tiny paragraphs, made almost entirely from quoted or paraphrased texts (kind of like a cento), the book has a subtext that pulls the reader along. I can’t resist. My students can’t resist. And in that way my own reading and my teaching life join again and again.
The year I was graduating from college, I went to visit an MFA program to see if I wanted to enroll there. Even though it was a 95-degree May day, the student who escorted me sported a long poetic scarf, which she wielded like an identity. Just looking at that scarf made me sweat. When I asked her if she planned to teach poetry after she got her degree or maybe go into book publishing, and if she was hoping to publish a book of poems, she waved at me and said, “Oh, I’m just here for the spiritual experience.”
I sat in on a pretty low-voltage poetry workshop–the students subdued and distracted, the instructor kindly but diffident. Nobody seemed to really like poetry much; the class felt like a required course, a prerequisite for something else unspoken. Afterward, my escort ushered me into another room, a kind of student lounge, with a couple cockroachy sofas, strewn with literary journals, their covers curling, and on the walls peeling posters for poetry readings long past. A poet was visiting for the afternoon, reading to the MFAers. I’d encountered his work in college. I thought of him as a poet of bogs and clouds, his verses nice enough but a little clammy.
In the flesh, he was a robust figure, his face Santa Claus pink, his eyes glistening, his hair graying into a halo. He smiled at us and began reading poems, in a crisp and lilting voice. I’d heard poets read before, my college teachers mostly, and they were good and inspiring. But in the drear of this lounge he grew utterly incandescent. The poems he read I remember as sorrowful, serious, the life in them ripe with solitude and rot. Yet he seemed thoroughly enlivened by the fact of reading them to us, by his awed delight that poetry existed at all and that we had the throats and mouths to speak it. I heard centuries in his voice–Yeats, bards, the storyspinners around peat fires who told clans who they were and where they came from.
I was too awed and shy to meet him afterward and thank him. But that hot May day, Seamus Heaney made me realize that poetry could take up residence in the blood, that it could resonate over time and into unlikely places, and that if we listened, it could bring us together in tragic joy.
