Ivan Klíma on Vítĕzslav Nezval

Vítĕzslav Nezval: A remarkable member of the Avant-garde

Foreword to Vítĕzslav Nezval: Prague with Fingers of Rain, translated by Ewald Osers (Bloodaxe Books, 2009)

Vítĕzslav Nezval, one of the greatest (but also most controversial) Czech poets, lived in a country whose history was rich in reversals and paradoxical changes, but also a country where poetry enjoyed extraordinary interest. Not only monthlies, but even the most serious Czech daily paper would carry a poem on their title pages. Some of the poets (even some rather bad ones) were considered national bards and every new collection they published became a social event. This was of course due to historical circumstances - it was the poets who became the main symbol of the national revival and the resurrection of the Czech language, and thus the birth of the modern Czech nation. The poetry of the nineteenth century was conservative and often didactic; one of its aims, repeatedly reiterated, was to prove that the Czech language was capable of expressing the most complex situations and that it was possible to translate into it the greatest works of world literature. Not until the end of the century did poetry begin to diversify and to reach artistic standards comparable to the poetry of the rest of Europe.

Almost symbolically, Nezval was born at the turn of the century - in the spring of 1900. He belonged to the exceptionally strong generation of poets that included the future laureate of the Nobel Prize Jaroslav Seifert (one year younger than Nezval) and the gifted Jiří Wolker (who, however, died before he was able to develop his talent to the hights of his generational coevals). This generation also included the outstanding prose writer Vladislav Vančura (who was just under ten years older), as well as Karel Čapek, who was already internationally famous as a prose writer and playwright at a time when Nezval published his first poetry. Even though Karel Čapek never wrote poetry, he influenced the language of a whole generation by his superbly translated anthology of modern French poetry.

That generation was, while still young, marked by three historical upheavals - the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, followed by attempted revolutions in Europe, and finally by the emergence of an independent Czechoslovak Republic.

Nezval succeeded during the war in avoiding military service (though he lost several friends in the war); what influenced him much more at the time was the Bolshevik Revolution. Like most young poets he sympathised with it, he believed that socialism would do away with poverty and enable the socially weaker ones to lead a dignified life. In his first, youthfully naive (but formally astonishingly ripe and unconventional), poems we still encounter a social note or the belief that an Uprising is impending.

People
Look into each other's eyes
Into the hearts
No one above you
All in a circle
Holding hands
All of you
Each has his own mother country
In your mother tongue
Thunder forth
All of you
- Already we know
This moment a world will rise from its swoon -
It's breathing

At twenty-four he joined the Communist Party, but it seems that he was fascinated not so much by Lenin's utopian (and bloody) vision as by the Russian modern movement, which in the first years after the Revolution was for many artists identical with the idea of a poetry liberated from all constraints and bourgeois prejudices. Years later Nezval reminisced: ‘To us the Soviet Union was an untouchable country ... There, poetry had freed itself from trite symbolism, academism and tedious realistic miniature. We came to know the grand poetry of Mayakovskiy and his friends ... Even though we had been students on Montmartre and Montparnasse, none of us could truly regard himself as a "westerner", because the honest avant-garde in the West understood itself with the honest Soviet avant-garde...’

Although he declared himself for the Communist movement and also for the movement of revolutionary avant-garde artists in Czechoslovakia that called itself "Devĕtsil", a group aiming at what they called "proletarian art", Communist ideas gradually diksappeared from Nezval's work. For a revolutionary he lacked one basic ability - the ability to hate and to write gloomily about a world that had not yet been "cleansed" by the proletarian revolution. Nezval was the very opposite - an essential optimist, a hedonist who enjoyed whatever life had in store for him. In a letter to a friend he admits: ‘Teige, Vančura and a few of his friends have realised that we shall not be redeemed by the art of social hope, that the simple people are not asking social experience from us, and that proletarian art can be practised without official sentimentality...above all, that we do not lack non-militancy or the courage to take off and fly cheerfully.’

One might say that an original and effective rhyme (never mind an evening in the company of friends or a pretty girl) was more important to Nezval than any revolutionary slogan.

Nezval was one of those exceptional creative persons for whom everything they encounter turns into poetry. The lightness of his verses is stunning (and at times dangerous to the poet himself: of his eighty-five titles by no means every one is superb). His ability to find countless metaphors for even the most everyday things was downright extraordinary: his verses, whether free or rhymed, had a magical power of insinuating themselves into the reader's ear and engraving themselves indelibly in his memory. I recall how enchanted I was by the refrain in one of his best poems, Edison:

But there was something beautiful to catch my breath
Courage and pleasure over life and death

I have mentioned Čapek's anthology of translations from modern French poetry. It was, above all, his congenial translation of Apollinaire's Zones that influenced Nezval's first collections. He himself characterised his beginnings as follows: ‘More than anything did we break and cut down forms, more than anything did we renounce forms, for repeated sentiments no longer captivated us; we raised the banner of an art that was able to utter everything for which the language of form had remained mute. I could now permit myself to make any theme the subject of my poetic interest and there was no danger that I would "develop" it the way the older poetry did. As when we water our garden with a watering can, a theme would become for me the subject of centrifugal rays.’

Later, on his frequent visits to Paris, he made the acqaintance of André Breton and became a passionate follower of surrealism.

That period (from which his poems about Prague date) may be regarded as the peak period of his creativity. Nezval had in him that which characterises a genius - the need forever to seek and find something new, a need further enhanced by the atmosphere of his day, which regarded novelty, freshness and rebellion against any tradition as its highest value, a period when artists like Picasso abandoned their style as soon as they had found it and hastened to find a new one. About surrealism Nezval recorded these personal remarks: ‘Has not surrealism come to us just in time, has there not been a need for this moral and intellectual crisis in people who have passed thirty and who have so or so many courageous works behind them, and does not a man of thirty who has achieved this or that find himself on an inclined plane from which the way leads straight to resignation and betrayal...?’

It should be remembered that the avant-garde which he then avowed not only had a demonstratively positive attitude to the Soviet revolution, but also displayed a liking for manifestos and theoretical proclamations, though - fortunately - the creative writers were not greatly bothered with their requirements. Thus, Nezval's poems about Prague, which the English reader is offered here in Ewald Osers' fine translation, are not easily assigned to any school or movement. They are simply the original poems of an inspired poet at the peak of his creative powers.

For a country lad from Moravia, Prague, from the moment he first stood there, became a theme from which emanated "centrifugal rays". Prague between the two wars differed in many respects from the city today. From the but recently collapsed monarchy it retained both its bilinguality and its liking for cafés, wine-cellars and taverns, some of which became famous as the meeting places of writers and artists. Several dozen literary and art periodicals were published in Prague. Czech artists were at home there as much as German or Jewish ones (Franz Kafka was still alive, as was Max Brod, the streets of the city still bore the traces of its natives Werfel and Rilke), there were Czech and German secondary schools and universities, there was a Czech and a German theatre and the mutual contacts of the cultures had a significant influence on the creative environment. There was a lively night life as well as literary discussions. The avant-garde professed collectivism and the protagonists of its ideas were united by ties that were often unaffected by years or frontiers. The person with most influence on Nezval was probably his friend Karel Teige, one of the chief theoreticians of the avant-garde.

In that precipitate inter-war period avant-garde theories influenced all the arts. ‘With contempt for bourgeois art,’ Nezval recalled, ‘and its psychologising filth and seeming glitter we let ourselves be guided by the correct goal, over to the roots, to the roots of man's inner life. That this was not to the liking of even some of our comrades... over that we didn't lose any sleep.’

On the eve of the Second World War, however, the thirty-year-old, or nearly forty-year-old, poet again found himself on an inclined plane. Decisive for his decisions this time were not so much artistic manifestos as political events - above all, the criminal trials in Moscow. While most of his friends in the avant-garde refused to accept them, Nezval by then did not wish to get into conflict with "the comrades". He preferred to part with his friends and his work until then. He left, or rather disbanded, the surrealist group he had helped to found.

The "comrades" seized power in Czechoslovakia after the war, and the avant-garde - totally ignoring the appeals of the Soviet ideologists who demanded that art should serve the building of socialism, the proletariat and its class struggle, and who recognised socialist realism as the only movement - suddenly became the target of furious attacks. Nezval's friend Karel Teige was labelled "the chief representative of the Trotskyite agency in Czech culture". Some of Nezval's avant-garde friends committed suicide and Nezval himself, however loyally he behaved, was in danger.

Unlike Karel Teige, who refused to yield to the pressure (he died just a few days before he was due to be arrested), Nezval continued along the road he had chosen at the time of the Moscow trials. With the lightness typical of him wrote a long servile poem in praise of one of the bloodiest tyrants in history, Stalin. Moreover, he added a prettily rhymed propaganda poem, Song of Peace, in which, at odds with his temperament, he cursed criminal imperialism in the spirit of Stalinist slogans.

By this unexpectedly degraded poetry he forged for himself a solid shield: none of the Party ideologists could any longer attack the man who had sung the praises of the ruling dictator and fighter for peace. For many admirers of Nezval his propaganda writings from the early fifties were not only a sign of the decline of his poetic powers, but also a stain on his entire oeuvre.

Nezval himself probably had no illusions about this work: for him his propagandist versifications were a tactical manoeuvre to preserve himself and the whole of his past work.

As the most highly acknowledged poet of the regime, honoured with the title National Artist he could now do what no one else could: during the period of the Stalinist darkness he published his entire pre-war oeuvre. I remember to this day how, on that desert that had spread over the Czech book market and engulfed it with socialist-realist literary refuse, Nezval's pre-war poetry had the effect of living water, of an unexpected and unbelievable oasis. As soon as, following Stalin's death, the worst terror somewhat abated, Nezval did whatever he could to cleanse his dead or rejected friends and once more called for freedom for the artists as an indispensable prerequisite of creative work.

When he died in 1958 we printed in the periodical Kvĕten, which the younger generation was allowed for a time to publish, not an obituary - which would have had to deal critically with the profound contrast between his pre-war and post-war work - but a poem that clearly revealed his real attitude to life:

Lift off the burden of all heavy things
Though destitute, walk with the step of kings
Like cypress, moon and friend of dreams you'll try
to raise the mighty sea up to the sky

Let wings of bees your human injuries dress
Fly without wings and rudderless
Make light of human fate, count death for nothing
and fly up to the heavens with your coffin!

Vítĕzslav Nezval  (1900-58) was one of the leading Surrealist poets of the 20th century. Prague with Fingers of Rain is his classic 1936 collection in which Prague’s many-sided life – its glamorous history, various weathers, different kinds of people – becomes symbolic of what is contradictory and paradoxical in life itself. Mixing real and surreal, Nezval evokes life’s contradictoriness in a series of psalm-like poems of puzzled love and generous humanity. Nezval was perhaps the most prolific writer in Prague during the 1920s and 30s. An original member of the avant-garde group of artists Devetsil (Butterbur, literally: Nine Forces), he was a founding figure of the Poetist movement. His numerous books included poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays and translations. His best work is from the interwar period. Along with Karel Teige, Jindrich Štyrský, and Toyen, Nezval frequently travelled to Paris, engaging with the French surrealists. Forging a friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard, he was instrumental in founding The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 (the first such group outside of France), serving as editor of the group’s journal Surrealismus. His mastery of language and prosody was unparalleled – contemporaries referred to it as wizardry. Alongside with surrealist poetry he wrote poems that sounded like genuine folksongs and for some time he teased the Czech literary public by the anonymous publication of three books attributed to a fictitious Robert David – one of 52 Villonesque ballades, another of 100 sonnets, all in strict classical form. His identity was guessed by the critics only because ‘no one else would be able to do that’.

Ivan Klíma is a leading Czech novelist and playwright. Born in 1931, he survived four years of his childhood in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin (see 'A Childhood in Terezin', Granta 44, 1993, pp.191-208). During the post-Stalin "thaw", he worked as a publisher's editor and with Milan Kundera and Miroslav Holub on the radical arts journal Kvĕten. He spent two years in exile after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and was persecuted and prevented from publishing (except in samizdat) on his return and had to work as a hospital orderly. Much of his fiction has been translated into English and published in Britain and the US, notably A Ship Named Hope (1970), My Merry Mornings (1985), Love and Garbage (1986), Judge on Trial (1991), My Golden Trades (1992), Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994), The Ultimate Intimacy (1997), Lovers for a Day (1999), No Saints or Angels (2001) and Love and Garbage (2002). In 2002 he was honoured with the Medal for Outstanding Service to the Czech Republic and the Franz Kafka literary prize.

Prague with Fingers of Rain by Vítĕzslav Nezval is published by Bloodaxe Books, price £8.95.

Siddhartha Bose on Indian poets

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets,

edited by Jeet Thayil

(Bloodaxe Books/Fulcrum,

2008): £12, 412 pages.

Review by Siddhartha Bose posted from The Wolf.

Recently, Aravind Adiga became the second Indian novelist in three years to win the Booker Prize. Amitav Ghosh, his older and more esteemed compatriot, also made the shortlist. Earlier this year, Midnight’s Children, the fantastical reimagining of post-Independence India and its most powerful and seething city, Bombay, was voted the best novel to have won the award in its forty-year history. These facts corroborate the extent to which the Indian-English novel—post-Salman Rushdie—is a visible entity in contemporary world literature. In contrast, the Indian poet writing in English occupies an uncertain, almost invisible space.

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, edited by one of the country’s finest living poets, Jeet Thayil, should be considered a significant event. It is an urgently contemporary and relevant book and deserves to rectify gaps in knowledge, especially in Britain, where Indian-English poetry rarely enters literary conversation. Bloodaxe should be commended for publishing some of the more interesting voices from Indian poetry in English, poets who view risk-taking in form and subject as a given.

In a striking passage from his long poem, ‘Missing Person’, the Bombay poet Adil Jussawala creates the persona of a poet condemned to obscurity, which is possibly representative of the Indian voice:

Bright sparks

on the international back-slapping circuit

are picking up prizes like static.

He’s for the dark.

The unnamed anti-hero of a poet, for whom ‘Exile’s a broken axle’, recalls Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. His voice is simultaneously rough and erudite, and he speaks from the underbelly of steamy, raw-nerved Bombay. It is a voice that reflects on its own insignificance and, in doing so, serves witness to an emerging and vital consciousness in contemporary poetry.

The most successful moments in Thayil’s anthology seek to give centre stage to such marginalised voices. In many ways, these voices represent the story of Indian-English poetry as a whole. Thayil wants this book to be ‘an introduction to an undeservedly little-known literature’. Many of the poems belonging to this literature inevitably address the modern, Indian identity as being perpetually hyphenated. Perhaps it is reductive to speak of a single identity in a country with over twenty official languages, English being only one of them. For example, one of the most popular Indian poets in America, Agha Shahid Ali, was a ‘Kashmiri-American’, to whom Thayil accurately refers as ‘a self-product of three cultures, Muslim, Hindu and Western, and a permanent “triple exile”’. The subject of Shahid Ali’s poetry is the trauma of history and the violence of cultural conquest, from colonialism to the dispute over Kashmir. Yet his language and idiom are reminiscent of the classical beauty of Urdu verse, as in ‘Farewell’:

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked

in each other’s reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are

found like this centuries later in this country

I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms.

Shahid Ali’s experience of living in many cultures and languages, as well as in their necessary histories, allows him a vast, politically engaged contemporary vision. He died of brain cancer in America and is little known in the UK.

The plural and hybrid voices of postcolonial exile and migration often create the most arresting modes of expression. This postcolonial vision is fractured, multifocal, and mutating. Rushdie has spoken of the ‘double-perspective’ inherent to the Indian personne de lettres, which works through the epistemological frames provided by the ‘East’ and ‘West’. One of the aims of this anthology is to chart this ‘chutneyfied’ lineage of Indian poetry—the mongrelisation of English, American, and Indian languages and identities—which Thayil claims is as rich as prose written by Indians in English. He resurrects, for a new readership, great poets like Arun Kolatkar and Dom Moraes, accentuates the inventiveness of contemporary writers like Mukta Sambrani, Vivek Narayanan, and Mani Rao, while also introducing us to lost renegades like Gopal Honalgerre and Lawrence Bantleman.

In Britain, Thayil himself is virtually unknown, although his collection, English (Rattalapax, 2003) ranks as one of the key publications in recent Indian-American poetry. Hailing from Kerala, Bombay, New York, and Hong Kong, his new work experiments with ‘inverted structure over strict verse forms’, while chronicling the afterglow of heroin addiction. ‘The Heroin Sestina’, published in this anthology, juxtaposes formal mastery with a brutal honesty that is rare in contemporary poetry:

[...] I’m saying, I know

the pull of it: the skull rings time

so beautiful, so low

you barely hear it. Itch this blind toad taste.

When you said, ‘I mean it, we live like stones,’

you broke something in me only heroin

could fix [...]

There is no affectation here, no problem of burdensome intertextual allusion. Even when the poet speaks to Baudelaire, remembering his ‘wolf’s heart’ as he wanders through Mexico City, the referencing is intimate, whisper-like, wise.

In contrast, for a poet as self-reflexively postmodern as Rukmini Bhaya Nair, the double perspective of postcolonial legacy is further complicated through negotiations with gender: ‘Considerthefemalebodyyourmost / Basictextanddontforgetitsslokas I / Whatpalmleafcandoforusitdoes / Therealgapsremainforwomentoclose I’ (from ‘Genderrole’). Here, the creation of identity locates itself within the interaction of ancient Hindu ritual and its slokas (prayers), spliced with reconstructions of post-structuralist philosophy. The compound words mirror the sound of Sanskrit invocation. For Mani Rao, the experience of gender is more visceral, where ‘Snakes run from burning skin’ (‘Untitled’). Mukta Sambrani, in her highly inventive Broomrider’s Book of the Dead, reflects on the nature of storytelling in a fashion reminiscent of the French nouveau roman:

Tell me the story of the swallowed plum pit or girl carried away to den of ants, silence for breaking. Break it. Was it a boy imprisoned by carpenter birds? Not woodpeckers. No. And was it a boy? Break. Who gets on the wrong train?

Jane Bhandari’s remarkable ‘Steel Blue’ bleeds Derek Jarman into words, through an alchemical seeing of the Bombay sea. ‘[U]nder rain-clouds was blued steel’ becomes ‘the navy of a raven’s wing’, and then morphs into spiderwebs that hold the memories of childhood. For the more conventionally minded reader, one notices the craftsmanship of Tishani Doshi, the mythmaking of Meena Alexander, and the humour of one of the presiding deities of the Bombay school, Eunice de Souza: ‘It pays to be a poet. / You don’t have to pay prostitutes’ (‘Poem for a Poet’).

Among the male poetry brigade, Srikanth Reddy’s play with form creates fascinating jigsaw puzzles, with ‘twilight in a box’ (‘Burial Practice’). In ‘Fundamentals of Esperanto’, Reddy reflects on the possibilities of meaning though language and also metaphor as translation:

Mi amass vin, bela amiko,

I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough.

There’s a man from Quebec in my head.

A friend to the purple martins.

Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows.

On the other hand, Sudesh Mishra’s poems, charting ‘dispersal by water’ in his native Fiji, work through an almost Williams-like directness and precision. The short poem below, ‘Suava; Skye’, whilst recalling ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, inverts metaphor and makes the reader confront it headlong, while celebrating, concurrently, the beauty of the environment and the natural world:

A half-spent

mosquito coil

mounted on an upended fork

buoyed

inside a squat jar

brimming with smoky water

is nothing

like the swan

he saw

that neutral day

arching

its ancient ashen neck

upon the flood

of a loch

crammed with brilliant sky.

Nothing like.

Similarly, the aforementioned Honnalgere, who once exchanged letters with Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden, brings a ‘reckless originality of thought’ to his poetry, which he expresses with a simplicity that is unnerving and strange:

She

with her

finger tips

touched his

tailbone

and waited for a reply

he said:

‘we have lost something else

with our lost tail.’ (‘The City’)

In the poem ‘Theme’, Honnalgere defamiliarises the female body with a similar strangeness:

‘there is a possibility / of breasts / becoming a theme / with coconut hard shells’. Here the complexity of thought and achieved simplicity of language hark back to the Zen koan, or the Taoist parable. Another previously overlooked figure of this anthology, Lawrence Bantleman, works through an almost surrealist imperative. His images are startling: ‘I’ve eaten Fish and in the place / Of centre bone a bomb / Smiles with a cherub’s face.’ (‘Sepuagesima’). For Thayil, this poet’s descent into obscurity and alcoholism in Canada symbolises the neglect that surrounds the Indian poet.

Significantly, much of the editorial work for this anthology was done for a special issue of Fulcrum (Issue 4, 2005), arguably the most innovative and internationally minded of current American journals. Thayil has added sixteen poets to the original fifty-six, covering the spectrum of post-Independence poetry. The very concept of the ‘Indian’ poet is addressed and reconstructed. Many live as cultural exiles in places as diverse as New York, Berkeley, London, and Melbourne; others are resident in the varied cultural centres of India; some, like Daljit Nagra, have never lived in the country of their ancestors. Thayil makes a special case of the link between Indian and American poets, claiming that it ‘goes back to Tagore, whose first appearance in the West was in Poetry, at the behest of Ezra Pound.’ A significant number of the poets represented in the anthology have either studied, or presently teach at, American universities.

If there is a complaint to be made, then I would say that there are a few too many poets in this selection. My interest wanes when I read lines like ‘... I hear the flutter of light feet / on the warm earth’, or clichéd references to ‘holy India’. However, many of the more idiosyncratic and interesting poets were first published by a small press in Calcutta, Writers Workshop. Run by one of the foremost Sanskrit scholars of our time, Professor P. Lal, this press has also published first collections of internationally renowned poets like Philip Nikolayev.

I will end by turning to the quintessential Bombay poet, Arun Kolatkar. In Marathi, he radicalised the language, forming the avant-garde along with Dilip Chitre and Namdeo Dhashal. His first collection in English, Jejuri, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976. In 2005, the New York Review Books Classics published a new edition of the book, which Rushdie called ‘one of the great treasures of modern Indian literature’. The poems in the Bloodaxe selection are from Kala Ghoda Poems, published in 2004, the year of Kolatkar’s death.

Kala Ghoda is a vibrant arts district of South Bombay, bringing together wealth and poverty, the cool and the seedy. At first, the speaker of the poem-cycle is a grotesque pie-dog—which resembles ‘a seventeenth-century map of Bombay / with its seven islands’—emblematic of the bastardised, hybrid nature of the city. The ‘city reconstructs itself’ through the dog’s vision. In a linked poem, ‘The Ogress’, the titular figure’s face is half ‘all scar tissue / and looks / more like a side of bacon’. She washes a boy, her shins ‘overrun by swirling / galaxies of backsliding foam / that collide, / form and re-form... / the curved space / of his slippery body, / black as wet slate’. An old fisherwoman eats her breakfast of bread and gravy, while a ‘motheaten kitten’ devours the shrimps she sells. The pie-dog can ‘almost taste her saliva’. Through humour, immaculate detail, and strange metaphor, the poet creates the megalopolis that, in turn, gives birth to the poems of its adopted sons and daughters.

Twenty-first–century Bombay is going through unprecedented growth and shocking urban displacement, a messy process that is reflected in the clamour of its buzzing art world, its film industry, and its media. It is fitting that Bloodaxe’s vital and important anthology of contemporary Indian poetry closes with the unique vision of one of Bombay’s master poets.

CD Wright interview

The Wolf Interview: C.D. Wright

In 2007 C.D. Wright’s Like Something Flying Backwards was published in the UK by Bloodaxe. Its selection was expanded from Steal Away: selected and new poems (Copper Canyon, 2003), which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize. Prior to this C.D. had published eleven collections in the US, including Deepstep Come Shining (1998) and Just Whistle (1993). Like Something Flying Backwards includes work from those and other earlier books, as well as new work from her latest US collection, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon, 2008), which has just been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. She has received numerous literary awards and currently teaches at Brown University, Rhode Island. Regarded as ‘One of America’s oddest, best and most appealing poets’, C.D. lives with her husband, the poet Forrest Gander, with whom she edited Lost Road Publishers for many years.

Lynn Keller: You were chosen to be a MacArthur Fellow in 2004. In receiving that marvellously generous ‘genius award’ that comes to its recipients out of the blue, you acquired a singular honour, perhaps some burdensome expectations, and a wonderful opportunity. What has that award meant to you, and what has it enabled?

C.D. Wright: Like many people I have a conflicted relationship with the reward system—the obvious part being that although the dollars are always welcome, and can always be put to use (time, tuition, taxes), the exhilaration of being tapped is nevertheless very short-lived. On the heels of exhilaration comes the sense of being undeserving. Being selected, and being aware of the field, means being aware of the talent not being rewarded. In poetry, there is no shortage of talent; there is a surfeit. People who say otherwise aren’t reading enough or they are only reading the most visible, most rewarded. I am astonished by the spectacular ranks of the young who continue to commit to the demanding ‘call’ to poetry; by the ingenious strategies they employ to get the language to reveal its possibilities to us, indeed, our possibilities to us. I am humbled by the poets who practice to the end of their days with such integrity and sway. And among peers, where comparisons are most inevitable, it is easy to think of others whose work I take in deep with a high and generally healthy degree of envy. The MacArthur did not free me up to become an even better poet because my own psyche is too busy setting its traps, rather it kept the pressure on the weak spots always wrangling to defeat my strengths. So, it added another set of challenges, albeit challenges worth contesting.

LK: Toward the close of the introduction to the new text-only version of One Big Self you say, ‘The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is part of.’ And you go on to suggest that the aim of the book is to encourage readers to see prisoners—who are held ‘apart from’—‘as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least with our minds, we are more likely to register the implications.’ Yet, writing in the Chicago Review about composing your most recent volume, Rising, Falling, Hovering, you echo Auden’s assertion that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’. How do these two statements fit together, and what do you see as poetry’s possible efficacies? (A similar tension, I think, appears within Rising, Falling, Hovering: in the context of the American bombing of Iraq, you write, ‘This is no time for poetry’ (15); in contrast to Akhmatova, you say you cannot describe the horrors of this ‘media borne war’; you assert, ‘Nary a death arrested nor a hair of a harm averted / by any scrawny farrago of letters’ (23). Yet you do write the poem nonetheless, saying, ‘The first task is to recover the true words for being’ (28).

CDW: Well, who at this point in time can obliterate the tensions between feeling the utter necessity of poetry, and the near total disregard for its existence? Who can even explain its stubborn persistence in the larger culture? Recently I was asked to do an interview on National Public Radio for a programme that usually interviews people writing timely nonfiction or who are noted players in the sociopolitical sphere. I scheduled it in, and then I was notified I was to be replaced by someone with a history book just out, and the interview would probably be rescheduled later. The rescheduling never occurred. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me or the merits of my book, Rising, Falling, Hovering, I thought it had everything to do with the very capable interviewer not wanting to be caught out having to read a book of poetry; then having to discuss a book of poetry on the air for an hour. A reason was never given, so I have had to supply one as a matter of speculation. I recall watching a video of Robert Creeley being interviewed in which he said something to the effect that like playing the harmonica, it will come back, if that is what you do. Beckett’s ‘You must go on. / I can’t go on. / I’ll go on’, even as ‘[the voice] dies away in a vault [...] vast enough for a whole people…’ underlies any encounter with forces beyond one’s control. And along with many others of my generation, it is not a state of fragmentation in which I strive to write, nor of assimilation, but one of reintegration. The seams should show, but the container must hold. It’s one thing to be ascribed a plurality of selves, often pitted against one another, and quite another to be denied one’s quite particular selfhood.

Also, I have always found the isolation of poetry from other public discourses a hard pill to swallow. The only time I felt that I was truly successful in bridging the separation between poetry and an uninitiated public was when I undertook a multimedia project called The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas. Because I was able to enlist artists from other media and because there was a mechanism set up for the project to tour, I learned I could use the tools of one art form to enhance another. It might have an attraction for communities in which poetry did not normally have a snowball’s chance in hell of reaching without compromising poetry’s inherent resistance to ‘reach out’. You only have to touch on the difficulty of poetry and the infotainment-driven context in which it gets made to know the gap is more akin to an abyss. That said, I would not be characterized as a populist. I do believe more people could engage with literature than are even minimally exposed.

LK: Could you elaborate about being denied one’s quite particular selfhood? Where do you see or feel this happening, and how? Is this something you have experienced yourself?

CDW: I just wanted to make a small claim for an individual consciousness, and the singular expression thereof, not for a mere transcription of subjective experience, but for the intermediate values the mind brings to bear on what the physical individual picks up as she makes her one earthly pass. I wouldn’t go so far as to trumpet a unified, stable identity.

LK: My second question follows from your comments about using one art to enhance another. Visual art has been an important component in many of your works, and as I recall, you ended up working on Deepstep Come Shining almost as if it were a visual installation on the walls. Are there other ways, besides enlarging the audience for poetry, in which the visual arts or the visual imagination have changed your poetry or your sense of poetry?

CDW: Simply put, I like to look. I see things I would otherwise miss through someone else’s eyes. If I could paint it or photograph it, I wouldn’t write it down. Deepstep was as close as I have ever gotten to a conceptually visual work, including my method of composition—on the wall. The forms inherent to one medium are not transposable, but they do penetrate the others’ borders. And they throw up possibilities to one another. I am very fond of what I call layering, of texture, building up and cross-hatching, if you will. I have never aimed for a smooth surface. I don’t know where else I could have gotten these notions if I did not like to look, and did not see for myself certain prospects for an application in language. And what I cannot perform in one medium that another can, I can still operate alongside. In collaboration can we create a third language, as translation arguably does.

LK: The cover images on your recent books are unforgettable photos. I’d love to hear more about those images and their meaning for you.

CDW: For the past two decades my covers (with one exception) have been photographs by either Deborah Luster or Denny Moers. With Deborah there is an ongoing collaboration. With Denny there is a complementary relationship to the text. In both cases long-standing friendship and mutual regard for image and writing are givens. The covers render the book whole. One can always take an image from the Getty’s mega-reservoir or from a museum. For me it’s personal, intimate, connected, grounded. I have known Luster since my fitful scribbler beginnings in Arkansas, before she in fact chose the camera as her instrument. Denny is one of my oldest friends in Providence; I met his images before I met the individual. Both of these artists use very idiosyncratic, labour-intensive means to get at photography. I like that. I remember one collaboration with Deborah when she was developing on the roof wearing a WWII gas mask (a process that quickly thereafter could be mimicked in Photoshop). Denny chemically paints his black-and-white images in the darkroom, rendering each image unique. Aside from my husband, Forrest, these are the people with whom I regularly talk about, fester over, question art.

LK: Your two selected poems—Steal Away, published in the U.S. in 2003, and Like Something Flying Backwards published in 2007 in the UK—have very different cover images that create very different effects. The cover of Steal Away, in which a ladder curves over a stark hill, suggests to me a mysterious but calmly open-ended expansiveness; I’ve only seen a small reproduction on the web of the image that appears on the new and selected poems published in Britain by Bloodaxe, but the wildly costumed and masked figure standing in thigh-deep water that appears there strikes me as a far more frightening, perhaps almost frenzied image. Why are the images for these similar collections tonally so different (or would you read them in other ways than I have suggested)?

CDW: The cover of Steal Away by Denny Moers is of an ancient hedge (a privet? in Portugal?). The hedge is so gargantuan, a long contoured ladder leans against its body to climb to and over its top; a snug opening has been cut in the hedge to allow ground passage. The title is from a well-known spiritual, and is put to secular, albeit spectral, use in an early poem including the lines ‘steal away / shadows of old boyfriends’. It seemed applicable to the collection, which I actually hoped to becalm in part with the title, and there was an obvious synergy with the cover image.

Like Something Flying Backwards is a more startling, somewhat hysterical title. The cover by Deborah Luster is of a participant in a country Mardi Gras. The masked figure appears to be rising out of a circular pool of water, but is actually on his knees on a trampoline. And I thought this title, this image, reflected the more untameable aspects of the collection that I hoped to foreground. It is, as you say, a near opposite approach to some of the same material. And I thought the points where the two collections diverged supported both ‘takes’.

LK: How else does Like Something Flying Backwards differ from Steal Away, and what accounts for those differences?

CDW: Neil Astley, the editor of Bloodaxe, wanted a larger representation of the poetry as he rightly assumed he was introducing me to a UK audience; so he included all of Deepstep Come Shining, whereas that title was still in print in the US, and so only a sample appeared in Steal Away, the US selected poems.

I included in the Bloodaxe edition poems I had not yet, and might not be, printed in a collection in the US, such as the gangly narrative ‘A Farm Boy’, written as a tribute to my father on his ninetieth birthday, along with poems that would end up in Rising, Falling, Hovering. Even with a new and selected, a consistent priority of mine is to make a book—a book in its own right, not just a collection. The composition of the book is very central to my aesthetic, and that would obtain even if the work were only to appear online. A chronology is a useful place to start in creating a selection of one’s writing but not satisfying enough to constitute the sole organising principle for a book.

LK: Your last three books of poetry, Deepstep Come Shining, One Big Self, and Rising, Falling, Hovering, employ a shared technique of repeating phrases or parts of phrases that make up the collage, weaving them through. Yet it seems to me that these repetitions may serve different functions in the three works with their quite different preoccupations or projects.

CDW: Along the way I discovered, beginning with Just Whistle: a valentine, that repetition is a very flexible convention. It has obvious sonic value. It shifts, emphasizes, accretes, augments, alters meaning. Repetition has a built-in momentum and thus can be used to establish or at least insinuate cadence. Very pleasurable. And when you are working on a longer work, repetition serves as a significant point of return, in lieu of a predetermined destination or definite narrative arc. It provides a breath-catching point of orientation. Very serviceable.

LK: Rising, Falling, Hovering depends on a foregrounded integration of very personal and broadly cultural situations; the recurring wounds and scars, for instance, are on and between lovers, and also in colonized cultures, or in the war-torn international world. What do you see as the role played by the personal material—the erotic connections, the tensions within the family, etc.—reported by the first-person speaker in this particular work?

CDW: Micro/macro, the dissonant self, the discordant world it inhabits. Our messy lives play out in this anarchic arena.

LK: And in this ‘anarchic arena’, how do you think about the uses of lineated writing and of prose? When do you use which one and why?

CDW: I recall Angela Carter saying that when a student asked her a pointed question about dialogue, she said, she had never been adept at dialogue, so she avoided it whenever possible. Dialogue being fundamental to writing fiction, and lineation being fundamental to writing poetry, I felt a considerable amount of relief in her response. I have never been confident in my sense of lineation, conditioned as I was to more or less end-stopping. But with the computer, lineation could be tried out every which way without the physical labour of re-typing; so I began to work more with the eye, the visual field, and to come to some understanding of language against space. I learned to enjamb, of course, but I do not find that a reliably effective device. It’s a conspicuous manoeuvre with an obvious result. I found the caesura more attractive as it directed both eye and breath. I prefer cadence to measure, but I have not fully developed its possibilities. Prose is more inclusive. I just don’t always want to leave so much out. In composing a long work, prose and poetry activate one another, take a cue from the other. A paradigm to which I aspire, unpunctuated, ineludible folding of line after line, cadence risen from the ground up is still beyond my reach. If I got there, I’d probably stick with it. Until then I herk and jerk my way through. I nevertheless consider it fortifying what Angela said in passing, as I knew it necessitated a great deal of artful negotiation to successfully avoid a staple of the art.

C.D. Wright was interviewed for The Wolf by Dr Lynn Keller. Many thanks are due to her and to The Wolf for their permission to post this interview on this blog. Like Something Flying Backwards is published by Bloodaxe at £12.

Tomas Venclova: The Labours of Poetry: Between Classicism and Ruins by Ellen Hinsey

In Herodotus’ Histories one finds the story of the two Spartans who offer themselves in atonement for a wrong committed by their democratic society. The tyrant who receives them tries to dissuade them from such extreme measures, suggesting instead that they switch sides and accept to live under tyranny. Their response, among the most moving in the history of world literature, is not only poignant but astounding: ‘You who have not experienced liberty do not know if it is sweet or not. If you knew what freedom was, you would advise us to fight for it not just with spears but with battle axes.’ For the text, written nearly 2,500 years ago, has already established the essential coordinates of an ethical geometry that remain valid to this day: at the base is the conflict between individual conscience and the threat of tyranny. And above both, in the freedom of the telling of the story, floats the word.

Tomas Venclova, one of the last of a generation of poets in the great European tradition, is a writer with a lived experience of both tyranny and the power of the word. Born on 11 September 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania, he took his degree (interrupted for a time due to ‘forbidden’ literary activities) in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius. He continued his studies in semiotics and Russian literature at the university of Tartu, returning to the University of Vilnius to teach. In addition to writing poetry and literary criticism, he translated writers such as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Charles Baudelaire and Osip Mandelstam into Lithuanian. During this period he also travelled extensively in the Eastern Bloc, in particular to Moscow and Leningrad, where he made the acquaintance of the great Silver Age Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, as well as a generation of younger poets, including Natalia Gorbanevskaia and Joseph Brodsky, who would become life-long friends. Already in strong disagreement with Soviet policies following the 1956 invasion of Hungary, his outspoken involvement in the 70s with dissident politics – which included being a founding member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group – led to a ban on publishing, exile in the West, and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977.

Joseph Brodsky, in his essay on Venclova’s work, ‘Poetry as a Form of Resistance to Reality’,[1] observed that Venclova’s involvement in such dissident activities ‘bordered on foolhardiness’. This remark is best understood in light of Lithuania’s particular fate in the second half of the 20th century. Venclova was born during the long-fought for but short-lived independence that Lithuania experienced during the interwar period 1918–40. At the start of the Second World War, Tomas and his parents were forced to leave Klaipeda (formerly the German city of Memel, occupied by Germany early in the war) and were relocated to Lithuania’s interwar capital, Kaunas. In 1940, the entire country was annexed by the Soviet Union, and during the first year of the war an estimated 17,000 Lithuanians were deported by the Russians. In June 1941, the country was invaded by Germany. During this period the Venclova family members were separated, and Tomas’s mother was briefly arrested. Over the next four years, more than 170,000 Lithuanians would be killed, including almost the entire Jewish population of the country. In the summer of 1944 when the Germans retreated, the Soviets reoccupied Lithuania, and while the exact number of those deported to Siberian labour camps at the end of the war and up until Stalin’s death is disputed, it is estimated at 140,000,[2] of which approximately 30 percent perished. The vice-like grip of these successive occupations, and the ‘long historical winter’ that followed in its wake, greatly suppressed Lithuanian culture and national aspirations. At the time of Venclova’s participation in the fragile dissident movement in 1976, support of Lithuanian human rights was indeed foolhardy. The country’s independence still lay another decade and a half in the future.

Venclova’s experience of growing up in the shadow of these post-war ruins is an integral part of his work. For, as in many European cities, the ruin that surrounded him was not merely metaphorical: in his writings he tells how, on his very first day of school, he got lost in Vilnius’ ruins and wandered for four hours in search of his house. Half of the city was destroyed, and on certain streets, every other house was burned out. Yet by some miracle, all the city’s churches had survived, together with certain other monuments from the capital’s architectural past. As a young man, Venclova came to regard these vestiges as a sign – one that ‘made a statement and exacted a demand’.[3] During the years of Communist monotony and repression, he memorised Vilnius’s architectural details down to the last window frame and column, and at difficult moments in his life he would stand in one of the city’s squares and allow the sheer presence of their historical continuity to lift his spirit. These vestiges represented the remains of a coherent world, a world that – however far off that eventuality might be – could one day, given enough patience, rise from the debris.

If it can be said that formal choices for poets are an extension of autobiography and a reflection of intimate belief, a reading of Venclova’s work affirms how such a firsthand encounter with des-truction can have the counter-effect of forging a driven uprightness. This personal and aesthetic credo was further strengthened by the moral compromises Venclova witnessed close to hand, not the least of which were those made by his father, a high-ranking Soviet official and poet, to whom he addresses a conflicted, poignant elegy in The Junction. After leaving Lithuania, Venclova travelled in Europe and in the United States, taking a position at Yale University, where he has been a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures for the past 25 years. During this period in exile he continued to write poetry, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. He has also written literary biography, cultural commentary and essays, many of which concern the fates of persecuted writers. Throughout his work he addresses the lived experience of totalitarianism and the lessons and warnings that can be gleaned from its dark historical passage.

But, the uprightness one finds in Venclova’s work is not only ethical, but also material and concrete – it is the technical basis out of which his poems arise. Long ago Venclova chose as his poetic vehicle a modern and “rebellious” form of classicism. While the formality of his poems might at first glance seem anachronistic to the Western reader, over time the implications of their logic become urgently clear. For Venclova’s brand of classicism has nothing to do with political conservatism (as the aesthetic is sometimes portrayed in the West) but rather the contrary: it is a way to preserve the conditions that give rise to freedom of thought, democracy and culture in general. Throughout the course of his oeuvre Venclova has affirmed that, in the face of the destructive forces of history, one of poetry’s tasks is to be ‘filled to the limits with harmony and sense, so that it might resist the monotony and predictability of the world outside’.[4] For Venclova, as well as for other poets with whom he shares this poetic vision, including Anna Akhmatova, a poem’s clarity, rhythm, syntax and composition constitute in them-selves a moral task.

To this end, Venclova’s poems employ a vast range of traditional forms and techniques, including variations on metrical schemes, intricate rhyme strategies and other resources from poetry’s inheritance. These technical elements are set against the poems’ contents and landscapes. If in his earlier volume of selected poems in English, Winter Dialogue, there is a concern with endurance, and a search for absolutes in the face of adverse conditions both in Lithuania and in exile, in his most recent work we find the figure of a poet returning from exile, surveying what has occurred, what buildings still stand, and the fates of those one loved. And while these poems are filled with melancholy at the passage of time and the poignancy of anticipated mortality, there is also a sense of affirmation. For despite everything, each element that is salvaged constitutes a form of victory. And in this light Venclova’s poems, with their stanzas that fit one atop the other, begin to appear like classical columns, which slowly rise towards the mythical silence where Venclova believes poetry begins and ends. His poems at once harbouring the memory of culture and becoming an enactment of culture itself – a testimony to all that can be, and is, preserved from the vicissitudes of History.

Understandably, the task that Venclova has set himself is a formidable one. And there are times when it seems that the poet believes that by sheer will and virtuoso technique alone, the tottering ruins of the world can be held together – just. Yet Venclova also allows for the possibility that this spiritual, philosophical and moral challenge might fail. And in the end, despite his cautious optimism, he perceives in this neither cause for surprise nor ultimate despair. A metaphysical poet, his work maintains the traditional task of the writer’s reflections on ultimate things that began before us and will exist after us, and thereby makes peace with the uncertain future that we create for ourselves. If classicism is the vehicle for Venclova’s craft, then his voice – the wise and patient voice that inhabits this poetic world – is not unlike that of Zeno of Citium, who sat teaching beneath the columns of the stoa’s portico in ancient Athens. For Venclova’s philosophy is not far from that of the Stoics who espoused the idea that good lies in the soul itself, in wisdom and self-control, and believed in a detachment that embraced pain and misfortune, life and death.

At the end of his most recent book in Lithuanian, Sankirta (The Junction), there is a poem in which the poet visits the lake district on the outskirts of Berlin, and stands on the shores of the Wannsee, home to the conference house in which the Nazis consolidated pol-icy for the extermination of Europe’s Jews. In ‘In the Lake Region’ the poet has been watching for days the restless movements of a black crow, and hypothesises that ‘The ancients would have said her / stubbornness augurs something.’ The poem goes on to say:

The past does not enlighten us – but still, it attempts
to say something. Perhaps the crow knows more about us
and about history’s dirt than we do ourselves.
Of what does she want to remind us? Of the black photos, the black headphones
of radio operators, black signatures under documents,
of the unarmed with their frozen pupils – of the prisoner’s boot or the trunk
of the refugee? Probably not. We will remember this anyway,
though it won’t make us any wiser. The bird signifies only stoicism
and patience. If you ask for them, your request will be granted.

Venclova’s most recent work offers us a vision of our time and returns to us fragments of civilisation’s aspirations, so often treated ironically by modern poetry. But Venclova would be the first to caution us against the belief in any easy solution. One might hear him saying that the benefits of an outlook such as his might be small, amounting only to ‘stoicism and patience’. But in times when the recovery of these qualities is paramount, in reading Venclova’s work you may find, if you ask for them, ‘your request will be granted’.

Notes:
[1] Tomas Venclova, Winter Dialogue, translated by Diana Senechal (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. xiv. Foreword by Joseph Brodsky.
[2] Statistics for this essay were provided by Dr Ceslovas Laurina-vicius at the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius. Current research is being carried out to establish ever more exact figures for these events.
[3] Tomas Venclova, Forms of Hope (Riverdale-on-Hudson: Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), p. 21, ‘A Dialogue about a City: Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova’.
[4] Forms of Hope, p. 138. ‘Three Russian Poets’.

This essay by Ellen Hinsey introduces her edition, The Junction: Selected Poems by Tomas Venclova, translated by Ellen Hinsey, Constantine Rusanov and Diana Senechal (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

Lithuania’s Tomas Venclova is one of Europe’s greatest living poets. His work speaks with a moral depth exceptional in contemporary poetry. Venclova’s poetry addresses the desolate landscape of the aftermath of totalitarianism, as well as the ethical constants that allow for hope and perseverance. The Junction brings together entirely new translations of his most recent work as well as a selection of poems from his 1997 volume Winter Dialogue. Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements and was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Since 1985 Venclova has taught Slavic languages and literature at Yale University.

Ellen Hinsey has published three books of poems: Update on the Descent (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist; The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 2002; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2003); and Cities of Memory (1996), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She also edited and co-translated Tomas Venclova’s The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). Her poems, essays and translations have appeared widely in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry Review, Poetry and The Irish Times. Her translations of contemporary French fiction and memoir are published with Riverhead/Penguin Books. Her other awards include a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Lannan Foundation Award. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College’s program and the French graduate school, the École Polytechnique.

Tomas Venclova and Ellen Hinsey are giving readings from their two new books in Britain and Ireland during March and April 2009, including at Poetry Now (Dun Laoghaire), Dove Cottage (Cumbria), Newcastle University, and in London at the British Library and British Lithuanian Society.

Carolyn Forché interviewed by Sandeep Parmar

Carolyn Forché has published three books of poetry in Britain, The Country Between Us (1983) from Cape and two collections from Bloodaxe, The Angel of History (1994) and Blue Hour (2003). Her first collection Gathering the Tribes won the Yale Younger Poets Award. She edited the Norton anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003); Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). Carolyn Forché has won many prizes for her poetry, including awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America for The Country Between Us and The Los Angeles Times Book Award for The Angel of History, and was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm. She lives in Maryland.

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SP: You have written that 'surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end'. Each of your collections, in particular The Angel of History and then in Blue Hour, formulate a kind of ending, whether it is the end of human history, or of prophecy, and where either uncertainty or rebirth must lie. The end becomes a continual one, an ongoing process, much like the 'open wound' of memory. How much has the need not to reach an end, or not to forget, contributed to the writing of both these books?

CF: We can think about going through an experience all the way to the end if we think of experience, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has suggested, as from 'the Latin ex-periri, a crossing through danger'. A risky crossing. He cautions against thinking about experience as the anecdotal material of a life lived. So we are continually crossing the abyss as we write, and to do so we must keep moving. We must be, as Paul Celan advises, en route but without destination. In this sense, I experience poetry as resisting eschatology , whether addressing the death of an individual or the larger, cosmic sense of the end of humanity or the world. The end is continual, open, and unknowable. The Angel of History attempts a poetic meditation on the twentieth century, and it closes with the birth of a cloud rising above an annihilated city, and with that cloud, a knowledge of ends unable to be borne. In Blue Hour, in the decade following, a consciousness at once singular and collective passes from life into death. So, yes, meditations on ends, but on ends without endings. As for memory and forgetting, these are large and intertwined subjects, deserving of more time than we have here. They have been my continual devotions.

SP: You've been involved in translating the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, in particular his selected poetry: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (2003). You have spoken about how poetry can become 'part of the life of the community'. Darwish is an example of such a poet. To what extent are Western poets able to write for a community?

CF: Mahmoud Darwish told me that for him, when he tells his own story, he inescapably tells the story of Palestine, and that destiny has ordained that his history would be read as a collective history, and his people be recognised in his voice. He shares the fate of his people, and they are spoken for in his poems. That has been both his blessing and his burden, to write in a state of continual emergency without respite. When Archbishop Oscar Romero asked me to leave El Salvador and return to the United States in March, 1980, only a week before he would be assassinated, I begged him to leave El Salvador as well. He was regarded as the voice of his people, the only voice to speak against institutional and state violence, and he was most prominent on the list of those targeted by death squads. His response to my plea was to smile and tell me softly that his place was with his people, and my place was with mine. As an American of the United States, I had never thought of myself as having a people, much less writing for a community, but I think now, after these many years, that artists, poets, philosophers and all humanitarians write for the party of the whole, and constitute a community of those who are keeping watch over all that we value: civil society, tolerance, enfranchisement, freedom of conscience and thought, social and political well-being and the preservation of the earth. This community was imagined by the French resistance poet Robert Desnos as an earth lit by thousands of fires, each a spirit keeping this watch, and when called upon, one bivouacs all over the world. So yes, poets of Europe and the Western hemisphere can begin to imagine ourselves as speaking for a community, as those from other parts of the world have long done. Part of that speaking is the language of the interior life.

SP: Partly in response to some of the criticism of The Country Between Us and the implication that the book was 'overly political' you said that 'Poetry can't be placed in the service of anything other than itself'. It also struck me that you were urged by those who remained in Salvador to go back to America and write about their collective experiences as well as your own. Did you feel that the poetry you were writing on your return was, in a sense, written for a "political" purpose?

CF: That poetry was written during my years as a human rights advocate in El Salvador, and in the aftermath, when I spoke publicly against military intervention and on behalf of those who sought asylum. My notebook and pen were always with me, and were my refuge. The poems were first-person lyric-narratives and in that mode, closely resembled my earlier work. I hadn’t recognized the perceived shift to the political in the poetry because I hadn’t recognised it in my life. I was not active in any political movement or party, and attended no meetings. I thought of the work I was doing as a matter of ethics rather than politics as I understood it, and the purpose of my poetry was poetry. I wrote essays about El Salvador, and answered Salvadoran requests by traveling the United States and speaking to students, church groups, and community gatherings. The idea of writing poetry with a particular intent is a fraught one, and perhaps, in the end, impossible.

SP: You are often called a 'Poet of Witness'. How far can one embellish to satisfy the craft while still being faithful to a kind of "documenting" of experience (whether it is your own or of a community)?

CF: The controversy surrounding The Country Between Us had to do with the perception that this poetry was political, and it seemed that there was a strong but until then unspoken prohibition against exploring certain subjects—war, brutality, injustice— in poems, even though it had been done, and for thousands of years. In the academy in the United States, controversy usually leads to symposia, and I was invited to participate in all manner of panel discussions regarding the relation of the poet to the state, and poetry to politics. On the one hand, there were those who decried the absence of politics in poems, and celebrated any poem that gave strong support to the reader’s political views. On the other were those who disapproved of poets writing about political struggles, wars, and man’s inhumanity to man, believing in some way that these subjects were not in the province of poetry. I came away from these meetings in despair, feeling that the arguments were simplistic and reductive, and this led to a thirteen-year project, beginning with research into poetry of the twentieth century, written by those who had endured conditions of extremity and suffered the depredations of the state: war, ethnic cleansing, exile, imprisonment, torture, censorship, banning orders, house arrest. Most poets of the twentieth century endured these things, especially beyond the English-speaking world. I read the poems for the mark of this extremity, for its impress, rather than for positions advocated or subjects addressed. I was interested in the legibility, in the poetry, of this experience, and also in the realm of the social, between the institutions of the state (and politics) and the private life of citizens. This is 'poetry of witness'. I’m not sure that I recognise the category of 'poets of witness'.

Regarding fidelity to truth, one does tell the truth in poems. Good poems are true. They are often more true than newspaper articles and certainly more true than the speeches of politicians. And they express a truth that endures far longer than language’s other life forms.

SP: Leonel Gomez Vides urged you to go to El Salvador and write about the war even before it had begun. His insistence that he wanted a poet (and not, say, a journalist), someone with a 'peculiar kind of sensitivity' was at odds with your feeling that an American audience didn't believe poets had credibility. Do you still, after having published The Country Between Us and others since, feel that Gomez was right to want a poet there?

CF: This is somewhat uncanny, but Leonel Gomez Vides was in my house last evening for the first time in many years, and so I posed your question to him. Would you ask a poet again, under the circumstances? “Of course. There is no doubt. You, as a poet, were open to what was going on, without preconceptions or professional constraints. You could see the place, you could smell it, and you were able, later, to bring the world of it alive to others, what it was like to be living in such a time. Read the newspapers of that period. There is nothing there. Maybe in two hundred years, people will be reading the poems.”

As for me, yes, I agree now with Leonel Gomez, but at the time I thought his idea compelling but also incomprehensible. That turned out to be a form of wisdom.

SP: Do you think it is possible for poets writing and living in the West to be 'poets of witness'? Are our experiences of war abroad too distant and mediated?

CF: We all write out of our deepest obsessions with language and experience, secrets and disclosures, speculative thought, music, a search for something, moving along the perimeter of what might be said. That given, we bear witness to the experience of human subjectivity. As to the understanding of ‘poets of witness’ as poets writing about war, or by extension, all forms of extremity, the battlefield is not the only vantage point. What concerns poets in this moment of crisis in the United States, most of whom are far from the wars, is the unease we feel, our apprehension regarding our historical moment and our future, our agency or lack thereof, our anger, our horror, our helplessness. How do we speak as poets to our people in a time of need? How do we exercise conscience? What is the loss of our country as we knew it doing to our minds and our art? If one feels distanced and removed, one can write of distance and removal, about what is being kept hidden and the task of seeing through the scrim of mediation.

SP: After having compiled Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, how did this broaden your awareness of poets living and writing in exile today?

CF: In response to the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, a Norwegian town offered him asylum, and inspired by the courage and generosity of this town, a small group of writers began the North American Network Cities of Asylum, extending refuge to writers and poets under threat of death or imprisonment. These writers are adopted by cities and towns across North America. There is a similar organisation in Europe and one in Mexico, and all are linked by mutual concerns. Our group consists of Russell Banks, Wole Soyinka, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, Jayne Cortez and myself.

SP: In an interview with David Wright in 2000, he quoted you as saying that the artists and thinkers you admire are a community of 'archivists of the incomprehensible'. How are these writers able to order and preserve those experiences or ideas that are in some way unreachable by thought?

CF: Writing is a means of retrieving from consciousness a knowledge irretrievable by other means.

SP: Your last two collections, The Angel of History and Blue Hour, mostly dispose of the solid first-person narrative voice. Witness seems almost to come from a community of voices, rather than just one, in these poems. Do you find that this plurality of the speaking voices acts as a protective conduit for the individual "author"? Is the move away from a recognisable 'I' a kind of anonymity?

CF: While I have long worked in a polyphonic mode, and welcomed the inclusion of other voices into my work, this openness to the ‘community of voices’ to quotations and dialogue is not quite the same as the occulting of the first-person voice, or the shift from the authorial, first-person speaker with single point perspective. The polyphonic poems are dialogic. But there is another mode that I began to explore in Blue Hour more intensely, and that is the I/Thou of encounter, speaker to other, even the other within oneself.

SP: The long poem from Blue Hour, 'On Earth', was influenced by Gnostic hymns dating back to the third century and takes on the abecedarian form. Among its obliteration of moments and objects and thought, you use quotes from various "thinkers", such as René Char, Julia Kristeva and Robert Desnos. How did you imagine that the form and its apocalyptic vision aligned itself with the Gnostic texts?

CF: The hymns, dating to the third century A.D. were recovered, along with Christian and Buddhist texts, from small towns on the northern fringe of the Taklamakan desert in the twentieth century. They aren’t like English abecedaries, because they are much longer than twenty-six lines. These mnemonic hymns offered a felicitous form for what might have been a very digressive, almost chaotic text, having to do with the passage from life into death and including the recollections of earthly life. The quotations are memorable for the consciousness disclosing itself: my own. The images and moments, epiphanies and notations are from my life. I see the poem as apocalyptic only when it is read as collective utterance, but on as the experience of an individual, it simply reveals one’s experience of mortality. The poem is formally influenced by the hymns, but not in terms of Gnostic belief.

SP: The line from 'On Earth': 'open the book of what happened' resonates with all of your work. And yet in this instance it is one of the many voices that interferes and does not clearly identify with an authorial speaker. Does this kind of decentering comment on the impossibility of witness or knowing, that which Burgess says is 'lost to our eye'?

CF: 'Open the book of what happened' is spoken, but by whom? It might be the poet herself, or the voice of an Other to whom the poet is listening. “Open” is an imperative, either from without or from within.

SP: You write about your son, Sean, in both The Angel of History and Blue Hour. In The Angel of History you write that when your son was born you became 'mortal'. For someone who has lived in the midst of great personal risk, do you feel motherhood made that kind of risk less worthy?

CF: It made the choice of that risk unacceptable, but we know that mothers live with their children in terrible conditions all over the world, including in war zones. It is not widely understood that over half the deaths in twentieth-century wars were those of women and children.

SP: You've commented in the past that the American poetry world is very conservative and concerned with reputation and marketability. Has this been your experience elsewhere, for instance in either Britain or Europe? If, at all, how do you find the British audience differs from American audiences?

CF: I don’t know how things are for poets in Britain or Europe. I have impressions. In Europe, people are less concerned with where one has published, or if one is “known”. I also don’t know whether the British audience differs from the American one, but readers in Britain seemed to understand Blue Hour very deeply, whereas the reception was more confused in America. The British and Irish reviews were very interesting to me, perceptive and intelligent. I learned something from them.

SP: What are you working on now?

CF: I am writing a memoir and a book of essays, as well as a new book of poems. Thank you, Sandeep, for your questions. I enjoyed thinking about them.



A shorter version of this interview appeared in issue 14 of The Wolf (March 2007).

Since giving this interview Carolyn Forché has joined the International Advisory Panel of The Wolf. Sandeep Parmar has subsequently become a Reviews Editor for the magazine, and was recently selected as one of the poets for James Byrne and Clare Pollard's anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, to be published by Bloodaxe in September 2009.

Obama's inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander interviewed by Natasha Trethewey

NT: What was growing up in Washington like? Did it have an effect on your work?

EA: Washington was a great place during the 60s and 70s. I grew up surrounded by electoral politics as well as the street politics and protests of the late 60s. The 1963 March on Washington was an often invoked benchmark of my family’s move from New York to that city. Washington’s disfranchisement was a vital issue throughout my childhood, and my father was a candidate in the city’s first mayoral election in 1974. So a sense of national issues played out on a local stage, and vice versa, and of private lives made public was a part of my upbringing.

Washington is also an international city, and an internationally black city. My childhood awareness of the rest of the black world was sometimes imprecise, but omnipresent, and my much admired and adored late grandmother was proudly an “internationalist” who grew up in D.C. as well and roller-skated to the embassies ‘to see that the rest of the world was there’, as I write in ‘Feminist Poem Number One’. I think that curiosity about the black world beyond my black city, and how I fit into it all, is important to my work, even when inexplicit.

My parents are New Yorkers – more specifically Harlemites, which is where I was born – and that is a fierce identity that never leaves you. I feel lucky not to have been too circumscribed by localness – any localness can have its limitations – to have something else to belong to and to fantasise about as well, which you see in many mentions of New York in my poems. I seem to be very interested in “real” or “natural” identities and their tug with constructed ones, and the romance of racial and geographic identification.

NT: You have a poem in your collection Antebellum Dream Book called ‘Race’. Reading the poem, and particularly the last two lines – ‘What a strange thing is race and family stranger still. / Here a poem tells a story, a story about race’ – I get a glimpse of not only your thoughtfulness, but also your sense of humor. It’s as if you said, ‘Okay, I’m going to deal with it once and for all – here’s the banner title.’ Can you talk about the role race plays in your work?

EA: There are great storytellers in my family, as in so many of our families. But sometimes it’s rare that those stories are transportable or translatable intact into poem form; somebody talking to you is not the same as how you would tell a story or use narrative in a poem. These stories about color and about passing and even about siblings and their adult relationships and the readjustments of their adult relationships, as you have in that poem are the stones that so many of us have and do tell or don’t tell.

As for the ‘banner headline’, ‘Race’, I always loved the way that my grandfather, and to a lesser extent my parents, used the word race to talk about ‘the race’ – meaning, of course, black people – as a thing that they could imagine, a body of people that we could imagine, that you could almost get your arms around, that the race was something tangible and palpable. I think it is in some very important ways generational. I also thought about the idea of what it meant to be a ‘race man’ or a ‘race woman’, what it meant to ‘do something for the race’, or what it meant to ‘bring shame upon the race’.

NT: You’ve written some successful persona poems about historical personae. How do you go about making their voices real, as in ‘The Venus Hottentot’, which is about Saartjie Baartman?

EA: With invented voices, how do we really know if they are accurate or not? There’s no way of knowing. Certainly in writing ‘The Venus Hottentot’, one of the big challenges was to hold on, especially when the Venus Hottentot herself speaks, because that’s a longer part of the poem – to create a voice, and then to hold on to it and keep it consistent when it was not a voice that felt close to my own.

NT: You make it look effortless, though.

EA: Oh, I labored! [Laughter] To really, really be tight and to strike the proper historical note and tone, I did a lot of historical research, though there wasn’t a lot to be found about Saartjie Bartmaan at the time. But I read about carnivals and circuses and London in the early 19th century, and all kinds of different things that would give me a sense of her world. I didn’t want to be anachronistic, although at the same time there are very deliberately anachronistic moments – for example at the end, when she imagines her daughters in banana skirts and ostrich-feather fans, which is alluding to a Josephine Baker act, not something that she would have known. But that is where poetic license comes in handy.

I think in a poem like ‘Race’, in a way, I’m speaking in a voice that is more familiar. Certainly that, too, is a very formal poem in its way. It has a set of rules that it follows, but it’s trying to be a little chattier, a little more contemporary. The speaker is a contemporary person like myself telling a story, with the things that I know and my vocabulary to call upon. What I’ve always been interested in about ‘The Venus Hottentot’, and what I think is such a great teaching tool about persona poems, is that if you write about a character who obsesses you, you might not even know necessarily why that character is so compelling to you. Much later, after writing ‘The Venus Hottentot’, I thought, ‘Well, of course I know about being a black woman who is the subject of objectification, who is in some people’s eyes a spectacle simply for being a black woman, who is in some people’s eyes sexualised simply for being a black woman.’ That’s something that we all know as black women in the world.

NT: In your third collection, Antebellum Dream Book, did you find yourself taking uncertain paths? And did much of the book’s surreal imagery come from actual dreams you were having?

EA: Much of it did; some of it didn’t. Obviously, much of it was made possible by first trusting the surreal images that came out of actual dreams. I’ve been lucky to always have been a really great dreamer. And I’ve always been fascinated by my own dreams and the dreams of others, what different cultures believe about dreams: how they guide you, how they tell you things that you should pay attention to, how they sometimes look ahead to the future, how they’re a place where the ancestors can come and speak to you. So I’ve used dreams before in poems, but I just went further this time, really trusting that these strange juxtapositions could work as poetry.

NT: So you aren’t afraid to trust that kind of surreal dream imagery to take you to new places?

EA: Well, I have a great fear of getting stuck in a rut. I think there are certain kinds of poems – such as poems in the ‘Venus Hottentot’ mode, poems that engage a black historical figure, an aspect of black history – that I sort of know how to do, and that I feel I can do well. I don’t want to do that kind of poem to death, although certainly there’s so much to write about in that whole area. That’s just to say I wouldn’t want to be someone who just writes the same version of a poem she wrote before over and over and over again. That would be the worst thing.

NT: Your first book begins with a poem that imagines the voice of a woman who has been objectified and thus rendered a mere body. Then you have a second collection entitled The Body of Life; and your next collection, Antebellum Dream Book, seemed to deal with the body in many more ways. In your work, what does it mean to ‘write the body’?

EA: I think, certainly for women, that the stories of so many bodies are not the stories that we have heard. I remember once, teaching Descartes, one of my feminist colleagues saying that she asked the class, ‘If Descartes were a woman who had given birth, would he have written “I think, therefore I am”?’ In other words, what would a more embodied version of that statement look like? What that means to me is ‘What would so many versions of our history look like if the body of the physically abused woman, the body of the sexually exulting woman, the body of the child-birthing woman, the body of the slave, the body of the domestic worker all spoke and told their stories and narrated their embodied experiences?’ That’s a huge, vast terrain. If you let a body speak, it gives you access to all sorts of concrete sensations that are vital, the stuff of poetry, the way a poem convinces. When my oldest child began to realise that he smelled things, he started telling me what everything smelled like: ‘Oh, it smells like toast in here’ or ‘Oh, it smells like sickness in here’. He’d go through experiencing the world only through smell. What a gift to go through life being aware that we’ve been given these senses and that you should live in them: something to look at, something to smell, something to taste – all as a gift.



Elizabeth Alexander is a leading American poet whose work has been inspired by a wide range of influence, from history, literature, art and music, dreams and stories to the ‘rich infinity’ of the African American experience. She is Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. In January 2009 she reads the inaugural poem for the swearing-in of President Barack Obama. Elizabeth Alexander has published four collections in the States: The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001) and American Sublime (2005), as well as a collection of essays on African American artistic life through literature, painting, film and popular media, The Black Interior (Graywolf, 2004). Her first British publication, American Blue: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), draws on all these. Copies can be ordered from Amazon.co.uk.


The above interview is an extract from ‘The Far, Deep Things of Dreamland: an interview with Elizabeth Alexander’ by Natasha Trethewey, from Poets & Writers (Nov-Dec 2001), reprinted from Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions: 1 (Bloodaxe Books, 2006). Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions: 1 is an anthology of work by Elizabeth Alexander, Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker and Jackie Kay. Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions are a new kind of anthology aimed at the general reader as well as the poetry lover. Compiled by Staying Alive editor Neil Astley, each book in the series covers four leading contemporary poets in depth, with substantial selections covering the whole range of each writer’s poetry, as well as intriguing and illuminating background material, including profiles, interviews, essays and commentary by the poets. To order from Amazon.co.uk, go to this page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1852247312/wwwbloodaxdem-21
American readers can order it here: http://www.amazon.com/Bloodaxe-Poetry-Introductions-Alexander-Dharker/dp/1852247312/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1230416840&sr=11-1

Natasha Trethewey is Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Her first two collections Domestic Work (2000) and Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) were published by Graywolf Press.

Joan Margarit and Anna Crowe in conversation

Joan Margarit is one of Spain’s major modern writers. Born in 1938, he worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but for the past three decades has become known for his mastery of the Catalan language. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he has translated. In poems evoking the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, Margarit reminds us that it is not death we have to understand but life. His poetry confronts the worst that life can throw at us, yet what lingers in the mind is its warmth and humanity. Bloodaxe Books published Joan Margarit's Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems, translated by Anna Crowe, in 2006, his first book of poetry translated into English. His work as an architect included many years working on on Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

From: OUR IN-CONVERSATION EVENT: 

TOPICS I’D LIKE TO COVER, AND QUESTIONS I’D LIKE TO ASK.
A regular event held at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Below is the transcribed dialogue between poet Joan Margarit and his translator Anna Crowe held at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2006.

Anna Crowe: Now that you are an "English poet", which you told me once you always wished you could have been, how do you think your poems sound in English? Do they make the same or similar noise as in Catalan? Do you recognise them as your poems?

Joan Margarit: I’m very happy to have a lot of my poems in English, but I am more happy because you are my translator. And the proof that this affirmation is objective is that our book is the poetry book society recommended translation.
In poetry, the Catalan tongue is nearer to English than Castilian, whose lines are generally longer. We can say one English eight or nine syllable line is a Catalan eleven syllable line and a Castilian fourteen syllable line. Also the rhyme in English and in Catalan is similar: it is a faint rhyme, if we compare it with the strong Castilian rhyme.

AC: I know you greatly admire the work of poets like Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop. When, in terms of your own writing career did you begin to read their work, and did you read it in English or in translation?

JM: There’s a good translation of Larkin into Spanish by Alvaro García.
Hardy and Bishop I read by translating them myself with the help of the American poet and critic Sam Abrams.
It’s the best way of reading the work of a poet who writes in another language, translating it.
Now, if life allows me enough time, I shall do the same with Philip Levine, Douglas Dunn and Anna Akhmatova.
Indeed, we’ll translate Douglas Dunn together, won’t we?

AC: Is there someone whom you might describe as your "father in poetry"? Was Gabriel Ferrater’s work important in your own development as a poet?

JM: I am the son of many fathers.
It is the fate of poets who write in minority languages like Catalan.
The most important of these fathers are the medieval ones, Jorge Manrique, Ausias March, and also, Pablo Neruda, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Thomas Hardy.

AC: Would you say that your poetry is typical or atypical of what has been written in Catalonia in the past thirty years?

JM: When I started to write poetry in Catalan, I was absolutely and totally atypical.
I was one of the first poets to separate the vindication of nationalism from the quality of the poetry, giving clear pre-eminence to the latter.
Now, among young poets, this is already the norm.
I think my main contribution has been to avoid literary Catalan and to write in the Catalan spoken by all.

AC: I have translated poems by you that are in a strict form, notably sonnets, and many of your poems are written in what sounds, to my English ears, very like iambic pentameter. What advice to you have for aspiring translators of poetry about the role of form in poetry?

JM: This is the central theme in translation.
One says that “traductore-traditore”, that is “translator-traitor”.
I cannot save the whole poem: it is impossible.
My personal rule is: first, I have to say the same as the original, I cannot say that “the wind whistles” if the original says “the wind sings”.
Second: my translation must be doubtless a poem, a good poem if it is possible.

AC: I believe your friend, the academic Sam Abrams, dedicated an earlier book of translations of Hardy to you, describing you as the ‘soul-mate of Thomas Hardy’, and it was seeing this that led you to explore Hardy’s work?

JM: The story is true and I explain it in my prologue to the translation of Hardy.
Sam had dedicated an essay on Hardy to me, with the words, “For Joan Margarit, kindred spirit of Thomas Hardy”.

AC:You have translated a huge number of Hardy’s poems into Castilian. What is it about Hardy’s work that appeals to you, and why did you translate his poetry into Castilian, and not into Catalan? Was this in order to reach a wider readership? Do you have a favourite Hardy poem?

JM: The poems by Hardy that I love best are Afterwards, A wife in London, Seen by the waits and Shelley’s skylark.
What attracts me in Hardy is the mixture of his Victorianism and his modernity: it is precisely the actual within the classical that I have always searched for. And so I translated him, renouncing his Victorianism more than his modernity, because you can’t keep everything when translating.
I translated Hardy into Spanish rather than Catalan because there isn’t a big enough market in Catalan for so many Hardy poems (about two hundred).

AC: You share another profession with Hardy—you are both architects. Are you familiar with any building he designed?

JM: Hardy’s era is one of transition between the old “Masters of Works” and “Architects”.
His work and mine have been very different.
But we have both carried out a lot of restoration work within architecture, and perhaps it is that which most unites us.
I have spent many years thinking of him while directing my work, winter mornings beside the bonfires which the bricklayers lit on the site with the remains of plank mouldings.
And I have always wished that I had written that long, magnificent poem, Heiress and Architect.

This is indeed an extraordinary poem, in which the words of the two characters are given equal weight in terms of imagery and rhetoric. There’s a strictly fair balance at work – the richness and sensual imagery of the Heiress’s words as against the relentless and annihilating power of the Architect’s replies to her. The verse about the “little chamber” which she wishes him to design is like a verse from Keats’ Eve of St Agnes, written 40 years or so earlier.

AC: Your poetry is remarkable for its tension, balance, a liking for minimal structure: are these ideas that have flowed into your architecture, or have they entered your poetry from your architecture, or is it that these are part of your individual make-up, and therefore characteristics of both? Could you say something about the relationship between your poetry and your architecture? What sort of structures do you like to design? Some would say that both professions call for a willingness to suffer dangerous exposure, to work, sometimes, without a safety-net, as you yourself say in your poem, Safety! Is it fortuitous that you serve both professions or do they share common goals?

JM: As for the relationship between Architecture and Poetry, I would say first of all that the only characteristics that differentiate poetry from prose are concision and exactness.

About concision, I would say that a poem is like the structure of a very particular building in which there is not a pillar or a beam too few or too many: and that if we take away one single piece, it would collapse.

If we take one word away from a poem, or exchange it for another, and nothing happens,
then it means that it wasn’t a poem. Or it was not yet a poem.
It becomes one only when you cannot take away or change any piece of the structure.
But then it will not necessarily be a good poem either: that is another theme which has more to do with the other characteristic I mentioned: exactness: a poem has to say just what the reader needs (most of the time without knowing it).

From this exactness comes the power of poetry to console, because poetry serves to introduce into people’s solitude some change which may bring a greater inner order in the face of life’s disorder.

As far as safety is concerned, I say in my poem of the same title:

...
with the wind at the top of the scaffolding,
and always facing into the void, because you know
that the man who’s installing a safety-net has no net.

A good poem is found only in that zone of poetry that passes very, very close to the abyss. The abyss of the ridiculous. But without falling into it.

AC: You followed your father’s footsteps in becoming an architect, and later you became Professor of Deep Foundations at the School of Architecture in Barcelona. Did you always know this would be the career you would choose? Was your father proud of you? Did you discuss your work with him?

JM: The relationship with my father was very complicated.

The affectionate poems dedicated to him reflect this
(this evening we will read one called My father’s face).

But the following poem, as yet unpublished, also reflects it.

It belongs to my next collection, House of Mercy,
and the poem is called Saturn.

SATURN

You ripped up my books of poems
and threw them out of the window into the street.
The pages looked like rare butterflies
that were floating down on people.
I don’t know whether we might, now,
be able to understand each other,
two tired and disappointed old men.
Probably not. Let’s leave it as it is.
You wanted to devour me. I wanted to kill you.
I, the son you had during the war.

AC: You say in your poem, ‘Elegy for the architect, Coderch de Sentmenat’, quoting him, that "architecture cannot disturb…that the house should be virtuous and humble, …not made in vain, original, sumptuous". You are one of the five architects responsible for implementing Gaudí’s plans for the Sagrada Familia. What do you yourself think of it? Can you say when the building might be finished?

JM: At the present pace of construction the Sagrada Familia —The Holy Family— will take about 30 years to finish.
It is financed without any help from any official body, only with donations and the price of entry tickets.
If I were religious I would say that it is a miracle.
But it is the most visited monument in the whole of Spain, even more than the Prado: two and a half million visitors a year.
It is the work of the maturity and old age of one of the greatest architects there have ever been:
a cathedral that is made generation by generation.
To continue this, for me as an architect, is both thrilling and an honour.
But I also think it is a marvellous folly.

AC: You write in Catalan, but almost immediately start putting the poem into Castilian. Can you tell us how this came about?

JM: A person may have one or several cultural tongues, but it may be that none of these allows you to enter the place where the poem is.
As in fairytales, it is about entering a crypt and you have to know the password that opens it.
All these questions are irrelevant when the mother tongue and the cultural tongue are one and the same.
When they are not, the cultural tongue may be a cathedral built on top of an inaccessible crypt.
I consent to the poem in Catalan and immediately plan in this language the skeleton of the poem. I work at it a lot and, generally, the final version bears little resemblance to the first.
After, all the versions, modifications and fresh starts that the poem suffers at my hands I make in Catalan and Castilian at one and the same time.

AC: You grew up in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Can you paint a picture for us of what life was like at that time for anyone living in Catalonia, where the language was proscribed in any form?

JM: I will answer you with a story.

A few years ago the President of the Spanish Government was Sr Aznar.
One day he invited to have lunch in his residence of Moncloa Palace two Castilian poets, one Andalusian, one Basque, one Gallego and me as a Catalan, to ask us to write the words to the national anthem (the words it has are never sung because it is obsolete, from the time of Franco).
My reply when he asked me how I would write it was:

1st) Dear Mr President: It’s lucky to have an anthem with no words.
Anthems are usually a series of grandiloquent words that are often insulting or aggressive towards other nations.

(For example, the Catalan anthem says
“With Castilian blood, we will make red ink
for painting the four bars of the coat of arms of our country”).

Let’s go on as we are, with an anthem without words.

2nd) Also I said to him: Dear Mr President, now I will explain to you
what the flag and the anthem mean for me.
When I was little, Franco had destroyed the Republic and forbidden my language, Catalan. Those cold mornings, in the little village where I lived, they compelled us to start the day at school by singing, in Castilian—a language that most did not know—the Spanish anthem.
To do this, one child held the flag-pole and another, standing on tiptoe, lifted the fabric of the flag and stretched it out in front of the class.

...
I still remember the special smell
of that special fabric that is used in making flags,
a smell that came back to me when they made me kiss the flag
when I did my National Service, which was compulsory.

Mr President, I told him, if you want me to make a poem out of all that, I can do it, but I doubt whether it will produce the anthem you are asking me for.

AC: You spent your adolescence in Tenerife, your treasure-island, as you call it in your poetry. Were the oppressive effects of the Franco dictatorship felt less rigorously there? Did your parents continue to speak Catalan at home?

JM: It didn’t seem like Spain:
Indian businessmen, links by ship (the plane was still of little importance) with America, Portugal and the UK more than with Spain.
Free port, free from taxes, few inhabitants, calm and peace-loving. A very sweet Castilian that I learned at once as though I were one of them.
Far from everything, in the middle of the sea, tourists almost non-existent…
The treasure-island!

ABOUT JOANA
AC: I would like to ask you about your daughter, Joana. She was born with Rubinstein-Taybe Syndrome, which meant that she had a mental age of about four, and suffered from severe motor disability. She needed crutches or a wheelchair to get about. She died of cancer when she was thirty, five years ago now, and you have written many poems to her and about her. How difficult was it for you to accept the hard facts of Joana’s disability?

JM: This difficulty, overcome day by day, has been our life, that of my wife and me.
She and I have dearly loved, and we dearly love our son and other daughter whom we have.
But Joana, because of her very helplessness, has probably been our great love.
A poem which reflects very clearly all these feelings is Sonnet in two cities.
It was written in Paris, in the Hôtel de l’Avenir.
Avenir means future in French.
There is first a quotation from a song of Leo Ferré: Thank you, Satan.
It says: Le rouge pour naître à Barcelone, le noir pour mourir à Paris.


SONNET IN TWO CITIES

Hôtel de l’Avenir, the final night :
Paris shows off her evening through the glass.
What luck to be approaching sixty -
my Porte des Lilas - wearing a smile.
What luck not to have been a sad man,
nor you a sad woman. Hurts
toughen us, make us compassionate.
What luck these two daughters. And this son.
What luck to be able to see, beyond the glass,
a city that does not exist, our own:
Ferré sings Verlaine, and the rain lays
its red and black reflections on the night.
Red for being born in Barcelona,
black for the night-trains to Paris.

AC: You have said that wherever you find yourself, you always try to imagine her being there also and how she might feel. What would you say to the argument that a loss like this is best put behind you, that a line should be drawn under the past? Why is it of the utmost importance for you, as a person and as a poet, to go on remembering her?

JM: Losing a father or mother you become an orphan.

Losing a wife or husband you become a widower or widow.

Losing a son or daughter has no name.

And everything that has no name is an object of attention on the part of poetry.

In general, requiems find expression, more than in the plastic arts, in music and in poetry.

AC: You have written about Pablo Neruda, whose work you greatly admire, and who, like you, had a mentally and physically handicapped daughter, but whom he sent back to Holland with her mother, while he returned to Chile, and never wrote any poems about her. In your poem, Motorway, you suggest he lost something important by not making her a part of his life.

JM: Neruda speaks only in a vague, irrelevant and remote poem about his daughter, Malva Marina, in his complete poetic work, in which he left no subject untouched and which is more extensive even than that of Thomas Hardy.
It seems to me that this is the proof that this question was an emotional black hole in his life.

AC: And lastly, for you, how should Poetry behave/what should Poetry be like?

JM: There are poets and intellectuals who attribute the lack of interest on the part of many people in poems which are unintelligible to the poor preparation or the insensitivity of these people. This is a field where there is an abundance of intent to confer an important role to things that are mere unrealities, and even philosophers have contributed to it, whose seriousness in deliberating these questions does not excuse their foolishness. This is the absurdity provoked by the alienation from poetry on the part of many readers, in a kind of self-destructive ritual by some intellectuals who seem to aspire to a poetry that says nothing and is read by no one.

If I can put it this way, the easiest thing is to write a bad poem that cannot be understood. It’s a bit harder to write a bad poem which may perhaps be understood. It’s much harder to write a good poem which cannot be understood. And, finally, to write a good poem which can be understood belongs by right only to the classical poets.

Joking apart, it seems to me that the only valid poetry is the kind that can be understood, and I can only come close to the concept of understanding a poem by saying that it is a process of going in and coming out. What is called, in information theory, a black box. One piece of information goes in and another comes out: a person goes in with a particular inner state, what I would describe, keeping the analogy with information theory, as a degree of disorder. A degree of
disorder means fear, misunderstandings, moods of sadness… Factors which are continually threatening inner equilibrium. This person comes out of the poem with a lesser degree of disorder or, if you like, more ordered. Understanding a poem is a process of going into and coming out of a black box.

There are few black boxes that our loneliness may somehow go into and come
out more consoled, more ordered, in short happier. Poetry is one of these, the one
which I personally have closest to hand together with music.



Anna Crowe was raised in England and France and is a poet, translator and creative tutor living in St. Andrews, Scotland. She is also the co-founder of StAnza, Scotland's Poetry Festival, and was its Artistic Director for seven years.


Bloodaxe Books published Joan Margarit's Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems, translated by Anna Crowe, in 2006, his first book of poetry translated into English. To order from Amazon.co.uk, go to this page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1852247517/wwwbloodaxdem-21
American readers can order from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Tugs-Fog-Selected-Joan-Margarit/dp/1852247517/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1230420898&sr=11-1