Poems I Journey With 17

A young Adrienne Rich

I like reading new and unusual poems from as many different cultural backgrounds as the English language will allow me. The poem I wish to offer for the reader’s perusal and reflection is one by the American Jewish poet Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012). The following poem I loved for its clarity of expression and for a new, if unusually realistic, insight into love that I had never actually considered before. Poems, like all good literature, should break new ground both in language and form, in content and ideas. This, Rich does with an ease that almost camouflages her consummate skill as an author. The poem I have chosen here is called “Translations.”

Translations
December 25, 1972

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political.

The Briefest of Commentaries

An older Adrienne Rich

I love people who push against convention, not in an anarchic sense, I hasten to add, but in a well thought-out and considered fashion. They are, of course, correct in their presuppositions, intuition and consequent reasoning, because, after all, nothing in the world is either “black or white,” or “cut and dried.” Rich belongs to this marvellous group of questioning authors who push against convention, not to bring the state of things to a crisis or to a state of collapse, but to advance a broader more inclusive agenda. Rich was married, and with her husband, who ended his life at a tragically young age of 45, parented three sons. In her late forties she began a lesbian relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor, Michelle Cliff, a relationship which lasted until her death. So her experiences of life were broad and unconventional.

What I like above this poem is that there are many renditions that could be given of poems from one language to another. Such renditions will depend upon the understanding of the text by the particular translator. Let us be aware of how we translate or interpret things, Rich seems to be saying to me. Let me not look on life solely from my own perspective. Let me try and see it through another optic if I can at all. I also like the conversational tone of the poem. Rich draws us into the conversation as she addresses the reader (her lover, her companion, her friend or whoever) in the second person singular.  The following four lines leap off the page for me:

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

Ah yes, I recognise such a woman myself in my mother and in many of the women whom I have met in my time: women who baked for and in love; who fought for and in love; women who were sorrowful because they suffered much in loving. Then, the single word “obsessed” that has its own line, indeed, its own stanza all to itself is most apt indeed. Women are obsessed, and then she tells us with what in the first word of the next stanza, should we ever be in doubt.  Of course, that obsession is with Love. That very stanza is worth reproducing here again for our timely reflection:

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

There is a marvellous mix of observation of all womanly occupations and preoccupations with her personal experience in this poem. As well as the usual occupations like ironing and household tasks we have the image of a woman typing a manuscript till dawn – a definite experience personal to a poet. Then, like the scene from a film, we are presented with the image of a woman trying to communicate with her ex-lover by phone. Again this scene is cinematic in quality:

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom

she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

Here we have an account of the man’s disloyalty, and indeed his betrayal of her to her sister to add salt to the wound of love. And yet all this grief, or indeed much of it, is caused by the narrow ageements accepted by more conservative society, by a politics of narrow conventions. There is much freedom pointed to in this poem. We, as readers, are invited to ponder these social conventions critically and to question our own prejudices and presuppositions. Such is the task of all good literature and certainly that of all good poetry:

Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy

and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief

is shared, unnecessary
and political.

Poems I Journey With 10

Archibald Macleish

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) is a major modernist American poet and writer of the twentieth century, and I first discovered him through his critical writings, rather than through his poetry.  I have beside me as I write the first book I bought by him way back in 1978 when I was a mere twenty years of age.  That book is called Poetry and Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961).  I remember being blown away by how easily he communicated to the reader his understanding of what poetry does and is.  In part one of that book, he discusses in a comprehensive way how poems work through sound, sign, image and metaphor.   In the second section of the book, Macleish treats of how what he has discussed in the first section functions in the works of Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats.  This book, consequently, would be a wonderful introduction to poetry appreciation for anyone wishing to learn more about how to read and enjoy it.

The Old Men in the Leaf Smoke

The old men rake the yards for winter
burning the autumn-fallen leaves.
They have no lives, the one or the other.
The leaves are dead, the old men live
Only a little, light as a leaf,
Left to themselves of all their loves:
Light in the head most often too.

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,
Raking life and leaf together,
The old men smell of burning leaves,
But which is which they wonder – whether
Anyone tells the leaves and loves –
Anyone left, that is, who lives.

For me, it is the existential thrust of this poem that engages me as a reader.  I have already alluded to the psychiatrist Dr Irvin Yalom's listing humanity's awareness of its mortality as being one of the four great ultimate concerns in every human being's life.  Raking leaves is a perennial occupation for anyone with trees in their garden.  Growing up, it was one task I loved to do when I visited my country cousins and when I spent some three years as a would-be monk.  This poem uses the leaf as a symbol of the mortality of humanity and for the shortness and beauty of life.  I love the way Macleish speaks of "lives" and "loves" and "leaves" as they are, in effect, slight or partial rhymes as these words share the consonants "l," "v" and "s."  Such felicity of language enchants this reader, simple though this use of words is.

Repetition in the poem gives it a song-like sound.  As a country boy, I can almost smell the burning leaves as I have stood beside many a man burning dead vegetation in my time. Another riveting thing about this poem is its apparent simplicity that somehow draws us into the deeper mystery that life is.  It would seem that life is an amorphous mix of things in unity rather than a collection of random things.  When one rakes a garden one rakes many bits and pieces of vegetation and insect life and mud and clay together in a unity, and that unity in plurality suggests a mysticism at work in Macleish's sensitivity.  And this latter mystical sensibility is all too apparent to the perceptive and open reader.  Let's read the second stanza slowly and meditatively with the thoughts and sensitivities of this paragraph in mind:

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,

Raking life and leaf together,

The old men smell of burning leaves,

But which is which they wonder – whether

Anyone tells the leaves and loves –

Anyone left, that is, who lives.

Mystically and linguistically leaves and lives and loves are all somehow magically one.  We are one with the poet raking them together as we live. On the one hand, then, this is a sad and depressing poem, and yet, on the other, this is a poem that suggests that we are part of the great cycle of nature, and we are ennobled by being part of it, never lessened, as, after all, we are the ones who do the raking.  We are the ones who do the maintenance on the garden.  We, in our turn, will become old men or old women, as the case may be, and we will surely smell of leaves and loves and lives.  Then, the beauty of the poem is that it does not state too much.  It connotes rather than denotes, and that is a wonderful device at the very heart of poetry.  Mystery, mystique, wonder and magic are always beyond capturing in prose.  They are more readily captured but never subdued or crushed in poetry.  That's why the last stanza defies paraphrase, which is surely anathema to anyone with a poetic sensibility.