Books and Music – Page 67

July 25, 2005 by Dave Bonta

A cure for summertime depression

It’s Summer Book Week at Via Negativa. Since I’ll be gone part of the week on vacation myself, I decided it would be an ideal time to consider what constitutes the perfect summer read. I’ve enlisted the help of my family to put up posts while I’m gone, and even do a little guest-blogging.

I can’t very well review my own mother’s book. Who would trust such obvious nepotism? On the other hand, Mom has included poems of mine in the front matter of three out of four books in her popular Appalachian Seasons series, so I think it’s high time I return the nepotistic favor. Since the books are blog-like journals anyway, the obvious thing to do here is simply to reproduce an entry from Appalachian Summer as a substitute blog post. Enjoy.

JULY 25. Most of the field wildflowers provide food for other creatures. This morning I watched a male American goldfinch feed on dame’s rocket seed. Bouncing bet attracted silver-spotted skippers and a black swallowtail butterfly while Joe Pye weed appealed to great-spangled fritillaries.

Then I encountered a patch of golden-yellow, common St. John’s wort (Hypericum perfolatum), an immigrant species that thrives in fields. It seemed to be devoid of feeding insects. Most insects avoid St. John’s wort because it emits a toxic chemical called hypericin, hence its genus name. Hypericin is made and stored in the leaves, flowers, and stem glands of St. John’s wort and slowly poisons a predator.

However, it depends on sunlight to activate it so some insects can avoid its toxicity by clever ruses. Butterfly of moth larvae that roll or fold a leaf and bind it with silk to cover themselves or sew leaves to form a shelter can eat St. John’s wort from within because they are shielded from sunlight. Stem borers and leaf miners are also protected from the sun. The tough outer layer of several adult beetles in the genus Chrysolina screen out sunlight. The soft-bodied larvae of Chrysolina hyperici can eat inside the leaf buds of St. John’s wort or feed openly on the plants only at dawn. In addition, they contain a large amount of beta carotene that combats phototoxicity. So, no matter how much a plant evolves to resist predators, there are always a few that can circumvent their prey’s resistance.

Humans have recently been taking St. John’s wort to fight mild depression. They too must stay out of the sun to avoid triggering hypericin. This seems counterproductive to me. I would become even more depressed if I were forced to stay inside. It is the bright sunshine that continually elevates my spirits. After a succession of gloomy, overcast days, my mood matches the weather. Only sunshine cures my depression. Yet so many people spend most of their lives inside under artificial light even in the summer. Perhaps those with mild depression would benefit from frequent walks in the sunlight, especially on such a spectacular day as this one.

– Marcia Bonta, Appalachian Summer

July 24, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Books for the trail

As I start thinking about assembling gear for a multi-day camping trip in the West Virginia wilderness, my first and most important consideration is what book to bring. I want something I can use to wake up my mind first thing in the morning, so that means lyric poetry. At camp, even more than at home, dawn is my favorite time of day; why fritter it away with my nose in a novel? Since we’ll probably be doing some backpacking, whatever book I bring can’t be too heavy, but if I should find myself spending a rainy afternoon in my tent, I wouldn’t want something I could finish in an hour or two. This argues for a paperback volume of an author’s selected or collected poems (I’m not too fond of multi-author anthologies).

Whatever book I pick will play a fairly large role in shaping my mood and honing my attention for a day of rambling through the woods. Thus, I think I’d prefer poetry that grows from the author’s attachment to the land, poetry that dives deep – as opposed to, say, poetry of alienation or of purely cerebral themes. Thus, I have narrowed the list of candidates to just a few titles. Here are the current contenders.

Nature: Poems Old and New, by May Swenson (240 pp., 13 & 3/4 oz.). Over half my choices are translations; Swenson’s deft and clever use of the English language reminds me how much we sacrifice by reading poetry in translation. May Swenson is a thinking person’s poet in the tradition of Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Bishop. This book, spanning the nearly five decades of her writing, is an appealing choice because of the breadth of her stylistic and geographic range. She writes great travel poems, with the kind of word music and understated precision I would like to achieve in my own work. Here are the closing stanzas of “Bison Crossing Near Mt. Rushmore”:

The bison, orderly, disciplined by the prophet-faced,
heavy-headed fathers, threading the pass
of our awestruck stationwagons, Airstreams and trailers,
if in dread of us give no sign,
go where their leaders twine them, over the prairie.
And we keep to our line,
staring, stirring, revving idle motors, moving
each behind the other, herdlike, where the highway leads.

Uncollected Poems, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow (266 pp., 15 & 3/4 oz.). What could be a better companion for an unstructured trip than an uncollection? This is the heaviest of my five candidates; one would expect that from a book with German on every left-hand page. Snow’s translations hold their own against the best original poetry in English – he’s that good. And with this book he performed an invaluable service by rescuing Rilke’s uncollected poems from critical obscurity. Though Rilke himself idealized the thematically unified collection and cemented his reputation as one of the 20th Century’s three or four greatest poets with such works as Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies (the latter also available in a Snow translation), the miscellaneous poems he tossed off while waiting for “real” inspiration to strike, if penned by any other poet, would be regarded as a life’s crowning achievement. While it may seem surprising to include Rilke in a short list of place-based poets, to me, the strength of his philosophical questioning stems from close contact with the physical world, at least since his watershed New Poems of 1907, written under the influence of his mentor, the sculptor Rodin. By way of illustration, here’s a brief, untitled poem written in “Paris, summer 1925 (before July 6),” according to the translator:

Ach, nicht getrennt sein,
nicht durch so wenig Wandung
ausgeschlossen vom Sternen-Mass.
Innres, was ists?
Wenn nicht gesteigerter Himmel,
durchworfen mit Vögeln und teif
von Winden der Heimkehr.Ah, not to be cut off,
not by such slight partition
to be excluded from the stars’ measure.
What is inwardness?
What if not sky intensified,
flung through with birds and deep
with winds of homecoming?

Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade, translated by Alexis Levitin (294 pp., 11 oz.). This is simultaneously the longest and the lightest of my five choices. Andrade couldn’t be more different from Portugal’s other great 20th Century poet, the proto-postmodernist Fernando Pessoa. His are poems of “succinct lyricism,” as one of the back-cover blurbs says, with a pre-Christian sensibility strongly reminiscent of Horace. Levitin has made a career out of translating Andrade, bringing out volume after volume with various small presses. Before acquiring Forbidden Words – a New Directions product – this past April, my only previous encounter with Andrade was through his Matéria Solar/Solar Matter, translated by Levitin and published by Q.E.D. Press. That might seem like the perfect summer vacation companion, but I passed it on to a sun-worshipping friend several years ago.

Travel is often fraught with sleeplessness, especially when it involves sleeping on the ground. But this in itself can sometimes be a source of wonderment, not merely frustration, as Andrade observes:

Ouí§o Correr A Noite Pelos SulcosOuí§o correr a noite pelos sulcos
do rostro – dir-se-ia que me chama,
que subitamente me acaricia,
a mim, que nem sequer sei ainda
como juntar as sílabas do silíªncio
e sobre elas adormecer.

I Hear Night Flow Through the Furrows

I hear night flow through the furrows
of my face – as if to call me,
as if, in just a moment, it will gently touch me,
I, who still don’t know
how to splice together syllables of silence
and drift upon them into sleep.

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai: Newly Revised and Expanded Edition, edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (195 pp., 12 oz.). Between Amichai and the equally great, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (see the translation of selected poems entitled Unfortunately, It Was Paradise), one can get a strong sense of the passions aroused by one, very small corner of the earth. This might seem like a strange choice for a book to take on vacation, which is supposed to take our minds off the tensions and violence of the modern world. But whenever I go into what we call wilderness, I try to practice a memento mori of sorts. This land was not always ours; other people whose descendents are still with us have memories and dreams for it that may be completely incompatible with our own. What does it mean to be a tourist in one’s own imagined homeland? Is it possible to become indigenous? If so, what would it take?

Tourists1
So condolence visits is what they’re here for,
sitting around at the Holocaust Memorial, putting on a serious face
at the Wailing Wall,
laughing behind heavy curtains in hotel rooms.

They get themselves photographed with the important dead
at Rachel’s Tomb and Herzl’s Tomb, and up on Ammunition Hill.
They weep at the beautiful prowess of our boys,
lust after our tough girls
and hang up their underwear
to dry quickly
in cool blue bathrooms.

2
Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David’s Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood their around their guide, and I became their point of reference. “You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s moving!” I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, “do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn’t matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there’s a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”

The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems by John Haines (275 pp., 15 oz.). As the unofficial poet laureate of Alaska, Haines offers plenty of fuel for wilderness dreams. But does that necessarily make his Collected Poems the best thing to take into the wilderness itself, or would that be too much like carrying coals to Newcastle? Another problem with Haines is his almost unvarying gravity. I asked a literature professor friend who hosted Haines for a several-day visit at his college one time if the guy ever lightened up – he didn’t. But as I admitted last December in my “Loose canon: 20th century poetry in English,” I am completely addicted to Haines’ shamanic/prophetic tone. One doesn’t read the book of Jeremiah for laughs, either.

The Way We LiveHaving been whipped through Paradise
and seen humanity
strolling like an overfed beast
set loose from its cage,
a man may long for nothing so much
as a house of snow,
a blue stone for a lamp,
and a skin to cover his head.

If the heat returns this week as predicted, I’m sure my hiking budding L. and I will be longing to trade our tents for igloos, too.

June 28, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The art of reading

Reading something for the second time is so much more satisfying than that first read-through. So many books withhold their full treasures from the first-time reader. Not that the first time can’t be special too, of course: surfaces are beautiful, and not to be taken lightly. During that first, heady encounter with a text, it is not merely the words that entrance us. The typefont, the design, the texture of the paper, the look and feel of covers and slipcovers, even the smell of the bindings – if new – or the patina that comes with good use: these too are manifest occasions for pleasure and surprise.

But few of us possess the skill as readers to avoid succumbing to that first-time excitement and finishing the book too soon. And to lay it aside at that point, never to return, would constitute not simply callousness but profound disrespect. Unless the book at hand be some cheap, manupulative thing, in which case even a single reading amounts to little more than “an expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” as Shakespeare once said about something else entirely.

As a reader, I must always aspire to do better next time and never become satisfied with my current techniques. If I know that my first time through a book tends to be a bit on the shallow side, I may change strategies and begin by lightly skimming through what look like the best spots, or re-visiting it at unexpected times and places, dipping into it just enough to whet my appetite for the first, prolonged session. But by then the first reading is really the second, or the third – it doesn’t matter. I’m no longer keeping score.

The kinds of books I enjoy most don’t necessarily need to be sampled in a set order, and sometimes I like to start with the last poem or chapter and work my way slowly toward the front. Or sometimes it’s fun to start in the middle and work toward both ends, alternating between the front half and the back. Hence, I suppose, my disdain for tightly plotted novels that insist on rigid conformity with standard procedure. Plus, given my addictive personality, I hate to get sucked into a book like that because I know I won’t be able to sleep, eat or do much of anything else until it’s done. Ten or twenty hours later I’ll emerge from the novel as if from a parallel universe, shaking with adrenaline and ready to drop from exhaustion at the same time. After an experience like that, it will take me several days to undo the spell and fully return to my own, familiar weltanschauung.

There was a time in my youth when I thought that kind of full-throttle excitement was indispensable to the enjoyment of a book. But as I near the threshold of maturity I find myself craving a calmer and – I would argue – deeper form of immersion. This doesn’t rule out novels altogether, but it does definitely favor the second reading over the too-hasty first one. The plot once exposed for the artful contrivance that it is, one is free to take one’s time and relish the writing for its own sake. All goals have been abandoned aside from the most general: to advance in pleasure through insight – or is it vice versa? Unless one has some ghoulish analytic project to complete, some heartless application of the whips and restraints of academic theory, one can dwell within the garden of the text almost indefinitely for the colors and the scent alone. The mind explores gently and almost by instinct now, enfolded in a matrix where word, image and meaning are coterminous and virtually indistinguishable. The senses return to an almost Edenic innocence. Freed of judgements and distances, the patient reader at last attains a kind of high plateau, every pore fully open and flooded with the clearest, coolest light.

What the writer finally wants to save,
laboring into the white afternoon
at her kitchen table,
adrift in drafts,
ringed in scraps for
the compost, is just this savoring
of time’s luxuriant spread.

May 29, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Ergonaut

I dream a ghost-body, heavy on top of mine. At first I am aroused, then frightened. It sits on my chest the way my big brother used to sometimes when we were kids, though it doesn’t taunt, doesn’t speak a word. I snort loudly to wake myself, find only my own arm sprawled across my ribs. I drift back to sleep and into a new dream, in which a psychopath smiles ingratiatingly and explains that he really couldn’t help murdering over 200 members of a small, isolated community in the mountains. I try to talk the others into locking him up, but we’re not able to reach consensus. The only suitable jail is the old springhouse, damp and cold, where I once imprisoned my little brother for several hours. I find myself joining the others to plead for his human rights. When the cops come, it is not to apprehend him but to interrogate us. “Have you seen a suit like this?” one of them asks each of us in turn, displaying a child’s plastic model of a gangster, furred in what someone informs me is meant to represent a zoot suit. I realize there is no right way to answer. I look at the handcuffs that I found in the basement and decide they really belong around my own wrists. “If they take me to jail, I’ll be safe from the murderer,” I think.

It’s only at the end of their all-day hike, as they begin to pitch camp beside the wilderness trout stream, that they realize they forgot to pack the bag that contained half their fishing gear. Time to improvise, says the engineer, while his friend the poet rummages around for the dime-bag of pot. A half an hour later they’re good and stoned. The engineer begins shaving willow wands for the basket trap he sees as clearly as a lure flashing in a sunlit pool. The poet rolls up his pants and wades out into the stream. He feels the hair rustling all over his body, follicles suddenly standing at attention.

I finally succumb to curiosity and install a free site meter from statcounter.com. I realize that it won’t be terribly accurate, since many regular readers use an aggregator such as Bloglines. I’m primarily interested in the search strings people use to get here, but the visit length data is fascinating, too. In two days, 83% of all visitors alighted here for less than five seconds. On the other hand, four people spent more than an hour with their browser open to Via Negativa. What sort of masochists are these? Here’s someone who’s been back five times already, and visited thirteen separate pages! And good grief, he lives in the same town and uses the same server as I do. Same browser, same operating system, everything. Unbelievable.

But what were they looking for, those less-than-five-second visitors? Two searched for the via negativa, poor souls. All the other Google searches were unique, and included the following (Via Negativa’s order in each search result is given in parentheses):

“bird calls” birdy birdy (5)
“origin of words” “spelunker” (3)
ADDIS ABABA FOAM &A PLASTIC FACTORY (3)
tribesman “man essence” (1 [!])
william stafford methow valley poems (4)
“The Recorded Sayings of Ch’an Master Lin-chi Hui-chao of Chen Prefecture” (4)
coon dong (2)
raccoons sex (4)
bestseller “baghdad burning” (3 [?!])
The word Hammock originates from a Haitian word (7)
THEODORE ROETHKE,DOLOR,analysis or explanation (2 – a Yahoo search)
lion fucked (2 [!])
Zuni vulture (5)

“But how many people actually remember seeing Barney Google in a comic strip?” asks Toonopedia. Indeed. While the search engine that bears his name seems omnipresent, he of the goo-goo-googly eyes and his once-famous steed Sparky have been mysteriously absent for half a century. There was no celluloid finish, no riding off into a sunset. One pictures instead some repudiation or return to sanity, as with Don Quixote. Except that Sancho – or Snuffy Smith – doesn’t buy it. It’s all too real to him, this epic snipe hunt, this been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me. “What’s so funny?” he wants to know. He’s still out there in his lonesome hollow, hunched over a keypad, typing outlandish search strings in the gathering dusk.

Late afternoon isn’t always the best time to read poetry, I find. The book is Katha Pollitt’s Antarctic Traveller, her first. After a while, I decide to jot down some of my accidental misreadings:

…sphincters [splinters] of glass and pottery…

…the world [word] that widens
until it becomes the word [world].

…the orchid,
which signifies the virtues of the noble man:
reticence, calm, clarity of wind [mind].

…now you’ve travelled half the world and seen
the ergo [ego] glinting at the heart of things…

Pollitt’s poems are wonderfully luminous; this is one of the best first books I’ve ever read. Its language is strange the way all truthful language should be. If my slips seem even stranger, perhaps that’s simply a measure of the mind’s difficulty in assimilating unfamiliar truths. We hear what we want to hear, reverse-engineer the worlds that come out of our mouths and call the results logic: the ergo glinting at the heart of things, just so much wind from a glass sphincter.

April 15, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Confessions of a serendipper

In yesterday’s post, I advocated for serendipity as a great way to find new poets. I have been unusually fortunate in this regard, I think, because the library where my father spent most of his professional career, Penn State’s Pattee Library on the University Park campus, is one of the largest libraries in the country – if not the world – to have completely open stacks. Anyone – even a ten-year-old kid with a yen for literature – can wander off in search of a call number and emerge hours later with an armload of books from the surrounding shelves. My father has often said he finds the easy browsability of Pattee Library to be one of its most patron-friendly features.

Until a recent expansion of the library led to a rearrangement, the literature was all shelved in one, big room with long, easy-to-browse aisles. All but the oldest stuff was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, which doesn’t distinguish between poetry, fiction and plays, but I grew to love the way it grouped literature according to language – I was a fan of poetry in translation from an early age. When Vicente Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize in 1977, my parents bought me a copy of Roots and Wings: Poetry From Spain, 1900-1975, a bilingual edition edited by Hardie St. Martin – still one of my all-time favorite anthologies. Fortunately, the library had an extensive Spanish literature collection, and I spent many hours wandering the stacks and grabbing anything that looked interesting. While most kids my age were getting their first exposure to more challenging ideas through the lyrics of the more thoughtful rock bands, I was burrowing deep into Lorca, Aleixandre, Vicente Huidobro, Rafael Albertí, and soon enough Neruda and Vallejo.

Around the same time, I stumbled across some anthologies of Japanese and Chinese literature up in the attic – texts from a class my mother had taken in college – and got hooked on Arthur Waley. That led to Donald Keene, Burton Watson and, eventually, a B.A. in comparative literature with a focus on Japanese and Chinese. So largely through serendipity I immersed myself in two of the main streams of influence upon North American poets in the second half of the 20th century.

My exposure to contemporary poets in English was less extensive and more haphazard, perhaps because it came originally under the tutelage of an elder poet with strong opinions of his own. I dutifully read the books he recommended, but other than William Carlos Williams, I didn’t really share his enthusiasm for most of the poets he idolized – wordsmiths like Hart Crane and Melvin B. Tolson. It’s only really been in the last 10-15 years, when I stopped trying to read poets that I thought I should read, and simply started acquiring whatever looked interesting in used bookstores and book sales, that I began to grasp the incredible richness of contemporary poetry in English.

These days I do prefer to buy poetry books rather than simply borrow them, again because of my fondness for the indirect, haphazard approach to reading. More often than not, if I’m in a mood to read poetry, I’ll quickly scan my shelves and grab two or three titles almost at random. Usually I will quickly lose myself in one of them, and end up dipping back into it several more times over the course of the following couple of weeks before finally returning it to the shelf.

How does one read a book of poetry? There’s no best way. Usually it’s a good idea to read it from beginning to end in one sitting at least once, but that isn’t always an ideal way to approach it for the first time. Often I’ll start in the middle and skip around for a while, reading perhaps half the poems in the book in this manner before settling down and starting from the beginning. Poems read for the second time almost always reveal more meanings and resonances than on the first go-round, but how much time should elapse between first and second readings? If you read a poem several times in quick succession, you may fool yourself into believing you’ve gotten everything out of it that’s there to get, and not read it again for another couple of years. But when you do, chances are you’ll see it in a completely different light.

My mentor always used to say that he liked to read poems first thing in the morning, and I’ve found he’s right – that is the best time. But it’s also the best time for me to do my own writing, so there’s a bit of a conflict. Many mornings, after I come in from the porch, I sit down to read a few poems from whatever book or magazine is handy and quickly find myself reaching for my pocket notebook. That’s how a lot of the material in this blog comes about. Even though I rarely discuss poetics or review books of poems, without this almost daily influence of poetry, Via Negativa would be nothing like it is.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us I was going to review the most recent book of poems acquired in the manner I advocated yesterday, but this post is getting a little long, so I’ll be brief. Actually, I already did share a quote from it in a post last week. The book is Mermaids Explained by Christopher Reid (Harcourt, 2001). I picked it up last month, along with a couple others, at my favorite used bookstore, which is also where I buy my coffee. While I was standing at the counter waiting to get a pound of beans ground, I noticed a sign – “Half Price Off, All Used Books. Ends Sunday.” I wasn’t particularly in a book-buying mood, but this was too good to pass up.

Mermaids Explained was hardcover, in good shape, and whoever this Reid fellow was (the former poetry editor for Faber & Faber, it turned out) the collection was edited and selected by Charles Simic, so I figured it ought to be interesting. I opened the book and read this:

Lines from a Tragedy

Pale twin,
aren’t you ashamed
of what we have come to?
Abject crawlers,
porters of heavy flesh,
the unpretty caryatids
of a decaying house . . .

Surely you remember
the great days of our infancy?
Bewhiskered sister,
we did not always wear
such slabs on our toes,
such smoked-looking calluses;
our veins did not always
bulge like this.

Years ago,
before the fall into walking,
we knew how to play
and to touch the world
with our nakedness.
We were as tentative, then,
and as sensitive
as hands.

“The fall into walking” – how wonderful! This, it turned out, was from a collection called Katerina, poems in the voice of a fictional female poet from an unnamed country of the former Communist Bloc. Reid manages not only to create a believable voice, but to imitate the sound and feel of English translations from the Slavic – a real tour-de-force. In fact, each of the books that this selection includes samples from has a unique style; Reid is, as Simic puts it in the Foreword, “not an easy poet to characterize. He likes disguises, playing different roles, trying out different voices. While some poets seek the absolute, Reid delights in metamorphosis. He can also be unflinchingly direct.” This last is perhaps one of the hardest skills for any poet to master, schooled as we are in the art of finding meaning through multiple layers of allusion, nuance and ambiguity.

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Maria – herself an accomplished poet, originally from one of those Communist Bloc countries of Eastern Europe but now, like Charles Simic, an American writing in English – tells a brief story:

I gave a poetry workshop today in a library as part of a California Council for the Humanities project.

Five people showed up: one was a friend who brought along another friend; two were there because next week they are giving a workshop-discussion on another part of the anthology that had the poems I was discussing; and there was one other guy there who kept challenging me to make him love poetry, seeing how he doesn’t have the “poetry gene.”

I tried, but short of a lap dance, I don’t see how else I could have made him excited enough about poetry to go read some more. He was so determined not to like any of it….

Reading this right after another dip into Mermaids Explained got my mental juices flowing.

Bugged
the man who does not possess the gene for poetry

Rap is sheer thuggery, poetry’s buggery –
I mean, it bugs me. Half the time it ain’t
even grammatical. I still like Al Pope –
so mathematical! When the cat goes
outside of the box, you better believe
she gets her nose rubbed in it. Listen
up now, this is a metaphor! I’m serious.
What the heck is a pet for, if not
to pet? That cat puts on airs. I say
Hey, old fish-breath, furr-ball, how’s
about jumping in my lap? Then purr all
day if you want. I’m getting crotchety,
I know, but Lord – why can’t things
be a little more straightforward?
Bikes could come with locks.
They could print more recipes
on the side of the box. Dictionaries
could tell you how to tell stones
from rocks. Words should say
what they mean, & don’t you forget it.
It’s all such hugger-muggery.
I just don’t get it.

February 28, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The bait

The working class couple at their first symphonic concert did not realize that they were paying to see a man dressed like a penguin dance with the upper half of his body. The woman likes it; the man isn’t so sure. “The music is always a half-second too slow,” he will complain during the intermission. What neither of them needs to say is that dancing is a thing for couples. During the slow movements, he puts an arm around her shoulders. When the tempo picks up, he folds his arms across his chest.

No talking or even whispering is allowed, and who the hell can tell when you’re supposed to clap? This is like being in an art museum – you don’t know how to act and everyone can tell that you don’t belong. If it’s not about feeling good and having fun, what’s the point, then? This whole thing is obviously enormously complex and requires something beyond a 12th-grade education to understand, he thinks. But the woman is impressed by the sense of something handed down essentially intact from the days when men dressed up for an ordinary night out on the town and women piled their hair on top of their heads and wore fancy gowns and all theaters looked just like this – dark green walls and gold leaf gleaming like an endless summer. She likes the quiet parts, the silences where no one claps, the lack of amplification. She is used to listening for what’s down deep, rather than simply paying attention to the ripples on the surface.

It’s like the way church used to be when she was a kid. She understands that the conductor is not performing for them; he is a servant to the music, which he merely shapes and draws out of the orchestra, out of the score in front of him the same way the priest used to pull meaning out of the Bible when it was all still in Latin. Every movement of his hand means something different. Watching him, she feels as if she can see a little ways into the future – a timeless place where nothing happens until we arrive, which we never quite manage to do this side of the grave. Something holy and even magical is taking place, like with the wine and the wafers.

When the on-stage lights go out three minutes into the third movement of the first piece on the program, no one seems especially upset. The conductor lowers his arms and the music stops almost immediately. He bows his head. The audience is absolutely silent with the surprise of it, staring into the darkness where the black-suited musicians have virtually disappeared. The light from the exits catches the polished wood of violins and violas dropping from chins to laps, like fish glimpsed at the bottom of a pond moments after you realize that something has taken the bait cleanly off the hook.

February 8, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Religion Bestsellers of 2005

Jesus told me that the following titles will have dominion over the Publisher’s Weekly Religion Bestsellers list by year’s end.

1. Your Second Best Life Now: Seven More Steps to Living Your Full Potential

2. Baked Beans for the Soul

3. The Prayer of Jezebel: Breaking Into the Blessed Life

4. Thou Shalt: The Power of Positive Commandments

5. Left Behind: How to Spot a Godless Liberal From the Rear

6. My God Can Whup Your God

7. Driven By What’s Inside: Ancient Secrets of the Subaru

8. Never In Vain: Using the Lord’s Name to Heal Anger and Spread Righteousness

9. The Lost Gospel of O™

10. Sacred Heart: Spiritual Wisdom of the Aztecs

January 19, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Primordial wonton

I’m in a bibliophiliac ecstasy. Yesterday I got two new books in the mail: Robert Alter’s magnificent translation and commentary on the Pentateuch – The Five Books of Moses (Norton, 2004) – and the “philosophical translation” of the Daodejing by Roger T. Ames and David T. Hall (Ballantine, 2003), a groundbreaking work. I am going back and forth between them like a dog with two supper dishes, or a bigamist who can’t decide which wife to spend the night with.

Dividing my attention this way – especially between two such contrasting works – may not seem like such a good idea. Eventually, of course, I’ll have to settle down with each in turn, take them to bed with me, read them with all the slowness and attention they deserve, lingering over each beautiful footnote. But in the meantime, this compare-and-contrast exercise has already yielded some tasty fruit. Last night, in the Appendix to Ames and Hall, I found the following:

Daoist cosmogony does not entail the kind of radical initial beginning we associate with those metaphysical cosmogonies that describe the triumph of Order over Chaos. In fact, the Zhuangzi‘s well-known account of the death of Lord Hundun – often translated negatively as Lord Chaos, but perhaps better rendered positively as Lord Spontaneity – provides a rather strong Daoist objection to the “One-behind-the-many” reading [of passages in the Daodejing that appear to refer to Dao as a kind of first principle]:

The ruler of the North Sea was “Swift,” the ruler of the South Sea was “Sudden,” and the ruler of the Center was “Hundun, or Spontaneity.” Swift and Sudden had on several occasions encountered each other in the territory of Spontaneity, and Spontaneity had treated them with great hospitality. Swift and Sudden, devising a way to repay Spontaneity’s generosity, said: “Everyone has seven orifices through which they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. Spontaneity alone is without them.” They then attempted to bore holes in Spontaneity, each day boring one hole. On the seventh day, Spontaneity died.

But why according to Zhuangzi shouldn’t one wish to bring order out of hundun? A reasonable question, indeed, if hundun is the confusion and disarray – the formless surds – that other cosmogonies describe as primordial Chaos. But if hundun is the spontaneous emergence of novelty that honeycombs all construals of order in the continuing Daoist present, then the imposition of order upon it means the death of novelty. After all, it is spontaneity that makes the life experience deliciously indeterminate and, in some degree, unpredictable. To enforce a given design is simply to select one of a myriad candidates for order and to privilege that one over the rest. Swift and Sudden have transformed the unsummed and causally noncoherent dao into a single-ordered world.

Well, yeah. But every act of artistic creation, every authentic making represents such a privileging, regardless of its origins in spontaneity. That’s the tragic beauty of life, it seems to me – and that is why I continue to draw so much inspiration from the great expressions of theistic faith, such as the Bible. This notion of a seven-day-long process of imposing a creative and destructive will sounds awfully familiar! But again, Chaos and Order are modern – or at least Hellenic – categories that don’t always fit the most ancient parts of the Bible. (After all, as a god of storm and whirlwind, as the agent of watery or fiery destruction, YHWH works as often through “chaos” as against it.)

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day.

Alter says about “first day” that, “Unusually, the Hebrew uses a cardinal, not ordinal, number. As with all the six days except the sixth, the expected article is omitted.” So perhaps we would do better to translate as if this were a Mayan text: “And it was evening and it was morning, Day One.” Because these are the days that will recur week after week and year after year until the end of time, no? I find it difficult to credit that the original authors of this passage understood divine creation as a one-time event. The mythic imagination doesn’t work that way.

Alter’s note for “welter and waste” points up the contrast with the Zhuangzi‘s hundun.

The Hebrew tohu wabohu occurs only here and in two later Biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce word coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means “emptiness” or “futility,” and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.

But that desert, or wilderness, remains an essential testing ground for spiritual heroism and a major locus of theophany throughout the Bible, so perhaps we are meant to understand tohu as empty more in the way that a womb might be construed as empty, rather than as a mere nullity or vacuum. Tohu wabohu could perhaps be seen as Openness – a close cousin of Spontaneity. And indeed, in this cosmogony God shapes or distills things from this omni-potential matter; there is no creation ex nihilo in the Bible.

Set against the vivid language of Genesis, the Daoist allegory may seem a little dry. And I’ll admit, I’ve never been a big fan of allegory as a genre, which may explain why I never focused on this passage in A. C. Graham’s translation and commentary (Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, Hackett, 2001 – another philosophically and philologically informed effort).

Graham, I discover, chose to leave “Hun-t’un” untranslated, supplying the following note:

Hun-t’un is the primal blob which first divided into heaven and earth then differentiated as the myriad things. In Chinese cosmology the primordial is not a chaos reduced to order by imposed law, it is a blend of everything rolled up together; the word is a reduplicative of the type of English “hotchpotch” and “rolypoly”, and diners in Chinese restaurants will have met it in the form “wuntun” as a kind of dumpling.

So there’s God in his white apron at the Panda House restaurant, rolling out the dough to make dumplings. Thus, at least, the pictures taking shape in the tohu-bohu of my mind, all higglety-pigglety.

December 7, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Loose canon: 20th century poetry in English

In a recent post at The Vernacular Body discussing favorite novels, reference is made to Nabokov’s notion that “there aren’t really any great authors, only great books.”

I have always felt this to be true about poetry. Some of my favorite poets, such as Louise Glück and Sandra McPherson, have written only one book I really like. And for me, the book-length collection is the highest expression of the lyric poet’s art.

So this morning, I decided to try compiling a brief, annotated list of my favorite books of poetry in English from the 20th century. I went through my shelves, being careful to pull out only those volumes that I would want to have with me on the proverbial desert island (which is not so far from my reality here, when you come right down to it). As I did so, I was reminded of the agony my friend Jo has been going through over the past two years as she attempts to give away all but her most essential books in order to complete a long-distance move.

The pile at my left elbow is now close to three feet tall, and teeters dangerously. In the interest of brevity I’ll skip the usual bibliographic information in favor of links to Amazon. (I am not endorsing Amazon.com, they just happen to have the most complete information of any on-line bookseller of which I’m aware. Though for some of the older volumes here, they don’t give much, and you’d be better off using Google.) I have rather arbitrarily limited myself to one book per favorite author. I will not – probably could not – rank them in any way, other than to mention in passing which one might be my favorite of all.

American Primitive, by Mary Oliver. A difficult choice, since every one of Oliver’s books is worth its weight in gold. She is in my opinion the finest nature poet in the English language – ever.

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, by Wendell Berry. I remember not thinking too highly of Berry when I was in my late teens and twenties, but either he changed or I did. This book is unified both by theme and method of composition: each poem describes a walk he took on a Sunday morning in lieu of going to church. Other people write about sacred time; Berry lives it.

Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. I love books in which the dead speak; I think this was my first.

The Folding Cliffs, by W. S. Merwin. If I’d compiled this list a year or two ago, I probably would’ve included The Lice instead. But Merwin’s lyric poems are beginning to wear on me, whereas this book-length poem about 19th-century Hawaii is, I think, one of the most satisfying narrative poems I’ve ever read.

Praise, by Robert Hass. Hass has equally mastered the line, the poem and the book-length collection. Each of his books contains an argument of sorts, though it’s less logical than ecological – not something that one could spell out in a review. (It’s in the nature of a poem that it can’t be summarized, Cleanth Brooks maintained.) I haven’t yet read all his books, so my selection of this volume is highly provisional.

Selected and Last Poems, by Paul Zweig. Normally I wouldn’t include a “selected poems” in this sort of list, but C. K. Williams has done a marvelous job of editing Zweig’s incandescent deathbed poems and matching them with the best from the three books published during his lifetime. The Last Poems by themselves make a satisfying, chapbook-length cycle.

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, by William Carlos Williams. The last and most beautiful poems of a poet who didn’t always practice what he preached, in my opinion. Perhaps it took until the end of his life before he found a place in his plain poems for the luminosity that had always suffused his prose.

The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Like Zweig’s Last Poems, a posthumous collection that coheres better than most books whose authors were alive to cull and augment and rearrange. Owen would probably make most people’s lists of the greatest poets of the 20th century, on a par with Rilke, Neruda and Lorca.

Song of Napalm, by Bruce Weigl. Some of the best wartime poems since Wilfred Owen. (Yusuf Komunyakaa has written Vietnam poems that are equally searing; I simply haven’t read enough of him to include one of his books on this list.)

North of Boston, by Robert Frost. “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Mountain.” ‘Nuff said.

Even in Quiet Places, by William Stafford. Why not Traveling Through the Dark? Actually, it was a toss-up between his last and first books. (There aren’t many poets you could say that about!) I simply prefer the effortless quality of his late work to the more obvious craftsmanship of his earlier poems.

The Branch Will Not Break, by James Wright. Another tough choice. One of the first books of American poetry to fully assimilate the lessons of 20th century Spanish-language poetry and translations from classical Chinese and Japanese.

Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, by Pat Mora. So much better than Eliot’s stupid cats! Manages with unpretentious virtuosity what few novels ever could: to create a well-rounded and likable character (Aunt Carmen) entirely from the idiosyncratic prayers she addresses to her santos. So well crafted, you might not even notice how many of the poems rhyme on the first read-through. Beautifully illustrated with full-color photographs, this book also functions as an authoritative reference on Sonoran folk Catholicism.

Red Suitcase, by Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is always making such exquisite music out of the silence between direct statements!

The Colossus, by Sylvia Plath. When I was a kid, I really hated the melodrama and narcissism of Ariel. So it was a susprise to discover a few years back how much I liked this book (and Crossing the Water, too). Not too many modern poets do grotesque as well as Plath and Ted Hughes did.

Crow, by Ted Hughes. An invented myth cycle with all the inconsistency and variety in tone of the real thing. The Amazon reviews call it violent and nihilistic, but to me it’s just a fun book.

Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes. Jazz poetry is its own category now, but this was the original bebop masterpiece. Very close to oral poetry in the way it’s put together, reminiscent of the dance cycles of the Piman and Yuman-speaking Indians of the southwest.

Butterfly Effect, by Harry Humes. Very understated yet enormously affecting poems by the unofficial poet laureate of Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Winter News, by John Haines. If Alaska didn’t exist, John Haines would’ve had to invent it. Actually, I’m not so sure he didn’t. I love the shamanic/prophetic tone, at its freshest here in Haines’ first book.

Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982, by Jack Gilbert. A first masterpiece is followed by twenty years of silence, then matched with poems equally pure but twice as wise. On the one hand, it would be great if more poets were this severe in their determination to write only necessary poems. On the other hand, I myself aspire to be like William Stafford, writing a poem a day.

Radio Sky, by Norman Dubie. I’ve only read this twice, but I was very impressed both times. He does religion very, very well: Jacob Boehme, Thomas Merton, Philip K. Dick and the Aztec Lord of the Near and Close are all here.

Passing Through: The Later Poems, by Stanley Kunitz. A master and a mage. Kunitz has written more perfect poems than anyone else I can think of. And though a “Selected and New” volume, this has a very pleasing shape to it.

Elegy, by Larry Levis. A posthumous collection for which Philip Levine deserves much credit. Possibly my favorite book in this entire list – which says more about me than about the book, I suppose. I don’t care how short your attention span might be, once you start this book, I promise you will not be able to put it down. And when you have finished it, you will drink yourself into a stupor.

The Jacob’s Ladder, by Denise Levertov. The prophet of “holy presence” at her best.

Radiation, by Sandra McPherson. Erudition without irony; a bracing work. Few books are titled so aptly.

Cathay, by Ezra Pound. Barely long enough to qualify as a chapbook, I suppose, and not the translation it purported to be – more like original poems based on borrowed outlines. But what vivid poems they are, what a satisfying cycle!

You Can’t Have Everything, by Richard Shelton. Shelton does for the Sonoran Desert what Humes does for eastern Pennsylvania and Haines for Alaska: “we are here we cannot turn back/soon we hold out our hands/full of money/this is the desert/it is all we have left to destroy”

The Lost Son and Other Poems, by Theodore Roethke. The Far Field is the more obvious choice, but this book edges it out in my opinion because of the short cycle of greenhouse poems. Roethke really had a gift for writing about plants.

The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück. The best way to describe this is: a book of hours from a fallen Eden in which the poet addresses a God in whom she does not believe – and God and the plants in her garden talk back.

Flamingo Watching, by Kay Ryan. Ryan is the quintessential thinking person’s poet, and can turn word play into an extreme sport. A tortoise “lives/below luck-level, never imagining some lottery/might change her load of pottery to wings.” An osprey’s nest is “a spiked basket/with hungry ugly osprey offspring in it.”

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, by Martín Espada. My favorite political poet, populist in a way Carl Sandburg could only dream about. Makes one wonder why more lawyers don’t write poetry.

Fragments From the Fire: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911, by Carolyn Llewllyn. Though others, such as Mary Fell, have put poems in the mouths of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company workers, none had the vision and the audacity to make them complete human beings and reconstruct the contexts of their tragically curtailed lives. What’s astonishing is that this was Lllewellyn’s first book.

Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs, by Stephen Dunn. One of our wisest living poets at his most inventive. Few books of poetry satisfy so completely Mina Loy’s definition: “Poetry is prose bewitched; a music made of visual thoughts; the sound of an idea.”

The Gathering of My Name, by Cornelius Eady. Kind of Espada meets Langston Hughes: street-wise, jazz- and blues-inflected poems exploring the intersection of the personal and the political. (Which sounds awfully darned cliched, doesn’t it?)

BioGraffiti: A Natural Selection, by John M. Burns. Who knew doggerel could be this good? I suppose it helps to know something about nature, though. Chock-a-block with outrageous puns and illustrated with hilarious old engravings.

Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, by Juan Felipe Herrera with linocuts by Artemio Rodríguez. A Mexican artist and one of the foremost Chicano poets collaborated on this reinvention of the card game known as Lotería, which is similar to bingo. Herrera’s hip improvisations are the closest thing on this list to “beat poetry.” I don’t know if I’d like them half so well without the linocuts they’re reacting to, though.

Next: New Poems, by Lucille Clifton. Clifton has remained in my personal top ten list of favorite poets longer than almost any other, aside from Emily Dickinson. Next edges out her other books for me because of the sequence about her husband’s death from leukemia, the “shapeshifter poems,” and the way the whole collection moves from outrage to something approaching acceptance.

Dismantling the Silence, by Charles Simic. The “so-whatness” that infects some of his later books is nowhere in evidence here. “I’m searching/For what my left hand/Hid secretly/From the right,” he writes, which is just about the best brief I can imagine for the method behind his abundant madness.

The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché. The poet makes a virtue of fragmentation, acting as a spirit medium for “a haunting mosaic of grief,” as it says on the back cover. Epochal.

Cruelty/Killing Floor, by Ai. Actually two collections in one, of course, but better for it. Whether you like Ai’s work depends I suppose on how strong a stomach you have, and how much you value empathy. But she is a consummate wordsmith as well as a gifted seer.

Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. If anyone knows of a better book of travel poetry in the English language, I’d like to hear about it.

O.K., that’s all! Kind of frustrating how few of your own favorites were included, isn’t it? If so, please feel free to leave a comment. I’m not averse to posting a list of favorites from Via Negativa readers, as well. Or post your own list and I’ll link to it. Let a hundred canons bloom!

UPDATE: Readers’ picks

(From Elck)

Handwriting, by Michael Ondaatje. “In my opinion, leagues ahead of his earlier poetry.”

North, by Seamus Heaney – “or, who are we kidding, just about any of his books.”

The Star-Apple Kingdom (earlier) or Tiepolo’s Hound (later) by Derek Walcott. “Omeros left me unmoved.”

Fredy Neptune, by Les Murray. “A bold book-length keen/narrative . . . Very Aussie, very colloquial, and quite accomplished.”

(From Susan Susurra)

It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, by Charles Bukowski. “I suppose what I appreciate in that one is his wry self effacement. He can be so dark and crass and ruthless, I guess I feel a bit more comfortable when he is aiming at himself.”

“For Heaney I’d pick Death of a Naturalist for you, and borrow it when I’m in a happy mood, North for me when I’m in a state of melancholy and want a walk with stories of death.”

(From Dale)

The Walls Do Not Fall, by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

(From Butuki)

Turtle Island, by Gary Snyder

(From Siona)

Diving Into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich

October 2, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Longing (5): the narrow road

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

Cue up Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, “Djam Leeli” (“The Wayfarers”)

I want to begin this last installment with a salute to all casual or first-time readers: you who have just alighted briefly in the course of a Google search for something else entirely and are wondering, “What the hell’s all this, then?”, or you wanderers who have been whiling away a few hours in a maze of links. “Longing? You gotta be kidding! How can anyone blog longing? What’s to say?

“On the other hand, what’s not to say?”

This extended meditation/collation of texts was sparked by the close conjunction in my mind of two very dissimilar things. One was the Robert Hass quote with which I have been heading each installment. The other was a chilling series of graphic photos and journal entries purportedly from an S&M slave that I stumbled across online, just as some of you have now stumbled here. I don’t normally get too worked up thinking about what consenting adults might choose to do to each other in the privacy of their own homes. It’s a free country, right? What disturbed me about this site was the lucidity with which the self-described slave extolled her torture, humiliation, and loss of will.

One page contained a critique of desire that could almost have been written by an adherent of some more extreme world-denying religious sect – a modern-day Manichaean. Like most people, she said, I grew up in a soulless American suburb convinced that the key to happiness was to acquire more and more stuff and to indulge myself in every way possible. But I found that the more I fed my desires, the more insatiable they grew, and the unhappier I became. But since I found my master, I have become a completely new person. The person I used to be no longer exists, vanished along with all consideration of “happiness” or “fulfillment.” I no longer have any will or desires of my own apart from his. I am his whore, a possession for him to dispose of as he wishes. If he took me to the edge of a cliff and told me to jump, I would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

I’m paraphrasing because I can’t quite bring myself to go back there (the torture photos were kind of harsh). In the past I have encountered some equally disturbing blogs that explore these issues from both master and slave perspectives; they shouldn’t be hard to find if you’re curious.

The point is, a little while later when I read that poem by Hass, I had a bit of a “Eureka” moment and decided to launch what would be in effect a brief for unquenchable desire. I wanted to avoid moralizing as much as possible, concentrating instead on presenting a comprehensive epidemiology, if that’s the right word. Deciding which among untold thousands of applicable cases to include has been daunting. Many of the blogs I read (mole, Lekshe’s Mistake, The Coffee Sutras, the vernacular body and Nomen est Numen, among others) deal with themes of desire, suffering and impermanence on a regular basis, so I knew I could avoid the more obvious sources.

It’s not exactly an original subject. And as the 20th-century Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz maintained, it may be every poet’s most essential theme: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” he maintained. (English translations of his selected poems by Naomi Lazard have been published by Princeton University Press under the title The True Subject [1988].)

I guess if I had to articulate my own position, I would say that for societies or individuals to achieve health and harmony, they must seek a balance point between longing and satiety, transcendent and immanent forms of the divine. There must be a middle way, whether or not one follows the Buddha’s eightfold path. In this last installment, I want to celebrate the journey itself.

Cue up Bessie Smith, “Long Old Road”

Blues lyrics so often look flat and disappointing on the page. If you can’t actually hear Bessie Smith’s world-weary contralto balanced by Louis Armstrong’s horn, the drummer’s snare interpolated between the Empress’s phrases – call and response, I and Thou – then the words she happened to sing on that long-ago day at the beginning of the Great Depression might seem a little lacking. It would be like trying to intuit a tapestry merely from the warp on the loom.

The frank despair of “Long Old Road,” while it might conform to popular stereotypes about the blues by people unfamiliar with the music, is something rarely found in an art form that was intended, first and foremost, as catharsis – medicine, as so many blues performers have testified in recorded interviews. Blues music in the early and middle decades of the 20th century functioned as a kind of secular alternative to organized religion for African Americans struggling to escape the daily indignities of Jim Crow in the South and discrimination in the north. It was unusual for a singer to declare on record, as Smith did in one of the last recording sessions before her tragic and untimely death,

You can’t trust nobody, you might as well
be alone.
Found my long-lost friend, and I might as well
stayed at home.

It has always struck blues fans as darkly symbolic that Bessie Smith died in the heart of that vast, deltoid-shaped piece of floodplain known as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, origin of what would become the most famous style of guitar blues. Actually, the Delta included several distinct musical traditions, but the one that people most identify with the region was invented in the environs of Clarksdale – the very place where Bessie Smith’s road reached its untimely end.

In the years following Bessie Smith’s death there were conflicting accounts of how she actually died. What is known is that after a late night performance somewhere in Mississippi, probably Natchez, Bessie headed for Memphis in a car driven by her boyfriend, Richard Morgan. In 1937 there were no expressways and Route 61 was a typical poorly lit, winding two-lane road. Near the outskirts of Clarksdale, in the early morning hours of that September day, their car, being driven at a high rate of speed, crashed into the back of a truck stopped on the side of the road.

A visit to this area two years ago finally gave me the images I needed to complete a poem I had been trying to write (and had even gotten published once, in an earlier version) for fifteen years.

LONG OLD ROAD
Bessie Smith, September 1937

From here to home an empty stretch
of Mississippi mud. Step on it,
driver. Ten years after the great flood
& everything still smells musty.
Could be
the Delta’s always like that–
overbearing sun fathering
cotton clear to the horizon,
rich black soil deeper than memory
& never a stone to throw.
The moody river & its serpent brood of bayous.

But I stay too long in any one place
& it heats up until I can hardly think
without boiling over, the fat
hits the fire & the whole
joint catches hell.

I need two bodies–the other
a refuge of Arctic relief for this
weary one, this jinxed & ginned
smoked glass-translucent skin
they spend a week’s wages to see
in the glare of gas lamps.
And the voice they skip revival for–
sure it’s mine. But the way
it takes hold of me sometimes
like a dog with a piece of old rag,
shakes me from head to foot,
I don’t know. That’s when I give
the word, hire a car
or hitch up with the next train out.

Keep moving. In all this flatness
I stand out like a bug.
But the moment I close my eyes
I’m stepping up to my house
back in Tennessee. With a sweet
soft absence of sound
I ease into the dark parlor,
my furs & silks whisper to the floor,
there’s the briefest of rattles as I slide
the deadbolt home.

Cue up Johnny Shines, “I Don’t Know”

Highway 61 was, even more than Route 66, a road to (relative) freedom. The northward migration of African Americans in the last century, flooding into the cities as economic refugees, was in many ways comparable to the earlier immigrations of peasants from Europe and China. U.S. Route 61 was the main north-south corridor between Mississippi and Chicago, and people, money, and music flowed in both directions. But even as some African American men were able finally to achieve a measure of security with a job from Henry Ford, their economic conditions remained still too marginal for many to provide for their wives or girlfriends, and those who had work as servants or cleaning ladies in the south were all too often unwilling to take their chances in a cold and alien north. In a country where employment was an essential accoutrement of manhood, the price for increased dignity and freedom was further instability in family relationships that had been fragile since slavery times.

This was the backdrop for Johnny Shines’ masterpiece, “I Don’t Know.” Again, while the lyrics in themselves are suggestive, one needs to hear Shines’ plaintive-yet-booming tenor, his understated slide guitar behind it. It is an ostensibly hopeful, even joyful, song with just a hint of melancholy about it – the opposite of “Long Old Road.”

Well I’m goin’ on the high road,
Gonna cross over on the eastern side. (2 x)
I’m gonna flag every passerby
Til someone give me a ride.

Well I’m goin’ to Chicago,
that’s what I’m gonna do. (2x)
Make a couple of paydays,
send back here after you.

When I’m gone, if you get lonesome
and you want to have some fun, (2x)
Just go on over to West Memphis, baby,
that’s where they barrelhouse all night long.

Shines grew up just south of Memphis in the northern tip of the Delta, and traveled all over the country playing music on street corners in the company of Robert Johnson. A moderately religious man, he never had much time for people who considered blues “the Devil’s music,” as he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1992:

You want me to tell you where that all came from? It ain’t nothing but bullshit. That was told to us as a way of scaring us into never leaving the farm. Them overseers tried to prey on our religion, whenever they might see us playing guitar or mouth harp or drums or singing, they saw it as us trying to liberate ourselves, and they didn’t like it. Especially anyone who was running to another plantation to play a gig. We was freeing ourselves, and they couldn’t stand for that. So they told us that if we sang anything else but gospel music, we would die and go to hell and burn by fire and brimstone forever and all that mess. They even got our own colored preachers believing that stuff, so they preached it to us, too. Now, if a man had spent his life on earth in hell, he sure don’t wanna die and go to hell, so he changes his ways. A lot of black people got so scared to sing the blues, they would find an example within the town who was, say a bluesman, and they’d make him an outcast, call him the devil’s tool. And they invented folklore about blues musicians going to the crossroads at midnight and letting the devil himself come up and tune their guitar (laughing), and selling their soul to play the blues. It’s all a lie, just a plain lie. And when Robert made that song about ‘I went to the Crossroads and fell down on my knees/ asked the lord above have mercy/ save poor Bob if you please’ – well, that was proof to them that he done sold his soul! Boy, they really gave Robert hell in those church towns. They told him he would burn.

Then, everybody wants to know what exactly he was singin’ about in that song? It was just some old crossroads in Mississippi – I think it’s probably where the Southern crosses the Yazoo Dog [Railroad], up there in Moorehead. He was mocking the myth, more than he was fearing it.

Shines eventually got a factory job in Chicago. Despite a great voice and virtuoso command of the acoustic and electric guitar, he was unwilling to accept what he considered the humiliating demands of the recording industry. Only with his “rediscovery” by white blues fans in the late 60s did he finally enjoy a second career as a full-time musician, but he remained very much his own man. Like Bessie Smith, Shines put a premium on originality, refusing to adapt his style to conform to anyone’s stereotype, no matter how flattering. Greil Marcus described the effect of his music in a review in Rolling Stone: “Shines steps outside himself, considers his place in the world, draws you into his body, and then, still standing a few steps off, tells you where you are: where, for the moment you live . . . ”

SOUTH SIDE VIEW
homage to Johnny Shines

blue ribbon of tar runs by
my baby’s door where
I am bound

make a couple
of paydays
play it tight

write: here’s luck
you can bell the cat & clip
the eagle’s wing

sing: everybody
talkin bout heaven
aint goin there

prayer: in this city lord
there’s no horizon
where can I rest my eye

cry: baby
on You

Cue up the Sabri Brothers, “Kali Kamaliya Wale”

I’ve never been very good at separating the physical from the spiritual. The distinction strikes me as a little phony, despite a few, millennia-long traditions that assert an unbridgeable distance between the two. I’m not even sure that the great comparative religionist Mircea Eliade’s distinction between the sacred and the profane represents a universal truth. (Haven’t we had enough of universalizing ideologies by now?)

Nevertheless, to me, heaven remains a very potent word, more signpost than destination, pointing beyond the objectives born of shallow cravings. A strong flavor of heaven attaches to the holy aspiration itself:

Shaykh Nizam al-Din said that in Kaithal there was a saint whom they call Sufi Badhni. He was so completely ascetical that he went about totally naked. Shayk Nizam al-Din comments that according to Islamic law, any person who abstains from the minimal amount of food and water required to keep the body functioning, or who does not wear at least enough clothing to cover the body parts . . . is commiting a punishable offense, but Sufi Badhni was a saint of such high character that he was exempt from these restrictions. . . .

Sufi Badhni loved the life of prayer. He sat in the mosque in front of the mihrab and had no other occupation but offering prayers day and night. One day some ‘ulama’ came to see him, as many people used to. The shaykh queried the ‘ulama’: “Will there be prayer in paradise?” They answered: “Paradise is the abode of reward, where no desire will go unsatisfied, no need unfulfilled. Devotions are only necessary in this world.” When Sufi Badhni heard that there would be no prayer in paradise, he exclaimed: “I’ll have nothing to do with a heaven where there is no prayer,” and then he added something in Hindi not fit to repeat.

“The Life of Sufi Badhni,” Bruce B. Lawrence, in John Renard, ed., Windows on the House of Islam (University of California Press, 1998)

The poems of the 16th-century Vishnavite saint Mirabai – a Rajput princess who renounced her title and privileges to live as a wandering beggar – remind us that the attempt to locate God or heaven is in some sense a game; we might as well enjoy it.

I’m like
the cloth
that someone dyed.

I’ll go now,
play at hide
and seek to please

my lord,
wearing five
teasing colours.

When found,
I will become
one-hued with light.

With lovers
away, girls write
line upon line.

My love,
he is here
inside.

He does not leave,
he doesn’t
need to arrive.

Says Meera, I gaze
at the path day and night.

(Shama Futehally, tr., In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera, HarperCollins, 1994)

Cue up Toshiro Mayuzumi, “Mandala Symphony”

What about pilgrimage, then? What is being enacted when, after many hardships and reversals, the pilgrims finally arrive at the threshold of the very image of heaven – right on earth?

The peyoteros assembled in a line, in their proper order, facing the ever-brightening eastern sky while Ramón chanted, prayed, and gestured with his plumes, until he directed them to set down their bundles. Ramón, at the head of the line, then beckond forward the first pilgrim, Carlos. Ramón squatted beside the largest water hole and taking up some in his gourd bowl removed Carlos’ hat and poured water into it. He then touched both of Carlos’ eyes with his plumes, sprinkled water on his hed, and had him drink that remaining in the bowl. The ritual varied somewhat for the primeros [first-time pilgrims]. Ramón took more time and care with them, praying over them longer. After they had drunk the Sacred Water instead of sending them immediately back to their places in line he removed their blindfolds and urged them to gaze up and behold the sacred place to which they had returned as gods. He pointed out the important features of the landscape, the places the gods had stopped and rested, eaten, sung, or talked with the animals while traveling back to their homeland. Especially affecting were Ramón’s ministrations to [his wife] Lupe at this time. He carefully led her from her place to the water and she remained motionless for a moment after he had removed her blindfold. He bade her to lift her eyes, to behold the place of the Ancient Ones, where it all began, and she did so slowly, almost reluctantly. The sun struck her face fully. She seemed transfixed and tears spread evenly down the wrinkles of her rapturous face. Seeing her thus no one could help but know that she found the Sacred Land as beautiful as she had been told all her life. . . .

Offerings were then spread out by each pilgrim, lined up, and displayed . . . With great care, each peyotero laid out or held heavenward his treasures, displaying them to the ascending sun. Impassioned prayers by Ramón told the gods that these were the offerings being brought for the hikuri. Ramón drew from his bags tortillas which he blended in his gourd bowl with some of the Sacred Water, stirring the mixture with the end of his candle, and then placed some of the resultant mixture in each pilgrim’s mouth. This was the sacred food of the First People. All prayed aloud but independently with great emotion, weeping and shouting, waving plumes and feathers and candles to the sky and in the four directions, pointing out the beauty of their gifts to the gods. Even the shyest and youngest among them, Victoria and Pablo, were outspoken and animated, imploring the deities to give them success in their quest.

The mood changed after the consumption of the sacred food. Laughter and shouts of joy replaced the weeping and praying, this because the “deities” had glimpsed their homeland and had been promised a successful return and peyote hunt. There was now much capering and cavorting. Francisco leaped about the springs like a rabbit, dazzling everyone with his agility. He had the gift of surprising people usually by looking one moment like a wizened fragile old man who would break if he moved, then suddenly and without warning leaping straight up in the air or dancing a little jig without reason. The bottles and gourds were brought out and everyone moved among the springs to gather the Sacred Water . . .

(Barbara G. Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians, Cornell University Press, 1974)

Cue up Bela Bartok, “String Quartet No. 5, Movement IV (Andante)”

The months and days are wayfarers in eternity – wrote the aging poet-priest, echoing a long-ago preface to a poem by Li Bo – and as another year comes around it, too, turns vagabond. Those who float away their lives on boats or arrive on the threshold of old age leading a horse by the bit – traveling is a constant for them; they are at home wherever they end up. Many are the worthies who, in centuries past, met their deaths on the road, and for my part, it’s been years now since I first found myself unable to watch a solitary cloud drifting on the wind without succumbing to an aimless longing. Last year I wandered down along the coast, and in autumn when I returned to my hut along the river and swept out the cobwebs, I found the year already drawing rapidly to a close.

With the new year came skies filled with springtime haze, and I thought about crossing the Shirakawa Barrier into the far north. I became so possessed by wanderlust, it was as if the god of travelers himself had taken hold of me, and I couldn’t keep my mind on a single task.

So I patched up my tattered underwear, strung new cords on my bamboo rain hat, and had three moxa treatments on my legs. I couldn’t get the thought of the moon at Matsushima out of my head. I sold my patch of land and moved into temporary quarters at Sampu’s villa. When I left, I hung a poem on a post in my hut. It began,

Kusa no to mo sumikawara yo zo hina no ie.

Even a thatched hut with one turn of the wheel can become a house for dolls.

– Matsuo Basho, Oku no Hosomichi, “Narrow Road to the Far North” (1690)