Celebrating Borges' Birthday

 I have to thank Maria Popova today for her 113th birthday remembrance of Jorge Louis Borges "Borges on Love and Loss" in The Atlantic and also in her blog post at Brain Pickings.**  I had intended to discuss the poem she published today in his honor, but stumbled into the middle of controversy:  Is the poem "You Learn" by Jorge Louis Borges or is it "After a While" by Veronica A. Shoffstall?

My online research would have it both ways: Shoffstall published it in 1971; his dates are not clear.  One online version lists Shoffstall as translator.  One blog gives Borge's Spanish version with this reference "texts recovered, 1919-1929. by Jorge Luis Borges, Sara Luisa del Carril.  Published by Barcelona: Emece, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003"--but I have not verified this.  I found no evidence of the existence of any publication on-line, and the question is not important enough to me to take on the footwork of going to the libraries and publishing houses that might have the answer.  I agree with two commentators that the poem doesn't have the rich allusions, images, and surrealism that are customary in Borges' style. Yet, I know he had a life beyond his writing that was more practical than surreal.

Hmm.  I am bemused by my lazy refusal of the detective role in this case.  I love research that finds sources of streams.  Along with other PhDs, I was trained as a "history detective" before the television show existed.  I am bemused, also, by being bemused!  It is a much more pleasant experience than my normal shame at doing less than possible, and more pleasant too than the perfectionism of actually doing it.  HA!  I have fallen right into Borges' "what if" world in which time is not reliable and change and changelessness co-exist.  He recognizes issues like perfectionism, and his characters could easily get caught in a loop of impassible passion.  

I see that I am celebrating Borges without the poem in question, an irony that I suspect Borges would like.  I will end by including a poem that is definitely one of the masters. 

The Art Of Poetry 

by Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing. 

 

Note: I borrowed this poem from "Famous Poets and Poems."  If you wish to quote it in any way, please refer to my source.  I have no copyright for this poem.  I just enjoy it.  And I thank Maria Popova for her reminder of this birthday and for her commitment to creativity.

** I removed the links to Maria's article because it has been removed.  You may find Brain Pickings here.

Connections and poetry

Last I wrote here, my holy experiment was to read one of my poems aloud.  Since then I have continued writing so that now, 14 poems later, I am ready to reflect on how interconnections abound.  

I had my first publication of sorts on-line a few days ago when Third Sunday Blog Carnival linked my blog to theirs and featured my poem “Pushed.” This poem about buttons was a response to an open challenge at dVerse PoetsPub.  Through responding to that challenge and others, I roamed many poetry workshops to interact with poets and ideas.  Eventually one of them, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, asked me to become a member. I joined with delight as the poems and comments from poets there lived up to its mission, which reads in part:
    

The purpose of this writing community is to ensure an intimate and supportive environment and an improvement of our writing skills. We are always open for change and knowledge.

The name of the blog reflects its purpose.  It is a fragment of a line from Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry.”  The first line of the poem—“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle”—leads to her list of poetic crimes until she says:

. . . nor till the poets among us can be

     "literalists of

      the imagination"--above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "maginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. . . . 

“Real toads” are to me the details that bring truth to senses.   
This is the perfect workshop for me as I practice my art.

Connections help me extend my own holy experiment to see where it leads and take opportunities as they appear.  Thus, a few days ago I completed an interview for the Poets United series “TheLife of a Poet” which should air soon. I didn’t refuse because it was too soon or I wasn’t published yet or any of the other ways I hide.  All I have to do is continue doing what I am doing while listening to the still small voice guide me on the path.

One thing is clear: being a poet is not about making money. Poet Charles Simic speaks to this in “Poets and Money,” today’s post in the NYR blog at The New York Review of Books:

We never got rich in the past and won’t see a dime in the future. Despite copyright laws, most of our poems are already freely available to millions of people on the Internet and in this age of short attention spans, poetry may end up by being the only literature people will read. With no bookstores left and libraries shut down, lovers in need of additional romantic stimulus will have to reach for their iPhones and find a poem suitable for the occasion to read to each other. Poetry’s strength comes from such practical uses. Everyone has heard of poems being read at marriage ceremonies and funerals, but I suspect nobody has ever tried to inflict a chapter of a novel or a short story on that kind of gathering. No wonder writers and intellectuals by and large disdain poetry.  “Poets work for nothing . . . .”

Simic goes on to describe the one occasion when he thought it might be about money. His anecdote is farcical in the extreme, until: 

. . . one bright sunny morning I rose before anyone else, sat at my desk and read what I’d been working on, and realized that everything about them was totally fake. I tore the poems up with great hurry and embarrassment and went out to take a long walk with my dog.

He couldn’t market what working-to-order did to his poem.  He, like me and the poets I am meeting now, writes with a different kind of urgency.   The toads we reveal in our poems are very definitely real.

Rambling about speaking or not

I've been acting my Quaker self for a couple of weeks: a retreat, a yearly meeting (PYM) full of sessions and queries and friends and Friends and new and renewed connections.  I think I made a commitment to rejoining Quakers in the Arts today.  I also "anchored" the afternoon session in which PYM passed the yearly meeting budget.  To anchor means 'to hold in the Light," so I did not so much attend the meeting as I did feel the spirit of the session, put prayer around its attendees, their ways of testifying, and the smooth moving forward of the agenda.  In previous years I felt the strong affect of a few people sitting aside to tend to the overall meeting, so I was glad to take on the role.  I will pay physically for sitting so long, but I am full of smiles for doing it.  

Before dinner I attended a "Telling our Stories" Holy Experiment (workshop) in which the leader talked a great deal about the importance of word choice and gesture and we told stories of our experiences with the nonverbal aspects of communication and how--despite commonalities across cultures--we can make some big bloopers.  My story was about being in Italy with the members of a theatre company I was studying.  We were praising the food in our effusive American way--and even broader--because most of us did not speak Italian and so we were gesturing and pointing, etc.  Later I discovered that our hosts assumed we were overacting and not only being stupid, but also lying.  They thought we disliked their food and trusted us less after that interaction.

Words.   As a stage director, I called non-verbal run-throughs as well as normal dress rehearsals because I wanted to be sure that body language communicated even if my viewers were not English speakers.  I'm not talking about overacting or "indicating" but I am talking about being theatrical.  Fun theatrical moments can be made of an opposite meaning between what the body is doing/saying and what the words/tone are saying. 

What's the equivalent for poetry?  I think, like in music, it is the meter, rhyme and vocal emotion that reach beyond the words.  Also sound choices like onomatopoeia and alliteration contribute a lot to mood and meaning.  And PERFORMANCE!  On the blogs, sound clouds allow the poet's voice to carry the poem and pictures add meaning just as they do in children story book.

I read my poem "Making Theatre" at the workshop because I thought it addressed the workshop leader's points, and now I realize that was MY holy experiment--to speak my art here.  I do not know how the rest of the workshop went, because--believe it or not--I am an introvert who has to recover a bit from public speaking my OWN things (teaching is not a problem).  It felt wonderful.  It was a little story, a tiny piece of a life, but it took our talk of words and non-verbals in a slightly different direction and I felt great.  Remember what poet Audre Lorde said?  "It is better to speak."  And to act.

 Making theatre

The theatre director has to expose his uncertainties to the cast, 

but in reward he has a medium which evolves as it responds:

a sculptor says that the choice of material continually 

amends his creation: the living material of actors 

is talking, feeling and exploring all the time — 

 rehearsing is a visible thinking-aloud.

-Peter Brook, The Empty Space

I wrote it.

I speak it.

I listen to an actor speak it

A wonder!  it has more than I thought.

Where is she from and where is she going?  

I ask, and starting here, the actor creates

the character's movement for me 

with the actor’s added motivation, 

always asking "what would I do if?"

what would I mean if?

and who am I doing it to?

and why?  Why?

Wanting something is key

(at least in the Western world)

without desire there is no drive 

and without drive, there is no show.  

Even words are empty gestures 

when they should be strategies.

Use s t i l l n e s s until you must 

speak until you must move.  

What would you 

do if . . . ?

You must speak 

these words

called a script, 

but this script 

is mayhaps only 7%

of what I mean.

  

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Inspiring Truth in Art

 

As I say on top of my poetry blog almost everything inspires me to write these days.  This video from 2009 is one of the visuals that I return to again and again to see the small strokes details sounds senses . . . how so little makes so much.  In her sand animation, Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova tells a story of the Ukraine's involvement in WWII so powerfully and sensually that it is also a poem and a dance.   It is truth in art.

 

 

Today Mrsupole's post on Theme Thursday convinced me that I should blog occasionally on the videos that inspire me.  You may want to visit his too!  And we'll meet back here to talk.

 

 

Tell all the truth, but cook it first*

Today a poetic blog buddy wrote in a comment on one of my poems that he thinks "truth plays out best in the tales we tell each other....as opposed to raw truth..."  which made me want to chart my poems and commentaries on a scale of truth.   However,  I can't conceive the dimensions of such a chart and therefore, instead, place all my poems at one point: the point of "how the truth appears to me now in a moment after time."  I wrote a poem about this "moment after" in the lines of Shakespeare's sonnet #18:

Shall I compare my Truth to that of a summer day?

Mine is much more lovely and more temperate.

Rough truths shake us, the limbs of raw truth sway,

And summer's truth hath all too harsh a gait.

Sometimes too bright the truth of heaven shines,

And often is its too solid purpose dimmed;

And every truth with Truth sometimes rhymes

By chance, or Nature's changing course, untrimmed;

But Truth's eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of the greatest Light it caught

Nor shall life brag Truth is of a grey shade,

When in eternal lines to Time Truth is wrought.

     So long as humans can breathe, or eyes can see,

     So long lives my Truth, and this Truth shines on thee.

*reference to Emily Dickinson's poem "Tell all the Truth but tell It Slant."