Anna Akhmatova

My 2013 post about Anna Akhmatova continues to be one of the most popular on my blog even though it’s just a few short lines about her masterpiece of a poem Requiem. I wonder if it’s because we’re looking for people who shine lights in the darkness? Americans as much as Russians visit that page. Or looking for the women who came before us, the ones who persevered, who left us something of themselves, when so many didn’t have that chance.

I didn’t know much about her when I posted it, just that she was persecuted for her poetry under Stalin. Wikipedia says Lydia Chukovskaya described how Akhmatova “would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove.” This one line provoked an image in my mind of the paper flaring into fire, curling up over the words, and diminishing into ash; and it provoked feelings, of admiration for her cleverness, the bittersweet pain of imagining her burning her own words and the fierce courage it must have taken to write them and rewrite them for her trusted visitors. I still don’t know much about her, but I want to know more.

 

Things that Keep Me Living: A Poem About My Rights by June Jordan

This poem got me through some tough times before, and it’s still a little lantern of one black woman’s rage and survival:

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear

my head about this poem about why I can’t

go out without changing my clothes my shoes

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want

to do with my own body because I am the wrong

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and

go to Poetry Foundation for the rest of it or listen to June Jordan herself recite it.

Naming of Parts — Henry Reed

I’ve had this poem stuck in my head for a few days now.

It has echoes of childhood for me–this is nose and the mouth and the eye–but the topic is anything but. It gives us all of the particulars, but never the whole; our understanding has to supply, maybe immediately or not until the end, what the whole is. That’s very much what poetry is to me: a naming of parts that adds up to something unstated, supplied by the reader.

Naming of Parts

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
               And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
             Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
              Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers
              They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
             For today we have naming of parts.

Thoughlet on 20 Seconds of Joy

Watching 20 Seconds of Joy, about BASE jumper Karina Hollekim, I understood more than I thought I would that urge to jump off cliffs, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes not, in an effort to feel or not feel the terror of living.

I wrote that and I thought, Did I mean the terror of dying? But no, I mean the terror of living. I mean those last two lines of the Mary Oliver poem that I love, The Summer Day, which I am going to totally spoil for you if you haven’t read it yet (go read it—the last lines were like that first plunge of a roller coaster for me: equal parts instinctual terror and excitement. My chest still clenches like I’m having an asthma attack when I read it, but not as scary because I can still breathe.):

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The terror of living is that it will end in dying and I won’t have done anything worthwhile with my one wild and precious life. That so much of life passes in a boring haze of work, or worse, being wished away, faster to 5 pm, faster to the weekend. That I haven’t been kind enough to my mother, haven’t had enough sex with my husband, haven’t finished writing this book yet…

Poetry Hit: Poems I Hate

Actually, there’s just one poem on my hit list right now. There are poems I don’t like and poems that don’t do anything for me when I read them, but I hate As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden. I hate it because it starts out by making me love it. It starts out like a love poem, or maybe a nursery rhyme like The Cow Jumped Over the Moon:

“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Then it turns a corner into bleak, and it’s the betrayal of love, or the impermanence of it:

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

I don’t mind the bleakness, a bleak poem can be a hard kind of comfort when everything around you feels hopeless or insubstantial. No, it’s the line about Jill on her back that makes me cringe every time. I can’t read it as anything but sexualized and pejorative and reducing Jill, standing in for woman, as Jack stands in for man, to sex–and not the freely given kind, but the kind that is bought and treated like a dirty commodity.

So, what poems do you hate?

Poetry Hit: Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

Reading poetry in translation is a weird exercise; there are so many more levels or people between you and the text. This is the first part of this poem, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer as it appears in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. You can read the full poem translated differently by Yevgeny Bonver on Poetry Lover or elsewhere on the web, translator uncredited (which is why I’m not linking. How could you not credit the translator??) or other versions translated by the same author but with different words (different versions from different years? Like I said, poetry in translation is weird.)

from the beginning of Requiem
by Anna Akhmatova

No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings–
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent
seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad.
Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman with
bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had
never heard me called by name before, woke up from
the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and
whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I answered: “Yes, I can.”
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

Poetry Hit: The Secret by Denise Levertov

I read poetry in the morning or before bed, one poem after another that I don’t understand or that doesn’t resonate with me, until I find one that makes me stop.

The Secret

BY DENISE LEVERTOV

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry.

I who don’t know the

secret wrote

the line. They

told me

(through a third person)

they had found it

but not what it was

not even

what line it was. No doubt

by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten

the secret,

the line, the name of

the poem. I love them

for finding what

I can’t find,

and for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again, in other

lines

in other

happenings. And for

wanting to know it,

for

assuming there is

such a secret, yes,

for that

most of all.

Poetry Hit

Image via Wikipedia

What do you think of The Flea? Convincing seduction? Coercive and creepy? 19th Century version of “Come on, let me just put it in for a minute”?

THE FLEA
by John Donne

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
‘Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

National Poetry Month — Poetry Hit

When I was 16, I was protesting the first Gulf War. I remember walking down a hallway, maybe into the library at school, and catching a glimpse of the bombing of Baghdad and the green tracers like aberrant fireworks in the dark night sky. I had never seen a war on TV before, and it was real in a way that nothing is real anymore after all these years of TV and war and violence on it. There were people under those bombs and because of the TV they were real to me, people like me and my family, who lived around the world in time zone where it was already night.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Also the 10,000 Maniacs performed the poem in the song The Latin One during their Hope Chest tour in 1990.

National Poetry Month — Poetry Hit

April is National Poetry Month in the US. To celebrate, I’m posting some of the poems I loved at 17.

Meeting at Night

BY ROBERT BROWNING

I

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!