Elizabeth Bishop / One Art

Photography by Alejandro Zenker

ONE ART

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch.  And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

-Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

ONE ART

One Art is another villanelle. It was written by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) after the death of her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. The two women lived together in Brazil for 15 years, and Soares committed suicide after Bishop left her and returned to America.

Bishop was a slow, meticulous writer, and some poems took more than 20 years to finish. I’ve seen the original drafts of this poem (by a professor who snuck photocopies out of Vassar’s library where Bishop’s papers are kept). The first draft was a journal entry. By the second draft, it was beginning to take shape as a villanelle. The final product came 22 drafts later.

http://bluedragonfly10.wordpress.com/2007/11/06/poem-of-the-day-nov-7/#more-49

Triunfo Arciniegas / Grandfather

El señor del sombrero
Medellín, 2011
Photography by Triunfo Arciniegas

Triunfo Arciniegas

GRANDFATHER

Translated from Spanish by C.D. Hernández
EL ABUELO

In his old age

he washed his eyes

with rose petal water.

Took naps

under the shade of a tree

and he would tell us stories

about horses lost in the fog

of deer trembling in water

of a house that burned all night.

"Time passes

like a ball of fire "

he once said.

The shadow of

his hat on his face

the ember of snuff,

the palm of his hand on my shoulder.

With a dry blow on the neck

he would send rabbits

to another world.

Garlic fasting

and a chair in the patio,

the secrets of my old man.

For my birthday

he opened the trunk,

his world,

he chose something

and judging by the way he held it

I understood that it was something he loved

a colorful top

which I still I have.

Carlos de Oliveira / An Instant



Karina Marandjian

An Instant

By Carlos de Oliveira

This column
of firmer syllables,
this flame
on the summit of the dunes
flaring
for just a moment,
this balance
so close to beauty,
this poem
just before
the wind.

Carlos de Oliveira / Chilhood

Childhood

By Carlos de Oliveira
BIOGRAPHY

Dreams
as large as cedars
that must
be brought from afar
on shoulders
to find
in the winter of memory
this crackle
of a flame:
your fragrance,
firewood
of melancholy.

Lucía Estrada / The Mask of Bone

THE MASK OF BONE

By Lucía Estrada

Translated by Nicolás Suescún

The mask of bone
refuses to reveal

                             if the features it hides
                             are those of a god

or of a beast

                             or of both, which, after death,
                             continue fighting
                             for the same crown

Derek Walcott / Sea Canes

SEA CANES

By Derek Walcott

CAÑAVERAL MARINO

Half my friends are dead.
I will make you new ones, said earth.
No, give me them back, as they were, instead,
with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk
from the faint surf's drone
through the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of ocean
down that white road alone,
or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.
O earth, the number of friends you keep
exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff  flash green and silver;
they were the seraph lances of my faith,
but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,
enduring moonlight,  further than despair,
strong as the wind, that through dividing caves

brings those we love before  us as they were,
with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

Collected Poems 1948-1984
originally published in Sea Grapes

Orlando Gallo / Goodbye

Madre e hijo
Gustav Klimt

GOODBYE

By Orlando Gallo

ADIÓS

Today my daughter drew with her finger in the air

an incipient goodbye

towards me over her mother’s shoulder.

We celebrated I for a long while

that first real gesture she made

even though it  provides evidence of a harsh reality:

Life trains us early

for farewells.

Triunfo Arciniegas / Ceremonies

CEREMONIES

By Triunfo Arciniegas

Translated by Anabel Torres

There’s my mother

Weaving with threads of light

The blood of her nights.

Sylvia Plath / The Colossus

Sylvia Plath

THE COLOSSUS
by Sylvia Plath

Translated into Spanish

by Julia de Ruschi Crespo and Jesús Pardo

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull-plates and clear

The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing.

Sylvia Plath / Strumpet Song

Picture by John U. Abrahamson

 STRUMPET SONG

By Sylvia Plath
Translated into Spanish by Jesús Pardo

With white frost gone

And all green dreams not worth much,

After a lean day’s work

Time comes round for that foul slut:

Mere bruit of her takes our street

Until every man,

Red, pale or dark,

Veers to her slouch.

Mark, I cry, that mouth

Made to do violence on,

That seamed face

Askew with blotch, dint, scar

Struck by each dour year.

Walks there not some such one man

As can spare breath

To patch with brand of love this rank grimace

Which out from black tarn, ditch and cup

Into my most chaste own eyes

Looks up.

Sylvia Plath / Event



Photography by Andreas H. Bitesnich



EVENT

By Sylvia Plath
Translated into Spanish by Jesús Pardo

How the elements solidify!—

The moonlight, that chalk cliff

In whose rift we lie

Back to back. I hear an awl cry

From its cold indigo.

Intolerable vowels enter my heart.

The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,

Opens its mouth now, demanding.

His little face is carved in painted, red wood.

Then there are the stars—ineradicable, hard.

One touch: it burns and sickens.

I cannot see your eyes.

Where apple bloom ices the night

I walk in a ring,

A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.

Love cannot come here.

A black gap discloses itself.

On the opposite lip

A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.

My limbs, also, have left me.

Who was dismembered us?

The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.

Triunfo Arciniegas / Biography



El beso de la suerte
Photography by Marco Chamorro

  biography

By Triunfo Arciniegas

Translated by Anabel Torres

 

With his top as a pencil

A little boy scribbles on the dust

The history of his life.

Lyndall Gordon / Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

by Lyndall Gordon

This is a biography of Emily Dickinson that goes further than any previous biography. As well as an enthralling account of the life of the poet, Lyndall Gordon has explored the vicious family feuds that began even before Emily Dickinson’s death & intensified afterwards. The life is well-known. Emily Dickinson lived a secluded life in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. I think she wrote the most extraordinarily original poetry of the 19th century. I loved her poetry as a teenager & although I hadn’t read her recently, as soon as I picked up this book, lines came back to me. As a teenager, her poems about death fascinated me. I felt a funeral in my brain; I heard a fly buzz when I died; Safe in their alabaster chambers; I died for Beauty but was scarce adjusted in the tomb. My copy of the poems has lines marked everywhere. The metaphors reminded me of the metaphysical poets like Herbert & Donne. The props assist the house until the house is built; My life had stood, a loaded gun. She had a rigorously Puritan education, studied the sciences & all this comes through in the work. The unconventional punctuation, the capitalization & dashes, was so radical at the time that it wasn’t until the 1950s that an edition was published with the original punctuation. Lyndall Gordon also has an interesting theory about the cause of Dickinson’s seclusion. One of the enduring myths is of the New England nun, flitting around the house in a white dress, coyly avoiding visitors. The conventional explanation is an unhappy love affair. Gordon has some compelling evidence that Dickinson may have suffered from epilepsy, which was seen as a shameful mental illness in the 19th century. The incurable, random nature of the symptoms of epilepsy could have left Dickinson reluctant to be seen much in public & the effects could also explain some of the striking images of psychic disturbance in her poetry. The fact that we have so much of Dickinson’s poetry at all is due to the efforts of her family as only a few poems were published during her lifetime & they had been tidied up by fussy editors. Reading about the feuds, the adultery, attempted fraud & bad feeling that erupted between two branches of the family in the century after Dickinson’s death makes me wonder how the work survived at all. It began with Dickinson’s brother, Austin’s, affair with a young woman, Mabel Loomis Todd, whose husband was a faculty member at the Amherst Academy. Austin Dickinson was Treasurer there & Mabel’s husband, a philanderer himself, seemed content for his wife to have an affair with a powerful man to further his own career. Austin was completely besotted with Mabel & removed himself emotionally from his wife, Sue, & their children. Austin & Sue lived next door to his sisters, Emily & Vinnie. The affair was conducted at his sisters’ house & caused divided loyalties from the start. Emily sided with Sue, her girlhood friend & most perceptive early reader. Vinnie sided with her brother. Mabel fancied herself as a discoverer of genius & although she never met Emily, she recognized the worth of her work when first Sue, then Vinnie showed her the poems. She undertook to edit a selection of the work after Dickinson’s death. She did an admirable job, although she tidied up the punctuation & added titles. The poems were an immediate success & Sue, who had still more poems in her possession, wanted to stop Mabel & edit her own selection. Mabel was a great plotter; she wanted Sue out of the way & her relationship with Austin legitimized. When her plans failed, she tried to get hold of some Dickinson land from Vinnie after Austin’s death & this led to accusations of fraud & a lawsuit. I couldn’t admire Mabel, but, she ensured that the poetry would survive. Then, the accusations & bitterness were carried on to the next generation - Mabel’s daughter, Millicent & Sue’s daughter, Mattie – each determined to uphold her mother’s reputation. Lyndall Gordon has done a wonderful job of putting together a coherent story from such tangled events. It’s impossible to summarise it & I feel I’ve done a poor job of it here. If you feel confused but intrigued, just read the book.

ABOUT ME

LYN

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

I'm an avid reader who loves middlebrow fiction, 19th century novels, WWI & WWII literature, Golden Age mysteries & history. Other interests include listening to classical music, drinking tea, baking cakes, planning my rose garden & enjoying the antics of my cats, Lucky & Phoebe. Contact me at lynabby16AThotmailDOTcom

http://preferreading.blogspot.mx/search/label/poetry