The pulse, again.
try to not return, unused.
A good use of life, this paying attention. Can we ever pay too much attention? It’s probably just a matter of timing your focus well to live well.
It’s funny, a good reader performs with intonation and body as much as with language. Several people remarked how they didn’t understand Spanish, or were not fluent enough to understand it, but letting Pura’s poems wash over them in Spanish, they didn’t have to understand language to understand. I found myself with too few words to race to couple the phrases but whether I was keeping up or letting it flow, I found my eyes tearing up.
What concessions due we make to syntax when we translate. I always remember my Spanish-speaking student translating for someone else and at some point the person who spoke Spanish too switched to English but the language brain is funny. He did not change facial expression or posture and kept simultranslating English to English without noticing for a few exchanges. I don’t think any of us did, until we did. What changes were they? To a simpler syntax, to reduce down the amount of thought complexity to keep on focus.
In poetry the task is different. You want to keep the music as much as you can, the layers of connotations where you can. Poetry is never truly translated but remade, in this case cooperatively since both Pura and her translator speak both languages, are both translators and been translated. Pura has brought to Spanish HD, Beckett, Robert Creeley, and Gertrude Stein. Gander and she most recently made Watchword (a bilingual edition from Wesleyan a month ago) and before that No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé”. Here’s a pair of sample poems.
Pura and her English translator Forrest Gander are interviewed here.
The summit reading was chock full of people. As Phil Hall said, “This is high culture, boy. bet if I read a sonnet right now, oxygen masks would drop from the ceiling.”
Phil Hall said earlier than this shot,
This poem that I’ve just written
hasn’t read my other poems
and if it did,
it wouldn’t like them.
He asked us to spend some time this to honor poets who passed recently Colleen Thibaudeau. Here’s a bit of one of her poems:
their laughter underground makes the thyme flower in darkness
my granddaughters are thin as fishbones & hornfooted but they are
always beautiful under the stars: like little asian paperthings
they seem to open outward into their own waterbowl
And Ruth Stone who published the second of her eventually 13 books when she was 56. She dreamt of better worlds, for example
In the Next Galaxy
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet.
Hall read a poem where he referenced real concrete living as somewhere to stand. “bill bissett knows the tree.” and later referring to himself “the fresh refrain smells of sawdust”.
While Philip Levine was rifling thru his books he spent the time recounting a reading where he kept searching for a poem he was sure he had published. The audience was getting restless then he remember, he’d never written that poem. He’s taken many shots at it but never finished it. That got a good chuckle out of the audience. He also quipped, “I forget what’s in these books. I keep looking for Blake. He’s not in here. He had the wisdom to stay in his own books.”
He told the story of what he speculated from when Hart Crane met Garcia Lorca in 1929 in Brooklyn, just shortly before they each died, one by suicide, one by politics.
Pura López-Colomé read in both Spanish and English. People who wanted her newest book had to act fast. They were gone by the time the reading was over.
Summit sound bites from Pura López-Colomé: “Pilgrims have a faith I feel envious of, constantly.” and “I drive my funicular from chance to fate.”
Phillip Levine in the Q&A said that when poetry gains confidence, it loses its geography and can communicate internationally. It reminds me of the axiom of painting. You start with a still life, move to still figures, then moving figures and then, when really good, you come back with all you have learned and pour it back into a still life again.
Phillip Levine tested Hall’s theory that oxygen masks would fall since he read a sonnet, written in syllabics rather than meter, so perhaps the ceiling sensors were foiled.
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Rusty Recaps his highlights of the week.
rob recounts some of them, including of day 6 here, marvelling, in part, at how Hall doesn’t dull down, but stays alert and engaged as he does.
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After largely 3 days to recover from 6 days, and only getting out to about 2/3 of what I’d like to have seen, I’m glad Versefest is no longer than it is.
The length allows some people to catch some if they’re occupied for a day or weekend. It’s a fabulous opportunity to buffet the different series, but what a marathon. Keep the quality but there’s no need for bigger, more. The regular series have that continuing covered. As with Writers Fest, wonderfulness fatigue sets in. Another event to blow my mind? I’d rather just absorb what’s happened so far.
I thought if we missed Rucker’s live performance, we might be able to get to the workshop but late nights caught up. I could get mobile by 2pm. I don’t know how people do regular 9-5 and have energy to catch any. The large number of volunteer helpers do make it possible on the organizing end.
I look forward to next year. And to the goodness happening this year. Which, next up this weekend, is a workshop on literary blogging and a reading by Ron Silliman thanks to AB Series.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.