BERNEVAL

Sujata Bhatt. Brunizem. “The Women of Leh are such —”

The appearance of Stein in this poem seems mysterious until one discovers that the dedicatee was a translator of the correspondence between Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. The poem is dedicated to Jürgen Dierking. He would go on to translate Bhatt.

in that place I dreamt
and I saw Gertrude Stein selling
horseradishes and carrots. There was no mistaking
those shoulders — but she fit in so well
with her looking-straight-at-you eyes.

And by association we leap to Gertrude Stein’s Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson (for which the Poetry Foundation nicely supplies a recording of Stein reading). However it is to the textual history I draw your attention, to the notes provide by Ulla E. Dydo, long time scholar of Stein and the notebooks (see A Stein Reader) which on page 376 informs us

On the back of the notebook for this piece are tiny private love verses to Toklas. Some become sections of the text. In the notes, details of “A Very Valentine” appear in more personal form than in typescript and in print. The original line “Very Stein is my valentine very Stein and very fine” becomes in print “Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.” Stein and Toklas are each other’s valentines, two lovers who are one, idem the same.

Let us return to the figure of Stein in Bhatt’s “The Women of Leh are such —”. We find her at the end of the poem.

Then she turned aside to talk with the tomato seller,
still keeping an eye on the dzo — it was hard to believe
but there was no mistaking that poise.

Idem, the same.

And so for day 1652
22.06.2011

Stupendous ending. “At the Official Function, Captain Green” in Mark Waldron The Brand New Dark.

my butter mouth that pushed them into the world.

What doesn’t melt…

And so for day 1651
21.06.2011

Mark Waldron. The Brand New Dark.

There are two poems that could be companion pieces because of their use of extended conceit. One animates sheets; the other, turns a bathtub into a sled.

The Sheets and Pillowcases

in this place, have a design printed on them
and he imagines the patterns might get up his nose while he sleeps

[…]

The oneiric qualities are also evident in “The Run”.

They’re in the bath together.
Like tobogganists heading down and down a hill,
snow covering the land like a sleep.

[…]

Of course the poem includes the waking up: “One day she may turn and find him gone. / Fallen off somewhere, / tumbling back towards the world.” The fun trick is that the reader can get back on and ride the poem one more time.

And so for day 1650
20.06.2011

Mark Waldron. The Brand New Dark. “Yes, Everything You Need is Here”

There is a poem-within-a-poem here.

A tree. […]

Gravity. […]

Rope. […]

Each of these is the opening to a stanza. Even as you read on, they keep tugging the attention. And when read down acrostic-style they impart a story of a hanging, just hanging there.

And so for day 1649
19.06.2011

Jan Zwicky.
Wittgenstein Elegies

This opens the section set in Rosro, County Galway.

Grooves in the rough-planed planks.
Trace the grain, back and forth, slow path,
back; and forth. Salt light from over
the dark chafed sea. So much is constant:
desk, cot, window. Wood, light, sea.
Trace, retrace, tide-worn wash of mind.
There is nothing left to strip away, grind
down, wear off: but still not pure enough, no
clarity. Words stumble, clutter, clog. I remain
a draughtsman; thought, dull pencil used
to trace the outlines that fragment and blur
at every stroke.

Note the odd punctuation: “back; and forth.” A mark not unlike a pencil blur. Double croche.

And so for day 1648
18.06.2011

Each transition is unique and yet part of the human story of variations on a given theme. I am reminded of the words of John Koethe in the concluding poem to Sally’s Hair, words about the performance of Richard Burton as Hamlet. Look for the reliance on seeing…

[…]
Whose whole reality is words? It’s nice to speculate,
And yet it’s just too facile, for the truth was much more
Gradual and difficult to see, if there to see at all.
We like to think they’re up to us, our lives, but by the time we
Glimpse the possibility of changing it’s already happened,
Governed by, in Larkin’s phrase, what something hidden from us chose
And which, for all we know, might just as well have been the stars.

Koethe is meditating about the influences on his coming to a life of words and thought — how that Burton performance may have been a catalyst. He finds the most willed and contorted syntax to express that destiny is possible thereby reaffirming that destiny is not all, certainly not all in recollection. Close your eyes, you’re in control.

And so for day 1647
17.06.2011

There is a magisterial poem in The Hayflick Limit where Matthew Tierney runs the gamut on the ages of man by following the metamorphoses of a character in body and attire. It is fittingly called “Age of Majority“. I like to see such prowess as conditioned by some lines from one of the earlier phobia poems — “Aulophobia” — fear of flutes which cautions us on how we read.

We follow symbolism at our own risk
to the hippocampus,

down rabbit holes, unearthing
dark incidents.

See what the warning achieves in these concluding lines to the initial section to the story of Ray in “Age of Majority”:

Life was loosening its middle; memories popped
into pneumatic tubes: TURNING POINTS, ANECDOTES,
REGRETS, etc., hither and thither before the shink
of keys to the convertible sent
a flush right to his prostate.

Hippocampus in overdrive? At what risk?

And so for day 1646
16.06.2011

Sujata Bhatt Brunizem “The Peacock”

Could be a set piece in school. Calls for that examination of tenor and vehicle that is the hallmark of our tentative forays into interpreting metaphor.

It concludes:

The cat will awaken and stretch.
Something has broken your attention;
and if you look up in time
you might see the peacock
turning away as he gathers his tail
to shut those dark glowing eyes,
violet fringed with golden amber.
It is the tail that has to blink
for eyes that are always open.

The ending reminds me of Marianne Moore and the frozen stillness that still animates the mind. There is of course a peacock treated at one remove (for it appears in a poem about Molière) in the poems of Marianne Moore (“To the Peacock of France”). Note how it too plays with the peek-a-boo unfurling of the tail.

You hated sham; you ranted up
   And down through the conventions of excess;
   Nor did the King love you the less
     Nor did the world,
     In whose chief interest and for whose spontaneous
       delight, your broad tail was unfurled.

Notwithstanding the titular animal, the peacock of Bhatt reminds me more of Moore’s meditation on the natural and the artificial found in the ending of “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish”.

Not brittle but
Intense—the spectrum, that
     Spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
     Whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their polish.

Likewise, the glory of the peacock filtered by the poet’s words.

And so for day 1645
15.06.2011

Minimal treat for maximal performance (without a title) from Mark Truscott Said Like Reeds or Things

leaves answer answer leaves

I have remembered this as “leaves answer answers leave” — just wanting that flutter of the “s” to be displaced in the breeze of breath. Regardless, I like how the first two words where the noun “leaves” provides a metonym for the image of a whole tree and somehow the leaf-full tree supplies an “answer” to some unknown yearning. The second half of the line emphasizes the fragility of any grasp of understanding that might be achieved by contemplation — the noun is converted to a verb and all leaves.

And so for day 1644
14.06.2011