BitterGrace Notes

"From darkness grows a gaudy revelation"

2012-02-01T14:02:00.001-06:00

We share the cycle of flower, grapeleaf, fruit.
They don't speak just the language of the seasons.
From darkness grows a gaudy revelation
which is perhaps the object of some mute
envy from the dead, who strengthen the soil.
Can we conceive how they regard their part
in this? It long has been their way to lard
the loam through with their marrow. But this toil:

the question seems to be, whether this is
done freely. Does this, heavy work of slaves,
ensphered press up to us, their lords, as fruit?

Or are they the lords, who sleep beside the roots,
and grant us out of their affluent graves
this thing halfway between brute force and kisses?

From Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Howard A. Landman

Im Garten von Schloß Pretzfeld, Curt Herrmann, c.1903

"the true, desired form of you"

2012-01-28T23:16:00.000-06:00

Grizzled and white the old man leaves
the sweet place, where he has provided for his life,
and leaves the little family, filled with dismay
that sees its dear father failing it:

then, from there, dragging his aged limbs
through the last days of his life,
aiding himself by what strength of will he can,
broken by years, and wearied by the road:

he reaches Rome, following his desire,
to gaze on the image of Him
whom he hopes to see again in heaven:

so, alas, I sometimes go searching,
lady, as far as is possible, in others
for the true, desired form of you.

Petrarch, from the Canzoniere, translated by A.S. Kline.

Female Nude with Blue Cloth, Koloman Moser, c.1013

"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"

2012-01-25T12:44:00.000-06:00

Fifteen completely delightful minutes long:

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

"Whole and alive, like an untorn language"

2012-01-23T22:17:00.001-06:00

What explains poetry is that life is hard
But better than the alternatives,
The no and the nothing. Look at this light
And color, a splash of brilliant yellow

Punctuating an emerald text, white swans
And mottled brown ducks floating quietly along
Whole and alive, like an untorn language
That lacks nothing, that excludes

Nothing. Period. Don’t you think
It is our business to defend it
Even the day our masters start a war?
To defend the day we see the daffodils?

From "Daffodils" by Alicia Ostriker. The complete poem is here.

I recently did a Q&A with Ostriker for Chapter 16. She's a brilliant writer, with interesting things to say about religion, poetry and politics. You can read the interview here.

Photo by BitterGrace. Share freely.

To Osip Mandelstam

2012-01-21T21:30:00.001-06:00

Where did this feeling come from?
…They”re not the first, these curls
I’ve caressed, and I’ve kissed
Lips darker than yours.

Stars have flared and died
(Where did this feeling come from?)
And eyes as well, flared and died
Before my very eyes.

And often in the dead of night
I’ve heard more wonderful songs
(Where did this feeling come from?)
Lying in a singer’s arms.

Where did this feeling come from?
What shall I do with it, singer
Who just stopped by, pretty boy
With the bedroom eyes.

"To Osip Mandelstam" by Marina Tsvetaeva, from The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt.

*With thanks to Howard, a wise and delightful friend of the blog.

Liebespaar, Koloman Moser, c.1913

"He's such a quiet little chap"

2012-01-20T13:39:00.001-06:00

I love my little Teddy Bear,
He's such a friendly fellow,
His fur, beautiful and soft,
Is neither brown or yellow.
He plays but never quarrels with me,
And keeps me gay and jolly,
And I don't have to punish him
As often as my Dolly.
He's such a quiet little chap,
No impish schemes he hatches,
He never barks, he has no fleas,
At least he never scratches.

"Bears" by Eula Smith-Zimmerman

Illus. by Raphael Kirchner (1876-1917)

"A severed hand is an ugly thing"

2012-01-19T21:39:00.002-06:00

...A severed hand

Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history...for contemplation or in fact...

Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man

Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

From "The Answer" by Robinson Jeffers. The complete poem (uncorrupted by Blogger's stubborn template) is here.

January 20 is the 50th anniversary of the death of Robinson Jeffers. I'm not sure I disagree with Mark Jarman's assessment that Jeffers is "a very great, bad poet," but his poems thrill me, even so. You can find Jeffers expounding on what Jarman calls his "unjust" vision here.

Clouds Over the Sea, Ivan Alvazovsky, 1889

Sweet

2012-01-17T19:39:00.000-06:00

A nice little compilation of vintage erotica. Some of these pictures are silly, a few are weird, but most of them are just charming. I can't help noticing how many of the women are reading...

"Now I am alone, following the downwar slur"

2012-01-17T11:04:00.000-06:00

Walking at Night
William Stafford

Now I am alone, following the downwar slur
Of blowing sleet past lights, and I remember:
The tremendous little train, quiet now with evening,
Sagging along that valley on the way home;
Those fragile Sunday mornings,
The men and women giving those days away,
Never caring what comes over the curve of the earth,
Measuring juke box life by drinks in a war boom bar,
Wearing wings from death by terror across the ocean;
Those walls sweeping together with walls in corners of knot-eyed wood;
Those persons looking at each other, their lives a richness;
And transported choirs of heroes on a buoyant sea.

Now, in a time of darkness and cold,
Those islands of fairness, piercing and staggering,
Live breathlessly like children dashing through a room;
And I have become a student of having
And not having.

From Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947

Stafford was born on this day in 1914. There's a nice long profile on him at the Poetry Foundation.

Moonlight and Frost, Alexander Helwig Wyant, c.1890

MLK, in honor of the day

2012-01-16T11:13:00.002-06:00

"Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

*This quote is from "On being a good neighbor," one of the sermons in Strength to Love. I encourage you to click over and read King in context, for a change.

The Charity, Mihail Mohov, 1842

"Don't ask why my strange heart loves you"

2012-01-12T18:36:00.000-06:00

Don’t ask why my strange heart loves you.
Do you know how corals are formed at the bottom of the ocean?
Waves are talking about a sleeping beauty
but you live far away from the waves’ voice.
Your thought is a steep cave
against which my life is crashing in vain.

From "Don't Ask Again" by Vesna Parun

Hermaphroditus and the Nymph Salmacis, Bartholomeus Spranger, c.1580

The story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (from Book IV of Metamorphoses, trans. by A.S. Kline) is here.

Today's post...

2012-01-11T19:13:00.001-06:00

...is at Turn Outward.

A rambling post, beginning with perfume and moving on to a vessel of the devil

2012-01-09T20:39:00.001-06:00

A few friends have mentioned that they miss the perfume posts here. I'm glad to know that people have enjoyed my perfume writing, but I'm afraid I won't be returning to it anytime soon. (I will, however, go on writing about interesting projects that touch on the subject of perfume, such as this and this.) For the record, I still love perfume. I still wear it and buy it, although I do a lot less buying lately. There was a time when I could afford to be both a bibliophile and a perfume freak. Now the budget only allows one expensive addiction, and between books and perfume there’s really no contest. My days of dropping $100 for a little bottle of scent are over.

That sounds a little sad. It isn't. Life changes (mine sure has), and flowing with the changes is part of the pleasure of living. Being poorer doesn't bother me, and it’s not really the reason I’ve stopped blogging about perfume. I’ve still got a large collection worth writing about, and I could always swap samples if I wanted to review new things. The truth is that I just don’t want to think about perfume anymore. I still thoroughly enjoy the stuff, but my cerebral engagement with it has almost disappeared. I now love perfume in the instinctive, easily satisfied way that I did as a kid, when I first started raiding the pretty bottles on my mother’s dresser: Spritz. Happiness. Done.

The perfume obsession is not the only fancy that has fallen away over the past couple of years. I used to love to cook and collect recipes, but these days scrambling an egg constitutes a major culinary effort. My cookbooks all have a thick coating of dust and I happily subsist on yogurt and almonds for weeks at a time. I was a pretty serious amateur herbalist for years, with a large collection of exotic herbs, homemade tinctures and the like. Since my divorce, I have – with frightening ease, it seems to me – forgotten most everything I used to know about damiana and he shou wu. A couple of months ago, I finally just said the hell with it and put all my herbs and the attendant paraphernalia in the trash. Birding has also gone by the wayside. I used to maintain a half dozen bird feeders year-round, monitoring the visitors and keeping a journal about their comings and goings. I still feed the hummingbirds, but the rest are on their own and it’s rare for me to spend any time observing the avian population in my yard.

I’ve been getting rid of material things, too. Keepsakes, clothes, furniture -- all kinds of items I acquired and kept for reasons I can't now fathom are leaving my life, one carload or garbage bin at a time. I aim to keep paring away until my house is empty of everything I don’t need or genuinely cherish. Unloading my too-large house is probably not an option anytime soon, but I plan to sell it the second I can get a decent price. In the future, home is going to be someplace small, and I hope to spend plenty of time far away from it.

The idea of a wandering, unencumbered life has always appealed to me. Most of my childhood fantasies revolved around achieving — alone — some exalted state of freedom or knowledge. In my dreams I found secret passages to magical places, befriended spirits in the woods, became a bird or a wild horse. Some remnant of those dreams still lurks in me. It fuels my desire to write, and it keeps my mind turning on certain myths and stories – especially, for more than a year now, the story of Mary of Egypt.

Everything about Mary’s life, particularly Sophronius’s version of it, fascinates me. Strip away the expressly Christian trappings (please), and the life of Mary of Egypt is a myth about the dualities that define human existence – body and spirit, feminine and masculine. It’s also a story about death and loss, and the struggle to find some meaning to life as death approaches. But apart from all those grand themes, it’s a tale about a remarkable woman who pursued the life she desired, first as a "vessel of the devil,” and then as a desert hermit. I admire her, and I feel a certain sisterhood. Lately, my 22-year marriage seems more and more like Mary’s long career as a harlot: a false life from which I’ve been delivered. I won’t be following her path as an ascetic. I’m a pleasure-loving animal to the marrow of my bones and that will never change. But to walk, as Mary did, out into the unknown, abandoning myself to the mere possibility of wisdom, seems like a good way to pass the time until I finally rest on the riverbank.

Saint Mary of Egypt, José de Ribera, 1691

"No, soul doesn't leave the body."

2012-01-06T12:00:00.001-06:00

Disappearing Act
by Eleanor Ross Taylor

No, soul doesn't leave the body.

My body is leaving my soul.
Tired of turning fried chicken and
coffee to muscle and excrement,
tried of secreting tears, wiping them,
tired of opening eyes on another day,
tired especially of that fleshy heart,
pumping, pumping. More,
that brain spinning nightmares.
Body prepares:
disconnect, unplug, erase.

But here, I think, a smallish altercation
arises.
Soul seems to shake its fist.
Wants brain? Claims dreams and nightmares?
Maintains a codicil bequeathes it shares?

There'll be a fight. A deadly struggle.
We know, of course, who'll win. . . .

But who's this, watching?

*Eleanor Ross Taylor died Dec. 30, 2011 at the age of 91. Chapter 16 has posted a tribute to her, with remembrances from Mark Jarman, Claudia Emerson, and others.

Profile of an Old Woman, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)

"foredefeated challengers of oblivion"

2012-01-03T17:02:00.000-06:00

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

"To The Stone-Cutters" by Robinson Jeffers

Ruine Heisterbach im Siebengebirge, Anton Schiffer (1811-1876)

"Beyond is a brightness I am not equal to"

2012-01-02T21:08:00.000-06:00

Beyond is a brightness
I am not equal to

Yet what I see
Turns into what I want

And to bring nothing but this body
To pass through

The one thing between
Myself and what I crave,

Almost done, the world a ruin
Of leaves, winter at the throat,

My song over and over until
So familiar I can do

What I am about to do

From "Bird at the Window" by Sophie Cabot Black. Read the complete poem here.

Song, Copyright ©2012 by Billy Renkl. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

"You quiver like a sea-fish"

2011-12-31T20:47:00.000-06:00

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

"The Pool" by H.D. (1915)

Zwei auf dem Rücken liegende Akte, Gustave Klimt, c.1906

"Sky full of laurels and arrows"

2011-12-30T21:42:00.001-06:00

And I love you,
Sky full of laurels and arrows,
White shadow of cities where the scars
Of forgotten swans
Waken into feathers
And new leaves.

From "Moon" by James Wright. The complete poem is here.

Moonlit Night on the Dniepr, Archip Iwanowitsch Kuindshi, 1882

Be Drunk

2011-12-27T18:10:00.000-06:00

Be Drunk
Charles Baudelaire

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Translated by Louis Simpson, text via poets.org.

For more on the uses of drunkenness, read "Aristotle -- The Wisdom of Silenus." (Worth clicking over just for the clip of Nureyev dancing The Afternoon of a Faun.)

The lineage of Silenus can be found at theoi.com

The Misfortunes of Silenus, Piero di Cosimo, 1505-1510

Introductions, introduced

2011-12-26T13:56:00.004-06:00

One of the things I love about this blog is that it gives me an opportunity to share the work of writers and artists I admire, including some you might not have heard about. Since I've spent a fair amount of time at workshops and writers'conferences over the past year, I've met a LOT of really talented people whose fine stories and poems have not yet found a big audience. I'd like to do my bit to remedy that, so I've decided to start regularly posting links to their work. If you like the stories you find below, do come back and post a comment so I can pass it along to the author. Happy reading.

Brandy Wilson teaches at the University of Memphis and she is currently at work on a novel. You can read one of her stories, "The Paris Times," at PANK Magazine.

Richard Alley is a freelance writer and journalist in Memphis. His story "Sea Change" appeared in Memphis Magazine last year, and you can read "Hav-A-Tampa," an excerpt from another story, at Glass Cases.

A.K. Benninghofen is a Mississippi native who now lives in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. She and I met at the Sewanee Writers' Conference last year. You'll find a couple of her great stories at Evergreen Review and Necessary Fiction.

Reading the Story of Oenone, Frank Millett, 1882

"nothing can slake my thirst"

2011-12-24T00:26:00.000-06:00

Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.

From The Love Poems of Marichiko by Kenneth RexRoth

Bather, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, 1913

"teeth broken from winter's harsh bite"

2011-12-22T15:59:00.003-06:00

The night a comet
with its silver tail
tucked between its legs
fell through darkness
to rest in the Wades'
dead field
Papa stood
on the back stoop
unmoving, wolf
starved in metal trap
teeth broken from winter's
harsh bite.

In the back of the shotgun
the crooked step jutting
out like a lip, he could see
the sky neck, feel the stars
shake they heads

That night he threw
the fallen stone
back to sky
the stars watched
it all come down
to ruined earth again.

Sky would not take back
what she had done
the fields spent,
barren.

From "Fallen" by Sheree Renée Thomas. See the rest at Strange Horizons.

"The Great Comet of 1861", illus. from Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt, E. Weiss, 1888

"Winter Sun"

2011-12-21T21:23:00.001-06:00

How valuable it is in these short days,
threading through empty maple branches,
the lacy-needled sugar pines... (more)

From "Winter Sun" by Molly Fisk

The Magpie, Claude Monet, 1869

Wishing you all a beautiful solstice

"We have roped swallows together into legions"

2011-12-20T21:43:00.001-06:00

We have roped swallows together
into legions.
Now we can't see the sun.
Everywhere nature twitters as it moves.
In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets
and the sun can't be seen.

But what can we lose if we try one
groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder?
The earth swims. Courage,
brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow.
Even as we freeze in Lethe we'll remember
the ten heavens the earth cost us.

From "The Twilight of Freedom" by Osip Mandelstam, 1918. The complete poem is here.

Ad Marginem, Paul Klee 1930

"but why not dream a little"

2011-12-19T20:39:00.001-06:00

When I’m running across the city
on the crowded streets
to home, when, in a blur,
the grass turns brown
beneath my feet, the asphalt
steams under every step
and the maple leaves sway
on the branches in my wake,
and the people look,
look in that bewildered way,
in my direction, I imagine
walking slowly into my past
among them at a pace
at which we can look one another in the eye
and begin to make changes in the future
from our memories of the past—
the bottom of a bottomless well,
you may think, but why not dream a little ...(more)

From "The Flash Reverses Time" by A. Van Jordan. (You'll find a 2007 post featuring Jordan here.)

Memory, Elihu Vedder, 1870

A random list, 2011 ed. (mostly books)

2011-12-18T19:37:00.004-06:00

'Tis the time of year to make annual lists -- best of, top ten, etc. -- and you'll find mine below. But first, a disclaimer: I’m not a big fan of these lists, or to put it more accurately, I'm not a big fan of creating them. I enjoy other people’s lists (like these, for instance), but when I try to make my own I find that I don’t relish the linear thought process required. I'm not the kind of person who wants or needs her ducks in a row, as even a brief look around my house will confirm. Also, I don’t like the exclusionary nature of lists: This always implies not that, and I hate to reject things that are essentially worthy. (That’s why I possess several hundred perfumes, even though I only wear about 20.) But if I cast aside all thoughts of organization and ranking, list-making does offer me the simple pleasure of revisiting good things, especially the ones that have taught me something or otherwise rocked my world. And, more importantly, a list is a handy way to share those things with people who might not otherwise know about them. Seen in that light, an annual list is a sort of gift to myself and to you. So, with a little ambivalence and a sincere hope that you'll find something that gives you pleasure, here's a random list of ten things I loved in 2011:

1. Frederick Busch’s Domestic Particulars: A Family Chronicle
This is a quiet, sad, beautifully constructed novel about parents and children, among other things. I wrote a brief review of it at Goodreads. I would never have read it if a friend had not urged it on me. Let me pay a favor forward and encourage you to get your hands on a copy. You'll be rewarded for the trouble.

2. Rodney Crowell’s memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks
This is absolutely not a book I would ever have picked up on my own, but I enjoyed every page. My review is here.

3. Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life
One of the most interesting and entertaining books I’ve read in a long time, Mrs. Nixon transcends genre. It's an artful blend of fiction, literary criticism, history and memoir, and reading it is a little like being happily lost in a house of mirrors. The book is not really concerned with Pat Nixon, but with “Mrs. Nixon,” a fictional person who is as much the creation of Pat Nixon as of Ann Beattie. The brilliance of Mrs. Nixon was completely lost on David Greenberg, who wrote a simple-minded, lukewarm review for The New York Times, and on Michiko Kakutani, who delivered a review that is so willfully dumb and mean-spirited I won’t even link to it. At least the book is getting some appreciation from smart readers like this one.

4. The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin
Mandelstam’s poems push me to a place I could never get to on my own, and I can never find my way back without their help.

5. Before the Great Troubling by Corey Mesler
I featured the title poem on the blog a while back, but the whole collection is wise, playful, and very smart. Go here to see some links to other recent poems by Mesler.

6. Some other good books I read or reread this year, in no particular order and excluding lots of worthy titles that I would list if I wasn’t afraid of trying your patience:

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

A Hole in the Earth by Robert Bausch

Brill Among the Ruins by Vance Bourjaily

The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey

1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Appalachee Red by Raymond Andrews

Rebel Powers by Richard Bausch

7. Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Apart from the way 3D glasses kept falling down my face, watching this film was a magical experience. Herzog, once again, has inspired me to do plenty of wondering about the primal sources of art and about our complex relationship to animals. I won't bore you with my musings, but the film strengthened my long held opinion that our sentimental attachment to our pets is a degraded expression of our deepest, most spiritual selves.

8. Brian Pera's Woman's Picture
Like many of my fellow perfume fanatics, I've been following the production of this film, and I was thrilled to finally see it at the Indie Memphis festival earlier this fall. A beautiful movie in every way, I hope it will be available on DVD soon so that more people can have the chance to see it. And I can't wait to see where Brian Pera takes his considerable talent in the years to come.

9. Susan Bryant's alternative process photography, exhibited this fall at Nashville's Cumberland Gallery
That's one of her images at the top of this post, and you can see more here and here. Wonderful, evocative stuff. Go look.

10. Glasgow in spring
I spent a couple of weeks in Glasgow this year and pretty much fell in love with a city I already liked quite a lot. I have thoughts of making it home someday. To see a few pictures from my visit, go here.

F.A.R., Copyright ©2011 by Susan Bryant. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

"Even the void has disappeared"

2011-12-15T20:56:00.000-06:00

The Void
Eugenio Montale

Even the void has disappeared
where one could once take refuge.
Now we know that even the air
is matter that weighs upon us.
Immaterial matter, the worst
that could have befallen us.
It isn't full enough because
we must people it with facts and actions
to be able to say we belong to it
and will never escape it even when dead.
To cram with objects what is
the sole Object by definition although
it doesn't care for it oh what a vile
comedy. And with what zeal we perform it!

From It Depends, 1980

The Story of the God of Kitano Tenjin Shrine, 13th century

"how pure a thing is joy"

2011-11-20T20:06:00.000-06:00

The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

From "What Are Years" by Marianne Moore

Two Finches, Zhao Ji (1082-1135)

"if your name gives peace to his thoughts..."

2011-11-15T22:08:00.000-06:00

If your hug gives courage to the heart
and your thighs stop the pain,
if your name gives peace
to his thoughts, and your throat
a shade to his berth
and the night of your voice, an orchard
still untouched by storms.

Then stay beside him
and be more devoted than anyone else
who loved him before you.

Fear the echo approaching
the innocent love nests.

And be gentle with his dream
bellow the invisible mountain
at the edge of the soughing sea.

From a poem by Croatian writer Vesna Parun. The rest of this translation can be found here (scroll down). A different translation is posted on this forum. Thanks to Ankica at Bellatrix for sending me this lovely poem.

Liebespaar, Otto Mueller, c.1920

"From this cup of my lips comes a song"

2011-11-01T21:06:00.001-05:00

From this cup of my lips comes a song;
It captures my singing soul, my song.

That in my words is the meaning of ecstasy,
That dies my happiness into grief, my song.

If you see that my eyes say a word,
Then take it as my forgetfulness, my song.

Do not ask of love, O it tells me of you;
My words of love speak of death, my song.

His hope, like flowers, I desire.
No drop of my eyes is enough, my song.

The daughter of this place sings qasida, a ghazal,
But what spoils her strange verses, my song?

O the gardener does not understand my happiness;
O do not ask for many looks of my youth, my song.

From this hands, these feet and words, it looks strange
That my name is written on the slate of this age, my song.

Ghazal by Nadia Anjuman*, trans. by Khizra Aslam

Die Wasserschöpferin (Danaide), Hans Ernst Brühlmann, 1909

*A previous post about Nadia Anjuman's poetry and her sad fate is here.

Lord of all Deaths

2011-10-30T22:01:00.002-05:00

THE DEEDS OF MUNG
(Lord of all Deaths between Pegana and the Rim)

Once, as Mung went his way athwart the Earth and up and down its cities and across its plains, Mung came upon a man who was afraid when Mung said: "I am Mung!"
And Mung said: "Were the forty million years before thy coming intolerable to thee?"
And Mung said: "Not less tolerable to thee shall be the forty million years to come!"
Then Mung made against him the sign of Mung and the Life of the Man was fettered no longer with hands and feet.
At the end of the flight of the arrow there is Mung, and in the houses and the cities of Men. Mung walketh in all places at all times. But mostly he loves to walk in the dark and still, along the river mists when the wind hath sank, a little before night meeteth with the morning upon the highway between Pegana and the Worlds.
Sometimes Mung entereth the poor man's cottage; Mung also boweth very low before The King. Then do the Lives of the poor man and of The King go forth among the Worlds.
And Mung said: "Many turnings hath the road that Kib hath given every man to tread upon the earth. Behind one of these turnings sitteth Mung."
One day as a man trod upon the road that Kib had given him to tread he came suddenly upon Mung. And when Mung said: "I am Mung!" the man cried out: "Alas, that I took this road, for had I gone by any other way then had I not met with Mung."
And Mung said: "Had it been possible for thee to go by any other way then had the Scheme of Things been otherwise and the gods had been other gods. When Mana-Yood-Sushai forgets to rest and makes again new gods it may be that They will send thee again into the Worlds; and then thou mayest choose some other way, and not meet with Mung."
Then Mung made the sign of Mung. And the Life of that man went forth with yesterday's regrets and all old sorrows and forgotten things -- whither Mung knoweth.
And Mung went onward with his work to sunder Life from flesh, and Mung came upon a man who became stricken with sorrow when he saw the shadow of Mung. But Mung said: "When at the sign of Mung thy Life shall float away there will also disappear thy sorrow at forsaking it." But the man cried out: "O Mung! tarry for a little, and make not the sign of Mung against me now, for I have a family upon the earth with whom sorrow will remain, though mine should disappear because of the sign of Mung."
And Mung said: "With the gods it is always Now. And before Sish hath banished many of the years the sorrows of thy family for thee shall go the way of thine." And the man beheld Mung making the sign of Mung before his eyes, which beheld things no more.

From The Gods of Pegana by Lord Dunsany, 1905.

Mung, the God of Death, Sidney Sime, c. 1905

Blessed Samhain, Happy Halloween, and so forth...

"yield a song to the decaying year"

2011-10-21T15:25:00.004-05:00

Now I am minded to take pipe in hand

And yield a song to the decaying year;

Now while the full-leaved hursts unalter’d stand,

And scarcely does appear

The Autumn yellow feather in the boughs

While there is neither sun nor rain;

And a grey heaven does the hush’d earth house,

And bluer grey the flocks of trees look in the plain.

So late the hoar green chestnut breaks a bud,

And feeds new leaves upon the winds of Fall;

So late there is not force in sap or blood;

The fruit against the wall

Loose on the stem has done its summering;

These should have starv’d with the green broods of spring,

Or never been at all;

Too late or else much, much too soon,

Who first knew moonlight by the hunters’ moon.

Gerard Manley Hopkins*

Vines, Paul Ranson, 1902

*[105], The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford University Press, 4th ed. I should have posted this one about a month ago to suit the season here, but I thought it was too beautiful to leave until next year. By the way, a "hurst" is a thicket or bramble. I had to look it up.

"Love the earth and sun and the animals"

2011-10-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

"The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is enough . . . . the fact will prevail through the universe . . . . but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..."

Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass

Sunset, George Innes, c.1860-65

"Light wrestling there incessantly with light"

2011-10-18T23:27:00.000-05:00

Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...

From "Voyages" by Hart Crane

Flower Clouds, Odilon Redon, 1903

"lives without beaks, without feathers, irretrievably lost"

2011-10-16T19:13:00.002-05:00

Once
I used to peruse the altlas of birds
that have vanished from the face of the earth,
the work of a pupil of David who had
failed in the genre of historical painting
and other monumental artistic aspirations.
I was musing on hypothetical atlases
of lives without beaks, without feathers,
irretrievably lost through the millennia,
insects, reptiles, fish
and also, why not? man himself
but who would have compiled or consulted
his opus magnum?

From "Once" by Eugenio Montale. The rest of the poem is here.

Laughing owl (Sceloglaux albifacies), John Gerrard Keulemans, c.1875

About the Laughing Owl

"...I became the daughter of your dream"

2011-10-11T14:49:00.000-05:00

My dear, what you said was one thing
but what you sang was another, sweetly
subversive and dark as blackberries
and I became the daughter of your dream.

This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,

you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

From "My mother's body" by Marge Piercy

Mother and Child Kneeling (Madonna), Wilhelm Lehmbruck, 1910

"either my breath is the breath of stars or I do not breathe"

2011-10-10T17:34:00.000-05:00

... in this moment which is so wondrous the way
it lies beside you, I either do not exist or the past
has never existed, either my breath is
the breath of stars or I do not breathe as I turn to you,
as you breathe my name, my heart,
as the net of stars dissolves above us, as you wrap
yourself around me like honeysuckle, the moon
turning pale because it is so drained by our love,
so that before this moment, before you lay beneath me,
you must have disguised yourself the way the killdeer
you pointed out diverts intruders to save what it loves,
pretending a broken wing, giving itself over finally
to whatever forces, whatever love, whatever touch,
whatever suffering it needs just to say I am here,
I am always here, stroking the wings of your soul.

From "Sonata" by Richard Jackson. The complete poem is here (scroll down).

Two Reclining Female Nudes, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

"lost among pinholes of light"

2011-10-09T00:35:00.000-05:00

The brick wall stretches into the sky,
the sky empty, save the constellations,

whose lives I love—yours most of all,
father of poets, whose lyre filled trees

and stones with awe, the lover torn to shreds
and thrown in to the river. Tonight,

you’re the swan, lost among pinholes of light,
your throat bitten by a black hole

that takes and takes and never fills.

From "To Orpheus" by Blas Falconer.*

Orpheus, Franz von Stuck, 1891

*Blas is a wonderful poet I've reviewed and interviewed over the years. He recently took part in an ekphrasis event in Memphis and had a few words to say about it in an article I did for Chapter 16.

"The petals of tenderness in them, their tentative ways of feeling..."

2011-10-06T19:10:00.001-05:00

Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur
turns in the soft dusk,
the lights of it blur,
the delicate spires are unequal
as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them...

And the soft air-breathers,
their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water
responding to some impalpably soft pressure,
turn with the city, too.

The petals of tenderness in them,
their tentative ways of feeling, not quite reaching out
but ever so gently half reaching out and withdrawing,

withdrawing to where their feminine star is withdrawing,
the planet that turns with them,
faithfully always and softly...

From "The Soft City" by Tennessee Williams.
Read the complete poem here.

Street at Stadtpark Schöneberg, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938)

"Open your hands..."

2011-10-05T17:46:00.000-05:00

Open your hands,
& a starling makes
its strange, thoughtful,
lone way to water, while
songs unwind from
the heavy branches—
those mild breezes
of the heaped season.

From "Love Poem" by Richard Bausch. Read the complete poem here.

La Fontaine, Jean-Jacques Henner, 1880

"What is pink?"

2011-10-04T17:02:00.000-05:00

What is pink? a rose is pink
By a fountain's brink.
What is red? a poppy's red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro'.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
What is green? the grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? Why, an orange,
Just an orange!

"Color" by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Design for the Red Sultan, Leon Bakst, c.1920

Charles Ives and Thoreau

2011-10-02T16:22:00.012-05:00

"Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony." The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity--a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of Nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism which teaches slavery. In music, in poetry, in all art, the truth as one sees it must be given in terms which bear some proportion to the inspiration. In their greatest moments the inspiration of both Beethoven and Thoreau express profound truths and deep sentiment, but the intimate passion of it, the storm and stress of it, affected Beethoven in such a way that he could not but be ever showing it and Thoreau that he could not easily expose it. They were equally imbued with it, but with different results. A difference in temperament had something to do with this, together with a difference in the quality of expression between the two arts. "Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he would speak extravagantly forever," says Thoreau. Perhaps music is the art of speaking extravagantly. Herbert Spencer says that some men, as for instance Mozart, are so peculiarly sensitive to emotion ... that music is to them but a continuation not only of the expression but of the actual emotion, though the theory of some more modern thinkers in the philosophy of art doesn't always bear this out. However, there is no doubt that in its nature music is predominantly subjective and tends to subjective expression, and poetry more objective tending to objective expression. Hence the poet when his muse calls for a deeper feeling must invert this order, and he may be reluctant to do so as these depths often call for an intimate expression which the physical looks of the words may repel. They tend to reveal the nakedness of his soul rather than its warmth. It is not a matter of the relative value of the aspiration, or a difference between subconsciousness and consciousness but a difference in the arts themselves; for example, a composer may not shrink from having the public hear his "love letter in tones," while a poet may feel sensitive about having everyone read his "letter in words." When the object of the love is mankind the sensitiveness is changed only in degree."

Charles Ives, from Essays Before a Sonata*: V, Thoreau

*Ives's "introductory footnote" to the essays: "These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can't stand his music--and the music for those who can't stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated."

A hymn for Sunday

2011-10-01T23:30:00.000-05:00

Therefore, to make your beauty more appear,
It you behoves to love, and forth to lay
That heavenly riches which in you ye bear,
That men the more admire their fountain may;
For else what booteth that celestial ray,
If it in darkness be enshrined ever,
That it of loving eyes be viewed never?

From "A Hymn in Honor of Beauty" by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

"I care not what despairs are buried there"

2011-09-30T18:55:00.000-05:00

Eride, V
by Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904)

Now in the palace gardens warm with age,
On lawn and flower-bed this afternoon
The thin November-coloured foliage
Just as last year unfastens lilting down,

And round the terrace in gray attitude
The very statues are becoming sere
With long presentiment of solitude.
Most of the life that I have lived is here,

Here by the path and autumn's earthy grass
And chestnuts standing down the breadths of sky
Indeed I know not how it came to pass,
The life I lived here so unhappily.

Yet blessing over all! I do not care
What wormwood I have ate to cups of gall;
I care not what despairs are buried there
Under the ground, no, I care not at all.

Nay, if the heart have beaten, let it break!
I have not loved and lived but only this
Betwixt my birth and grave. Dear Spirit, take
The gratitude that pains, so deep it is.

When Spring shall be again, and at your door
You stand to feel the mellower evening wind.
Remember if you will my heart is pure,
Perfectly pure and altogether kind;

That not an aftercry of all our strife
Troubles the love I give you and the faith:
Say to yourself that at the ends of life
My arms are open to you, life and death.

How much it aches to linger in these things!
I thought the perfect end of love was peace
Over the long-forgiven sufferings.
But something else, I know not what it is,

The words that came so nearly and then not,
The vanity, the error of the whole,
The strong cross-purpose, oh, I know not what
Cries dreadfully in the distracted soul.

The evening fills the garden, hardly red;
And autumn goes away, like one alone.
Would I were with the leaves that thread by thread
Soften to soil, I would that I were one.

Leaves, William Trost Richards, 1855

"I like for you to be still"

2011-09-28T18:37:00.000-05:00

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not
touch you.

From "I Like for You to Be Still" by Pablo Neruda, trans. by W.S. Merwin

Orient, Luis Ricardo Falero (1851-1896)

Tillinghast and Piero

2011-09-27T08:50:00.000-05:00

What did they lack that you and I lacked?
His pose
turning the one unravaged cheek to the artist—
suggests a dignity
we easily find too easy.

From "A Letter" by Richard Tillinghast. Complete poem is here.

I recently did an interview with Tillinghast, which you can read here.

Diptych of the Duchess and Duke of Urbino, Piero della Francesca, c.1472. There's a nice piece about this painting at The Guardian.

*Nashville-area folks can see Tillinghast at the Southern Festival of Books next month.

"in between one eye blink and the next"

2011-09-26T00:17:00.000-05:00

And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Time paused, allowing time to be installed
Within that countless interim,
Coiled up, on hold,
A memory predicted and recalled.
Now, that weak muscle flexed,
All that contained him started to unfold

In front of him, a moving book
In three dimensions he could wander through,
At will, at any point, now, since, before,
To feel, to listen and to look—
A house, or suite
Of rooms around a circling corridor,
And waiting there, he knew,
Were all the peopled days he’d not repeat.

Form "The House of Time" by Stephen Edgar. Complete poem is here.

Der Kaktusliebhaber, Carl Spitzweg, c.1850

*After many weeks away, I seem to be making regular posts again. My thanks to everybody who hung around to welcome me back. It's a pleasure to go searching again for words and images to share with you. Not sure where all the time went while I was away from here. A lot of it was spent reading and writing. I've read some gorgeous books in the past few months, including Appalachee Red by Raymond Andrews, Mr. Field's Daughter and Rebel Powers by Richard Bausch, Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow, and the new Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. Kevin Wilson's new novel, The Family Fang, is smart and great fun -- I reviewed it here. As for the writing, I've been lucky enough to devote more of my work time to fiction, and I spent two weeks at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. I wrote a little essay about that for Chapter 16.

For longtime readers who don't keep in touch with me via Facebook, I'm sad to report that Kobi, the Big Yellow Ball of Crazy, died in August. Kobi was the most troubled and troublesome of my dogs, and the one that loved me best, so of course she was my favorite. I always said she would wind up breaking my heart and she did. I miss her.

Finally, an apology for my poor housekeeping. I have neglected the blog so thoroughly for the past few months that I just now discovered that some Blogger spasm (probably that huge hissy fit last spring) tweaked the template just enough to knock a bunch of the past year's posts slightly askew. Urgh. They are still readable, but we are all about the pretty here at BitterGrace Notes and misaligned text is intolerable. I'll eventually fix all the posts so that those of you who like to scroll through, say, the Gallery of Antique Smut will find nothing to offend your eyes.

"a glint of bronze in the chill mornings"

2011-09-23T19:33:00.000-05:00

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

From "To the Light of September" by W.S. Merwin. Complete poem is here.

Early Autumn White Birch, Maxfield Parrish, 1936

Happy Mabon

"Oh how sweetly, when we are young, it hurts..."

2011-09-22T16:23:00.000-05:00

To the Moon
by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

O lovely moon, now I’m reminded
how almost a year since, full of anguish,
I climbed this hill to gaze at you again,
and you hung there, over that wood, as now,
clarifying all things. Filled with mistiness,
trembling, that’s how your face seemed to me,
from all those tears that welled in my eyes, so
troubled was my life, and is, and does not change,
O moon, my delight. And yet it does help me,
to record my grief and tell it, year by year.
Oh how sweetly, when we are young, it hurts,
when hope has such a long journey to run,
and memory is so short,
this remembrance of things past, even if it
is sad, and the pain lasts!

Translated by A.S. Kline

Sleeping Nude in Front of the Mirror, Franz Nölken, 1915

Rilke on sadness

2011-09-19T20:16:00.000-05:00

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Mournful Foreboding of What is to Come, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, c.1810

"She dreaded a beast and discovered a god."

2011-09-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

If I were Psyche how could I not
bring the lamp to our bedside?
I would have known in advance
all the travails my gazing
would bring, more than Psyche
ever imagined,
and even so, how could I not have raised
the amber flame to see
the human person I knew
was to be revealed.
She did not even know! She dreaded
a beast and discovered
a god. But I
know, and hunger
to witness again the form
of mortal love itself.

From "Psyche in Somerville" by Denise Levertov. The complete poem is here.

Psyche and Cupid, Peter Paul Rubens, c.1636

Before the Great Troubling

2011-09-16T12:21:00.000-05:00

Before the Great Troubling
by Corey Mesler

There were times of great clarity.
There were days when time
did not imprison, did not
glad-hand the devil.
And there was a feeling that this
would all go on, getting
better and better,
enriching us in ways we could never
foresee. This was the feeling
we lived under as if
it were shade.
There were times, before the great
troubling, when we
were happy to think the world vast
and shapeless, when
we were happy to call modernity
out host. This I remind myself
when it closes in.
This comforts somehow
as if in the past is the seed of a
future where I will
once again walk out into the dark-
ness as if it were my
best dream, as if it held things for me
that I would need, things
as particular and personal as a poem.

Corey Mesler is a gifted poet and fiction writer who also -- along with his wife, Cheryl -- owns a bookstore in Memphis. I interviewed Corey recently for Chapter 16, and he had fascinating things to say. You can read the Q&A here. The beautiful poem above is from his new collection by the same name, which is full of lovely, funny, smart stuff. Go here to order a copy.

Storm at Sea, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1569

Poem ©2011 by Corey Mesler. Used by permission. All rights reserved

"Every Verse is a Child of Love"

2011-09-13T19:37:00.002-05:00

Every verse is a child of love,
A destitute bastard slip,
A firstling -- the winds above --
Left by the road asleep.

From "Every Verse is a Child of Love" by Marina Tsvetaeva. More here.

Nude Child with Open Arms, Giulio Romano (1499-1546)

"...the sun itself disguised"

2011-09-12T18:16:00.000-05:00

"The sky to the east was black with bird, the sun itself disguised. Thousands of passenger pigeons beat southward, a flying carpet of them. Catto held his breath. A hundred thousand. might be. They were free. Marveling up at them he felt pure, the innocence of dawn. He watched in welcome every spring, in godspeed every fall. The birds flew in a vast, oval mass, no pairs, no skeins, no wedges, only the great mass of them, and the steady, fading rush across the face of the sun. A dark mass, the blushing breasts obscured, they dimmed the golden morning."

From When the War is Over* by Stephen Becker

A Pair of Passenger Pigeons (''Ectopistes migratorius''), John James Audubon (1785-1851)

"Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon"

*I'm in the middle of reading this beautiful novel -- one of those wonderful books that seems to have been unjustly forgotten. More about Becker here.

"The reverberations of Stygian remembrance..."

2011-09-11T22:31:00.000-05:00

It is given to mortals to love, to recognize,
to make sounds move to their fingers,
but I have forgotten what I wanted to say
and a bodiless thought returns to the palace of shadows.

The Transparent One still speaks, but of nothing.
Still a swallow, a friend known as a girl, Antigone.
The reverberations of Stygian remembrance
burn like a black ice on one’s lips.

From "I Have Forgotten the Word I Wanted to Say" by Osip Mandelstam. Read the complete poem here.

Passage to the Underworld, Joachim Patinir, 1515-1524

"Leaves scarcely breathing..."

2011-07-22T22:22:00.006-05:00

Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.

In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.

From Stone 24 by Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Clarence Brown & W.S. Merwin, The selected poems of Osip Mandelstam

Summer, Gustave Doré, 1860-70

Australian poet, edible perfume, etc.

2011-07-07T21:13:00.003-05:00

Now my five senses
gather into a meaning
all acts, all presences;
and as a lily gathers
the elements together,
in me this dark and shining,
that stillness and that moving,
these shapes that spring from nothing,
become a rhythm that dances,
a pure design.

From "Five Senses" by Judith Wright. You can read a profile of Wright here, and there's an interesting interview with her here.

******************************************************************

Wright’s poem about the commingling of the senses seems like an appropriate introduction to my first perfume post in -– what? Must be months. To be honest, I doubted I’d ever write about perfume here again. Not that I’ve lost my love for the stuff. I’ve just lost much of my enthusiasm for writing about it, in part because writing about it usually means acquiring it, and I am presently not in a mood to acquire things. Even an extra 2ml vial seems like a major addition to the clutter around here. I have fantasies about mysterious men in trucks showing up some morning and carting it all away, leaving me nothing but my books, my bed and the coffee pot.

That said, pleasure-seeking still trumps my monastic impulse occasionally, so when Julie Rose (who writes wonderfully at Everything is Interesting) contacted me recently about a lovely discovery she’d made at a farmer’s market in Maine, I couldn’t resist checking it out. Seems Julie ran into an old acquaintance named Kathi Langelier who has started a business devoted to handmade herbal products. Kathi’s creations include floral and herbal elixirs that Julie described to me as “basically edible perfume.” This, I had to try. Kathi has been kind enough to send me some samples, including Wild Rose, Ginger, Lavender and Chocolate Love. The base is made with locally sourced raw honey, and the organic essences include lavender and wild rose that Kathi harvests herself. Julie declared them “intoxicating” and I agree. When I opened the bottle of Wild Rose, my first thought was OMG, my rose HG. It has a rich, almost boozy rose fragrance, as potent as any rose soliflore in my perfume cabinet. But, unlike my many rose oils, attars, etc., this rose I can eat. Kathi recommends putting a few drops into tea or water, but you can also take it straight from the dropper, and it’s absolutely delicious. The Lavender is just as delightful, with a combination of flavor and aroma that could satisfy the most powerful lavender jones. The Ginger and Chocolate Love aren’t quite as impressive on the fragrance front, but they certainly taste great, and I’m fascinated by the composition of the Chocolate Love, which includes – in addition to raw cacao – damiana, ginseng, hawthorn berries, maca root and saw palmetto. Quite an herbal aphrodisiac.

You can check out the elixirs for yourself at Kathi’s Etsy site, or on Facebook. Happy dosing.

The Five Senses and the Four Elements, Jacques Linard, 1627

"Our hearts are a sea..."

2011-06-26T20:16:00.000-05:00

Our hearts are a sea, a lake,
Finally a little pond, where
Spider webs interlock over the round leaves,
And below them our longing
Is only a single drop of dew.

From "Written in the Sunset" by Hsiung Hung, trans. by Kenneth Rexroth.

Pond at Sunset, Fyodor Vasilyev, 1871

"giving all the universe"

2011-06-23T23:29:00.000-05:00

As men give vast lands to little papers with line and color, I have imagined more on the surface of your body, giving all the universe in this model....

From "A Love Letter" by Russell Edson

Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694)

Edith Wharton and other fools for love (myself included)

2011-06-22T15:50:00.001-05:00

First, some sublime words on erotic escape, from Wharton's 1909 poem "Terminus" --

And thus some woman like me, waking alone before dawn,
While her lover slept, as I woke & heard the calm stir of your breathing,
Some woman has heard as I heard the farewell shriek of the trains
Crying good-bye to the city & staggering out into darkness,
And shaken at heart has thought: "So must we forth in the darkness,
Sped down the fixed rail of habit by the hand of implacable fate–
So shall we issue to life, & the rain, & the dull dark dawning;
You to the wide flare of cities, with windy garlands and shouting,
Carrying to populous places the freight of holiday throngs;
I, by waste lands, & stretches of low-skied marsh
To a harbourless wind-bitten shore, where a dull town moulders & shrinks...

You can read the rest of the poem here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

These are some less sublime words from Wharton, taken from one of her letters to Morton Fullerton. They are consolation to anyone who has ever drunk dialed, or otherwise been pitiful in the grasp of unrequited love:

I never expected to tell you this; but under the weight of this silence I don't know what to say or leave unsaid. After nearly a month my frank tender of friendship remains unanswered. If that was not what you wished, what is then your feeling for me? My reason rejects the idea that a man like you, who has felt a warm sympathy for a woman like me, can suddenly, from one day to another; without any act or word on her part, lose even a friendly regard for her, & discard the mere outward signs of consideration by which friendship speaks. And so I am almost driven to conclude that your silence has another meaning, which I have not guessed. If any feeling subsists under it, may these words reach it, & tell you what I felt in silence when we were together!

You will find the rest of the letter here.

Nothing can quite top Wharton, but I'm posting so rarely these days I feel I should give you your money's worth when I do show up, so here are a few more variations on the theme:

There's a wonderful piece in Guernica on Pauline Réage/Dominique Aury, the author of The Story of O. The article is an excerpt from Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, by Carmela Ciuraru. The discussion of the novel is skippable if you have read it, but the examination of Aury's relationship with Jean Paulhan is pretty interesting. "She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter."

In case you missed it, here's a slide show at The Daily Beast of e.e. cummings' erotic drawings, along with snippets of his love poems.

Finally -- because what's a blog without a little shameless self-promotion? -- here's a new essay by me about how some things survive our loving foolishness.

Evening, Anders Zorn, 1892 (Many thanks to Jon, an erudite friend of the blog, for providing the proper title and date of this gorgeous painting.)

Lost

2011-05-09T17:01:00.002-05:00

Since I got to Glasgow, I’ve been stopped at least twice a day by people needing directions. I barely know this city, so only once or twice have I been able to help at all. I just smile and say sorry, I’m new here, too. They smile and go on their uncertain way. I don’t mind these little encounters, but I am always tempted to return their question with mine: Why, on a busy street with scores of people passing by, did you decide to stop me?

As long as I’ve been old enough to wander around the world by myself, I’ve been a magnet for people who have lost their way. It doesn’t matter if I’m rambling around my home turf or thousands of miles away in a completely unfamiliar city – I’ll be the person who’s asked for help. I’ve always found this baffling, since I don’t exactly stand out in a crowd. I’m an average-sized, quietly dressed woman. I’d like to think it has something to do with looking exceptionally intelligent, but I suspect it has more to do with looking exceptionally harmless; also, aimless. I am an ambler by nature. Even when I have destination and an arrival time in mind, I tend to walk pretty slowly and let the things around me catch my eye. No doubt that makes me seem more approachable than the majority of people, charging along as if they were off to battle.

Ironically, I don’t often ask for directions myself. Unless I’m late for a job interview or some other important rendezvous, I actually like getting lost. There’s a wonderful little thrill in the moment when I realize that I don’t know where I am, and have no idea how to make my way back to familiar ground. It’s liberating, and creates a feeling of being wide-awake to the environment. Suddenly, I have to pay attention instead of cruising around on autopilot. Sometimes I deliberately seek the experience, in the spirit of the dérive – a concept that, if anything, has become even more subversive in our increasingly virtual world.

A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.

From "Coda" by Basil Bunting

Wikipedia on the dérive

A Parisian Street Scene with Sacre Coeur in the distance, Luigi Loir (1845-1916)

"The trout leaps up from the water"

2011-05-04T13:46:00.000-05:00

The trout leaps up from the water,
and if there is sun you see
the briefest shiver of gold,
and then the river again.
When the trout dies
it turns its white belly
to the mirror of the sky.

From "Damselfly, Trout, Heron" by John Engels

A Trout Rising, Joseph Crawhall (1861-1913)

The Color of Night, among other things

2011-05-02T17:41:00.000-05:00

I am a little shocked to see that it has been almost a month since my last post. In spite of my good intentions I seem to keep wandering away from the blog. I've been literally wandering, in fact, which is one of the reasons I've neglected BitterGrace Notes. At the moment, I'm sitting in a nice little hotel in Glasgow, not far from Kelvingrove. Glasgow is beautiful now, sunny and reasonably warm, flowers in bloom everywhere--quite different from my last visit in gloomy, cold December. This is a great city in any season, though. Since I arrived last week, there have been two great global media frenzies (the Will & Kate nuptials and the assassination of Osama bin Laden), both of which seem to have left Glaswegians completely unmoved. I love that.

Before I hopped across the Atlantic, I spent a few days in Chattanooga, covering the Conference on Southern Literature for Chapter 16. (My posts are here, here and here.) It's a great conference, very small and friendly, and features members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Wendell Berry, Allan Gurganus, Dorothy Allison, Ann Patchett and Natasha Trethewey were just a few of the names on the line-up. It's held every 2 years, and any Southern lit fan should attend at least once. Mark your calendars for 2013.

The panther-wielding maenad who adorns this post is there in honor of a new novel by one of the writers featured at the conference, Madison Smartt Bell. I interviewed Bell about The Color of Night back in February, and now that the book's out I've written a review. (You gotta read at least one to find out what maenads have to do with it.) I can't recommend Bell's brilliant little book highly enough. It'll scare you and make you think, not necessarily in that order.

Furious maenad, 490-480 BCE

"You glow like a perfumed lamp"

2011-04-08T19:55:00.001-05:00

You glow like a perfumed lamp
In the gathering shadows.
We play wine games
And recite each other's poems.
Then you sing `Remembering South of the River'
With its heart breaking verses. Then
We paint each other's beautiful eyebrows.
I want to possess you completely -
Your jade body
And your promised heart.
It is Spring.
Vast mists cover the Five Lakes.
My dear, let me buy a red painted boat
And carry you away.

From "For the Courtesan Ch'ing Lin" by Wu Tsao, trans. by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. Read the rest of the poem here. You will find a brief commentary on the poem here.

Zwei Mädchen mit Tulpe, Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen, 1921

"large, brilliantly beautiful, fat"

2011-04-07T19:18:00.000-05:00

"She was fat the first time we saw her, large, brilliantly beautiful, fat. She seemed for this moment that never again returned to be almost a matron, someone real and sensible who carried money to the bank, signed papers, had curtains made to match, dresses hung and shoes in pairs, gold and silver, black and white, ready. What a strange, betraying apparition that was, madness, because never was any woman less a wife or mother, less attached; not even a daughter could she easily appear to be. Little called to mind the pitiful sweetness of a young girl. No, she was glittering, somber, and solitary, although of course never alone, never. Stately, sinister, and absolutely determined."

Elizabeth Hardwick on Bille Holiday, in The New York Review of Books

"Let a joy keep you"

2011-04-05T20:43:00.001-05:00

Joy
Carl Sandburg

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere—
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

Text from Bartleby.com

Two Boeotian Girls (costume sketch for the ballet Narcisse), Leon Bakst, 1911

Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Bausch, et al.

2011-04-01T13:18:00.001-05:00

I just realized that I have a couple of recent interviews up at Chapter 16 that I’ve failed to mention here – one with Joyce Carol Oates, and another with Richard Bausch. Bausch has some interesting things to say about the writing process and the "Southern writer" issue, and Oates discusses her new memoir. You’ll find lots of other good recent stuff on the site, including an essay by Amy Greene (author of Bloodroot), and interviews with Bobbie Ann Mason, Yann Martel and Tom Perrotta. Please click here to see it all.

By the way, when I say please click, I mean PLEASE click. Chapter 16 is a non-profit that relies on grants and donors to keep going (and pay writers). The folks who shell out the money like to see evidence of readers, so think of every click as a vote against the guillotine for our little project. We thank you.

Beggars at the Door, Rembrandt, 1648

Lost and Found

2011-03-29T01:46:00.001-05:00

I want to tell you about something that happened yesterday – or rather, something that didn’t happen, which was finding my college diploma. I took a notion to look for it late yesterday morning and wound up spending the entire day ferreting through every drawer, box and file folder in the house, with no success. Around 3 o’clock I ran out of reasonable places to look, but that didn’t stop me. I hunted through a few unreasonable places before revisiting every possibility I’d already tried. Twice. No diploma.

I did, however, find lots of other things. I found a few ancient Polaroid snapshots of my teenage self, and some incredibly bad pictures I took during a high school trip to Europe. (Venice has never looked so homely.) There were scads of letters, some from people I can’t even remember knowing, and a surprising number of sweet little love notes from my former husband. (Children picking up our bones...)

What really surprised me, though, were the number of stray notebooks and sheets of paper scribbled with bits of my writing. I don’t mean my freelance writing, the stuff I do for hire. I almost never hang onto drafts of articles and reviews once they’ve been published. The things I found were scraps of fiction I’ve written over the years; most of it (judging from the surrounding flotsam) produced during stretches of time when, if asked, I would have denied doing any such writing at all.

Even some of you who have known me since POL days may not know I write fiction. I’ve never had a lot to say about it on the blog. Mostly, that’s because I think there are few things more tedious than a writer of meager accomplishment blathering on about her process, her ideas, her multitude of unfinished projects. Blech. I’d rather be forced to read a thousand bland mommy blogs, and I assume you would, too. So I’ll just say that there have been periods in my life when I worked hard at writing fiction (like now), and periods when I didn’t work at all.

Or so I thought. The bits of work I found yesterday mostly date from the first few years after I moved back to Tennessee from Chicago, and I could have sworn I hadn’t been writing anything then except for a few early freelancing efforts. But there was the evidence, tucked away in one folder or box after another, revealing that I was actually scribbling down little scenes and monologues for stories, or for a long-gestating novel that was first conceived more than 20 years ago. Apparently, I was only half-aware I was doing this even at the time, which is why the scraps wound up hidden in so many unlikely places.

I have to admit that didn’t find any work that was very exciting. The vast majority of it is useless crap. What does kind of thrill me, though, is the knowledge that those thoughts and ideas kept rolling even when I was doing absolutely nothing to push them. The urge to make art was just there, seeking an outlet, without any recognition or encouragement at all. That’s a comforting thought – to me, at least, and I suppose it would be to any writer, because there is always that kernel of doubt about the decision to write. There’s always a part of you that wonders if you are just an attention whore with intellectual pretensions, as opposed to someone with a gift for making stories. (Yes, it is possible to be both, but I’m choosing to look on the bright side here.)

Of course, I am not at all certain that I have a real gift for making stories, but I can’t get around the fact that I have a visceral desire to make them, and that’s good to know. It’s a happy thing to find out what manner of beast you are. Now, if I could just find that diploma...

The Letter Writer Surprised, Gabriel Metsu, 1662

"You were forever finding some new play"

2011-03-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

The Exposed Nest
Robert Frost

You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But ’twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover.
’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once—could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven’t any memory—have you?—
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.

Text from Bartleby.com

"Thekla larks from dorsal," Novitates Zoologicae (Volume 18), 1912

For the Pagan contingent*

2011-03-20T19:01:00.001-05:00

Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars
Makest to teem the many-voyaged main
And fruitful lands- for all of living things
Through thee alone are evermore conceived,
Through thee are risen to visit the great sun-
Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on,
Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away,
For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers,
For thee waters of the unvexed deep
Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky
Glow with diffused radiance for thee!
For soon as comes the springtime face of day,
And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred,
First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee,
Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,
And leap the wild herds round the happy fields
Or swim the bounding torrents. Thus amain,
Seized with the spell, all creatures follow thee
Whithersoever thou walkest forth to lead,
And thence through seas and mountains and swift streams,
Through leafy homes of birds and greening plains,
Kindling the lure of love in every breast,
Thou bringest the eternal generations forth,
Kind after kind.

Lucretius, from On the nature of things (De rerum natura)

Blühender Apfelbaum, Ilse Heller-Lazard (1884-1934)

*I should have saved this for Beltane but couldn't resist posting today. Happy Spring.

"The moon has brought a shadow..."

2011-03-19T21:11:00.000-05:00

Amidst the flowers a jug of wine
I pour alone lacking companionship.
So raising the cup I invite the Moon,
Then turn to my shadow which makes three of us.
Because the Moon does not know how to drink,
My shadow merely follows the movement of my body.
The moon has brought the shadow to keep me company a while,
The practice of mirth should keep pace with spring.
I start a song and the moon begins to reel,
I rise and dance and the shadow moves grotesquely.
While I'm still conscious let's rejoice with one another,
After I'm drunk let each one go his way.
Let us bind ourselves for ever for passionless journeyings.
Let us swear to meet again far in the Milky Way.

"Amidst the flowers a jug of wine" by Li Bai (Li Po), 8th century. Uncredited translation from China Page.

Fragrance of Spring, Ma Lin, 13th century.

"Map of terror and pleasure"

2011-03-13T22:02:00.001-05:00

Map of terror and pleasure,
ardent junk, passionate congress
filled with the arguments of chemicals,

Echo chamber for the fanatical cries
of stubborn generations, all the quaint invisibles
death has grown a beard on,

labyrinth of desire, playing field of impulse,
factory where decay's silent armies clock in,
philosopher-clown blowing a horn at each epiphany.

From "Body" by Alissa Leigh.

Study from life: Nude male, John Trumbull, 1795-96

2011-03-08T20:09:00.000-06:00

So much do I remember now:
the pulse of obedient hearts,
hot tongues licking
the night; and I heard,

like a dry wind over leaves,
the scaly rustling of reptiles
coiling and resting . . .
All turned in the lamplight

eyes that never turned from mine
in their bright interrogation
(for I could see them,
and yet they were not there).

And I would speak, my hand
upheld to shield me,
when the shutter clapped
and my lamp blew out—

(was it a natural wind,
or a spirit-breath
lifting the leaves
of heavy trees in the night?)

From "In the Sleep of Reason" by John Haines (1924-2011). The complete poem is here.

Haines's obituary in The New York Times.

A Tornado in the Wilderness, Thomas Cole, 1831

"melancholy fancies come and go"

2011-02-27T13:14:00.001-06:00

L'AMOUR PAR TERRE
by Paul Verlaine

The wind the other night blew down the Love
That in the dimmest corner of the park
So subtly used to smile, bending his arc,
And sight of whom did us so deeply move

One day! The other night's wind blew him down!
The marble dust whirls in the morning breeze.
Oh, sad to view, o'erblotted by the trees,
There on the base, the name of great renown!

Oh, sad to view the empty pedestal!
And melancholy fancies come and go
Across my dream, whereon a day of woe
Foreshadowed is--I know what will befall!

Oh, sad!--And you are saddened also, Sweet,
Are not you, by this scene? although your eye
Pursues the gold and purple butterfly
That flutters o'er the wreck strewn at our feet.

Trans. by Gertrude Hall

Cupid presenting a rose to a butterfly, Antoine-Denis Chaudet, c. 1802

The Color of Night

2011-02-22T20:41:00.002-06:00

Madison Smartt Bell has a new novel coming out in April, The Color of Night, which is a remarkable meditation on the nature of violence and suffering. Not that the book is quietly meditative; on the contrary, it's a fever dream, full of bloodlust and death. The protagonist is a woman -- a profoundly damaged, frightening woman. The novel is beautifully written, brilliant and disturbing. I've read my galley copy twice and can't wait to see what kind of reception it gets. I did a Q&A with Bell about the book, which you can read here, and you'll find a lengthy excerpt here.

Orpheus has a sort of recurring bit part in the novel, hence the painting above and today's choice of poem, one of my favorites by Mark Strand. (Do go and read the whole thing.)

... it came
As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard
Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement
Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep
Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame,
Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes,
Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees
By a weaving stream, brushing the bank
With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs
Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby,
With his severed head rolling under the waves,
Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl
Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language
Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,
Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift...

From "Orpheus Alone" by Mark Strand. The complete poem is here.

Death of Orpheus, Emil Levy, 1866

"True beauty is truly seldom"

2011-02-18T11:58:00.001-06:00

[...] Here I am
Sitting on a chair, thinking
About you. Thinking
About how it was
To talk to you.
How sometimes it was wonderful
And sometimes it was awful.
How drugs when drugs were
Undid the good almost entirely
But not entirely
Because good could always be seen
Glimmering like lame glimmers
In the window of a shop
Called Beautiful
Things Never Last Forever.
I loved you. I love you. You were.
And you are. Life is experience.
It's all so simple. Experience is
The chair we sit on.
The sitting. The thinking
Of you where you are a blank
To be filled
In by missing. I loved you.
I love you like I love
All beautiful things.
True beauty is truly seldom.

From "You Were You Are Elegy" by Mary Jo Bang. The complete poem is here.

*The boys in the photo are my father and his brothers. Dad is the little one on the right. Today is the anniversary of his death. If you are in the mood to read reminiscences, you'll find mine of him here. He's also featured in this blog post.

Mark Jarman, et al.

2011-02-16T15:08:00.000-06:00

As usual, I give you a reader painting to accompany a new Chapter 16 post. Something about this red-haired girl makes me want to look at her for hours, but I encourage you to leave her and go read my interview with poet Mark Jarman. He has interesting things to say about his work and about the impact of digital media on poetry. He also talks about Robinson Jeffers, a poet who has been featured on this blog many times.

Other recent pieces on the site include Susannah Felts's Q&A with writer Kevin Wilson and a review from Ed Tarkington of The Illumination, a new novel by Kevin Brockmeier.

Here's snippet of Jarman's poem "Coyotes." You'll find a link to the complete poem at the interview:

Is this world truly fallen? They say no.
For there's the new moon, there's the Milky Way,
There's the rattler with a wren's egg in its mouth,
And there's the panting rabbit they will eat.
They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope,
Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?

Young girl reading, Federigo Zandomeneghi (1841-1917)

"I yearn upward, touch you close, then stand away"

2011-02-13T19:32:00.000-06:00

Two in the Campagna

by Robert Browning

I wonder do you feel to-day

As I have felt since, hand in hand,

We sat down on the grass, to stray

In spirit better through the land,

This morn of Rome and May?

For me, I touched a thought, I know,

Has tantalized me many times,

(Like turns of thread the spiders throw

Mocking across our path) for rhymes

To catch at and let go.

III

Help me to hold it! First it left

The yellowing fennel, run to seed

There, branching from the brickwork's cleft,

Some old tomb's ruin: yonder weed

Took up the floating weft,

Where one small orange cup amassed

Five beetles,—blind and green they grope

Among the honey-meal: and last,

Everywhere on the grassy slope

I traced it. Hold it fast!

The champaign with its endless fleece

Of feathery grasses everywhere!

Silence and passion, joy and peace,

An everlasting wash of air—

Rome's ghost since her decease.

Such life here, through such lengths of hours,

Such miracles performed in play,

Such primal naked forms of flowers,

Such letting nature have her way

While heaven looks from its towers!

VII

How say you? Let us, O my dove,

Let us be unashamed of soul,

As earth lies bare to heaven above!

How is it under our control

To love or not to love?

VIII

I would that you were all to me,

You that are just so much, no more.

Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!

Where does the fault lie? What the core

O' the wound, since wound must be?

I would I could adopt your will,

See with your eyes, and set my heart

Beating by yours, and drink my fill

At your soul's springs,—your part my part

In life, for good and ill.

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,

Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,

Catch your soul's warmth,—I pluck the rose

And love it more than tongue can speak—

Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far

Out of that minute? Must I go

Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,

Onward, whenever light winds blow,

Fixed by no friendly star?

XII

Just when I seemed about to learn!

Where is the thread now? Off again!

The old trick! Only I discern—

Infinite passion, and the pain

Of finite hearts that yearn.

Commentary on the poem here.

Liebespaar, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1903

"Voluptuous sorrow holds us like a cobweb"

2011-02-10T21:38:00.001-06:00

Moonlight fills the laurels
Like music. The moonlit
Air does not move. Your white
Face moves towards my face.
Voluptuous sorrow
Holds us like a cobweb
Like a song, a perfume, the moonlight.

From "Confusion of the Senses" by Kenneth Rexroth. You can read the complete poem and listen to a recording of it at this interview with poet Sam Hamill. A very good article by Hamill on Rexroth can be found here.

The Embrace, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

"Body, remember not only how much you were loved"

2011-02-09T18:02:00.000-06:00

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.

From "Body, Remember" by C.P. Cavafy, trans. by George Barbanis. The complete poem is here. (There are "official" translations here and here, but I like Barbanis's DIY effort better than either.)

Undergrowth with walking couple, Vincent van Gogh, 1890

"We are both the snake and the wheel"

2011-02-01T10:59:00.000-06:00

Yesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk.
Crushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt.
We are both the snake and the wheel.
There are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable
Truth of being, here, at the edge of lasting
and not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect,
Time lifted above time by time.

From "A Treatise on Poetry: IV Natura" by Czeslaw Milosz, trans. by Robert Hass

Two Studies of a Bird of Paradise, Rembrandt, 1630

"Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?"

2011-01-30T12:27:00.002-06:00

"Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey.
"Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?"

"It is evening," the poet said, "and I am listening because some
one may call from the village, late though it be.
"I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of
eager eyes beg for music to break their silence and speak for
them.
"Who is there to weave their passionate songs, if I sit on the
shore of life and contemplate death and the beyond?

"The early evening star disappears.
"The glow of a funeral pyre slowly dies by the silent river.
"Jackals cry in chorus from the courtyard of the deserted house
in the light of the worn-out moon.
"If some wanderer, leaving home, come here to watch the night and
with bowed head listen to the murmur of the darkness, who is
there to whisper the secrets of life into his ears if I,
shutting my doors, should try to free myself from mortal bonds?

"It is a trifle that my hair is turning grey.
"I am ever as young or as old as the youngest and the oldest of
this village.
"Some have smiles, sweet and simple, and some a sly twinkle in
their eyes.
"Some have tears that well up in the daylight, and others tears
that are hidden in the gloom.
They all have need for me, and I have no time to brood over the
afterlife.
"I am of an age with each, what matter if my hair turns grey?"

From The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore, 1915

Seated old man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Paul Muldoon on poetry as a Class A drug

2011-01-25T19:49:00.000-06:00

Five Dialogues, Paul Muldoon from Wunderkammer Magazine on Vimeo.

"Nothing can be done about flowers falling away"

2011-01-24T22:47:00.000-06:00

With a cup of wine, listening to songs of new words,
In the same pavilion tower and last year's weather.
The sun is setting in the west, but when will it return?

Nothing can be done about flowers falling away,
The swallows, seeming acquaintances, are coming back.
Along fragrant paths of the little garden I alone pace to and fro.

Yan Shu, Song Dynasty
Uncredited translation from China Page

Painting by Huang Quan, 10th century

"There will be little enough to forget"

2011-01-20T21:21:00.000-06:00

There will be little enough to forget —
The flight of crows,
A wet street,
The way the wind blows,
Moonrise: sunset:
Three words the world knows —
Little enough to forget.

From "1892 - 19—" by Archibald MacLeish.*

Figures On The Noordeinde, The Hague, Floris Arntzenius (1864-1925)

*One of the things that took me away from the blog last fall was a fiction writing workshop with Richard Bausch. It was a great experience, a gift on many levels. One of the pleasures it brought me was a renewed acquaintance with MacLeish's poetry, which I sought out after Bausch cited him as a an unjustly neglected poet. While a lot of his work doesn't seem to have held up very well, there are some beautiful pieces that shouldn't be forgotten. Check out MacLeish's Collected Poems.

This announcement will startle few, and few will be grieved by it.*

2011-01-19T12:59:00.000-06:00

I'm back. Poe's birthday seems like a good moment to return from the void. Hope to account for myself in posts to come. Meanwhile, in honor of the day, I recommend to you one of my favorite short stories by Madison Smartt Bell, "Small Blue Thing" -- a clever tribute to the birthday boy.

And here's a short animated film that takes off the beginning of "The Tell-Tale Heart":

*Taking liberties with the line from Rufus Griswold's famous obituary for Poe: "This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it." Read the whole obit here.

"your quick astute amazements"

2010-11-12T19:34:00.001-06:00

If they have compared you
to the fox it’s for the prodigious
leap, for the scud of your feet
which unite and divide, which scuff
and freshen the gravel (your balcony,
the streets near the Cottolengo, the field,
the tree on which shivers my name,
happy, humble, and defeated)—or perhaps only
for the luminous wave which you shed
from your tender almond eyes,
for your quick astute amazements,
for the hurt
of torn feathers which your childlike hand
can give with one clasp ... (more)

Eugenio Montale, translated by Alan Marshfield

Tanzender weiblicher Akt (Dancing Nude), Christian Rohlfs, 1927

"The river in its abundance"

2010-11-07T11:10:00.001-06:00

Eros at Temple Stream
by Denise Levertov

The river in its abundance
many-voiced
all about us as we stood
on a warm rock to wash

slowly
smoothing in long
sliding strokes
our soapy hands along each other’s
slippery cool bodies

quiet and slow in the midst of
the quick of the
sounding river

our hands were
flames
stealing upon quickened flesh until

no part of us but was
sleek and
on fire

From Selected Poems

Liebespaar, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1908

"Not thinking anything"

2010-11-02T12:34:00.000-05:00

I think...I think says the brain...
But the little spire with the eyes of ecstasy
On the brain's dome is the life,
Not thinking anything,
But flaming...little fool you will cease
Flaming when you flame up to peace.

From "Doors to Peace" by Robinson Jeffers

Moonlight on the Loire, Henri-Joseph Harpignies, 1885

For a discussion of environmental ethics...

2010-10-26T10:31:00.000-05:00

...and a lot of other things, mostly not including literature, click here to read my interview with Margaret Atwood. And when you're done with that (or with deciding to skip it), please cruise around Chapter 16 for all the other good stuff there — for example, Ed Tarkington's review of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, and Charlotte Pence's Q&A with Marge Piercy.

Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), Thomas Cole, 1825

(Cole's painting seemed fitting to Atwood's discussion of the environment, and the post-apocalyptic settings of her speculative fiction. Cole's aesthetic seems very much in sync with Atwood's generally, I think. You can see a bunch more of his work here.)

Peacock, Manguel, Boldini...

2010-10-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

Apologies for being so scattershot with my posts in recent days. Life is a full-time job lately. Since I've been away so much, I thought I'd do a multipurpose post that hits all my usual topics. Here I give you:

1. Antique smut — Reclining nude, Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931)

2. A link to my last piece at Chapter 16 — My interview with poet Molly Peacock is online here.

3. A mention of perfume — Since there were only a few people interested in the Enigma draw, you can all have a sample. Lisa BTB, Margi, and StellaP, please email me your addresses!

4. Something of interest off-blog — Here's a great essay by Alberto Manguel, "The Muse of Impossibility."

5. Poetry — I'll be posting my interview with Margaret Atwood tomorrow, so here's a bit of one of her poems to whet your appetite.

I watch you
watching my face
indifferently
yet with the same taut curiosity
with which you might regard
a suddenly discovered part
of your own body:
a wart perhaps,

and I remember that
you said
in childhood you were
a tracer of maps
(not making but) moving
a pen or a forefinger
over the courses of the rivers,
the different colours
that mark the rise of mountains;
a memorizer
of names (to hold
these places
in their proper places)

So now you trace me
like a country’s boundary
or a strange new wrinkle in
your own wellknown skin
and I am fixed, stuck
down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mind’s continent...

From "The Circle Game" by Margaret Atwood

There, I think that covers all the bases. Back tomorrow with Atwood. Y'all enjoy your week.

"Soul, one's life is one's enemy"

2010-10-20T10:28:00.001-05:00

Against weather, and the random
Harpies — mood, circumstance, the laws
Of biography, chance, physics —
The unseasonable soul holds forth,
Eager for form as a renowned
Pedant, the emperor's man of worth,
Hereditary arbiter of manners.

Soul, one's life is one's enemy.
As the small children learn, what happens
Takes over, and what you were goes away.

From "Ceremony for Any Beginning" by Robert Pinsky

Two Children in a Stable, Madeline Green (1884-1947)

Dolor of Autumn: Enigma

2010-10-17T12:11:00.001-05:00

This fall I've been making a weekly trip to Memphis, which is about a three hour drive away. I go down in the early afternoon and head back home around 8:30 pm, which puts me on a long, dark stretch of interstate at a time when there's very little traffic. I don't really mind it -- in fact, I enjoy the utter solitude. But at some point in the trip I always start flashing on the face of the The Man from Carnival of Souls. Funny how all it takes is the right set of factors -- i.e., isolation and darkness -- for the make-believe ghosts to come out. (The real ghosts always show up when you least expect them, like last Christmas when my father passed me in a Ford Focus as I drove to my friend's house for a holiday dinner. He's been dead for years but I swear it was him.)

Anyway, this is supposed to be a perfume post. What's all this talk of ghosts? Well, the theme here is the dolor of autumn, and what's more dolorous than the feeling of being pursued by ghosts, fictional or otherwise? And yes, I do have a perfume that evokes just such a feeling: Enigma, a largely forgotten fragrance from the largely forgotten Alexandra de Markoff line. Fragrantica calls it a woody oriental, and that's true enough, if the wood in question is musty, worm-eaten and dark with age. Although Enigma starts out with a blast of generic, floral-tinged spice, it quickly becomes a sort of eau de haunted house, with a grim bitterness that overwhelms its deceptive introductory smile. If you tested it blind, you'd swear it was some edgy niche creation, rather than a 70s era mainstream. I give it high marks for originality, though it is so unsettling and insistent -- kinda like those ghosts -- that I generally wear it only when I'm home alone and feel like surrendering to its strangeness.

Leave a comment or email me to enter the draw for a sample of Enigma. Or, if you don't want to wait to be creeped out, just watch the end of Carnival of Souls:

Photo above is a still from the movie. If you've never seen Carnival of Souls, you can watch the whole thing here.

Mommy and me

2010-10-16T19:32:00.000-05:00

(Last Friday was my mother's 74th birthday, and the occasion reminded me of this post I wrote a couple of years ago. Although, as usual, I'm blathering on about me here, I'm also paying tribute to her.)

I caught a glimpse of my mother in a department store mirror the other day. There she was—her loose, energetic walk, her vaguely blissful expression, the distinctive tilt of her head.

It was me, of course.

Middle-aged women are supposed to be horrified when they see themselves morphing into their mothers, but I can’t say I mind it much. My mother is an attractive person. She’s in her seventies now, and she’s still lively and curious. She goes dancing every weekend with her boyfriend, who’s a bit younger than her. He’s got a few dozen acres of land out in the sticks, where the two of them have separate houses but a shared existence. They enjoy a menagerie of dogs, goats and chickens, and while neither of them has a lot of money, they’re happy and do as they please. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I could do a lot worse than to end up like my mother.

Still, it was a shock to see her looking back at me in the mirror, because I’ve always been so certain that I’m nothing like my mother. Physically, we’re built on completely different models. We have the same dark eyes—and, alas, the same freckles—but there the resemblance ends. From my soft facial features to my long skinny feet, I am unmistakably my father’s child. Neither of us is a bombshell, but my mother has always been very attractive to men. Even now they follow her around like puppies. I have never had that problem, although actual puppies do seem to find me alluring.

In personality and temperament, we might as well be different species. My mother is charming, caring, a people pleaser who loves attention. She’s no doormat, but she’s prone to hero worship. I am a bookish introvert, soft-hearted but basically selfish, and (my father’s influence again) I’ve got an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide. My mother is a natural mediator, whereas I am opinionated and argumentative. One of her favorite sayings is, “There’s always a happy medium.” You would have to hold a gun to my head to get me to say that.

Still, there’s obviously some powerful genetic inheritance from her that is beginning to show itself as I age. It’s strange to be reminded that characteristics we think of as profoundly our own—even ones as seemingly individual as a facial expression—are built into our DNA; stranger still to think that they can be wired to hide themselves for decades, emerging when the organism hits just the right level of decay. Not that I’m complaining. As genetic time bombs go, a quirky walk beats the hell out of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Like I said, I’ll be happy to have an old age like my mother’s—and who knows? I may yet find out what it’s like to have men follow me around like puppies.

Peggy Shippen (wife of Benedict Arnold) and Daughter, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1790-1830). Image from Wikimedia Commons. There's an interesting old article about Arnold and Shippen here

In case you need this as much as I do...

2010-10-14T21:29:00.002-05:00

"O hushed October morning mild"

2010-10-14T20:26:00.001-05:00

We are well into fall here, though it's still pretty warm. The leaves are at a wonderful point of turning -- warm autumn color touched with lingering green. There was a fierce little storm Tuesday night, and the next morning the trees were draped in mist. There was a wonderful perfume in the air, a fine mixture of damp greenery, fallen leaves and wet earth, traveling on a sweet northern breeze.

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.

From "October" by Robert Frost

The Emerald Pool, Albert Bierstadt, 1870

Early risers

2010-10-10T19:25:00.000-05:00

"Early risers feel at ease with each other, perhaps because, unlike those who sleep late, they are given to understatement of their own achievements. Orion, the most widely traveled, says literally nothing. The coffee pot, from its first soft gurgle, underclaims the virtues of what simmers within. The owl, in his trisyllabic commentary, plays down the story of the night's murders. The goose on the bar, rising briefly to a point of order in some inaudible anserine debate, lets fall no hint that he speaks with the authority of all the far hills and the sea."

From A Sand County Almanac ("October"), Aldo Leopold.

A Faggot Gatherer At Dawn, Iulii Iul'evich (Julius) Klever (1850-1924)

"the nothing it cares for me"

2010-10-07T21:23:00.000-05:00

How did we do? A medium job,
which is well above average. But because
she had opened her heart to me as far
as she did, I saw her fierce privacy,

like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung
with disappointments, and I knew
that to love her I must love the tree
and the nothing it cares for me.

From "The Cloister" by William Matthews

Leda and the swan, Giovanni Boldini, 1884

"the innocence of your fragrance"

2010-10-01T20:05:00.001-05:00

Because the rare perfume

Of your swanlike paleness,

Because the innocence

Of your fragrance,

Ah, because all your being,

Music so piercing,

Clouds of lost angels,

Tones and scents,

Has by soft cadences

With its correspondences,

Lured my subtle heart, Oh

Let it be so!

From "To Clymène" by Paul Verlaine, translated by A.S Kline, text from Poetry in Translation

Study to the Morning, Philipp Otto Runge, 1809

"We can never be with loss too long"

2010-09-30T15:42:00.000-05:00

We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone ...

From "At Thomas Merton's Grave" by Spencer Reece

(A profile of Spencer Reece can be found here.)

Haystacks, Autumn, Jean-François Millet, 1873