Piedad Bonnett / A Matter of Statistics

A MATTER OF STATISTICS

by Piedad Bonnett
BIOGRAPHY
Translated by Nicolás Suescún

Piedad Bonnett / Cuestión de estadísticas

They were twenty-two, said the report.
Seventeen men, three women,
two children with bewildered eyes,
sixty-three shots, four Creeds,
three deep, muffled curses,
forty-four feet with their shoes,
forty-four unarmed hands,
a single fear, a hatred that sizzles,
and a thousand silences putting on
bandages on the mangled soul.

Mario Benedetti / Don't Save Yourself

Don't Save Yourself

by Mario Benedetti

Mario Benedetti / No te salves (De otros mundos)

Mario Benedetti / Non ti salvare (Dante)

Don't stay motionless

by the side of the road, don't suspend joy

or love halfheartedly don't save yourself now or ever. don't save yourself. don't fill yourself

with calm. don't reserve a still corner in this world don't let your eyelids droop heavy like judgements don't forsake your lips don't go to sleep

without heavy eyes, don't consider yourself bloodless

Don't judge yourself

without time. But if, despite it all, you can't help it and you suspend joy and you love halfheartedly and you save yourself, and you become calm, reserve a still corner in the world let your eyelids droop heavy as judgements and remain without lips and sleep without cause, imagine yourself bloodless, judge yourself in haste and Stay motionless by the side of the road and you save yourself

then Do not stay with me.

Joe Orton

The Saturday Poem: With Joe on Silver Street

by Helen Tookey

Tuesday 1 August 1967Saturday 1 February 2014 08.00 GMT

Said goodbye to Kenneth this morning. He seemed odd. On the spur of the moment I asked if he wanted to come home to Leicester with me. He looked surprised and said, 'No.'

– from the diary of Joe Orton

In scratty fake-fur jackets, jaunty caps
and baseball boots we saunter Silver Street,
skiving our ls: it's Siwver Street to slack-
mouthed Midlanders like us, who can't be arsed
with alveolar laterals. Of course,
RADA and elocution did the trick,
but still you keep a hint of Saffron Lane –
it charms the pants off Peggy and the rest,
just like the coat: 'Cheap clothes suit me,' you smirked,
'It's cos I'm from the gutter'; and it works,
they're all down on their knees, lapping it up.
Sometimes I think I hate you, Joe: I can
be cruel, but cruelty is something pure
for you, a fire that kills and makes things clean
and true; and I know anger, but the rage
that shoots your star high through the London nights
is something I'm afraid to face. You've travelled
far beyond me, Joe, and you don't plan
on coming back, I know; but here we are
on Silver Street, and look, in black and white,
that little word you never had the time
to strike out from those last blind lines, Joe: home.

• From Missel-Child (Carcanet, £9.95). 

 

Five Poets Reflect on the Life and Work of Yusef Komunyakaa

At a panel at this year’s PEN America World Voices Festival, five poets discuss the pain and self-actualization in the poems of Komunyakaa.

By Spencer GreenMay 16, 2019

Every year PEN America presents its World Voices Festival, a literary festival in New York City featuring at least 200 writers and artists from over fifty countries in conversation about some of the most important literary, cultural, and political topics of our age. This year the event spanned six days, from May 6th to May 12th, and Guernica writers were able to attend four of the events. These are their dispatches from the festival.

On May 11th, at the PEN America World Voices Panel panel “Love in the Time of War: A Celebration of Yusef Komunyakaa,” poet Toi Derricotte asked a packed audience at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in Greenwich Village to take some time to think about spaces where we had reimagined ourselves. After a moment, she asked everyone to share that space out loud, whether to the room or a neighbor. The collective response was a shy, half-whispered clamor of times and places—churches, libraries, organizations like Brooklyn’s Cave Canem—that rose to a swell of laughter in which no single answer took priority. “Man, that is so cool!” Derricotte exclaimed. “Wow, I love that!”

Derricotte was joined by fellow poets Maurice Emerson Decaul (who also moderated), Tyehimba Jess, Kevin Young, and Javier Zamora to celebrate Yusef Komunyakaa, a writer who has spent much of his decades-long career considering how we imagine and reimagine ourselves—whether it happens through sublime self-actualization or because of painful coercion. Young, the current poetry editor at The New Yorker, discussed Komunyakaa’s influence on his own Black Maria, a collection of film noir poems featuring a bruised and Komunyakaa-esque narrator (“All’s I got left [is] one lousy alias: S.O.S. Malone. My real name’s A.K.A. Jones. Leastwise, that’s what I’ve been told.”) When he read Komunyakaa’s “Unnatural State of the Unicorn,” which considers the contradictions between the poet’s artistic success and his experiences with racism and as a veteran, Young interrupted himself to repeat two lines—“I’ve done it all / to be known as myself—his voice breathless and shaking.

The event centered heavily on Komunyakaa’s service in Vietnam and the themes of domestic and foreign conflict that he returns to across several collections, particularly Dien Cai Dau and Neon Vernacular. “He so vividly introduces a new generation to the complexities and the weight of war,” Jess said, reflecting on how fewer and fewer of his students can remember a time when the US was not engaged in conflict or occupation. “I can’t imagine talking about the Vietnam War without his work.” When Zamora introduced “Facing It,” Komunyakaa’s famous account of visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, some audience members gasped softly  in recognition and anticipation.

Derricotte read “Camouflaging the Chimera,” an account of a military ambush written entirely in the first-person plural, and urged the audience to pay careful attention to the use of “we.” “Perhaps the speaker in the poem…is in denial, out of touch with his sense of personal responsibility,” she said. “Or perhaps the ‘we’ in the poem becomes all of us. None of us can claim innocence for what is being done in the world” (Young added that the “we” is “generous and Whitmanesque”). After drawing attention to Komunyakaa’s ambivalence as a black soldier and his other writings on American white supremacy generally, Derricotte said of her own childhood, “We always knew we were in a conflict. I was aware all the time that I was in a situation that might detonate. It was a physical way you held your body, the way your brain grew…That internal understanding of living in conflict all the time is something that is an internal understanding of war.”

But throughout the event, Decaul and the other guests took care to call special attention to moments of compassion and tenderness that always appear alongside the suffering and grief in Komunyakaa’s work. “We Never Know,” from Neon Vernacular—which was read twice, first by Jess and later again by Decaul—opens with a man gunned down, “danc[ing] with tall grass / for a moment, like he was swaying / with a woman.” When the poem’s narrator approaches the body, he confesses, “There’s no other way / to say this: I fell in love” before turning the corpse onto its back “so he wouldn’t be / kissing the ground.” Young also read “Ode to the Maggot,” which concludes: “Little / Master of earth, no one gets to heaven / Without going through you first.”

Zamora, a former student of Komunyakaa’s, mentioned often that the poet was a uniquely compassionate mentor, “generous to students and to poetry.” Discussing one of his own poems, in which he eulogizes the man who protected him during a border crossing that turned violent upon the arrival of US Border Patrol, Zamora said, “He made me feel comfortable and secure enough to share very personal stuff. That is very hard to do as a teacher, when you are dealing with a student who has gone through trauma. But I already knew going into the room that I could do that, because of what he has produced.”

GUERNICA

Diana Krall / Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhqSL4yW4n4

Diana Krall 

 Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word

by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

What I've gotta do to make you love me
What I've gotta do to make you care
What do I do when lightening strikes me
And I wake up and find that you are not there

What do I do to make you want me
What I've gotta do to be heard
what do I say when it's all over
And sorry seems to be the hardest word

chorus
It's sad, so sad
It's a sad sad situation
And it's getting more and more absurd
It's sad, so sad
Why can't we talk it over
Oh, it seems to me
Sorry seems to be the hardest word

What do I do to make you love me
What I've gotta do to be heard
What do I do when lightening strikes me
What've I gotta do
What've I gotta do?
When sorry seems to be the hardest word

YAHOO

Bill Coyle / Respiratory

Paul Klee

Respiratory

by Bill Coyle

On the stone patio
koi mill in their pond.
What do kept goldfish know
of anything beyond?

They know in any case
that certain shadows cast
upon the water’s face
have fed them in the past,

so that when anyone
leans over the low wall
they rush to him as one
to see what crumbs might fall.

Today is a good day
to stay indoors and warm,
the sky, granite and gray,
hung with its forecast storm.

When rain and leaves flash by
your window they appear
to my abstracted eye
as snow, already here.

Geoffrey Brock / One morning

One morning

by Geoffrey Brock

The boy is wide awake:
he climbs into our bed
and clambers toward my head,
wielding a yellow rake.

Combing my hair, the boy
giggles with every stroke.
His is a simple joke:
he knows his plastic toy

is not a comb, my hair
is not disheveled sand,
and yet his furrowed mind
has seen a likeness there—

delight grows from small seeds.
And for now I won’t worry
what else might, as we hurry
toward what the future breeds.

Michel Houellebecq

Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013 by Michel Houellebecq - review

Houellebecq the poet: who knew? 

Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013 by Michel Houellebecq / Digested read

DAVID SEXTON

Thursday 12 January 2017

Since the publication of his latest novel Submission, foreseeing a France submitting to Islam, on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, the stature of Michel Houellebecq as perhaps the most radical and far-sighted  novelist now writing in any language,  has been widely recognised. All six of his novels, beginning with Whatever in 1994, now look like contemporary classics.

What’s less well-known among his English-language readers is that he began his literary career as a poet, in 1991 publishing both his first collection, The Pursuit of Happiness, and a marvellous, Baudelairean poetic manifesto, Rester Vivant: méthode (Staying Alive, not yet translated). To Houellebecq, poetry remains primary. “The novel… in comparison to the poem remains a minor genre,” he told Bernard-Henri Levy in their correspondence, Public Enemies. 

His poetry has been presented in English before, in The Art of Struggle, a dual-language text of his second collection by academics Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews (Herla/Alma Books, 2010) but has previously made little impression here. Now his main British publisher Heinemann has brought out a substantial selection from all four of his books of poems, in both French and English, translated by Gavin Bowd, who has known him for 20 years and whom Houellebecq (whose English is not  bad) has amicably called “my best translator in the language of Donald Duck”.

The book is presented by the publisher as simply as possible, almost indeed as if it were a novel in short lines, doubtless in the hope of winning it the wide readership it deserves. There’s no introduction whatsoever, just the plain text, not even an index.

That seems a pity, for the collection does actually need some explanation, even for those who already know something of Houellebecq’s work. It is very much his “personal anthology”, in which he has rearranged 132 poems not chronologically but into five themed sections, moving from comic desperation with the world of heartless consumption,   through a search for love and intimacy nonetheless, to a final section of some degree of mystical acceptance, Immobile Grace. 

When published in French (Gallimard, 2014), the anthology was preceded by a long and brilliant introduction by the young academic Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, which not only explained the structure of the book but the unique qualities of Houellebecq’s poetry, the true extent to which it is an act of non-reconciliation, of “taking note, without concession, of the monstrosity of the world”, a world that is “strictly unbearable”.

And his means of confronting that world  are those of structure, as she says. “Metrical structure, rhyming structure, rhythmic structure: versification is not an adventitious pleasure, it’s the very principle of resistance to a deliquescent world.”

Just so. In his poetry Houellebecq presents the shocks and absurdities of modern life not casually but with beautiful formality, in alexandrines worthy of his beloved Lamartine, or quatrains as precise and irrefutably rhymed as those of A E Housman, charting what is not to be endured. His poetry is often not only absolutely direct  emotionally — contrary to his reputation as a misogynistic cynic, deeply romantic even — but also remarkably funny, deploying, as Novak-Lechevalier  observes, an art of montage, “the brutal juxtaposition of heterogeneities”.

And here is the rub. Of all literary forms, poetry, depending as it does on those precise verbal structures, is the least translatable. Houellebecq’s novels are pretty fully available to the English language-only reader. But the truth is that, admirably accurate as Bowd’s translations are, Houellebecq’s poems, read in English alone, unrhymed and in a completely different rhythm, are nothing like as remarkable as they are  in the original. If you are able to use this edition as a crib, it’s a treat. But if you consult only the English you’ll wonder why this poetry could possibly  be worth taking to heart.

That’s sadly true of the very simplest piece. Houellebecq: “Pourquoi ne pouvons-nous jamais/Jamais/Être aimés?” Bowd: “Why can we never/Never/Be loved?” It doesn’t rhyme the same way,  it’s not a mantra.

Or again: “Il n’y a pas d’amour/ (pas vraiment, pas assez)/ Nous vivons sans secours,/ Nous mourons délaissés.” Worthy of Baudelaire, hard to forget once read. “There is no love/ (not nearly, not enough)/ We live unaided,/ We die abandoned.” Flat as a pancake, gone in a flash.

 So, as a publication in English of a substantial part of the work of one of the greatest authors of the age, unlikely to be particularly profitable, this is an admirable endeavour.  

However, it could have been so much more helpful an edition — introducing itself, perhaps  translating Rester Vivant as an appendix, and even the fantastically raw journal Mourir that Houellebecq  wrote in 2005 as a contrary summation of his life at that point (still available online). 

A missed opportunity. For Michel Houellebecq is one of those writers who matters now, in his entirety, if any do.

EVENING STANDARD

Catherine Phil MacCart / The Bells of Notre-Dame

The Bells of Notre-Dame

By Catherine Phil MacCarthy

Nine bells line the main aisle,

flaxen domes echo one another,
as visitors pour in,
rocked by each
newborn colossus
stood on oak beams,
cast in bronze with
its own design
and tone.

“Marie”, “Gabriel”, “Denis”,
parade along the queue –
“Et elle a conçu du Saint-Esprit.”
Hands caress the patina,
gauge the width
of the lip, test notes
rapping the rim.
Each chime stirs
the house

with an acoustic tone
pins a celebratory hum
of pandemonium,
heralds the North tower
hung with instruments again,
that mark the flow of hours
for how long more
from earth
across the skies?

Czeslaw Milosz’s Battle for Truth

Having experienced both Nazi and Communist rule, Poland’s great exile poet arrived at a unique blend of skepticism and sincerity.

By Adam Kirsch

May 22, 2017

In July, 1950, Czeslaw Milosz, the cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., received a letter from Jerzy Putrament, the general secretary of the Polish Writers’ Union. The two men had known each other for many years—they had been contributors to the same student magazine in college, in the early nineteen-thirties—but their paths had diverged widely. Now the arch-commissar of Polish literature told the poet, “I heard that you are to be moved to Paris. . . . I am happy that you will be coming here, because I have been worried about you a little: whether the splendor of material goods in America has overshadowed poverty in other aspects of life.”

The language was polite, even confiding, but the message could not have been clearer. Milosz, who had been working as a diplomat in the United States for four years, was no longer considered trustworthy by his superiors. He was being transferred to Paris so that he would be within reach of Warsaw. Sure enough, a few days before Christmas, Milosz was summoned back to Poland, and his passport was confiscated. “He is deeply detached from us,” Putrament observed, after meeting with Milosz in person. There was “no other option” than to keep him in the country, lest he end up defecting to the West.

This scenario had played out countless times in Communist countries. In the Soviet Union, under Stalin, it often ended with the summoned party being sent to prison or shot. And the Communist regime in Poland, which had been installed by Stalin at the end of the Second World War, had reasons to be concerned about Milosz. For one thing, he had left his pregnant wife and their son in the United States, giving him a strong incentive to return. For another, he had never joined the Communist Party. He was allowed to serve the Polish government without a Party card, largely because his reputation—he had been a leading light of Polish poetry since the mid-thirties—was considered valuable to the new regime.

Far more damning evidence of Milosz’s disaffection with the regime lay in notebooks, full of poems that were not published until years later. What would Putrament have thought if he had read “Child of Europe,” written in New York in 1946?

Do not mention force, or you will be accused
Of upholding fallen doctrines in secret.

He who has power, has it by historical logic.
Respectfully bow to that logic . . .

Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision.
Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.

These lines mocked the Communist claim to rule, which was based on the theory of history as formulated by Marx. According to the concept of dialectical materialism—“diamat,” as its adherents often abbreviated it—the triumph of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was not a contingent event but the necessary result of an age-old process of class conflict. Milosz turned this presumption of “historical logic” upside down: if Communism now ruled Eastern Europe, it was not because of the laws of history but because the Russians had burned the house down. “Diamat is a tank,” Milosz confided to a friend in 1951. “I feel like a fly which wants to stand up against that tank.”

Andrzej Franaszek’s “Milosz: A Biography” (Harvard), edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker—a longer version appeared in Polish in 2011—tells the story of what happened next. Stuck in Warsaw, unsure if he would ever be allowed to leave or to see his family again, Milosz was despondent. A friend, Natalia Modzelewska, recalled that he “became mentally unstable [and] suffered from bouts of depression, which gradually got worse. . . . It was easy to discern that he was close to a nervous breakdown.” It wasn’t just his own fate that frightened him. Milosz had mostly been away from Poland since 1946, and had not witnessed the worsening climate of repression in the country. Now he could see. “I came across astronomical changes,” he wrote in a letter to another exile. “Peasants go mad with despair, and in the intellectual world state control is deeply entrenched and it is necessary to be a 100% Stalinist, or not at all. The so-called Marxists are highly depressed.”

It was thanks to Modzelewska that he had the chance to leave Poland and save himself. Her husband was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and she urged him to take up Milosz’s case with the President of Poland, Boleslaw Bierut. “Can you vouch that he will return?” Bierut asked. The minister could not, but replied, “I am deeply convinced that he ought to be allowed to go.” Whether this was a gesture of mercy, or of respect for a great writer, or even of contempt—if Milosz couldn’t serve the state, why should the state keep him?—it meant freedom. On January 15, 1951, Milosz was back in Paris. On February 1st, he slipped out of the Polish Embassy and headed for the offices of Kultura, an émigré publishing house, where he remained in hiding for the next three and a half months. He did not return to Poland until 1981, the year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The summons to Warsaw in 1950 was one of many hinges of fate inMilosz’s life—moments when he could have become an entirely different person, or simply disappeared. Franaszek’s richly detailed, dramatic, and melancholy book is full of such close calls. Born in 1911 to an aristocratic Polish family in Lithuania, which was part of the Russian Empire at the time, Milosz was swept up in the maelstrom of the twentieth century from the beginning. When he was three, the First World War made him a refugee, as his family fled the advancing German Army. His father, an engineer, served first the tsarist and then the Bolshevik government, and the family spent the war years crisscrossing the region—Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Estonia. In a late poem, Milosz recalled an episode from 1918, when they were trying to get home to Lithuania during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. At one train station, he was separated from his parents:

. . . the repatriation train was starting, about to leave me behind,
Forever. As if I grasped that I would have been somebody else,
A poet of another language, of a different fate.

At the last minute, a stranger reunited them. But a sense of the caprice of fate never left Milosz. “The things that surround us in childhood need no justification, they are self-evident,” he wrote in “Native Realm,” a memoir. “If, however, they whirl about like particles in a kaleidoscope, ceaselessly changing position, it takes no small amount of energy simply to plant one’s feet on solid ground without falling.”

After the war, the family settled in Wilno—now Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, but at the time a majority-Polish city. Even as a boy, Milosz was passionate and ambitious, with an intense seriousness that made it hard for him to accept the conventional routines of church and school. A childhood friend compared him to “a tomcat, constantly tense and grumpy”; later in life he acquired the nickname Gniewosz, which blended his name with the Polish word for “anger.” In his teens, he was capable of gestures of melodramatic despair. On one occasion, edged out in a romantic rivalry, he put a single bullet into a revolver and, Franaszek writes, “spun the barrel, put it against his head and pulled the trigger.” He lost—or maybe won—this game of Russian roulette; but, in Franaszek’s telling, it’s clear that any kind of calm or satisfaction remained elusive to the end of his life.

Such a condition is hardly surprising for anyone of Milosz’s generation, in that part of the world. Millions of his contemporaries lived through, or died in, the First World War; the Lithuanian Wars of Independence; the Polish-Soviet War; the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R., in 1939; the Holocaust; the Eastern Front of the Second World War, which passed back and forth across the country from 1941 to 1945; and the postwar occupation by the Soviet Union. Milosz’s course was complicated by the fact that his class and national allegiances were anything but straightforward. He grew up speaking at least four languages, and, although his family belonged to the Polish gentry—and still owned a country estate in Lithuania, where he spent the happiest days of his childhood—they were, like most of their class at the time, quite poor. “My material existence was so primitive that it would have startled proletarians in Western countries,” Milosz reflected later.

As an aristocrat without money, and a Pole whose homeland was Lithuania, Milosz could not wholeheartedly embrace any of the political identities swirling around him. Postwar Poland, newly independent after more than a century of tsarist rule, experienced a sudden surge of chauvinist pride and annexed much of Lithuania, including Wilno. Milosz was repelled by the Poles’ religiosity and nationalism—their growing hostility to Lithuanian, Jewish, and Belarusan minorities. In 1931, Wilno University, where he was a student, was convulsed by anti-Jewish riots. Milosz, Franaszek writes, was “among the few defending the Jewish students.” (Jerzy Putrament, not yet a Communist, took part in the riots, beating Jews with a heavy cane.)

Milosz was at the university from 1929 to 1934, and he published his first collection of poems in 1933. He drew close to several left-wing student groups, but, although his anti-nationalism made the left a natural home for him, he could never bring himself to become a full-fledged Marxist, much less a member of the Communist Party. His sense of truth was too individual, too much a matter of poetic perception, to submit to the dictates of a party, even one that claimed to be acting according to the laws of history. “Reading articles by young Polish Marxists, one suspects that they really wish for this period to herald a future which sees the total demise of art and artistry,” Milosz observed in a 1936 essay. “They are preoccupied solely with sniffing out betrayal and class desertion.”

In 1937, Milosz moved to Warsaw to work for Polish Radio. There he fell in love with a colleague, Janina Cekalska. Janka, as she was known, was unhappily married to another man, a film director. She aspired to become a director herself, and had founded an organization to promote leftist filmmaking. But she soon put her ambitions aside, seeing her mission as the development of Milosz’s talent, and she became a crucial reader of his work. Milosz, who had already been through several stormy and bruising love affairs, worried that committing himself to Janka might compromise his artistic calling, but they soon started living together, and they married some years later. It proved to be a difficult marriage. “She was a rational person, but made a mistake choosing me,” he said late in life. He was, he realized, “not at all material to be a husband and father.”

By the end of the thirties, Milosz’s intellectual position was becoming intolerable. He was opposed to everything the Communists opposed, yet he suspected that a Communist takeover would be disastrous. At the same time, anyone could see that Poland’s future held war or revolution, or both. Contemplating the fate of his country, he wrote, years later, “I had a kind of horror, some basic dread.”

THE NEW YORKER