Shelley claimed poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their moral influence on politics is exemplified by the spoken words which struck the world’s conscience when a young Sudanese-American poet was invited to tell the gathered attendees of COP26 in Glasgow what was happening as a result of climate change to the voiceless people of the world.
We are treated at every poetry session to a similar experience as our readers declaim their selections. The written and the spoken words inspire us and we return energised to our lives, grateful for a hour or two of the human spirit bursting forth in word and song (yes, we listened to Leonard Cohen, that twin of Bob Dylan).
Two of our readers are leaving the group for personal reasons. We shall keep in touch directly; and indirectly through this blog. On occasion we have had past members join us for particular sessions.
The next meeting will be to read Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, on Nov 19 via Zoom. For those who have purchased the 4-novel Kindle edition, MBF, the first novel, ends at Chapter 62 with the sentence: “It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.”
Pamela
Pamela chose poems of Jeet Thayil (born 1959), an Indian poet who dabbles in music. He has published four collections: These Errors Are Correct, English, Apocalypso and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992).
Thayil is the son of the well-known editor T. J. S. George. Pamela has visited him, and says his beautiful wife was friends with her aunt in Kottayam. His sister, Sheeba Thayil, also writes. She is married to a relative of Geetha. Mr. George edited the biography of Geetha's uncle, Mr C. S. Samuel, who was Chairman of Brooke Bond (1978 – 83).
Thayil received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College (New York). His first novel, Narcopolis (Faber, 2011), was set in the Bombay of the 1970s and '80s, and tells about the city's underbelly, and the drug scene of which he was a part.
Thayil is the editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, 60 Indian Poets and other collections.
He wrote the libretto for the opera Babur in London. It is an exploration of the complexities of faith and multiculturalism in modern-day Britain.
Thayil is also known as a performance poet and musician. Thayil was a guitarist for the psychedelic rock band Atomic Forest in the early 1980s for a brief period. After his wife, Shakti Bhatt, an editor died from an illness, Thayil established a literary prize in her name, that has been awarded annually since 2015.
I like the phrases Thayil used, said Pamela. Priya remarked that had our reader Geeta been present today, she would have asked: why is the poem called ‘Palm Secular’? The answer is a bit rude if you read the poem and note the object before which the narrator bows.
Thayil, being a modern poet, will not deign to tell the reader the context of any poem. We can guess the first ( Life Sentence) has to do with someone (perhaps his dead wife) who is seeking to make her way back into his consciousness; the second (The Opposite of Nostalgia) with a scene of desperate prostitutes; and the third (Psalm Secular) is about a love tryst which is benevolently looked upon by
The moon that hangs
above the street
on a silver thread
lifts its skirt to dance.
Arundhaty
She chose the poem Funeral March by Etel Adnan. Maria Popova blogs about poets, assembles their poetry, and disseminates her work. This piece about the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, Arundhaty received two weeks prior. It was written by the poet Etel Adnan, after Gagarin died, ironically, in a MIG-15 fighter plane accident.
It is a painted poem about life, death, loneliness, and our cosmic redemption, said Arundhaty. Etel Adnan is a writer, artist, poet and many other things besides. Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy, and from 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California.
The Algerian war of independence affected her, and she stopped writing in French (the language of many Lebanese, as much as Arabic) and shifted to visual art. During the movement of poets against the war in Vietnam she began to write poetry too.
In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers, and stayed in Lebanon until 1976.
Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris in 1977, and won the France-Pays Arabes award. The novel was translated into 10 languages, and had considerable influence. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California but travelled often to Paris.
In the late seventies, she wrote texts for two documentaries on the civil war in Lebanon. Etel Adnan’s poetry has been set to music by contemporary musicians.
(Taken from http://www.eteladnan.com/)
You can read more about her at Etel Adnan: Poetry of Suffering.
The poem was created as a combined poetry and art work by Ms. Adnan and exhibited in a long roll of paper, folded like an accordion. The whole work is shown above, and the ending of the poem in the panel below:
The poem ends thus –
Gagarin first man in space but also the thirteenth
the sun god Ra and murderous Isis
Eliah and Jesus and you
Mohammad hovering above Jerusalem
refusing to enter Paradise but unclothed
and reduced to a heap of ashes
you prophet Eliah carried by your horses
burning close to the sun
all of you cosmonauts carried by our dreams
floating above sleep
all of you pioneers of that space
which lingers between atom and dream
we heard the tremendous minute of silence
you all stood when Gagarin came to you
the great child in the great machine.
(https://www.ulrikehaage.com/a-funeral-march-for-the-first-cosmonaut/)
Since this poetry session, news came about the poet's death in Paris on Nov 14, 2021 at the age of 96. An obituary presented by The New York Times is linked here.
Devika
Longfellow is a famous American poet. Devika asked her husband a poem he remembered and it was something from Longfellow which KRG had read long ago. So Devika chose the poet her husband favoured, and a famous poem we had not recited before, A Psalm of Life. The bio below is chiefly her contribution.
Bio of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. He achieved a level of national and international prominence previously unequalled in the literary history of the United States and is one of the few American writers honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey—in fact, he is believed to be the first, as his bust was installed there in 1884. Poems such as Paul Revere’s Ride, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), and A Psalm of Life were mainstays of primary and secondary school curricula, indelible in the memory of generations of readers who studied these poems as children. Longfellow’s achievements in fictional and nonfictional prose, in a striking variety of poetic forms and modes, and in translation from many European languages, resulted in a remarkably productive and influential literary career.
Born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, Longfellow grew up in the thriving coastal city he remembered in My Lost Youth (1856) for its wharves and woodlands, the ships and sailors from distant lands who sparked his boyish imagination, and the historical associations of its old fort and an 1813 offshore naval battle between American and British brigs. His father, Stephen Longfellow, was an attorney and a Harvard graduate active in public affairs. His mother, Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow, was the daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, who had served in the American Revolution. She named this second son among her eight children for her brother, Henry Wadsworth, who had died in Tripoli harbor in 1804.
When Henry and Stephen Longfellow arrived for the fall 1822 term at Bowdoin College it was a small and isolated school with a traditional curriculum and conservative Congregational leadership. The stimulus Henry Longfellow found there came less from classes or the library than from literary societies. Elected to the Peucinian Society, he mixed with the academically ambitious students. Public speaking provided another outlet for Henry’s artistic and rhetorical skills at Bowdoin: in his Junior Exhibition performance he anticipated The Song of Hiawatha (1855) by speaking as a ‘North American Savage’ in a dialogue with an English settler, and his commencement address argued for redirection of national values in support of American Authors.
Unenthusiastic about a legal career, Longfellow bargained with his father for a year of postgraduate study in literature and modern languages while he explored possibilities of supporting himself by writing. Fate, however, intervened to protect him from the bar. Mrs. James Bowdoin, for whose late husband the college had been named, contributed $1,000 to endow a professorship in modern languages (only the fourth in the United States), and—on the strength of Longfellow’s translation of a Horace ode that had impressed one of his father’s colleagues among Bowdoin trustees—college authorities offered the position to the young graduate at his 1825 commencement on the condition that he would prepare for the post by visiting Europe and becoming accomplished in Romance languages.
On the advice of George Ticknor of Harvard, Longfellow decided to add German to French, Spanish, and Italian. He sailed from New York to Le Havre in May 1826 and spent the next three years rambling through Europe’s cities and countryside’s, absorbing impressions of cultures and places, living with families in Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and developing linguistic fluency.
Back at Bowdoin in his new role, Longfellow felt stultified in a college atmosphere so different from what he had experienced at Göttingen and stifled by the provincial atmosphere of Brunswick. He also found himself overburdened with instructional tasks—introducing students to the rudiments of various languages and developing teaching materials he could use in classes, to replace the previous rote recitation of grammar with actual literary conversation and translation.
Despite the frustrations Longfellow experienced in his new vocation, there was personal happiness. Shortly after his return from Europe, he began his courtship of Mary Potter, daughter of Judge Barrett Potter; she was a Portland neighbour who was a friend of his sister Anne. Longfellow and Mary Potter were married in September 1831.
Longfellow sought diplomatic posts, and considered opening a girls’ school in New York or taking over the Round Hill School in Northampton. He applied for professorships in Virginia and New York before release came in the form of an invitation to succeed Ticknor as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. To prepare himself for the new opportunity, Longfellow undertook another period of European travel—this time accompanied by his wife and two of her friends.
Longfellow’s goal in this second European journey was to acquaint himself with Scandinavian languages. Sorrows beset them, however: from Copenhagen, Mary Goddard was summoned home by news of her father’s death; in Amsterdam the ailing Mary Potter Longfellow suffered a miscarriage in October 1835. Although she proceeded with her husband and Clara Crowninshield to Rotterdam, Mary’s health declined over the next weeks and she died on November 29, leaving her widower stricken. Longfellow moved on to Heidelberg and immersion in German literature—readings in Goethe, Schiller, Ludwig Uhland, Jean Paul Richter, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)—that awakened a new sense of poetry as emotional expression.
Restless and sorrowful, Longfellow then set out alone to travel through the Tyrol and Switzerland. Near Interlaken he met Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, and continued his journey with Appleton and Appleton’s charming and accomplished family. Falling in love with the daughter, 17-year-old Frances Appleton, in July 1843, he married her.
Most of us only get one life. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had four. In the first, he arrived in Cambridge in 1837, fresh from a six-year professorship at Bowdoin College. Longfellow, sporting long hair, yellow gloves, and flowered waistcoats, cut quite a romantic, European-style figure in what was then a provincial village of 6,000. At Harvard, as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages, he soon earned a reputation as an earnest and well-liked teacher who didn’t just walk the foreign walk but talked the talk as well: He was eventually fluent in eight languages and a competent reader in eight others.
Longfellow’s second life began in 1854, when – tired of teaching and bolstered by some publishing successes – he took up the life of a full-time writer, the first American to make a living as a poet.
Then came Longfellow’s third life of sorts – not long after his death in 1882. His reputation as a poet, which had taken some critical sniping in his own day, faded fast, and he then faced a hundred-year barrage of scorn. Some of it came from fellow poets, whose emerging modernist sensibilities demanded that poems be inward and difficult. (Ezra Pound, a grandnephew of Longfellow, was said to have been embarrassed by the family connection.)
In the past two decades, the work of Buell and others have given Longfellow his fourth life, the one in which he lives on as an American writer worthy of renewed attention – both a competent poet and, said Buell, “a point of reference” in a golden age of New England literary life.
When he died of phlebitis less than a month after his 75th birthday and only a few days after completing The Bells of San Blas, Longfellow left an estate worth 356,320 dollars to his children and grandchildren; his weekly book sales then amounted to 1,000 copies. He also left a loving family and grateful readers who have continued to honour him by erecting statues and naming parks and schools for him, Evangeline, and Hiawatha.
Much of the above is taken from these Web sites:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/henry-wadsworth-longfellow
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/02/the-many-lives-of-henry-wadsworth-longfellow/
A curse of poets who write memorable lines is that they are remembered often out of context, as this story by Mark Twain exemplifies: three seedy characters calling themselves Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow enter a lonely miner’s cabin at the foot of the Sierras. They quaff his whisky, cheat at cards, and by discharging famous lines from one another’s work, hoodwink the old miner, who doesn’t know these “littery swells” are all impostors. “This is the forest primeval,” shouts the sham Longfellow as he dances around the cabin. “Here once the embattled farmers stood/And fired the shot heard round the world,” the sham Emerson replies. Early the next morning, just before the scoundrels take off, Longfellow grabs the miner’s only pair of boots and shouts as he takes off:
these boots shall lay “footprints on the sands of Time.”
Joe noted this poem has many such lines which resonate in one's memory decades after you first read them. The meter of the poem is trochaic when it starts (4 feet, each a trochee, i.e. a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable). But it changes rhythm. For further analysis consult:
https://btk.ppke.hu/uploads/articles/135505/file/introduction/poetry/metre_sub2.html
It is a very fluid poem – one has little difficulty laying the stresses since the lines flow in a stately manner. Joe noted as readers observed that this is a hortatory poem, and that's why it has fallen into disfavour, since in modern times poetry does not try to exhort anyone to live on a high moral plane. To survive and keep your dignity, is sufficient.
Geetha
Geetha chose something she had learned in school and was thrilled when Joe expressed his joy at Masefield's poem. It's a poem she loved because it was about the lure of the sea. But in school one never gives much thought to the poet.
Biography of the Poet
John Masefield, (1878 – 1967), is best known for his poems of the sea, Salt-Water Ballads (1902), which included the poems Sea Fever and Cargoes), and for his long narrative poems, such as The Everlasting Mercy (1911), which shocked with its colloquial coarseness.
After schooling Masefield was apprenticed aboard a sailing ship that went around Cape Horn. He left the sea after that voyage and spent several years living precariously in the United States, devouring books. He returned to England, worked for a time as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian, and settled in London. After he succeeded Robert Bridges as poet laureate in 1930 and remained until 1967, his poetry became more austere.
The long narrative poem Dauber (1913), concerns the eternal struggle of the visionary against ignorance and materialism, and Reynard the Fox (1919) deals with many aspects of rural life in England. He also wrote novels of adventure—Sard Harker (1924), Odtaa (1926), and Basilissa (1940)—sketches, and works for children. His other works include the poetic dramas, as well as an autobiographical volume, So Long to Learn (1952). Masefield was awarded the Order of Merit in 1935. This bio depends on material from the Brittanica web site.
Sea Fever was published in 1902. The original title was hyphenated and each of the three stanzas began
I must down to the seas again
and not
I must go down to the seas again
The latter in Joe’s opinion is no improvement at all to the ear, for it breaks the rhythm and it doesn't scan. The OED does list ‘down' in one of its meanings as an intransitive verb, to come or go down; to descend, citing authors from the 1700s and even Thomas Hardy. Joe couldn’t imagine Masefield would have changed it – some stupid editor would have changed it.
You can see another biography on the Masefield Society site.
It turns out that when Salt-Water Ballads – Masefield's first volume of poetry, was published in 1902 none of the three stanzas began with the ‘go’, but when when the Collected Poems of John Masefield appeared in 1928, the ‘go’ was inserted in the first stanza, but not in the second and third. Here is the poet himself reading it. Arundhaty recalled that she too read a lot of poems in her school days and they are slowly coming back.
Gopa
The long Tennyson poem Morte d'Arthur was Gopa's selection. She read an excerpt.
Biography of Tennyson
Joe
Joe said: I’ll tell you how I chose the poem, and the poet; then I’ll go to the poem itself; and finally say a few words about the poet.
I wanted to visit the church where we used to hear Mass, St. Anthony of Padua in Falls Church, Virginia. I picked up a paper while exiting and it featured a saint called Alphonsus Rodriguez, who had a sad early life. He lost his parents, then he lost his wife, and finally he lost his three sons by age 39. He then wanted to become a Jesuit but for lack of education he didn’t make the grade. However, he became a lay-brother and for forty-six years he remained as a porter at the gate for the Jesuit College of Palma in the island of Majorca, Spain, answering the door and talking to everyone who came to seek advice or solace.
I learnt that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (also a Jesuit, you recall) had written a sonnet for Alphonsus Rodriguez. That clinched my choice of poem and poet. But a few explanations, first. Hopkins uses a compressed syntax. His vocabulary does not align with common use.
He uses three words in this poem as verbs which we know generally as nouns: Gall, Tongue, and Vein.
Gall as verb means to hurt by rubbing
Tongue as verb mean to give tongue to
Vein as verb means to decorate with coloured, incised, or impressed markings suggestive of or resembling veins
And he uses Hurtle, normally a verb, as a noun to mean the clashing sound of conflict, whereas we employ it as a verb usually.
Now the poem.
In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez
Laybrother of the Society of Jesus
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
In the first octet (rhymed abba abba) Hopkins refers to the normal signs of external conquest: gashed bodies, bashed up shields, etc which forge the honour of the glorious fighter, even as for Christ and the martyrs.
But when the battle is fought within (taming oneself of self-love, tempering the passions, etc), you won’t hear any signs of that internal struggle.
The sestet slows down the rhythm (it is rhymed ccd ccd) to match the pace of Rodriguez’s life which went on for years and years without any great and original events. Rodriguez encountered people habitually as if he was meeting God, even as we say Namaskaram or Namaste, which means, I salute the divinity in you.
The name of the one to whom tribute is being paid occurs in the last line only which baldly states
in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
Short Bio of Gerard Manley Hopkins
He was born an Anglican in 1844 to a British Consul in Hawaii and won a poetry prize in school. With a scholarship he made it to Balliol College, Oxford, where his gifts were highly praised by Benjamin Jewett, later the master of the college. There was a movement in the 1860s at Oxford called the Oxford Movement in which many high-ranking Anglicans converted to Catholicism. He fell under the influence of John Newman, later Cardinal Newman, who was one such and also converted; later he became a priest of the Jesuit order.
He considered his poetic gift at variance with his priestly vocation and they say he burned his early poems in 1868 when he entered the noviciate. However a trove of poems written in his own hand was kept by Robert Bridges, whose grandson handed them over to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
In 1875 Hopkins returned to poetry inspired by the lives of five nuns who died in a shipwreck, which he commemorated in a poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. He wrote a string of sonnets of which the most famous was The Windhover. Probably the most anthologised of his poems, because it’s easily understood and has striking images, is Pied Beauty which begins
Glory be to God for dappled things
During his short time as a poet he made number of innovations which are associated with some new terminology in poetry coined by him; two of the most striking are inscape and sprung rhythm. You can read about them at his official website. Hopkins is considered so important today that his poems are taught to every student of English literature and find their way into all the anthologies, yet he was hardly known in his lifetime.
He had a faculty for sketching, sometimes in great detail, an art he was taught by his aunt. You can view some of his drawings on this blog.
He was a great poet for alliteration. Most of his poetry was privately circulated; a favourite correspondent of his was Robert Bridges, the poet laureate. Hopkins resisted the urge to publish. He taught classics at several colleges, learned Welsh, and was sent to University College, Dublin, in 1884. He didn’t like it there and to our misfortune (and his) he contracted typhoid there and died in 1889. But the first collection of his poetry did not appear until 1918 (edited by Bridges).
A few hundred pages of his letters reveal a developed faculty for incisive criticism, and a tolerant humanity. People liked him for the integrity of his thinking, and his readiness to defer in humility.
For a fuller biography consult this official Hopkins website.
Priya mentioned the poem Pied Beauty and ‘sprung rhythm’ – always a question in exams in India. Joe said though Hopkins belonged to the Victorian era, he had many of the characteristics of modernism in his poetry. In fact a number of poets like T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and others acknowledged their debt to him. Priya referred to a bird in one of Hopkins’ poems, was it a kite or a hawk? It was a skylark, and the poem is called The Caged Skylark which begins:
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage,
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells —
Look up what Hopkins means by scant in this instance. This poem too is a sonnet in the same Petrarchan rhyme scheme, abba abba ccd ccd
Kavita
Kavita chose the poem since feeling is first by e. e. cummings.
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), often styled as e e cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. An important American poet, Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. He uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.
His poetic themes share an affinity with the Romantic tradition, but his poems have have some quirks of syntax, and ways of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences.
His father was a professor at Harvard University. From an early age, Cummings’ parents supported his artistic gifts. He wrote poems and drew as a child, and many of his summers were spent on the lake in New Hampshire, where his father had two houses.
As he matured, Cummings moved to an "I, Thou" relationship with God. His journals are replete with references to "le bon Dieu", as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork. Cummings also prayed for strength to be his essential self.
He received a B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University, developing an interest in modern poetry, with the peculiarity that he ignored grammar and syntax, while aiming for a free-flowing use of language.
In 1917, Cummings enlisted in the Ambulance Corps during WWI. Cummings fell in love with the city of Paris, to which he returned throughout his life.
He and a friend expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans. They were imprisoned by the French military on suspicion of espionage. Failing to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels, his father wrote to President Woodrow Wilson to obtain his release. The Enormous Room (1922), is a poem about his prison experience.
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and lived there for two years before returning to New York. His collection Tulips and Chimneys was published in 1923 where his inventive use of grammar and syntax is evident. Cummings soon made his reputation as an avant-garde poet.
During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Cummings travelled extensively to Paris, throughout Europe, and the Soviet Union, recounting his experiences later. He worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924–1927).
In 1926, Cummings's parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived. His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life.
In 1952 Harvard University, made Cummings a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.
Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home by the lake in New Hampshire. He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67. Cummings by this time was a widely read poet in the United States.
Cummings's papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Though Cummings was married twice, his longest relationship, lasting more than three decades, was with Marion Morehouse.
It was in 1934, after his separation from his second wife, that Cummings met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. She lived with Cummings until his death in 1962.
Despite his radical and bohemian public image, he was a Republican and later an ardent supporter of Joseph McCarthy.
In the chosen poem Kavita said the poet is asking readers not to over-analyse love, but be open to romance and allow themselves to fully feel the emotion.
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
Kavita liked the last line. Devika mentioned that Oct 13 and 14 are the birthdates of two of our poets, Thayil and Cummings, and of course Joe and she have birthdays on Oct 12! Kavita's is on Oct 24, her daughter’s is on Oct 28.
KumKum
Two poems of Cavafy were read in 2009 by Indira Outcalt: Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca. KumKum was enchanted and now in her daughter Rachel’s library she found a collection called The Complete Poems of Cavafy.
Constantine P. Cavafy Bio by KumKum
C.P. Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled. Cavafy's father was an importer-exporter, who traveled to Liverpool, England frequently. Unfortunately his father died in 1870, leaving behind his widowed mother and eight siblings. His mother moved to Liverpool to facilitate the older sons to take care of the family business there.
Cavafy lived in England much of his young adulthood learning English and enjoying Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde .
With the failure of the business in Liverpool, the family had to move back to Alexandria. Later, Cavafy's mother moved to Constantinople with her children. Cavafy lived there the rest of his life. He died in 1933 of Cancer.
Cavafy was an avid student of history and ancient civilizations. A great number of his poems have historical themes, the celebration of a historical event or a character or a city of the past.
During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet. Very few of his poems were published. He was an openly gay person. His close friends’ circle appreciated and had access to all his compositions. Many of his poems are of highly personal nature, and he made no attempts to hide his homosexual bent. His unvarnished style and homosexual sensibility are worth a mention. Cavafy's language was flat, simple and direct, whether he was writing about nature, life or beauty. W.H. Auden wrote in the introduction of The Complete Poems of Cavafy:
“Simile and metaphor are devices he never uses; whether he is speaking of a scene, an event, or an emotion, every line of his is plain factual description without any ornamentation whatsoever.
What, then, is it in Cavafy's poems that survives translations and excites?
Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech.”
Additional links:
The blurb of the book below provides added material:
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-parallel-Oxford-Classics/dp/0199555958
This is an archive acquired by the Onassis foundation:
https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive
Man with a Past (The New Yorker is behind a paywall), an article from the magazine:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past
Charles Simic, the poet, has written an appreciation in 3,400 words at the London Review of Books, which again needs access by subscription:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n06/charles-simic/some-sort-of-a-solution
The first poem KumKum read was The Open Window. The lines
My window opens up a world
Unknown. A source of ineffable,
Perfumed memories is offered me
Wings beat at my window ––
depict a person in thought, gazing from the window and ushering in sweet sighs and keen memories offered up insistently like the wings beating at the window. It is a reposeful image.
The second poem KumKum declared was her favourite, An Old Man. The old man is at a table in the café and he meditates on lost time:
He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.
But then the very condition that brought on this regretful reverie overtakes him:
... But with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the café.
This is the “tone of voice, a personal speech,” W.H. Auden spoke of. The readers thought it ‘beautiful’ in a chorus of voices. Geetha thought it was lovely – it is giving us all a message, she said. Devika chimed in, and Zakia. Prudence dictated his life and now his life has gone by. Beautifully written said Zakia, and she thanked KumKum for sharing.
KumKum left the third poem to be included in the blog and read at leisure by KRG enthusiasts.
Priya
It is the hundredth anniversary of Subramania Bharati's death. He is well known in Tamil Nadu and South India, but many in the north have not heard of him.
Bio of Subramania Bharati
Chinnaswami Subramania Bharati was born in Ettayapuram, South India, in 1882, and died in Madras, in 1921 at the early age of thirty-eight. Bharati left behind a remarkable legacy of poetry and prose writings. For Tamils his stature might be likened to that of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. He is called Mahakavi.
He was influenced by the Romantic poets, and used the pen-name “Shelley-dasan”, meaning disciple of Shelly. Much later, inspired by Walt Whitman, he wrote prose poems, possibly for the first time in an Indian language. He was also interested in haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry form.
Poetry oozed out of him; he has written on a number of subjects. He worked in Tamil Nadu as a teacher, and in Varanasi as a journalist. He was a linguist – he knew French, Arabic, Sanskrit, Telugu, Hindi. Bharati was a title conferred on him by the Raja of Ettayapuram for his talent in poetry.
He lost his mother at age 5, his father at age 16, but before that he got married to a girl aged 7, Chellama. He treated her very well and they had a very happy marriage, though she was not lettered.
He is considered a pioneer of modern Tamizh literature. In poetry he used simple words and rhythms, in contrast to the earlier complex structures. His poems, especially those regarding the fight for freedom, are very forceful. His output was prodigious – thousands of poems came from his pen. He has written odes to Russia and Belgium. He has written about the divine personalities of different religions. He has translated the speeches of Aurobindo, Tilak and Swami Vivekananda. He worked as a journalist at the Swadesamitran newspaper published from Madras (it folded in 1985).
Bharati was an ardent Indian nationalist too, an advocate of social reform, and a visionary poet. He fought against the caste system in Hindu society. Bharati was born in an orthodox Brahmin family, but he considered all living beings to be equal, and to illustrate this he performed the upanayanam (the thread ceremony) for a young Dalit man and made him a Brahmin.
Bharati was persecuted for his convictions both by the British and by the orthodox elements of his own society, who treated him as an outcast. He was exiled from British India in 1908 and went to live in Pondicherry, the French colony souuth of Madras. He wrote epic poems in Pondicherry. He spent ten years in exile there and eventually returned to Madras, where he died.
He translated the the Bhagvad Gita into Tamizh, and also Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
Though much remains to be done in the area of translation, a sample of Bharati’s works has been translated into every major Indian language, as well as some European languages, including English, French, German, Russian, and Czech. The Government of India conferred upon him the title of Indian “National Poet.”
During his lifetime, the colonial government banned the publication of Bharati’s works because of his pro-independence views. Bharati had to struggle constantly against poverty.
However, Bharati was keen to publish a definitive edition of his works. He hoped to raise funds from his friends and publishers. He also sought help from the Maharajah of Ettayapuram, his native town.
He expressed his intention to employ improvements in the printing and binding of his works, and to set a low price for his books. Bharati’s efforts did not bear fruit during his lifetime. After his death, the project was taken up by his widow, Chellamma. She published notices seeking the help of the public in her undertaking.
She established a publishing company called Bharati Ashramam in Madras. The first volume appeared in January of 1922, and included ninety “National Poems”– patriotic songs in the cause of Indian independence and cultural revival. Chellamma wished to bequeath these publications to the people of Tamil Nadu upon her death.
Another publishing company, Bharati Prachuralayam, formed by Bharati’s brother, C Viswanathan, went on to publish almost all of his writings. Chellamma retained the copyright in Bharati’s works, and later purchased it for Rs 4,000/- .
The copyright was purchased from Viswanathan by the government of Madras, but the government also paid Chellamma and Bharati’s two daughters five thousand rupees each at this time.
The government began to publish Bharati’s works in 1950. The copyright in Bharati’s works was released to public by the government of Tamil Nadu state in 1954.
A Standard Edition of Bharati’s poetry was finally published by S. Vijaya Bharati, the grand-daughter of Subramania Bharati, who created her own publishing imprint for this work to ensure its authenticity. She was able to publish Bharati’s complete poetry in four volumes in 2015 – 94 years after the poet’s death.
(The above account is taken from a biography offered by Professor Mira T. Sundara Rajan, whose mother is S. Vijaya Bharati. See https://professormira.com/subramania-bharati/ . The Wiki article has been used also. )
Priya read an excerpt from The Cuckoo's Song: Kuyil Pattu. The 46-page epic is available for a song on Kindle. The poet is dreaming in a forest. He hears the sweet singing of the cuckoo. The cuckoo says she can meet after two days for a close encounter. But when he goes, he finds the cuckoo flirting with a monkey. The cuckoo contrasts the bewitching charms of the monkey with his poor imitation, Man, who may try to imitate the monkey in many ways, but what will he do for ‘a god-given tail’?
Priya also read the poem, Wind. The readers were grateful for being introduced to a new poet they should know. Devika said in Chennai you hear a lot of Bharati's poems especially those having to do with the freedom struggle.
Joe mentioned going for a walk on Independence Day from his cousin Maya's home in Gandhinagar, Adyar many years ago. The streets were deserted until he came across a school, the Bala Vidya Mandir, nearby where a function was going on and all the children were sitting on the ground in neat rows. Speeches and songs came over the mike until a young lad of 9 or 10 years stood up in a veshti (dhoti) and black coat wearing a talaipa (turban) looking for all the world like the image of Bharati we see in photos. Then he started off and worked himself up into a lather, not a poem, but an impassioned oration, that blew everyone away. Of course Joe knew about Bharati but there he saw the incarnation of a young Bharati!
Saras
Two poems of Carl Sandburg, who has never been recited at KRG were read by Saras.
Biography of Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg, (1878 – 1967) was an American poet, historian, novelist, and folklorist.
Sandburg worked in various occupations from the age of 11 — as a barbershop porter, a milk truck driver, a brickyard hand, and a harvester in the Kansas wheat fields. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, he enlisted in the 6th Illinois Infantry. These early years he later described in his autobiography Always the Young Strangers (1953).
From 1910 to 1912 he acted as an organiser for the Social Democratic Party and secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee. When he moved to Chicago in 1913 he became an editor of System, a business magazine, and later joined the staff of the Chicago Daily News.
In 1914 a group of his Chicago Poems appeared in Poetry magazine (issued in book form in 1916). Chicago Poems is an ode to a city. It's a clear eyed and unapologetic love letter: where you tell your true-love you love them not in spite of their imperfections but because of them. This was Sandburg's first volume of poetry, written in the years just after 1912 when he moved to Chicago. In his most famous poem from the collection, Chicago, he depicted the city as the laughing, lusty, heedless “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.” Sandburg’s poetry made an instant and favourable impression. In free verse like that of Whitman, he eulogised workers: “Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Gary, they make their steel with men” (Smoke and Steel, 1920). The Humanities magazine of the National Endowment for the Arts called him ‘A Workingman‘s Poet.’
In Good Morning, America (1928) Sandburg seemed to have lost some of his faith in democracy, but from the depths of the Great Depression he wrote a poetic testament to the power of the people to go forward, The People, Yes (1936). The folk songs he sang before delighted audiences were issued in two collections, The American Songbag (1927) and New American Songbag (1950). He wrote the popular biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vol. (1926), and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vol. (1939; Pulitzer Prize in history, 1940).
Another biography, Steichen the Photographer, the life of his famous brother-in-law, Edward Steichen, appeared in 1929. In 1948 Sandburg published a long novel, Remembrance Rock, which recapitulates the American experience from Plymouth Rock to World War II. Complete Poems appeared in 1950. He wrote four books for children—Rootabaga Stories (1922); Rootabaga Pigeons (1923); Rootabaga Country (1929); and Potato Face (1930).
In his poetry he used mostly free verse, but was indifferent to whether rhymes were useful or not. He has given scores of definitions of poetry, but the one Saras liked best is:
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
Chicago Skyline early 1930.
The first poem, Chicago, is about the city of Chicago and what makes it go. In the opening stanza Sandburg announces the trades of the city:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
He dares anyone show him another such city:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong
and cunning.
Since Chicago is a relatively young city (estd. 1833) Sandburg refers to it as a “Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud.” He acknowledges the gangsters of the city (Al Capone and his mob) and the killings.
In the second poem At a Window, Sandburg lends his sympathy to the poor, and lets in their hunger, but asks for a little love:
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
Thommo
Leonard Cohen started out as a poet but today he is best known as a singer and performer. Two of the many songs he wrote attained great popularity. The first, Suzanne, was popularised by Judy Collins who made it a world-wide hit; when Cohen sang the composition it received little publicity and a muted response.
Leonard Cohen Bio by Thommo
Leonard Cohen was born in a suburb of Montreal on 21st September 1934. His Lithuanian-born mother Marsha, daughter of a Talmudic writer, migrated to Canada in 1927. Cohen says he had a very Messianic childhood and was told that he was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest and Moses’ brother.
Cohen was at first a poet, and was influenced by William Butler Yeats and Irving Layton who taught at McGill University. Composing the songs, for which he became world famous, came later.
After graduating from McGill he published quite a few poems. His first published book of poetry was Let Us Compare Mythologies brought out in 1956.
Cohen’s poetry however, received only lukewarm praise. His next book The Spice-Box of Earth was brought out in 1961. It helped him to reach out to the poetry scene in Canada.
Cohen’s father’s will provided him with a modest trust income just about enough to allow him to pursue his poetic ambitions.
It was, however, the song Suzanne Takes You Down that got him international recognition. Suzanne became popular world-wide after Judy Collins’ version became a huge success. Hallelujah, easily Cohen’s greatest success, was first released on his album Various Positions in 1984. He sang it during his Europe tour in 1985 but it had limited success initially. Hallelujah won greater popularity through John Cale’s and then Rufus Wainright’s versions, and attained universal acclaim after the song was featured in the 2001 animated film, Shrek.
Cohen’s own vocal versions never had the appeal of the rendering by other singers. Perhaps his gravelly voice may have turned off some people.
Because of its title (which means ‘rejoice in praising God’) many assume that it is a Christian song. It is not. It is laced with religious imagery drawn from Cohen’s Jewish background – for instance the episode of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah; and Samson’s hair being shorn off by Delilah.
But Hallelujah (pronounced ha·luh·loo·yuh) is essentially a bitter song about broken love and loss.
There’s a documentary ‘Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song’.
It explores Hallelujah from its origins and its poor initial reception until it became one of the most recognised and celebrated songs of all time. Here's a clip. Many well known singers (they say about 200) have sung Hallelujah. These include Celine Dion, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins, Susan Boyle and Bon Jovi. The documentary was approved by Cohen in 2014 just before his 80th birthday. Cohen died two years later on 7th November 2016.
The story goes that Bob Dylan once asked Leonard Cohen how long it had taken him to compose Hallelujah. He replied sheepishly that he had taken 2 years. But his masterpiece had actually taken 7 years.
There are so many versions. The one Joe posted is a bit different from the one sung by John Cale. Not surprising given that he is believed to have written over 80 drafts and there is an estimated 250 versions of every single line.
Here is Thommo singing Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.
Everyone was thrilled that Thommo sang. Devika said he should choose a poem to sing every time. KumKum said we love to have Thommo singing when he should be reading. ‘Lovely’ and ‘Nice’ were other exclamations by readers like Kavita and Zakia. Joe said it is ironic Hallelujah was ever thought to be a religious poem, considering the suggestive nature of the lyrics:There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me do ya
I remember when I moved in you
The Holy dove was moving, too
These lines should remind readers of the quote from Hemingway’s novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, where the hero, Robert Jordan, asks Maria “But did thee feel the earth move?” – her lover was describing the intensity of their mutual sexual pleasure.
Thommo said two of the three notorious women in the Bible figure in the poem – Bathsheba and Delilah. Only Jezebel is missing.
Zakia
Zakia wished the session could have ended on the note of Thommo‘s singing. But hers was to be the last poem. Her son, Suhail, and daughter-in-law, Fatima, had been to Moscow recently (on their honeymoon?). Suhail picked up a novel called Father and Children (titled Fathers and Sons in the Russian edition). It is a work by the the nineteenth century Russian author, Ivan Turgenev. He also wrote poetry and upon googling Zakia found poems of his.
Ivan Sergyevitch Turgenev (1818 – 1883) Short Bio
Turgenev was of the Russian nobility; he was born in Orel, 100 miles south of Moscow, on October 28, 1818. His education was begun by tutors at the family mansion and he studied later at the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. Berlin and the Russian emigrés in the city influenced him. He hoped to teach Hegelian philosophy when he returned to Moscow in 1841. He entered the Ministry of the Interior at St. Petersburg, where his interests turned toward literature. He wrote verses and comedies, read George Sand, and made the acquaintance of Dostoevsky. His ambitious mother cut off his allowance when he resigned from the Ministry in 1845, giving up a diplomatic career. This forced Turgenev to support himself.
Turgenev was an enthusiastic hunter; his experiences in the woods of his native province supplied the material for A Sportsman’s Sketches, the book that first brought him to the notice of the literary world. He left Russia in 1847 and took up a liaison with Pauline Viardot, a singer and actress, with whom he maintained relations for the rest of his life.
In 1850 he returned to Russia. He found Dostoevsky banished to Siberia; and himself under suspicion by the government for praising Gogol, who had just died. He was arrested and imprisoned for a short time, and kept under police surveillance. In western Europe, he was recognised as being one of the great living Russian authors. Upon his mother‘s death he inherited an income of about $5,000 a year from his estates and travelled. When Madame Viardot retired from the stage in 1864 and took up residence at Baden-Baden, he followed her and built a small house there for himself. They returned to France after the Franco-Prussian War, and bought a villa at Bougival, near Paris, and this was his home for the rest of his life.
Gustave Flaubert met Ivan Turgenev in Paris – Flaubert was 41 years old and Turgenev, 44. They struck up a friendship and a 17-year correspondence. The 230-odd letters they exchanged, mostly after 1868, are filled with discussions of literature and politics. In March 1863 Flaubert wrote: “I have considered you a master for a long time. But the more I study you, the more your skill leaves me gaping. I admire the vehement yet restrained quality of your writing, the fellow feeling that extends to the lowest of human creatures and brings landscapes to life.”
He died on September 3, 1883 from cancer of the spinal cord. His body was taken to St. Petersburg and buried with national honours.
Turgenev preaches no doctrine in his novels, and offers no remedy for the universe; but he sees clearly certain weaknesses of the Russian character and exposes these with absolute candour. His books are intensely Russian and he rivals the master novelists of the West. His felicity of language and excellence of structure inspires admiration; Fathers and Children and A House of Gentlefolk represent his art at its best.
(This bio is taken from a site called http://www.turgenev.org.ru/en/ You will find more information there and links to translations of his works in English.
A more elaborate biography will be found at
https://www.geniuses.club/genius/ivan-sergeyevich-turgenev
Yet another biography from which Zakia read excerpts is found at
https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/ivan-turgenev/)
Zakia read from the prose poem A Dream; a short excerpt in which a boy at a window alerts the people to a coming calamity:
'Look! look! the earth has fallen away!'
And then they realise it is water rushing up to swallow them:
'It is the sea!' the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. 'It will swallow us all up directly…. Only how can it grow and rise upwards? To this precipice?'
Zakia said it was the recent floods in north Kerala and the warnings about the Mullaperiyar dam that motivated her to read this poem. It might just as well be the warnings of the small island nations about global warming and how the waters are rising to engulf their lands!
Joe pleaded with the readers to send the poet bios in asap for the blog. At the next session on Nov 19 we will read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.
The December session for reading humorous poems will be on Dec 3.
The Poems
Arundhaty
Funeral March by Etel Adnan
you were searching through the hands of the monkey tree
that pipeline to the sky
a light incoherent like a wave
was moving behind the clouds
and you went swimming into that distant
pool you went to be suspended there
cool as the western side of palm leaves
under the break of noon
there are potholes in the skies
familiar to the wanderers of the sierras
moving icebergs which taste like
antimatter when physics go wild
Gagarin Scott Gherman Titov McDivitt
Komarov the new hierarchy of archangels
bringing messages from outer space
decoding the protons and moving under
a shower of travelling electrons.
seven sunsets for a single evening
and the uninterrupted moon
growing into their eyes with the look
of mothers looking back on us from the other
side of our deaths
Seven sunrises for a cosmonaut!
Devika
A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Geetha
Sea-Fever by John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
Gopa
Morte d’ Arthur by Alfred Lord Tennyson
So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:
I perish by this people which I made,—
Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again
To rule once more—but let what will be, be,
I am so deeply smitten thro' the helm
That without help I cannot last till morn.
Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur,
Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how
In those old days, one summer noon, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword—and how I row'd across
And took it, and have worn it, like a king:
And, wheresoever I am sung or told
In aftertime, this also shall be known:
But now delay not: take Excalibur,
And fling him far into the middle mere:
Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word."
…………………………………………………………..
Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword,
And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur:
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.
…………………………………………………………
And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
But now farewell……. I am going a long way
Joe
In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Laybrother of the Society of Jesus
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
(Boldface Emphasis is Joe’s)
Kavita
since feeling is first by e. e. cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
– the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
KumKum
3 poems by Constantine P. Cavafy, a Greek poet (1863 – 1933)
#1. The Open Window
In the Calm of the autumn night
I sit by the open window
For whole hours in perfect
Delightful quietness.
The light rain of leaves falls.
The sigh of the corruptible world
Echoes in my corruptible nature.
But it is a sweet sigh, it soars as a prayer.
My window opens up a world
Unknown. A source of ineffable,
Perfumed memories is offered me
Wings beat at my window---
Refreshing autumnal spirits
Come unto me and encircle me
And they speak with me in their innocent tongue.
I feel indistinct, far-reaching hopes
And in the vulnerable silence,
Of creation, my ears hear melodies,
They hear crystalline, mystical
Music from the chorus of the stars.
#2. An Old Man
In the inner room of the noisy cafe
an old man sits bent over a table;
a newspaper before him, no companion beside him.
And in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.
He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
and yet the time when he was young seems like
yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.
And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
and how he always trusted her – what folly! ––
the liar who would say, "Tomorrow. You have ample time."
He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.
… But with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the café.
#3. Had you Loved Me
(From the French)
If a shining ray of love
should warm the darkness
of my life, the first throb
of my grief-stricken soul
would be a happy rhapsody.
I do not dare to whisper
what I wish to tell you:
is an unbearable penalty for me. ––
Had you loved me … but alas, this a deceptive hope!
Had you loved me, I would see
the end of tears
and hidden pains.
Indeed the guileful hesitations
would no longer dare to show their crafty face.
You would be found
amid divine visions.
Rose blossoms would have adorned
the bramble of life. ––
Had you loved me … but alas, this is a deceptive hope!
Pamela
3 poems by Jeet Thayil
Life Sentence
Let’s say you’re not opposed to the ghost
in principle, you understand her neediness,
and let’s say she’s distracted, or busy,
she’s busy looking for a way back in,
but the shore appears distant,
not to mention, impossible to attain,
a far-off place where her former friends
no longer speak her name, which is lost,
and no word she hears is audible
through the static and the clatter;
so let’s say you forget to speak her name,
you do not repeat her lovely name,
because your talk is of meat and money,
and let’s say you’re not crazy or bitter,
it’s just that you don’t want to hear her say,
Why, why did you not look after me?
~ From New and Uncollected Poems (2003-2015)
The Opposite of Nostalgia
I’m trying to forget
those days one day at
a time –
the pitiful rooms
with their puddles of light,
the women I haggled with,
the car stopped in the street,
the wife barefoot,
on the run,
car keys in her hand.
Or I’m there, the sum
of my ambition
defined by old
rage, my anger like a slow child
hitting out at anyone
who comes
her way. I’m thinking
of the negotiation
with strangers, the attempt to say
things differently,
the men’s room at the airport,
the glassine bag, the rolled-up note,
the line hitting the back of my throat
with a kick
like an anesthetic,
and, later, the paramedic
saying I’m lucky
to be
alive, and telling him
he’s wrong, I’m
not lucky or alive,
just high.
~ From These Errors are Correct (2008)
Psalm Secular
When you I taste
god awakes
from a century’s
sleep or murder.
I fold my hands,
press your blessings
to my head.
I kneel abed,
mouth small praises
where thy thighs
collide. I bow, arise.
Soon the sun
will do the same,
arise and bow.
I take two pears
from the Gauguin bowl,
shine them with your slip.
We eat sweet and fast.
Juice flecks our lips.
‘Gravid!’ I shout,
for the poor joy of it.
And you? Laughing,
my name in your eyes,
you cry one word.
The moon that hangs
above the street
on a silver thread
lifts its skirt to dance.
~ From English (2004)
Priya
The Cuckoo's Song by Subramania Bharati
The cuckoo sings its love for the monkey:
‘Oh! My divine Monkey-Lover!
Can any woman resist your love?
Man thinks he is the Lord of the Earth!
Maybe, he is for such mundane matters
As institutionalising things!
But look! Your incomparable hairy chest
And gentle speech,
And your bewitching hunch that adds a gait
To your walk and stature
Of no less charm
Can man be equal to you?
True, he competes with you
Covers his body with umpteen clothes
To match your silken charm from head to foot,
Apes his face and chin with hairy growth
In poor imitation calling it beard and moustache!
Leaps and jumps as you do
But, he does in a drunken state,
But, yet, tell me
Where will he go for a god-given tail?
(Translated by Indira Parthasarthy )
Wind by Subramania Bharati
The wind blows strongly and causes a lot of destruction. How can we make friends with it?
Wind, come softly.
Don’t break the shutters of the windows.
Don’t scatter the papers.
Don’t throw down the books on the shelf.
There, look what you did — you threw them all down.
You tore the pages of the books.
You brought rain again.
You’re very clever at poking fun at weaklings.
Frail crumbling houses, crumbling doors, crumbling rafters,
crumbling wood, crumbling bodies, crumbling lives,
crumbling hearts —
the wind god winnows and crushes them all.
He won’t do what you tell him.
So, come, let’s build strong homes,
Let’s joint the doors firmly.
Practise to firm the body.
Make the heart steadfast.
Do this, and the wind will be friends with us.
The wind blows out weak fires.
He makes strong fires roar and flourish.
His friendship is good.
We praise him every day.
(Translated by A.K. Ramanujan)
Saras
2 poems by Carl Sandburg
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go
free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen
the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back
the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong
and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid
against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be
Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the
Nation.
At a Window
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
Thommo
I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Maybe there’s a God above
All I ever learned from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya
And it’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Baby I’ve been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew ya
I’ve seen your flag on the Marble Arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me do ya
I remember when I moved in you
The Holy dove was moving, too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Zakia
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