SUNDAY POEMS
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Sunday Poems: For Young Poets: 4 Poems
April 6, 2014 at 5:51pm
RILKE in a letter to his young friend Balthus Klossowski, who later became a well-known painter, emulated Rodin in galvanizing the young artist’s colours choking in an aporic stillness through a poet’s lens. Rilke showed, on the one hand, how the modern poet forms his notion of poetry and fulfills his vocation to write by listening to the voices of his predecessors, disseminated into nature like a dismembered Orpheus. But he also asked, on the other hand, how the modern poet can accede to a lineage that descends from Orpheus without in some sense destroying himself in the process... “A God can do it. But how, tell me, is/ a man to follow him through the narrow lyre?” The double realm of Orpheus, who had gone down to the underworld and back, cannot be completely recreated, even by a complicated arrangement of double mirrors, in the post-Orphic world. Like the Romantics, Rilke imagines Orphic song as pre-conscious or ahnend (intimating), whereas modern song is inevitably conscious or wissend (knowing), as he puts it. What Rilke proposes here is a return to a posture in which the poet would defer to the Orphic model and recapture a kind of beauty that belongs to an earlier epoch. By participating in Orphic song, modern poetry, in effect, slips through a ‘crack in time’ to reconnect with its own origins. The great poet encouraged Balthus to slip through a crack in time to get back to his rhythms, to beats of time.
Rilke was one of our original masters who wanted to share his experience with those who were to carry forward and re-invent traditions of poetry. What he said for the young poets are still followed, quoted and construed widely. Others followed him in style. Read these four poems…
1. ~YOUNG POETS~/ Nicanor Parra
Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.
(TR: Miller Williams)
2. ~ENTRANCE~/ Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever you are: in the
evening step out
of your room, where you
know everything;
yours is the last house
before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in
their weariness
barely free themselves
from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one
black tree
and place it against the
sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the
world. And it is huge
and like a word which
grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes
on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go . . .
(TR: Edward Snow)
3. ~TO A YOUNG POET~ / Mahmoud Darwish
Don't believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own
words.
As if you are the first to
write poetry
or the last poet.
If you read our work, let it
not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.
Don't ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.
Truth is white, write over it
with a crow's ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage's light.
If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.
If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.
Life is less alive than we think but we don't think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions' health.
If you ponder a rose for too long
you-won't budge in a storm.
You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend,descend and ascend.
You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.
One thousand birds in the hand
don't equal one bird that wears a tree.
A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.
Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.
Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart's sake,
follow it before you reach your path.
Don't tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.
Deviate, with all your might,deviate from the rule.
Don't place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.
Don't believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan's trace.
A moral is as a bullet in its poet's heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you're angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing,
nothing when you serenade yourself in a closed room.
The road is long like an ancient poet's night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream's measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.
Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children's graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers' navels.
You won't disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn't resemble me
is more beautiful.
From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.
Don't think, when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition's light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?
The poem is always incomplete,
the butterflies make it whole.
No advice in love. It's experience.
No advice in poetry. It's talent.
And last but not least, Salaam.
(TR: Fady Joudah)
4. ~ADDITIONAL ADVICE FOR A YOUNG POET~/Elisavietta Ritchie
“ Writer
has nothing to teach and everything
to learn, at all times.” (Albert Camus)
1.
Only one paper napkin
for those six empty minutes?
Cover it with a poem.
Wipe your face
on the other side.
Between the splotches: write.
2.
Lose your pen?
Try a pencil. When this
breaks, wears out,
charcoal till you’re black
as the burnt stick
worn to smudge.
Write with ash
on the sea.
Write on grass,
red ink on flames,
blue on the sky,
white on snow.
When all implements
disappear,
use your blood.
♠♠ NICANOR PARRA is a Chilean poet known for what he termed anti-poems, a mix of sardonic humour, existentialist whispers and a limpid locution. Roberto Bolano ranked him higher as a poet than Gabriela Mistral, Neruda and Huidobro; ♠♠ RAINER MARIA RILKE is commonly ranked alongside Hofmannsthal and Stefan George as a giant of 20th century German-language poetry; ♠♠ MAHMOUD DARWISH is probably the greatest Arab poet of our time. In his poetry, often Palestine is used as a metaphor for exile, the human condition and the predicament of dislocation and dispossession. Lorca, Neruda and Yeats were among his favourites and influences; ♠♠ ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE is a Russian American poet, translator and environmentalist.
Sunday Poems: For Young Poets: 4 Poems
April 6, 2014 at 5:51pm
RILKE in a letter to his young friend Balthus Klossowski, who later became a well-known painter, emulated Rodin in galvanizing the young artist’s colours choking in an aporic stillness through a poet’s lens. Rilke showed, on the one hand, how the modern poet forms his notion of poetry and fulfills his vocation to write by listening to the voices of his predecessors, disseminated into nature like a dismembered Orpheus. But he also asked, on the other hand, how the modern poet can accede to a lineage that descends from Orpheus without in some sense destroying himself in the process... “A God can do it. But how, tell me, is/ a man to follow him through the narrow lyre?” The double realm of Orpheus, who had gone down to the underworld and back, cannot be completely recreated, even by a complicated arrangement of double mirrors, in the post-Orphic world. Like the Romantics, Rilke imagines Orphic song as pre-conscious or ahnend (intimating), whereas modern song is inevitably conscious or wissend (knowing), as he puts it. What Rilke proposes here is a return to a posture in which the poet would defer to the Orphic model and recapture a kind of beauty that belongs to an earlier epoch. By participating in Orphic song, modern poetry, in effect, slips through a ‘crack in time’ to reconnect with its own origins. The great poet encouraged Balthus to slip through a crack in time to get back to his rhythms, to beats of time.
Rilke was one of our original masters who wanted to share his experience with those who were to carry forward and re-invent traditions of poetry. What he said for the young poets are still followed, quoted and construed widely. Others followed him in style. Read these four poems…
1. ~YOUNG POETS~/ Nicanor Parra
Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.
(TR: Miller Williams)
2. ~ENTRANCE~/ Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever you are: in the
evening step out
of your room, where you
know everything;
yours is the last house
before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in
their weariness
barely free themselves
from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one
black tree
and place it against the
sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the
world. And it is huge
and like a word which
grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes
on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go . . .
(TR: Edward Snow)
3. ~TO A YOUNG POET~ / Mahmoud Darwish
Don't believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own
words.
As if you are the first to
write poetry
or the last poet.
If you read our work, let it
not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.
Don't ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.
Truth is white, write over it
with a crow's ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage's light.
If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.
If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.
Life is less alive than we think but we don't think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions' health.
If you ponder a rose for too long
you-won't budge in a storm.
You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend,descend and ascend.
You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.
One thousand birds in the hand
don't equal one bird that wears a tree.
A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.
Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.
Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart's sake,
follow it before you reach your path.
Don't tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.
Deviate, with all your might,deviate from the rule.
Don't place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.
Don't believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan's trace.
A moral is as a bullet in its poet's heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you're angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing,
nothing when you serenade yourself in a closed room.
The road is long like an ancient poet's night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream's measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.
Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children's graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers' navels.
You won't disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn't resemble me
is more beautiful.
From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.
Don't think, when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition's light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?
The poem is always incomplete,
the butterflies make it whole.
No advice in love. It's experience.
No advice in poetry. It's talent.
And last but not least, Salaam.
(TR: Fady Joudah)
4. ~ADDITIONAL ADVICE FOR A YOUNG POET~/Elisavietta Ritchie
“ Writer
has nothing to teach and everything
to learn, at all times.” (Albert Camus)
1.
Only one paper napkin
for those six empty minutes?
Cover it with a poem.
Wipe your face
on the other side.
Between the splotches: write.
2.
Lose your pen?
Try a pencil. When this
breaks, wears out,
charcoal till you’re black
as the burnt stick
worn to smudge.
Write with ash
on the sea.
Write on grass,
red ink on flames,
blue on the sky,
white on snow.
When all implements
disappear,
use your blood.
♠♠ NICANOR PARRA is a Chilean poet known for what he termed anti-poems, a mix of sardonic humour, existentialist whispers and a limpid locution. Roberto Bolano ranked him higher as a poet than Gabriela Mistral, Neruda and Huidobro; ♠♠ RAINER MARIA RILKE is commonly ranked alongside Hofmannsthal and Stefan George as a giant of 20th century German-language poetry; ♠♠ MAHMOUD DARWISH is probably the greatest Arab poet of our time. In his poetry, often Palestine is used as a metaphor for exile, the human condition and the predicament of dislocation and dispossession. Lorca, Neruda and Yeats were among his favourites and influences; ♠♠ ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE is a Russian American poet, translator and environmentalist.
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