Silver Ribbons – Brief Poems by Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell (1879–1944) who also also wrote under his Gaelic name, Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil, was born in Belfast to a Catholic Nationalist family from County Down. From his father, a Catholic Parnellite, he imbibed fervent nationalist politics, and from his mother, of mixed Catholic–Presbyterian stock, a strong interest in Gaelic culture. He was educated in Belfast and, after working for his father, he entered the teaching profession. He helped to set up the Ulster Literary Theatre in the early 1900s and contributed some plays that he wrote. He also wrote the words for musical airs including two famous Irish airs: My Lagan Love and Gartan Mother’s Lullaby. Additionally, some of his poetry was picked up by musical composers such as Ivor Gurney and Arnold Bax who set them alongside a number of their own tunes. He visited Dublin in 1902 where he met a number of prominent members of the Nationalist movement while, at the same time, furthering his career in song writing and poetry. During this time he contributed poems regularly to Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman and Standish O’Grady’s All Ireland Review. 

Soon after the publication of his first volume of verse, The Garden of the Bees in 1904, he moved to Dublin and, failing to find regular work there, moved to London where he was involved in Irish literary activities while working as a teacher. As secretary of the Irish Literary Society of London, he often wore a kilt. While in London he seems to have met with the London-based Modernist Imagist poets circle of T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound. He also met Nancy Maude, the daughter of Col. Aubrey Maude of the Cameronian Highlanders, at a poetry reading and married her in May 1910, against the objections of her family. Shortly after, they moved to Dublin and then to a a forty-three-acre farm at Lackendarragh, Co. Wicklow. He became a friend of Patrick Pearse and joined the staff of Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, teaching Irish history. In 1911 he published his first volume of prose, Mearing Stones: Leaves from My Note-book on Tramp in Donegal, illustrated with his own drawings. A play he wrote, Judgement,  was performed at the Abbey Theatre in April 1912 and proved a critical and popular flop. Yeats justified the play’s failure by claiming that he had it performed solely for Campbell’s reputation’s sake. He makes an appearance as “Mountainy Mutton” in Gas from a Burner (1912) Jame Joyce’s verse diatribe, in the voice of his publisher, about the Irish literary scene at the time:

To show you for strictures I don’t care a button
I printed the poems of Mountainy Mutton
And a play he wrote (you’ve read it I’m sure)
Where they talk of “bastard”, “bugger” and “whore”

The name “Mountainy Mutton” is a mocking reference to The Mountainy Singer, a collection of poems by Campbell published in 1909 by Maunsel & Co, the publishing company that renaged on its promise to publish Dubliners. It irked Joyce that the language in Judgement, a Campbell play published by Maunsel, was worse than that objected to in his collection of short stories.

Joseph Campbell was a founding member of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin in 1913. The Irish Citizen Army drilled on the lawn of his Wicklow house in 1915. He took part, as a supporter, in the Easter Rising of 1916, doing rescue work. The following year he published a translation from Irish of the short stories of Patrick Pearse, one of the executed leaders of the Rising. He became a Sinn Féin Councillor in Wicklow in 1921. In the Irish Civil War he was on the Republican side and was interned in 1922/3. He was rumoured to have sought internment to escape his unhappy marriage. (Irish writer Francis Stuart said: That fella went to prison during the Civil War deliberately in order to get away from his own wife. That’s neither patriotism nor poetry.) During a hunger strike by the prisoners to secure their release, Campbell went ten days without food. Released in December 1923, he was hardened and embittered, his religious faith shattered by the Catholic Church’s condemnations of the anti-treaty side. His marriage broke up in 1924, after he and his wife had affairs, and he emigrated to New York in 1925 where he lectured at Fordham University and worked in academic Irish studies, founding the university’s School of Irish Studies in 1928, which lasted four years. He was the editor of The Irish Review, a magazine of Irish expression.

Plaque on the Campbell home in Belfast

Campbell returned to Ireland in 1939, and lived as a semi-recluse at Lackandaragh in County Wicklow. He was embittered by what he saw as the betrayal of his ideals, railing against the national schools for producing appalling types – tittering, cigarette-smoking girls and uncouth boys. He wrote a long poem A Vision of Glendalough (1940), and made several programmes on literary, historical, and autobiographical topics for the Irish national broadcasting service, Radio Éireann. He proved to be an accomplished broadcaster with a rich, warm radio-friendly voice. He died alone at home from heart disease on the 5th June 1944, aged 64, and his body was discovered two days later by a neighbour. He is buried in Deansgrange cemetery.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND IMAGISM

I first came across the connection between Irish poet Joseph Campbell and the Imagist movement in London when I encountered a tweet from Frank Hudson who has written extensively on that connection. He is particularly enamoured by Night and I Traveling (see below) which he calls a poem which is remarkable not just for its tightly compressed and effecting scene, but for being published in 1909 so that it might be counted not just as the work of the first Irish poet to use free verse, but also as one of the earliest published examples of Imagism. It wasn’t until 1913 that F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound published their “A few Don’ts by an Imagiste”  and laid out the three famous Imagist suggestions/rules, but before that in London Flint, Pound, and T. E. Hulme had been working out how to radically strip back poetry to a fresh, precise, and direct essence in the months before Campbell published “Night, and I Traveling.” He has set the poem to music and has praised it above more celebrated Imagist poems calling it to my judgement as fine an early Imagist poem as the more famous and anthologized ones, arguably a more worthy example because of its empathetic attention to the isolated rural woman in a still-colonialized Irish hut in place of Pound’s  damp impressionistic leaf-faced Paris Metro riders published four years later.

Israeli poet Natan Zach, in an essay entitled, ‘Imagism and Vorticism (in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 , ed. Malcolm Bradbury & James MacFarlane) celebrates another brief poem by Campbell – The Dawn Whiteness (see below): ‘Despite some arguments to the contrary, the continuity of Imagist work from [T. E.] Hulme’s circle to Pound’s school can be readily traced. Joseph Campbell’s “The Dawn Whiteness” illustrates the kind of Imagist poem coming from the former … Slight without being trivial, the poem’s concentration on the image echoes the Symbolist stress on essential form to the exclusion of all allegedly extra-poetic matter. Though mildly suggestive of mood or state of mind, it minimizes the poet’s personal involvement, and is not manifestly symbolic in the sense of standing in for anything distinct from its own delimited surface meaning. The poem strives for verbal economy, its lightness of touch recalling the Japanese Haiku.

The Imagist poets can be categorised in two ways. There were those, such as Richard Aldington and T. E. Hulme, whose best work is their poems in that genre. And there are those, like Ezra Pound. Amy Lowell and Adelaide Crapsey, for whom the Imagist poems are but a small part of a wider oeuvre. Joseph Campbell belongs to the latter category. Most of his work reflects the tropes of the Georgian poetry popular at the time with a touch of Celtic Twilight modes to add to the mixture. Even in many of the shorter poems below, the rhythms and the rhymes reflect contemporaneous trends. However, there are a few poems, the better poems, written in the curt free verse style best suited to Imagist poetry. Alongside the two poems mentioned above, there is On the Top-Stone and, my favourite Campbell poem, simply entitled Darkness and as evocative as the best Imagist poems. You may nominate your own favourite Joseph Campbell poem in the comment box below.

Brief Poems by Joseph Campbell

I SPIN MY GOLDEN WEB

I spin my golden web in the sun:
The cherries tremble, the light is done.
A sudden wind sweeps over the bay,
And carries my golden web away!

***

DARKNESS

Darkness.
I stop to watch a star shine in the boghole——
A star no longer, but a silver ribbon of light.
I look at it, and pass on.

***

TO A TOWN GIRL

Violet mystery,
Ringleted gold,
Whiteness of whiteness,
Wherefore so cold?
Silent you sit there—
Spirit and mould—
Darkening the dream
That must never be told!

***

SNOW

Hills that were dark
At sparing-time last night
Now in the dawn-ring
Glimmer cold and white.

***

TO THE GOLDEN EAGLE

Wanderer of the mountain,
Winger of the blue,
From this stormy rock
I send my love to you.

Take me for your lover,
Dark and fierce and true—
Wanderer of the mountain,
Winger of the blue!

***

THE DAWN WHITENESS

The dawn whiteness.
A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavily over it.
The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.

***

NIGHT, AND I TRAVELLING

Night, and I travelling.
An open door by the wayside,
Throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light.
A whiff of peat-smoke;
A gleam of delf on the dresser within;
A woman’s voice crooning, as if to a child.
I pass on into the darkness.

***

ON THE TOP-STONE

On the top-stone.
A nipping wind blowing.
Winter dusk closing in from the south Ards.
The moon rising, white and fantastic, over the loch and the town below.
I take off my hat, salute her, and descend into the darkness.

***

THE CLOUDS GO BY AND BY

The clouds go by and by,
The heron sings in the blue—
And I lie dreaming, dreaming
Ever of you.

The stag on the hill is free,
And the wind is blowing sweet—
But I lie bound a prisoner
At your feet.

***

A SHEEPDOG BARKS ON THE MOUNTAIN

A sheepdog barks on the mountain,
The night is fallen cold;
The shepherd blinks at his fire,
The sheep are in the fold.

The moon comes white and quiet
Into the winter sky;
And nothing walks the valley
To-night but you and I.

***

DEAD OAKLEAVES EVERYWHERE

Dead oakleaves everywhere
Under my feet,
Filling the forest air
With odours sweet.

Acorns, three, four and five,
Falling apace.
Thank God I am alive
This day of grace!

***

LIKE A TUFT OF CEANABHAN

Like a tuft of ceanabhan
Blowing in the wind
Is my slender Aine Ban—
White and soft and kind.

Kind her heart is, but her clann’s
Cold as clay or stone.
Would that I had herds and lands
To take her for my own!

***

SIC TRANSIT

I lit my tallow
An hour ago,
And now it is burning
Dark and low.

The glimmer lengthens
And turns about,
Sinks in the sconce—
Then flickers out!

LINKS

Joseph Campbell biography on the Dictionary of Irish Biography site

Joseph Campbell biography on the My Poetic Side site

The Wikipedia page on Joseph Campbell

The Ricorso page on Joseph Campbell

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reviews a book on Joseph Campbell

Frank Hudson’s blog posts on Joseph Campbell

The Mountainy Singer (Complete Text)

Dancing Feet – Brief Poems by Sir John Davies

Sir John Davies (1569 – 1626) not to be confused with his contemporaneous poet and namesake, John Davies of Hereford, was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who was appointed Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.  He was baptised at Tisbury in Wiltshire. His father, Edward, was of Welsh descent, and his mother, Mary, came from a Wiltshire landed family. He was educated at Winchester College for four years, during which he developed an interest in literature. At the age of sixteen he attended Queen’s College, Oxford, where he stayed for just eighteen months, with most historians questioning whether he received a degree. He seems to have sown some wild oats there. As his nineteenth century biographer and editor, Alexander Grosart puts it, I fear that with the death of his lady-mother there ensued a full plunge into the frivolities and gaities of the University and Inns of Court society… He was fast of tongue and ribald of wit, with a dash of provocative sarcasm. Davies spent some time at New Inn after his departure from Oxford and it was at this point that he decided to pursue a career in law.

In 1588 he enrolled in the Middle Temple, where he did well academically, although suffering constant reprimands for his behaviour which eventually cost him his enrolment. In 1594 Davies’s poetry was admired by Queen Elizabeth who wished him to continue his study of law at the Middle Temple. In the following year, his poem, Orchestra, was published. He was called to the bar in July 1595.

In February, 1598, he was disbarred for the offence of entering the dining hall of the Inns in the company of two swordsmen and striking one Richard Martin (a noted wit who had insulted him in public) with a cudgel. Again, Grosart relates  Davies came into the Hall with his hat on, armed with a dagger, and attended by two persons with swords. Master Martin was seated at dinner at the Barristers’ Table. Davies pulling a bastinado or cudgel from under his gown, went up to his insulter and struck him repeatedly over the head. The chastisement must have been given with a will; for the bastinado was shivered to pieces—arguing either its softness or the head’s asinine thickness. Having “avenged” himself, Davies returned to the bottom of the Hall, drew one of the swords belonging to his attendants, and flourished it repeatedly over his head, turning his face towards Martin, and then hurrying down the water-steps of the Temple, threw himself into a boat.  This extraordinary occurrence happened at the close of 1597 or January of 1598. Davies retired to Oxford where he chose to write poetry, including his first significant longer poem, Nosce Teipsum (Know Thyself). In 1601 he was readmitted to the bar, having made a public apology to Martin, and in the same year served as the member of Parliament for Corfe Castle. In 1603, he was part of the deputation sent to bring King James VI of Scotland to London as the new monarch. Like Queen Elizabeth, the new king was also an admirer of Davies’s poetry, and rewarded him with a knighthood and appointments, first as Solicitor-general for Ireland and, later as the Attorney-general in Ireland. Davies was to be a central figure in the drive to ‘complete’ the conquest by the consolidation of a kingdom of Ireland, on the English model, across the island as a whole, through the extension of royal power, common law authority, and English ‘civility’.

Davies was the crown’s candidate for speaker of the commons in the Irish Parliament in 1613. After the 1605 Gunpowder plot and the Plantation of Ulster in 1613–15, the constituencies for the Irish House of Commons were changed to give Protestants a majority. While the vote for speaker was being taken, Catholic MPs, angered at what they considered to be the unjustified creation of these new parliamentary boroughs to ensure an artificial Protestant majority, placed a Catholic candidate, Sir John Everard, in the speaker’s chair. In the ensuing tussle divers knights and gentlemen of the best quality took Sir John Davies by both his arms and lifted him from the ground and placed him upon Sir John Everard’s lap. Everard was subsequently removed from the chair, prompting Catholic MPs to walk out of the commons in protest. Undeterred, Davies proceeded with his acceptance speech. That ludicrous image of the portly, corpulent, rotund and weighty English politician being hoisted by his compatriots onto the lap of an Irishman in an Irish Parliament is an apt metaphor for British colonial activity in Ireland. (Pardon my politics.)

During one of his circuits in Ireland, in March 1609, Davies married Eleanor Touchet, daughter of Lord Audley (afterwards Earl of Castlehaven). According to Grosart in his introduction to The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, Her later years were darkened with insanity of a strangely voluble type. It is to be feared she was an ill “help-meet” for her husband. This chauvinistic comment hides an intriguing tale. His wife, one of the most prolific women writing at the time, was the author of numerous pamphlets and prophecies. These writings were a source of conflict in the marriage and Davies burned a set of the prophecies that Eleanor had been writing. According to scholar Dianne Watt, she responded by dressing in widow’s weeds and predicting that he would die in less than three years. One day in December of the following year, she began to weep uncontrollably during dinner, and three days later her husband died. Three days before he died, it is related, she gave him pass to take his long sleep.

In 1626 he had been named chief justice of king’s bench in England, but on the day set for his installation (usually given as 8 December), he was found dead of apoplexy following a convivial gathering the previous evening. His funeral sermon was preached by fellow poet, John Donne, and he was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.

.

THE POETRY OF SIR JOHN DAVIES

The earliest poems for which Sir John Davies became known were his epigrams, published with other poems of his in a collection entitled Epigrammes and Elegies by J.D. and C.M containing both Davies’ work and posthumous works by Christopher Marlowe who died violently at the age of 29 in 1593. The book was reprinted twice and, despite the admiration of Queen Elizabeth, to whom he addressed his work Hymns of Astraea, was included in a list of published works that the state ordered to be confiscated and burned.

Despite his admiration for Davies, Grosart admits the epigrams have limited value. It must be conceded that the Epigrams have dashes of the roughness, even coarseness, of the age.…They self-revealingly belong to the wild-oats sowing of the Poet’s youthful period. Nevertheless, I have ventured their reproduction in integrity for four reasons:—

(a) These Epigrams, from their subjects and style, are valuable, as expressing the tone of society at the time.

(b) It would be suppressio veri to withhold them, toward an accurate estimate of their Author. They furnish elements of judgment.

(c) They were what gained the Poet ‘a name’: even when tartly spoken of by Guilpin he is called the ‘English Martial’ from them.

(d) These Epigrams belong to a section of our early Literature that contemporaneously was abundant; and it were advantageous if characteristics of particular periods were more recognised in literary criticism.

Accepting point (d) above, I include the epigrams below as an example of the style of epigram popular at the time. I prefer the Latin epigrams of Thomas Campion, the epigrams, also in Latin, of the Welsh poet, John Owen and the briefer but more incisive epigrams of Ben Jonson. The few epigrams of John Donne, who conducted the funeral service for Sir John Davies, display a far superior sense of style. While the influence of Martial is evident – point (c) above – they lack the eloquent resonance of the Latin poet. Judge for yourself.

In 1593 his poem “Orchestra, or a Poeme of Dauncing was “licensed to Iohn Harison”. The earliest known published edition is that of July, 1596 when Davies was a twenty seven year old student at the Inns of Court . The title-page of this edition is followed by a dedicatory sonnet To his very friend, Ma. Rich. Martin who, we are informed, was the first mouer and sole cause of it, and that he was the Poet’s “owne selues better halfe,” and “deerest friend.” Ironically, this is the same Richard Martin he was later to attack with a cudgel after a deadly quarrel and estrangement. (See above.) The poem, written in rhyme royal, uses dancing as a metaphor to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity. Invoking Homer, it describes the attempts of the suitor Antinous to persuade Penelope, chaste and patient wife to the long-meandering Odysseus, to dance with him, while it details, at great length, the antiquity and universality of dancing. Although elegant and enjoyable in parts, the poem is over-extended and over written with an excess of courtly love conceits. There are, however, interesting stanzas such as this one from early in the poem

Since when, they still are carried in a round,
And changing, come one in another’s place;
Yet doe they neither mingle nor confound,
But euery one doth keepe the bounded space
Wherein the Daunce doth bid it turne or trace;
This wondrous myracle did Loue deuise,
For Dauncing is Love’s proper exercise.

and this one from later in the poem

Learne then to daunce, you that are Princes borne,
And lawfull lords of earthly creatures all;
Imitate them, and thereof take no scorne,
For this new art to them is naturall—
And imitate the starres cælestiall:
For when pale Death your vital twist shall seuer,
Your better parts must daunce, with them for euer.

There are interesting lines such as

My feet, which onely Nature taught to goe,
Did neuer yet the art of footing know.

and

For all the words that from our lips repaire
Are nought but tricks and turnings of the ayre.

The original publication was described on the title page as Not Finished. But, even with stanzas restored in a later edition, it still fails to cohere. As Grosart notes, these added stanzas show that the Poet had intended to pursue his subject further; even the hitherto omitted stanzas reading more like a fresh ‘invocation’ than a ‘conclusion.’

Theodore Roethke was an admirer. Stanley Kunitz introduced his friend to this poem by Davies. He recalls that Roethke responded to its “clear-voiced music” with “excitement and “joy” and composed a sequence entitled Four for Sir John Davies. The opening lines of Roethke’s poem contemplate the energetic cosmos depicted in Davies’s poem: “Is that dance slowing in the mind of man / That made him think the universe could hum?” Roethke sees this cosmic dance as a projection of the “mind of man,” not as a feature of the natural world. Roethke, like Davies, considers the role that the human mind plays in producing the cosmic hum. Although the ideas explored are those of Davies translated, as it were, to a twentieth century environment, the language, the syntax, the questioning mode, the sway and the cadences owe more to Yeats than to the Elizabethan poet. “I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; / I take it, and I give it back again.” If I prefer Roethke’s poem to that of Sir John Davies, it is because I see it as more polished, more concise and more musical.

T. S. Eliot was also an admirer. A essay simply entitled Sir John Davies, published in the Times Literary Supplement, (9 Dec 1926) and reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, (1957) did much to bring the Elizabethan poet to a wider audience. He begins by elevating the poet’s worth, Davies is a poet of fine lines, but he is more than that. For Eliot, the key poem is Nosce Teipsum… the plan, the versification, and the content of Nosce Teipsum are, in that age, highly original …  In a language of remarkable clarity and austerity Davies succeeds in maintaining the poem consistently on the level of poetry; he never flies to hyperbole or bombast, and he never descends, as he easily might, to the pedestrian and ludicrous. Eliot admits that the philosophy behind the poem is neither original nor profound. He also admits that Davies has not had the credit for great felicity of phrase. Yet he even goes so far as to compare him, not unfavourably, with Dante. Unfortunately, I cannot agree. While the poem is not exactly ludicrous, I do find it pedestrian and overlong.

Three Elizabethan poets had a role in establishing English colonialism in Ireland: Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir John Davies. Of the three, Davies was the most influential politically but the least accomplished poetically. He lacks the mellifluous eloquence of Spenser and the acerbic insights of Raleigh. Although Eliot praises the concision in his lines, he is not a concise poet. There are close on one hundred stanzas in Orchestra, yet Roethke can, in four poems of four stanzas apiece, deal with the issues in a more melodic and more concise fashion. There are close on five hundred stanzas in Nosce Teipsum, yet W. B. Yeats can, in Sailing to Byzantium, deal with the body and soul conundrum far more eloquently and far more concisely. (Even his longer two-part poem, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, with its wonderful line – Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? – is far more imaginative and far more emotional than the tepid stanzas of Sir John Davies.)

There is no doubting the skill that Davies brought to his poetry. In his Hymnes of Astræa in acrosticke verse (1599) a homage to Queen Elizabeth, he devised an ingenious form with two stanzas of five lines and a concluding stanza of six lines with the first letters of each line spelling ELISABETHA REGINA. To compose one of these may be ingenious, but to publish twenty-six is overkill. Davies was also an accomplished sonneteer. In his Gullinge Sonnets (1594) he was able to satirise writers of bad Elizabethan sonnets by imitating and mocking the style and substance of such sonnets. (Carol Rumens has an interesting take on one such sonnet.) However, it takes him nine sonnets to do what Shakespeare can do, with far more panache, in one, his sonnet 130. As for the epigrams (below) they are longer than would fit in to a pre-2017 tweet. They also have less bite than many epigrams of his contemporaries. But they are interesting examples of the style of the times.

JOHN DAVIES AND JOHN DAVIES

Two poets with the same name co-existed in Elizabethan England. John Davies (c. 1565– 1618), a writing-master and an Anglo-Welsh poet, referred to himself as John Davies of Hereford (after the city where he was born) in order to distinguish himself from Sir John Davies (1569–1626). John Davies of Hereford was one of the most prolific poets of his age. He maintained a successful career as a writing-master and, at Oxford, instructed scholars in the art of writing, though he was not a university scholar himself. Alhough his poems were published in some dozen large volumes, only one reached a second edition. His literary ambitions far out-stripped his talent. He later moved to London, where he mingled with gifted poets whom he addresses in great profusion in The Scourge of Folly (1611). Among these were Francis Bacon, Sir John Davies, Fulke Greville, Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, John Marston, Joseph Hall, Herbert of Cherbury, Francis Beaumont, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman. 

The Scottish scholar and clergyman, Alexander Balloch Grosart chiefly remembered for reprinting much rare Elizabethan literature, provided two-volume editions of both poets. Comparing the two, he wrote I have no thought of claiming for John Davies of Hereford the many-sided genius of Sir John Davies. The point I am alone anxious to establish is, that as having occupied himself with these lofty metaphysical-ethical problems, his intellect had affinities thereto declarative of brain whilst his poetic interpretation, if not in the large utterance of the early gods and without the grandeur of Nosce Teipsum has distinctive worth — together sufficient to vindicate the recognition I ask for him. That is no doubt a just assessment, although Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, in their anthology The School Bag, reproduced an amusing, intriguing and very readable sonnet called ‘If there were, oh! an Hellespont of cream’.

John Davies of Hereford was certainly aware of his more illustrious compatriot. He wrote a lengthy commendatory poem with this fawning salutation: Jn loue and affection of Master lohn Davies, mine approved good friend, and admiration of his excellence in the Arte of Writing. He also wrote this amusing sonnet on his namesake – To my right worthilyt-beloued Sr John Dauies Knight. Attumey generall of Ireland. (I am indebted to Shakespearean scholar Bastian Conrad for alerting me on his Twitter feed to this poem reproduced directly below.)

Brief Poems by Sir John Davies

IN QUINTUM . 

Quintus the dancer useth euermore ,
His feet in measure and in rule to moue 
Yet on a time he call’d his Mistresse, “‘whore”
And thought with that sweet word to win her loue:
Oh had his tongue like to his feet beene taught
It neuer would haue uttered such a thought.

***

IN GELLAM . 

Gella, if thou dost loue thy selfe, take heed,
Lest thou my rimes unto thy louer read;
For straight thou grin’st, and then thy louer seeth 
Thy canker-eaten gums and rotten teeth. 

***

IN FAUSTUM

“That youth,” saith Faustus, “hath a lyon seene,
Who from a dicing-house comes money-lesse ” : 
But when he lost his haire, where had he beene?
I doubt me he had seene a Lyonesse? 

***

IN DECIUM 

Audacious painters have Nine Worthies made;
But poet Decius, more audacious farre,
Making his mistris march with men of warre,
With title of “Tenth Worthy” doth her lade.
Me thinks that gull did use his tearmes as fit,
Which tearm’d his loue “a gyant for her wit.” 

***

IN HAYWODUM

Haywood, that did in Epigrams excell, 
Is now put downe since my light Muse arose; 
As buckets are put downe into a well, 
Or as a schoole-boy putteth downe his hose.

***

IN CASTOREM

Of speaking well why doe we learne the skill,
Hoping thereby honour and wealth to gaine;
Sith rayling Castor doth, by speaking ill,
Opinion of much wit and gold obtaine? 

***

IN LICUM

Lycus, which lately is to Venice gone,
Shall if he doe returne, gaine three for one:
But ten to one, his knowledge and his wit
Will not be bettered or increas’d a whit. 

***

IN DACUM

Dacus with some good colour and pretence,
Tearmes his love’s beauty “silent eloquence:”
For she doth lay more colour on her face
Than ever Tully us’d his speech to grace.

LINKS

Robert Armstrong’s biographical notes in the Dictionary of Irish Biography

The Britannica page on Sir John Davies

The Wikipedia page on Sir John Davies

The Wikipedia page on Eleanor Davies (née Touchet) the wife of Sir John Davies

The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies Volume One

The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies Volume Two

Alexander Hutchison on ‘Orchestra

T. S. Eliot essay on Sir John Davies

Four for Sir John Davies – a poem by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke reads his poem, Four for Sir John Davies

Black Butterflies – Brief Poems by Charles Simic

Charles Simic (originally Dušan Simić) was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. In April 1941, when Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and bombarded Belgrade, 3-year-old Dušan was thrown from his bed by the force of a bomb exploding nearby. In his early childhood, during World War II, he and his family were forced to evacuate their home several times to escape the indiscriminate bombing of Belgrade by the Allies. Simic’s father, George Simic, was arrested a number of times. Eventually he fled Yugoslavia in 1944 for Italy, where he was jailed. On his release at the war’s end, he spent five years in Trieste and then moved to America. Simic’s mother, Helen, made various attempts to escape postwar Yugoslavia and was herself briefly incarcerated, along with her sons, by the communist authorities. At age 15 Charles Simic moved with his mother and his brother to Paris, where he attended French schools and studied English at night school. Eventually the family were granted passports in 1953 and, after being granted American visas, they set sail for New York in August 1954.

Reunited, the family lived in New York for a year and then settled in Chicago where Simic attended high school there. In a bid to blend in among his peers at school, Dusan Simic took on the American sounding name ‘Charles’. He started writing poems in high school, in part, he said, to impress girls. He wrote in English instead of his native tongue since no American girl was likely to fall for a guy who reads love poems to her in Serbian as she sips a Coca-Cola. He published his first poems in The Chicago Review when he was 21. I finished high school in Oak Park, then my parents broke up. I left home and was on my own, and got a job in the city on the Near North Side. Then I picked up and went to New York City… After that, I came back to Chicago, but the family had fallen apart, and there was no money, so first I worked during the day at the Chicago Sun-Times. As his family could not afford to send him to college, he worked as an office boy on the Chicago Sun-Times and attended night classes. In 1958 he moved back to New York, where he worked at a variety of jobs – parcel-packer, salesman, housepainter, payroll clerk – and studied and wrote poetry at night. His first poems were published in 1959 when he was 21. In 1961 Simic was drafted into the army and spent two years as a military policeman in Germany and France. On his return to New York, he enrolled at New York University, where he studied linguistics. He originally wanted to be a painter, he said, until I realized that I had no talent. In 1964 he married Helen Dubin, a dress designer and daughter of a Russian and Serbian couple. He received a bachelor’s degree in Russian in 1967 from New York University and published his first full-length collection, What the Grass Says, that same year.

Simic has been incredibly prolific as a poet, translator, editor and essayist. He has translated the work of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian poets, including Tomaz Salamun and Vasko Popa. He translated and edited the anthology The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (1992). In addition to poetry and prose poems, Simic has also written several works of prose nonfiction, including 1992’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.  His book of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990; Walking the Black Cat (1996) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Jackstraws (1999) was a New York Times Notable Book of the year; his Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004) won the prestigious Griffin International Poetry Award. Other collections from this period include Hotel Insomnia (1992), Night Picnic: Poems (2001), and My Noiseless Entourage (2005). His work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007. Simic was the recipient, in 2011, of the Frost Medal, presented annually for “lifetime achievement in poetry”. Recent collections include The Lunatic (2015), Scribbled in the Dark (2017), Come Closer and Listen (2019) and No Land in Sight (2022).

In 1973 the University of New Hampshire offered him an associate professorship, and he has remained there ever since, living in the town of Strafford in Coos County. He has described himself as a “city poet” because he has lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years. He has lived in New Hampshire where he was Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

BLACK BUTTERFLIES – THE SHORTER POEMS OF CHARLES SIMIC

It is difficult to describe or to pin down the style of Simic’s poetry even though it has changed little throughout his lengthy career. Although distinctly American, it is influenced by Eastern European models. I like Ian Sampson’s comment in a Guardian review of Selected Poems 1963-2003, Simic’s work reads like one big poem or project, a vast Simic-scape of ‘eternal November’. He has a wonderful ability to take ordinary objects, like the two pairs of underpants in the poem Windy Day (below), and put them in an entirely fresh context. His childhood experiences of war, displacement and privation also animate many of his poems as can be seen in such poems as Fear, January and War (below).

While I admire many of his poems I have a special fondness for those of a briefer length. A poem like Evening Chess (below) can convey anger, strategy, pain and family tension in just two brief lines. A one-line poem (a monostich) such as Fate can use rhyme, social interaction and humour in less than half a dozen words. A quatrain such as Black Butterflies can be ghostly and earthy, heavy and light, landed and at sea – all at the same time. This does not come easily. He has compared his poetry to playing chess, often being beaten but enjoying how he tends towards short poems that require endless tinkering…they depend for their success on the placement of words and image in proper order, and their progression duplicates the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate. Or, as he put it in an interview in Granta Magazine, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head. A brief poem intended to capture the imagination of the reader requires endless tinkering to get all its parts right.

I have taken numerous poems from numerous collections written over fifty years in a prolific and consistent career. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I leave the last words to Charles Simic: I revise endlessly and yes, in the process, my poems get shorter and shorter. At some point, I realize that whatever I had there is all the poem needs. The challenge of saying “everything” in a few words continues to tempt me.

Brief Poems by Charles Simic

Fear 

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling,
And there is no sign of the wind.

***

Couple at Coney Island

It was early one Sunday morning,
So we put on our best rags
And went for a stroll along the boardwalk
Till we came to a kind of palace
With turrets and pennants flying.
It made me think of a wedding cake
In the window of a fancy bakery shop.

***

Watermelons

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

***

November

The crosses all men and women
Must carry through life
Even more visible
On this dark and rainy night.

***

Once December Comes

There’s another kind of sky,
another kind of light
over the wintery fields,
some other kind of darkness
following in its footsteps,
eager to seek our company
in these frost-bitten little homes,
standing bravely
with no dog in sight.

***

January

Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse

An empire, I read somewhere,
Maintains itself through
The cruelty of its prisons

***

Evening Chess

The Black Queen raised high
In my father’s angry hand.

***

My Mother Hoped 

To take her sewing machine
Down into her grave,
And I believe she did that,
’Cause every now and then
It keeps me awake at night.

***

For Rent

A large clean room
With plenty of sunlight
And one cockroach
To tell your troubles to.

Elegy

No one has seen me today
as I too have seen
no one
not even myself

here
bent as I was
intently
over the particular.

***

First Thing in the Morning 

You eavesdrop on birds
Gossiping in your yard,
Eager to find out what
They are saying about you.

***

My Darling Clementine

You lifted our low-down mood
This dark autumn evening,
Playing that sweet old song
With a comb and toilet paper.

***

Could That Be Me?

An alarm clock 
With no hands
Ticking loudly
On the town dump.

***

  FATE

   Everyone’s blind date.

***

Left Out of the Bible

What Adam said to Eve 
As they lay in the dark:
Honey, go and take a look.
What’s making that dog bark?

***

Gospel

Half-way to nowhere –

I thought I heard
Church bells ringing,
The blind man on the corner
Call out my name.

***

Astronomy Lesson

The silent laughter 
Of the stars 
In the night sky 
Tells us all 
We need to know.

Object Matrimony

World-famous fire-eater
Seeking a tantric dancer
To join him on the sea bottom
And blow bubbles with him.

***

My Secret Identity Is

The room is empty
And the window is open

***

The Last Lesson

It will be about nothing.
Not above love or God,
But about nothing.
You’ll be like the new kid in school
Afraid to look at the teacher
While struggling to understand
What they are saying
About this here nothing.

***

War

The trembling finger of a woman
Goes down the list of casualties
On the evening of the first snow.

The house is cold and the list is long.

All our names are included.

***

Poem

Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.
Then, I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.

***

The Lunatic

The same snowflake
kept falling out of the gray sky
all afternoon,
falling and falling
and picking itself up
off the ground,
to fall again,
but now more surreptitiously,
more carefully
as night strolled over
to see what’s up.

Black Butterfly

Ghost ship of my life,
Weighted down by coffins
Sailing out
On the evening tide

***

Mystery Theater

Bald man smoking in bed,
Naked lightbulb over his head,

The shadow of his cigar 
Next to him on the wall,

Its long ash about to fall
Into a pitch-dark fishbowl.

***

New York

No one sees me in your streets
Though I’m still there
Loitering and stopping
To peek into empty stores
And talk to a lone pigeon.

***

At Tender Mercy

O lone streetlight,
Trying to shed
What light you cande
On a spider repairing his web
This autumn night,
Stay with me
As I push further and further
Into the dark.

Astronomy Lesson

The silent laughter
Of the stars
In the night sky
Tells us all
We need to know

***

Windy Day

Two pairs of underwear,
One white and the other pink,
Flew up and down
On the laundry line,
Telling the whole world
They are madly in love.

***

The Hand  that Rocks the Cradle

Time – that murderer
No one has caught yet

***

Haystack

Can you find in there
The straw that broke
Your mother’s back?

***

Dark Window

Of a crying woman
With her tears lit
By the headlights
Of a passing car.

***

Where Do My Gallows Stand?

Outside the window
I looked out as a child
In an occupied city
Quiet as a graveyard.

***

The Wind Has Died

My little boat,
Take care,

There is no
Land in sight.

***

Night Thoughts

Light frightens them. Darkness too.
They crawl into our beds,
Not to talk, but to whisper
The way one does in the morgue.

LINKS

Poems

A large selection of poems are available on the Poetry Foundation Site

Another large selection is available on the Best Poets site

More than 60 poems are available on the Poem Hunter site

Almost 40 poems are available on the Voetica site

18 poems are avaiable on the Poets.org site

Interviews

Interviewed by Mark Ford for The Paris Review

Interviewed by Bianca Stone for her podcast

Interviewed by Judith Roney for The Florida Review

Interviewed by Grace Cavalieri at the Library of Congress

Interviewed by Peter Mishler for the Literary Hub

Interviewed by Rachael Allen for Granta

Interviewed by the Serbian magazine CorD

Interviewed by Michael J. Vaughn for Terrain.org

Interviewed by SJ Fowler for 3:AM Magazine

Charles Simic

Cement Angels – Brief poems by Nelson Ball

Nelson Ball (1942-2019) was a poet, editor, publisher, and bookseller specialising in the small press in Canada. He was born in Clinton, in Huron County in southern Ontario. He moved to Seaforth, Waterloo, then Kitchener for the first 20 years of his life. In Toronto, in the 1960’s, he was part of an enormous wave of poets and small press editors and publishers. He created Weed/Flower magazine, which later became Weed/Flower Press, publisher of books and chapbooks by many Canadian poets which ran from 1965-1974.

In 1965 he married Barbara Caruso, a visual artist from Kincardine. The couple enjoyed their bohemian existence, but found it difficult economically, so they moved to Toronto in 1967, where Nelson Ball found steady work as a library assistant at the University of Toronto and made extra money as a cataloguer at the Village Book Store. That allowed him to launch William Nelson Books, with a shop and extensive mail-order catalogue. However, he needed ever-larger quarters and was being priced out of the Toronto real estate market.

Nelson Ball’s home in Paris

He and Caruso searched from Owen Sound to St. Catharines for the right property. One afternoon, they were driving through the town of Paris, once named “the Prettiest Little Town in Canada” by Harrowsmith Magazine. (The town, established in 1829, is named, not after the French city, but for the nearby deposits of gypsum, used to make  plaster of Paris.) They discovered an advertisement in a real estate broker’s window for a three-storey structure built in 1928 as the head office of Canadian Gypsum and Alabastine. The office/laboratory, owned by Domtar, had been deserted since 1984, an industrial relic in a residential neighbourhood. It was a perfect home for the couple with plenty of room for Ball’s vast collection of books plus a large studio – with a view of the Grand River – where Caruso could paint and store her completed art. A convoy of two tractor-trailers and a special fine-art van was needed to transport their possessions to their new home at 31 Willow Street. Catherine Stevenson has made an interesting documentary about the house 

He ceased writing poetry during the 1980s as he concentrated on his bookselling business, but reemerged to enjoy a second chapter as a poet with the publication of With Issa: Poems 1964-1971 (ECW Press, 1991), Bird Tracks on Hard Snow (ECW Press, 1994), The Concrete Air (The Mercury Press, 1996), Almost Spring (The Mercury Press, 1999), At The Edge Of The Frog Pond (The Mercury Press, 2004) and In This Thin Rain (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2012), as well as a large array of smaller publications. He eventually retired from bookselling to devote more of his time to his poetry. In 2016, he was awarded the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Small Waterways (Apt. 9 Press). A selected poems, Certain Details (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017) edited by Stuart Ross, offers a major overview of the breadth of Nelson Ball’s poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball’s major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form.

On December 30, 2009, Barbara Caruso died of cancer. Nelson Ball continued to live in the house on Willow Street. In the summer of 2019 he opted for a medically assisted death at the Brantford hospital, near Paris, where he had been ill for about six weeks. He died August 16th, 2019. His ashes were laid to rest, next to his wife, artist, Barbara Caruso (1937-2009) in Paris, Ontario. There is a dedicatory bench, overlooking the Nith River and Penman’s Pass.

Dedicatory bench in Paris, Ontario

THE POETRY OF NELSON BALL

Nelson Ball has spoken of his admiration for other practitioners of the brief poem, in particular the work of Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker. Their influence is evident in the poems available below. Cameron Anstee has referred to Ball as Canada’s greatest practicing minimalist poet. Stuart Ross, in his introduction to  Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball, has claimed that Nelson is what might be called a poet’s poet: he is widely revered by many Canadian and international poets. But Nelson is also a people’s poet: his work is instantly accessible, plainspoken, direct.

Nelson Ball, himself, has written: I liked haiku as simple nature poems. But I didn’t want to restrict the forms of my poems, so I didn’t try to write haiku. In truth, I had difficulty identifying and counting syllables. I had a strong desire to write poems of pure description, letting the image reveal itself without any direct statement of idea or emotion. I found it difficult to make this kind of spare expression work. My observations of both the world and of words and language were too generalized, not particular enough. I was looking for some kind of magic rather than looking at the particularities of words and the world.

Brief Poems by Nelson Ball

Authenticity

A new headstone
at the cemetery

awaits certification
by birds

***

Tracks

Words
on this white paper

bird
tracks

on

hard 
snow

***

Dry Spell

storm
clouds

roll 
past

tease 
these

rattling
aspens

***

Centipede at Midnight

startled
it fell

off
the wall

startling 
me

****

Longevity Assured

cement
fence
posts

***

Ahead

In the distance
on a roadside hill

either 
tree stumps

or
gravestones

***

Idleness

On this hot day
I feel languid

watching
the south wind

bend
grasses

towards an
oncoming storm

***

Shore Song

Wave folllows wave over stones
turning over & over & over

from sunrise to sunset
sunset to sunrise

for ever & ever & ever

***

Trying to See What’s There

I’m 
troubled by

how 
much

I didn’t see
before

that now 
I see

Briefly

Lighning’s
spike

ties
sky

to 
earth

***

Fall Sky

Swallows
dart

back and forth

like 
hyphens

on grey paper

awaiting
words

***

Heron

A heron
stands

stalk-
still

in
water

waiting

***

Pissing On An Electric Fence

The main text of this poem
as yet unwritten

is likely
to remain so

with
good aim

and
luck

***

Anomaly

Cement
angels

***

Some Mornings

Some mornings
as I awaken

I compose a poem
in my head

usually gone
when I get to my desk

this morning
I caught one

***

In My Time

short
trees

grew

very
tall

***

The Meaning of Death

It’s 
the 
end

of 
morning 
coffee

***

Together

In the low breeze
two trees squeak

LINKS

A Rattle of Spring Frogs by Nelson Ball (complete text of this chapbook)

Cameron Anstee writes about his friend Nelson Ball

Nelson Ball & Barbara Caruso / Home Project / A Photo Documentary

Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball, ed. Stuart Ross, reviewed by rob mclennan

rob mclennan blogspot on Nelson Ball

A review by Michael Dennis of  Minutiae from Apt. 9 Press

A review by Michael Dennis of  Some Mornings from Mansfield Press

A review by Michael Dennis of A Gathering, an elegy to the Canadian poet, David W. Harris

The Paris Museum Blog page on Nelson Ball

Nelson Ball: His Last Day

Images of the dedicatory bench in Paris, Ontario

Dewdrops – Brief poems by Kobayashi Issa

Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶, 1763 – 1828) was a  Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest known for his haiku poems and journals. He was born in 1763 with the name Kobayashi Yatarô to a farmer and his wife in the village of Kashiwabara, a village of approximately one hundred houses in the highlands of the province of Shinano, close  to the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. He would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, raising buckwheat, rice, and other crops on the nearly two acres of family farmland, but a different destiny unfolded for him, following the death of his mother. His grandmother, Kana, reared him with deep affection until, when he was eight years of age, his father remarried. Although his stepmother, Hatsu, treated him well for two years, upon the birth of her first child, his step-brother Senroku, she relegated Issa to a role as a subordinate and began to abuse him, often physically. He has described in his memoirs how he was expected to look after this brother, often finding himself soaked in the child’s urine, and how he was punished when the baby was unhappy. Issa’s local schoolmaster, noticing the boy’s unhappiness, encouraged him to write haiku: With haiku you can show what you are feeling inside. His grandmother died when he was 14 and, soon after, he left his small village and went to the city of Edo, the present day Tokyo. Little is known of his life there,  other than that he began to study haiku and donned monk’s robes.

In 1790 he was elected to a position at an academy of poetics, the Katsushika school, but, as his innovative instincts clashed with the more traditional curriculum already in place at the school, in 1792, he resigned, proclaiming himself Haikaiji Issa in a declaration of poetic independence. His literary signature literally translates as Haikai Temple One-Tea. As he explained, In as much as life is empty as a bubble which vanishes instantly, I will henceforth call myself Issa, or One Tea. Thus he compared his life to the bubbles rising in a cup of tea – an appropriate image in Japanese cultural life.

His father died of typhoid fever in 1801 and, in his will, divided his estate equally between Issa and his half-brother. When the poet’s stepmother, Satsu, and his half-brother,  Senroku, contested the will, Issa was obliged to leave his home town once again, despite the fact that (according to Issa) his dying father’s request was for him to come home permanently. He spent the next thirteen years living in Edo while he attempted to convince the local authorities to carry out his father’s wishes.  His frustrations are reflected in a poem he wrote when he was in his forties

古郷やよるも障るも茨の花
furu sato ya   yoru mo sawaru mo   bara no hana 

the closer I get
to my village, the more pain …
wild roses

After sorting out the will, Issa managed to secure rights to half of the property his father left. He returned to his native village at the age of 49 and soon took a wife, a young woman called Kiku. After a brief period of happiness, difficulties returned. The couple’s first-born child died shortly after his birth. A daughter died less than two-and-a-half years later, inspiring Issa to write the haiku for which he is best known

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara

This dewdrop world —
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

In May, 1823, Issa’s wife, Kiku, died when he was sixty-one. He remarried almost immediately. His wife, thirty-eight-year-old Yuki, was the daughter of a local samuri. The marriage lasted less than a year and the couple were divorced soon after that marriage. Perhaps for purposes of continuing his family, Issa married again in 1825, his bride this time a young farmer’s daughter named Yao.  His wife was pregnant when their house burned down in a fire that destroyed most of the village and the couple had to move into a renovated grain barn on the property. Issa had a stroke and died in the winter of 1828, and his only surviving child, Yata, was born five months his death. The building in which he last lived, a windowless clay-walled storage shed, has survived, and was designated a National Historic Site in 1933. 

Photo: Tim L. Lanthier (Getty Images)

Issa’s Haiku

Issa was very prolific. He composed over 20,000 haiku on a variety of subjects. R. H. Blyth notes that Issa wrote dozens of haiku featuring small creatures: 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 100 on fleas, nearly 90 on the cicada, and about 70 on various other insects. There are almost one thousand verses on such creatures.  When you key in the word “dew” on David G. Lanoue’s Issa site, which contains 11,750 originals and translations, you come up with 304 poems. Two of these are included below. The most famous, the most frequently translated, is featured in the first selection of translations below.

“a world of dew”

In 1817 Issa wrote a haiku on the one-year anniversary of the death of his first child, a boy named Sentarô. It has a one-word headnote: “Grieving.”

露の世は得心ながらさりながら
tsuyu no yo wa tokushin nagara sari nagara

it’s a dewdrop world
surely it is…
yes… but…

(translated by David G. Lanoue)

Two years later, in 1819, Issa revised his haiku to write about the death from smallpox of another child, a one-year-old daughter named Sato. 

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
……And yet, and yet —

(translated by Robert Hass)

In one text Issa prefaces this brief poem with the note, “On losing a beloved child.” This haiku, written after the funeral, on the occasion of burying his child’s ashes, originally appeared at the end of the following prose passage from his book A Year of My Life (1819).  Here he is writing about Sato, his one-year-old daughter, who had contracted smallpox. 

After two or three days, however, her blisters dried up and the scabs began to fall away — like a hard crust of dirt that has been softened by melting snow.  In our joy we made what we call a ‘priest in a straw robe.’  We poured hot wine ceremoniously over his body, and packed him and the god of smallpox off together.  Yet our hopes proved to be vain.  She grew weaker and weaker and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes forever.
Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly.  For myself, I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return, and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall.  Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love.

                                        The world of dew

                                   is the world of dew.

                                        And yet, and yet —

(prose translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa; haiku translated by Robert Hass)

The word tsuyu (‘world of dew’) is a distinctly Buddhist concept. In Japanese literary tradition, drops of dew are used symbolically to represent human life and its transience, in reference to the Buddhist allegory between the fleeting nature of dewdrops and human life. Art Krumsee, commenting on the poem, writes What gets lost, I think, is the utter beauty and perfection of the dewdrop metaphor. If you really look at a dewdrop closely, it is profoundly beautiful. Life, too, including the life of Issa’s daughter is profoundly beautiful. What’s more, given the spherical, mirror-like quality of a dewdrop, this small thing reflects all of life. Buddhist purists focus on overcoming grasping in an impermanent world, but Buddha did not ask followers other than monastics to live a life without love and relationships. Loving someone means suffering when they are gone. Issa perfectly captures here the contradiction within which Buddhists outside of the monastery live. Rather than running from that contradiction, Issa embraces it. (Quoted by David G. Lanoue in his comment on the poem in his Haiku Guy collection of Issa’s poems.)

The final word of the poem is nagara. R. H. Blythe notes that Issa was very fond of using nagara which Blythe translates as “nevertheless”, although, like Robert Hass, he translates its use in this poem as “And yet – and yet -“. (See below).

Over time this brief poem has attained almost the same iconic status as Basho’s celebrated poem about a frog. It has been extensively translated and I include a variety of such translations below. My own favourite remains that of Robert Hass.

Brief Poems by Kobayashi Issa

“a world of dew”

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara

The world of dew
is the world of dew
……and yet, and yet–

Robert Hass

***

This world of dew
is only a world of dew—
and yet

Sam Hamill 

***

this world of dew
is only a world of dew—
and yet….and yet….

Makoto Ueda

***

This dewdrop world —
It may be a dewdrop,
And yet — and yet —

R. H. Blyth

***

the world of dew
is the world of dew,
and yet . . .
and yet . .

Nobuyuki Yuasa

***

The world of dew
Is a world of dew, and yet
And yet. . .

Donald Keene

***

The world of dew is a world of dew and yet and yet

Hiroaki Sato

***

This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

Lewis Mackenzie

***

Dew evaporates
and all our world is dew…
so dear, so fresh, so fleeting

Peter Beilenson

***

this world
is a dewdrop world
yes… but…

David G. Lanoue

***

This Dewdrop World …
a dewdrop world it is, and still,
although it is …

Harold Henderson

***

This dewdrop world-
yet for dew drops
still, a dewdrop world

Leon Lewis

***

Granted this dewdrop world is but
A dewdrop worlds, – this granted, yet

Basil Hall Chamberlain

***

This dewdrop world,
is a dewdrop world,
and yet

Timothy L. Jackowski

***

World like a dewdrop-
Though it’s only a dewdrop,
Even so, even so-

Glenn Shaw

***

it’s a dewdrop world,
nothing but a dewdrop world,
this is true, and yet…

Jan Walls

***

The world of dew
is a world of dew,
And yet.

Jane Hirshfield

***

This world of dew
is a dew-drop world indeed;
and yet, and yet …

Michael R. Burch

***

This dewdrop world
is dew, adieu.
Renew… Adieu …

Conor Kelly

OTHER POEMS

露の世の露の中にてけんくわ哉
tsuyu no yo no tsuyu no naka nite kenka kana

amid dewdrops
of this dewdrop world
a quarrel

David G. Lanoue

***

in every dewdrop
in this dewdrop world there is
raucous squabbling

Jan Walls

***

a world of dew
and within every dewdrop
a world of struggle

Sam Hamill

***

a world of dew –
but even dewdrops
disagree

Billy Mills

***

かたつぶりそろそろ登れ富士の山
katatsuburi   soro-soro nobore   fuji no yama

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!

R. H. Blyth

***

little snail
inch by inch, climb
Mount Fuji!

David G. Lanoue

***

Snail, carefully, slowly, climb Mount Fuji

Hiroaki Sato

***

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
……but slowly, slowly.

Robert Hass

***

tiny snail
in your own snail way
climb Mt Fuji

Billy Mills

***

隅の蜘案じな煤はとらぬぞよ
sumi no kumo anjina susu wa toranu zo yo

corner spider
rest easy, my soot-broom
is idle

David G. Lanoue

***

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
……casually.

Robert Hass

***

Spider,
do not worry,
I keep house casually.

Jane Hirshfield

***

目出度さもちう位也おらが春
medetasa mo chû kurai nari oraga haru

my “Happy New Year!”
about average…
my spring

David G. Lanoue

***

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom
……I feel about average.

Robert Hass

***

New Year greeting-time:
I feel about average
welcoming my spring

Sam Hamill

***

The auspiciousness
is just about medium—
my spring

Stephen Addiss, Fumiko Yamamoto and Akira Yamamoto

***

人先に鷺の音する氷哉
hito saki ni sagi no oto suru kôri kana

before people do
herons raise a clamor
“Ice!”

David G. Lanoue

***

heron sees
the lake ice over
before we do

Billy Mills

***

痩蛙まけるな一茶是に有り
yasegaeru makeru na issa kore ni ari

scrawny frog, hang tough!
Issa
is here

David G. Lanoue

***

skinny frog
don’t give up the fight—
Issa is here

Makoto Ueda

***

Lean frog,
don’t give up the fight!
Issa is here!

Harold Henderson

***

Skinny frog,
……hang on …
Issa to the rescue!

Michael R. Burch

***

蝿一つ打てはなむあみだ仏哉
hae hitotsu utte wa namu amida butsu kana

while swatting a fly
“All praise to Amida
Buddha!”

David G. Lanoue

***

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
……killing mosquitoes.

Robert Hass

***

Each time
I swat a fly, I chant
“Namu Amida Busto”

Stephen Addiss, Fumiko Yamamoto and Akira Yamamoto

***

All the while I’m praying to Buddha
I’m continually killing mosquitoes.

Michael R. Burch

***

古郷やよるも障るも茨の花
furusato ya yoru mo sawa[ru] mo bara no hana

the closer I get
to my village, the more pain…
wild roses

David G. Lanoue and Shinji Ogawa

***

At my home everything
I touch is a bramble.

Asataro Miyamori

***

Everything I touch
with tenderness alas
pricks like a bramble.

Peter Beilenson

***

The place where I was born:
all I come to-all I touch-
blossoms of the thorn.

Harold Henderson

***

My old village calls-
each time I come near,
thorns in the blossom.

Leon Lewis

***

my hometown-
all I approach, all I touch,
flowers of the thorn

Makoto Ueda

***

My native village
on approach and to the touch
a bramble rose.

Glenn Shaw

LINKS

The Wikipedia page on Issa

The Haikupedia page on Issa

David G. Lanoue’s website presents over 11,000 of Issa’s haiku in a searchable archive

Kobayashi Issa – Selected Haiku

Haiku by Kobayashi Issa

Some poems by Issa discussed on the First Known When Lost blog

Kobayashi Issa: Modern English Translations of the Japanese Haiku Master

That Lovable Old Issa by Earle Joshua Stone

An Essay on Issa by Leon Lewis

Issa’s Untidy Hut from a Poetry Blog

About a Poem: Pico Iyer on a haiku by Kobayashi Issa

Issa: My Life Through the Pen of a Haiku Master

Issa’s Dew: From the Hermit’s Thatch Blog

Kobayashi Issa and the ‘And yet…’ of Human Existence

Gabriel Rosenstock on Issa

Short Walks – Brief poems by William Bronk

c Photo by Kelly Wise

William Bronk (February 17, 1918 – February 22, 1999) was born in a house on Lower Main Street in Fort Edward, New York. He was a descendent of Jonas Bronck, after whom the Bronx is named. His family moved to Hudson Falls in New York where Bronk grew up and lived for most of the rest of his life. His mother was a homemaker and his father ran a business, Bronk Coal and Lumber, in Hudson Falls. He attended Dartmouth College, beginning in 1934, where he studied under the critic and poet Sidney Cox and met Robert Frost. After graduation he studied at Harvard for a semester but decided I couldn’t take any more of that. He left to write a study of Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman that was published 30 years later as The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States.  He taught English briefly at Union College, Schenectady, New York, and enjoyed it a great deal, but he knew he would need a graduate degree to continue. During World War II, Bronk served, first as a draftee but later, after a military education, as an officer. It was the only time in his life that he ever drove a vehicle.  He served as an army historian during the war and wrote A History of the Eastern Defense Command and of the Defense of the Atlantic Coast of the United States in the Second World War. He was honourably discharged from the army in October 1945

Bronk Coal and Lumber Company

His father had died unexpectedly in 1941 and William inherited the business. In January 1947 he took over management of the Bronk Coal and Lumber Company as a temporary measure. He stayed for over thirty years, enjoying the work as it gave him both financial security and the creative energy to write without having to worry about book sales.  I never had to calculate the effect … I could write what I wanted to write without worrying about all that. He said that the poems emerged in his mind as he went about this daily business. When a poem  was ready, he wrote it down, preferring to work on paper rather than at a typewriter.  I hate to type. I’ve never really learned to use the typewriter. He seldom rewrote or modified a poem once it was put on paper. He retired from the business in 1978.

William Bronk’s house in Hudson Falls, 1974

Aside from extensive travelling, which he enjoyed, he spent most of his life in his home in Hudson Falls, Washington County, New York where he lived alone in a large Victorian house with an Aga stove.  The house is a frequent metaphor with me. I think very likely that when I die it will be torn down. It has a two-wire electrical system. It’s inadequately insulated. The plumbing is old. No modern person would put up with it.  He never held a driver’s license, and only drove a vehicle once, an Army Reconnaissance vehicle at an Army post in Virginia during the war. He preferred to walk or cycle around his locale.  His childhood home became a pilgrimage point for many young poets and artists, who enjoyed his hospitality and his renowned cooking.

His first book of poems, Light and Dark, was published by Cid Corman’s  Origin Press in 1956. He explains the title thus: But the theme is always light and dark and ‘The light of that darkness and the darkness of that light’ as Melville talks about in Pierre. A subsequent publication The World, the Worldless (1964) published by New Directions did not achieve much success. In 1981, when the University of New Hampshire began collecting Bronk, he had had ten books of poetry and three books of essays published by small presses. He won the American Book Award in 1982 for his collection Life Supports: New & Collected Poems. During his life he published 30 collections of poetry with significant small presses including Elizabeth Press, New Directions, North Point, and Talisman House. A Selected Poems was published in 1995. 

William Bronk died of respiratory heart failure on Sunday, February 22, 1999 at the age of 81 in his home in Hudson Falls, New York. He is buried in Union Cemetery in the Hudson Falls/Fort Edward area of Washington County, New York.

Gravestone in Union Cemetery

THE POETRY OF WILLIAM BRONK

To know you can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with. That quotation from Beckett, a writer much admired by Bronk, may serve as an epigraph to the poetry. That optimism, countered by pessimism and superseded by a mordant abnegation could serve as a means of entry to the poetry, even if Bronk lacks Beckett’s remarkable bleak humour. True, there are difficulties. Explaining Why Nobody Reads William Bronk, Daniel Wolff offers four succinct reasons:

1: It’s hard.

2: It’s hard. (Repeat)

3: The tone of voice.

4: It’s unknowable.

1: It’s hard

There are many ways in which the poems are hard to fathom. Kay Ryan, in an essay on Bronk for Poetry Magazine, puts it this way: Bronk’s poems are almost entirely abstract and disembodied ….  his language desiccated but also conversationally halting and embedded. There is no flesh, no world, precious little metaphor—as though every human attachment is cheating.  If one were to apply the W. C. Williams rubric “No ideas but in things”, Bronk’s poetry almost always subverts it. His motto could be “No things, but ideas.” 

In one poem he claims that “Ideas are always wrong,” but, ironically that is an idea. A relentless sense of abstraction makes for difficult reading and the difficulty is viewed as an irrelevance. As Daniel Wolff puts it in the essay mentioned above, Bronk was writing in an age of mostly personal and confessional poetry, where the recipe seemed to be: take sensations, describe in detail, simmer till they reach an implied conclusion, serve warm. Instead, Bronk baldly states that your (and his) impressions of the world are of no importance. No wonder the poems are hard. They may not be hard to read but they are often hard, as I say, to fathom.

2: It’s hard (Repeat).

In an essay by Ty Clever entitled Ruin Bares Us: William Bronk and the Poetics of Demolition, he discusses the manner in which the poetry deviates from certain common assumptions: think “poetry” and its typical associations—lush language, music, metaphor, description—and you’ve just described everything a Bronk poem is not. However he see this as a benefit rather than merely a difficulty. But that’s precisely the reason we should be reading him. The value of Bronk is his relentless skepticism regarding almost all conventional poetic means. Or as Daniel Wolff puts it Whatever slight music these lines have is in the repetition …. (of) this almost clinical voice ... It’s the voice of someone who sounds like they’re looking at humankind from a distance.

3: The tone of voice

Christian Wiman in a Poetry Foundation article entitled The Drift of the World has an unusual description of the tonality of the poems: one tone that has no more range than the hum of the fluorescent lighting. That lack of range is an impediment if you read too many of the poems at one sitting, but read individually, or heard in Bronk’s resonant voice (two examples are cited below) where he sounds like an actor in a Beckett play, there is a wonderful suggestiveness in the tonal monotony. Daniel Wolff speaks of a flat declarative voice . The poems, as is evident below, move between the first person singular and the first person plural with a lugubrious insouciance. And that insouciance applies to the reader. In the poem below entitled Note For The Kitchen Table he says to those reading the poems Pass them on if you will or leave them unread./They speak of only what would still be there.

If that sounds portentous, it fits an established pattern. At times the portentousness of the utterances can be overbearing but, especially in the shorter poems, the flat statements can imbue the poems with a surprising resonance. Another poem, Bid, bids the reader to engage and then steps back : Come into the poem, reader. The door will close /itself behind you. You can leave whenever you will. It is as if the reader is almost an irrelevance. That monotone which Wiman identifies is often off-putting but, in small doses, as in many of the poems below, it has its own peculiar attraction.

4: It’s unknowable

Christian Wiman in the article noted above puts it like this: Bronk is all hedgehog. He knows one thing, which is that he does not truly know one thing. He sometimes seems determined not to be inspired. While he is constantly communicating through a cloud of unknowing or unknowingness, the poems themselves are not unknowable. Wallace Stevens, with whom Bronk has often been compared, begins one of his poems with a celebrated sentence, The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully. Everything in Bronk’s poetry hovers around that “almost”. It is as if the poems interrogate the intelligence rather than resist it, as if the intelligence, while unknown, is seeking to become known. Interestingly Steven’s poem, Man Carrying Thing, ends with a couplet that could almost be a Bronk poem in itself:

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

There is no doubt that Stevens is more eloquent, more evocative, more imaginative and more popular than Bronk. Part of the fascination of Bronk’s poetry is the persistence, even in the face of the unknowable: It is by our most drastic failures that we may perhaps catch glimpses of something real, of something which is. (His account of these failures is from an essay Copan: Historicity Gone.) I began with a Beckett quote, so it may be appropriate to conclude with one: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Brief Poems by William Bronk

Short Walk

Awake at night, I walk in the dark of the house.
Bare feet are quiet. The rooms are undisturbed.
What else had anyone’s days and nights been like?
I think, now, not any more than this.

***

Forget It

Don’t remember; all this will go away:
the good, the bad, will go. We’ll go away.
And something already is that still will be.

***

The Informer

I overhear the poem’s talk to itself.
Is that what it said? I write it down to try.

***

At Hand

Things
are just
out
of reach
and
as we stretch
for them
we push them
farther
away.

***

After Bach

In cello suites we learn the way despair,
deepest sadness, can and must be phrased
as praise, thanksgiving. Of course we knew
this anyway but mightn’t have dared it on
our own.
And the way the sadness can be in part
to accept the absence of One to say it to.

The World

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

(Listen to William Bronk read this poem.)

***

Estrangement

One way I think we don’t exist
is that we would be such a strange thing
for it to use. What a strange thing it is.

***

Matins

Early, before the day has been, I know
the day. I lie with it in the unspoken dark.
Sometimes, I doze again to mark its coming.

***

Foresight

I lie in bed
practicing dead;
it may take some
getting used to.

***

The Drawing

Art’s care
discriminates
not art 
not life
but art’s desire
and life sees 
itself there
and is drawn.

***

Compensation

To live without solace is possible because
solace is trivial: none is enough.

What You Can Do 

I used to think it was impossible with boys.
It is impossible with girls too.
Oh, you can do it but if you think that that’s what it is
you have to deceive yourself. It isn’t that.

***

The Writer

Truth has a story it tries again to write.
Over and over again it writes it off.
There aren’t any stories that aren’t true.

***

Easy Company

Knowing your solitude is there,
my solitude consents here
not needing what it needs.

***

The Conclusion

I thought
we stood at the door
of another world
and it might open and we go in.
Well,
there is that door
and such a world.

***

Epiphany

We learn not to expect so much of days;
even more, mornings are beautiful.

***

Of Poetry

there is only the work.

The work is what speaks
and what is spoken
and what attends to hear
what is spoken.

***

Untitled

The truth has many forms which are not its form
If it has one. What has a form of its own
Or, having, is only it? There is truth.

***

Who’s There

We need to separate ourselves from ourselves
to be ourselves. All that pain and power:
that isn’t us. All that busyness,
the alienation and hate, those love affairs.

The Passage

People are passing; I look in passing at them.
Look, how the light comes down through them: they glow:
Once, I grasped at one. Oh, it was sweet.
It had nothing to do with me, or anyone.

***

Note For The Kitchen Table

I left the poems where you would find them.
Pass them on if you will or leave them unread.
They speak of only what would still be there.

***

Vicarious

Except from our
mortality
how should
infinite
eternal know
how beautiful 
the brief world
is to us?

***

Bid

Come into the poem, reader. The door will close 
itself behind you. You can leave whenever you will.

***

 The Wall

Watching the curve of the long line of your back,
desiring, I said in my mind that each of us
is alone forever, forever. We live with this.

***

No Way

You know, I am told my tenderness for you
is for me, really, that if I treat you gently, I replace
a harshness I suffered from, the roles reversed.

***

Visionary

Poems don’t make by added post and beam
the whole barn or see the barn as built.
The most the poem can do is know within
itself, in a certain joint, this fits with that.

***

Coming to Terms 

When I had love it felt like cigarettes,
like alcohol, it was like sleep.
Wasn’t it good. Now I still have sleep.
Life keeps hold of me now in its terms.

***

The Lullaby

Howl, world, in your hurt: that certainty
always to bear, be born. Never to fail.
Hearing the wind, I hear the world’s wail.
Let me go sleep on it. Sing, sing.

(Listen to William Bronk read this poem.)

LINKS

Poems

Three poems on the Poem Hunter site

Five poems on the Modern American Poets site

Reading from his  Selected Poems at his home in Hudson Falls

Life Supports: New and Collected Poems: New Edition. (Talisman House Publishers)

Biography

William Bronk biography on the Famous Poets and Poems site

Interviews

At Home in the Unknown: an Interview with William Bronk by Mark Katzman

Excerpts from an interview with William Bronk by Edward Foster

William Bronk – interviewed by Henry Lyman for Poems to a Listener (1986 series)

William Bronk – interviewed by Henry Lyman for Poems to a Listener (1994 series)

Essays

Why Nobody Reads William Bronk by Daniel Wolff

Ruin Bares Us: William Bronk and the Poetics of Demolition

Neither Us nor Them: Poetry Anthologies, Canon Building, and the Silencing of William Bronk by David Clippinger

Christian Wiman on the poetry of William Bronk

Kay Ryan on the poetry of William Bronk

William Bronk’s Path Among the Forms

A review of the letters between Cid Corman and William Bronk

Daggers of Light – Brief poems by Andrea Cohen

Photograph: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

Andrea Cohen grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and has written poems, she says, for as long as I can remember. I used to walk with my dog through the woods, making up little songs. It was what I loved to do––and my days haven’t changed too much since then. Of the same dog she has said, I hung out with my dog in the woods and would recite poems to him. He was a very good dog and did not let on that the poetry was very bad. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she was also a Teaching-Writer Fellow.  Andrea Cohen is the author of the poetry collections Everything (Four Way Books, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way Books, 2019), which was included on The New York Times “Best Poetry Books of 2019” list, Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999) which was a winner of the Owl Creek Poetry Prize. She has received several fellowships to MacDowell and directs The Blacksmith Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Blacksmith House, site of the village smithy and spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s poem The Village Blacksmith. She also writes about marine research at MIT.

GRIEF IN BRIEF

There is a persistent sense of loss and deprivation in many of the brief poems which accumulate in the recent collections of Andrea Cohen. A Refusal to Mourn (see below) condenses Dylan Thomas’s plangent and verbose lament into a seven-word cry of pain. First Love is a dark joke on the darkness of love. The “dagger of light” referred to in one poem illuminates the spectral world the poet inhabits. The ability to constrain dark emotions in small spaces is central to the achievement and ambition of these poems. I do want to say as much as I can in a few words, and many of these very short poems tend to find their way to me pretty much whole. Like a fruit falling from a branch. Though like a fruit that gets some leaves clipped, or gets polished. The world, like some fruit, may be “bitter-sweet”, as the title poem of Nightshade has it, but, as it concludes, “what living isn’t?”

Brief Poems by Andrea Cohen

First Love

She was
always
leaving
the dark on.

***

Refusal to Mourn

In lieu of
flowers, send
him back.

***

Love

It’s an extreme
sport – like in-
door beekeeping.

***

Light

It looked like something
you could pick up, that

dagger of light.
He left it there,

not trusting what
he might do with it.

***

Night

Someone was talking 
quietly of lanterns –

but loud enough
to light my way.

***

Nightshade

It trades in
poison and

in balms. We
call it bitter-

sweet – what
living isn’t?

***

How Sound Travels

You said goodbye and I
heard good and I, and

only later, the buzzing
b, its lethal sting.

Summer Lake

You can’t fish
for light, or

you can, but
you have to

throw it back.

***

Fellow Traveler

She went everywhere
with an empty suitcase.

You never know when
you’ll need to leave

swiftly with nothing.

***

Wedding Dress

Look closer:
she sewed it

from a hundred 
tattered flags

of surrender.

***

Prayer

Dear God, give
me the strength –

in the presence
of deaf gods –

to stop praying.

***

Silence

Not an absence
of blackbirds

singing, but
an abundance

of blackbirds
listening.

***

Diaspora

I carry 
everything

my people
lost.

***

Bunker

What would I
think, coming

up after
my world

had evaporated?
I’d wish

I were water. 

LINKS

An interview with Andrea Cohen on Redivider.

A large selection of poems are available through her website.

Andrea Cohen reads a selection of her poetry at the 2017 Nantucket Book Festival.

The Salmon Poetry page for Long Division.

The Salmon Poetry page for Kentucky Derby.

An interview with Andrea Cohen in Memorious.

An interview with Andrea Cohen in The Arkansas International.

Kate Kellaway reviews Long Division in The Guardian.

Jackson Holbert reviews Furs Not Mine in The Adroit Journal.

White Sound – Brief poems by Julie O’Callaghan

Author photo: Katie O’Callaghan

Julie O’Callaghan was born in 1954 in Chicago. Her great-grandparents had emigrated there from Ballyjamesduff in County Cavan. She was the second of seven children. Her father, Jack, whom she has written about extensively, was a High School teacher of English in the Chicago Public School system. She visited Ireland in July 1974, two days after her twentieth birthday. She was supposed to spend her third year of college studying abroad in Trinity College Dublin, and then go back to the United States. Instead, having written some poetry, she attended a poetry reading where, subsequently, she met the Irish poet, Dennis O’Driscoll whom she was later to marry. She never went back to live in the United States: I went back and told my parents that I was moving to Ireland. And I never finished my degree, which was a bit of a thing.

She took a job in the library in Trinity College, and continued to write poetry. In 1983 she had her first book of poetry, Edible Anecdotes, published by Dolmen Press. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.  Her second collection, What’s What, published by Bloodaxe Books in 1991, was a Poetry Book Society Choice.  No Can Do (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Tell Me This Is Normal: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008) was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A chapbook, Problems (Pressed Wafer, Boston), appeared in 2005. Her most recent collection, Magnum Mysterium, dealing with the untimely death of her husband, Dennis O’Driscoll, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020.

Her poetry has been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and 2, BBC Radio 3 (including a commission for Poetry Proms 2002), BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Ulster, Public Radio International (Garrison Keillor), and RTE and BBC television. She has also written poetry for older children. These include Taking My Pen for a Walk (Orchard Books, 1988), Two Barks (Bloodaxe Books, 1998) and The Book of Whispers (Faber & Faber, 2006). She received the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award in 2001 and was awarded Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries in 1985, 1990 and 1998. She is a member of the Aosdána, the Irish association of artists which was created in 1981 on the initiative of a group of writers with support from the Arts Council of Ireland.

John Register, Untitled

THE POETRY OF JULIE O’CALLAGHAN

I first discovered the poetry of Julie O’Callaghan when I was asked to review her first collection, Edible Anecdotes. This is what I wrote at the time: The voice of the mid-West on vacation – crude, colloquial and demonstrative. It is the brash voice of the American salesman promoting freedom, free enterprise and enterprising garbage. It is the voice of returned emigrants, lamenting their loss. It is the mixed voice of Irish people at tea-break overheard in snatches of conversation. All these voices are captured in dramatic moments or demotic monologues, and their vibrancy sings. Subsequent volumes amplified the range of that voice as it retained its demotic thrust while extending its emotional range. The heart-breaking poems about her father’s death that were included in No Can Do, particularly in a sequence entitled Sketches for an Elegy, continue to use a colloquial timbre but imbue it with a depth of grief that fuses the disparate sketches into a coherent threnody. And that voice achieves a desolate plangency in her latest collection, Magnum Mysterium where the concluding sequence, After Dennis O’Driscoll, strips the anecdotal technique to a bare and brutal account of an almost unbearable grief with the burden of her husband’s loss borne with a wry irony and an  indefatigable grace.

In a modest comment, in an interview with Trinity News, she confesses to her poetic weaknesses. I have no notions whatsoever. I don’t know anything about poetry. Rhymes, metres and all that. It’s just not happening up there.  While that may be true – and it may not – she has an unerring sense of poetic rhythm that propels the poems in diverse directions. And there is something else resonanting through the poems, something learned perhaps from her lengthy engagement with The Pillow Book  of Sei Shōnagon, a court lady to the Empress of Japan, completed in 1002. In a set of poems collected under the title, Calligraphy, and included in Tell Me This Is Normal: New and Selected Poems,  the American slang and the Irish incidentals give way to a purer sense of oriental decorum. Unlike the Canadian poet, Suzanne Buffam, who uses the pillow book to compile contemporary lists to update the Japanese poet’s style (see my account of this on the Suzanne Buffam page) Julie O’Callaghan offers a more wistful, more allusive homage (although she does, in a poem called 21st Century Pillow Book, teasingly introduce a set of urban lists). This Japanese influence adds an emotional depth and a technical breadth to a poetry that may, at times, seem slight but is, in fact, and in the words of Wendy Cope, poetry you can understand: lively, entertaining, well-observed.

 

 

Brief Poems by Julie O’Callaghan

Bag

I have here 
a plastic bag with handles

inside I carry a few pieces of myself 
a spare arm, replacement vein, extra skin

they do come in useful
on days like today.

***

Time

Only a moment ago
he lay beside me
saying silly poetic things.
The mat is still warm,
incense from his robe
haunts the air.

***

White Sound

When rain
whispers
it is snow.

***

Skinny

All I ever eat is cake.
I eat it at every meal.
Oh and I drink Snapple.
First I take a forkful of cake,
then I wash it down with Mango Cocktail.
That’s my secret 
on how come
I’m so skinny.

***

Facing West

Walls of twinkling skyscrapers
need all the help they can get.
They soak up the colours of dusk.

People quit cooking
or stop laughing at the TV
and turn peach, violet and pale blue

– they are facing west.

***

Over

When he saw geese
gathering on a lake in Wisconsin
he said, ‘Oh no – summer’s almost over.’

Over? It was still hot.
Summer thunderstorms still pounded
nightly on the roof.

***

Island Life

I live on an island.
But that’s not the worst part.
Water sloshes uncontrollably
at the edges
of this entire geological formation.
You can hardly
go anyplace
without falling off.

***

The Day

When the day came
(oh it comes)
and the big old horse
is too stiff
to be ridden
his owner
carries a little chair
into his stable
and reads him poetry
instead.

***

Once When I Visited the Mall

I bought a magnificent floral-skirt
the one I had been searching for
which I knew woud be perfect
for every occasion.
But at home
the flowers seemed faded.

***

Train Music

this is what
I was trying to remember:
sad train moan
in the heat
howling
to the nation.

***

Solitary Confinement

The rattling keys
in my hand
I come 
to our front door
enter
and 
lock myself in
set the alarm
and commence
my Life Sentence.

***

After Dennis O’Driscoll

I had everything:
a cozy house
a genius husband
a happy life
a Sunday roast
a flower garden with gravel paths

and then one day…

***

All poems © Julie O’Callaghan
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

 

LINKS

Julie O’Callaghan’s website.

The Julie O’Callaghan page on the Bloodaxe Books site.

Interview with Julie O’Callaghan in Trinity News

Julie O’Callaghan reads a selection of her poems in the  Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin. 

A review of Magnum Mysterium by Fred Johnston.

A review of Magnum Mysterium by Enda Coyle-Greene.

Julie O’Callaghan reads her poem “After Dennis O’Driscoll” at the UCD Special Collections Reading Room.

 

All poems © Julie O’Callaghan
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Watching Rain – Brief poems by Ono no Komachi

Ono no Komachi drawn by Kikuchi Yōsai (1781 – 1878)

Ono no Komachi (小野 小町, c. 825 – c. 900) was a Japanese waka (now known as tanka) poet. Very little is known of her life other than a broad date of birth and that she was active in the mid-9th century. Despite extensive research attempting to discover her place of birth, her family and her life, she remains a mystery and a legend. Some believe that she was a lady-of-the-bedchamber in the service of Emperor Ninmyō, others believe that she was a low-ranking consort of the emperor. She had romantic entanglements with various men and these poetic exchanges are preserved in the Kokin Wakashū,  a collection of “Japanese Poems of Ancient and Modern Times”, an early anthology of the waka poetry dating from the Heian period. Her poetry is so well regarded that she is listed among the Rokkasen (Japanese Poetry Immortals), as well as in the introduction to the Kokin Wakashū, which contains her only surviving works. She is also one of the Sanjūrokkasen (the Thirty-six Immortals of Poetry) and the Nyōbōsanjūrokkasen (Thirty-six Immortal Lady Poets).

She was famous for her beauty and passion; she likely served at the court of Emperor Ninmyo, and her poems were a success in her own lifetime. The legends that have developed about her life have eclipsed the historical Ono no Komachi. One such legend is that concerning her harsh treatment of her admirer Fukakusa no Shosho, a high-ranking courtier. Komachi warned her suitor that he would have to visit her every night for 100 nights before she would submit to his charms. Fukakusa set about his task with determination and turned up each evening at Komachi’s house in all weathers. Tragically, though, the strain proved too much and Fukakusa died on the 99th night. Further legends tell of an aged Komachi living to be one hundred, forced to wander in ragged clothes, her beauty faded and her appearance so wretched that she was mocked by all around her, as punishment for her earlier mistreatment of her lovers. Another legend concerns her dying in poverty, her skull lying in a field; when the wind blows through the skull’s eye socket the sound evokes Komachi’s anguish. The true facts may never be known. 

The poetry, however, continues to endure. She is, arguably, the earliest and best example of a passionate woman poet in the Japanese canon commencing a tradition continued by Izumi Shikibu in a later age and Yosano Akiko in the modern one. Those poems, usually sad, deal with such subjects as lost love, unrequited love, loneliness, and the passing of time symbolised by changes in nature, especially fading blossoms and the changing colour of leaves in autumn. In his book, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century, translator, critic and literary historian Donald Keene said that The intensity of emotion expressed in Komachi’s poetry not only was without precedent but would rarely be encountered in later years. The poetry of the Kokinshu was usually pitched in a lower key, and the ingenious use of language was a mark not of overpowering emotion but of a kind of intellectuality. Komachi’s poetry, however extravagant in expression, always seems sincere. 

The poetess Ono-no Komachi in the rain by Utagawa Toyokuni II.

TRANSLATORS

Helen Craig McCullough (1918 –1998) was an American academic, translator and Japanologist, best known for her 1988 translation of The Tale of the Heike. Her translations are included in Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985)

Donald  Keene (1922 –2019) was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. While staying at Cambridge, after winning a fellowship for Americans to study in England, Keene went to meet Arthur Waley, one of whose translations is included below, who was best known for his translation work in classical Chinese and Japanese literature. For Keene, Waley’s translation of Chinese and Japanese literature was inspiring, even arousing in Keene the thought of becoming a second Waley. He discusses the poetry of Ono no Komachi in his book, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (see above).

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) often regarded, much to his disdain, as one of the central Beat poets was also a prolific reader of Chinese  and Japanese literature. Some of the translations below are from his collection One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. Oddly there are two translations of one poem: a translation he did with his collaborator, Ikuko Atsumi, and one credited only to himself. I prefer the latter. More of his Japanese translations are available on the Kenneth Rexroth post on this blog.

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator who has received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her poetry reflects her immersion in a wide range of poetic traditions, both Asian and Western. She has edited and co-translated, with Mariko Aratani, a collection of the work of the two foremost women poets of classical-era Japan: The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990). Through these, and other translations, she was instrumental in bringing tanka  to the attention of American poets.

Michael R. Burch is an American, poet, columnist, essayist, and editor who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He also edits The HyperTexts  a literary website which has been online for two decades and currently gets around 1.5 million page views per year. On this site he includes translated poetry from Old English and numerous other languages into modern English. One page on his site is devoted to the poetry of Ono no Komachi where he offers numerous translations of her brief poems. More of what he calls “loose translations” of Ono no Komachi are available on the Michael R. Burch post on this blog.

Brief Poems by Ono no Komachi

花の色はうつりにけりないたづらにわが身世にふるながめせしまに

Hana no iro wa
utsurinikeri na
itazura ni
wa ga mi yo ni furu
nagame seshi ma ni

Alas! The beauty
of the flowers has faded
and come to nothing,
while I have watched the rain,
lost in melancholy thought.

Translated by Helen Craig McCullough

***

The flowers withered
Their colour faded away,
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in brooding,
And the long rains were falling.

Translated by Donald Keene

***

While watching
the long rains falling on this world
my heart, too, fades
with the unseen color
of the spring flowers.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani

***

Without changing color
in the emptiness
of this world of ours,
the heart of man
fades like a flower.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and  Ikuko Atsumi 

***

Watching the long, dismal rains
inundating the earth,
my heart too is washed out, bleeds off
with the colors of the late spring flowers.

Translated by Michael R. Burch

Aki no yo mo
na nomi narikeri
au to ieba
koto zo to mo naku
akenuru mono o

Autumn nights, it seems,
are long by repute alone:
scarcely had we met
when morning’s first light appeared,
leaving everything unsaid.

Translated by Helen Craig McCullough

***

The autumn night
is long only in name—
We’ve done no more
than gaze at each other
and it’s already dawn.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani

***

Autumn nights are “long”
only in verse and song:
for we had just begun
to gaze into each other’s eyes
when dawn immolated the skies!

Translated by Michael R. Burch

Hito ni wan
Tsuki no naki ni wa
Omoiokite
Mune hashiribi ni
Kokoro yakeori

This night of no moon
there is no way to meet him.
I rise in longing:
My breast pounds, a leaping flame,
my heart is consumed by fire.

Translated by Donald Keene

***

On such a night as this
When no moon lights your way to me,
I wake, my passion blazing,
My breast a fire raging, exploding flame
While within me my heart chars.

Translated by Earl Miner

***

You do not come
On this moonless night.
I wake wanting you.
My breasts heave and blaze.
My heart burns up.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth 

***

He does not come.
Tonight in the dark of the moon
I wake wanting him.
My breasts heave and blaze.
My heart chars.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and  Ikuko Atsumi 

***

When I cannot see him
In the dark of a moonless night,
Fire rises in me—
Leaping in my burning breast,
Charring my heart with its flames.

Translated by Steven Carter

***

Nights when the moon hides
All hope of seeing you leaves me
Desire lies smoldering
Within my breast flames burn wild
Fire scorching my sleepless heart

Translated by Charles Cabell

***

On nights such as these
when no moon lights your way to me,
I lie awake, my passion blazing,
my breast an inferno wildly raging,
while my heart chars within me.

Translated by Michael R. Burch

わびぬれば身をうき草の根をたえて誘ふ水あらば去なむとぞ思

Wabinureba
mi o ukikusa no
ne o taete
sasou mizu araba
inamu to zo omou

In this forlorn state
I find life dreary indeed:
if a stream beckoned,
I would gladly cut my roots
and float away like duckweed.

Translated by Helen Craig McCullough

***

So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.

Translated by Donald Keene

***

This body
grown fragile, floating,
a reed cut from its roots . . .
If a stream would ask me
to follow, I’d go, I think.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani

***

Wretched water-weed that I am,
severed from all roots:
if rapids should entice me to annihilation,
why not welcome their lethal shoots?

Translated by Michael R. Burch

色見えでうつろふ物は世中の人の心の花にぞ有りける

Iro miede
Utsurou momo wa
Yo no naka no
Hito no kokoro no
Hana ni zo arikeru

The flowers and my love
Passed away under the rain,
While I idly looked upon them
Where is my yester-love?

Translated by Yone Noguchi

***

A thing which fades
With no outward sign—
Is the flower
Of the heart of man
In this world!

Translated by Arthur Waley

***

How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower
of the human heart.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani

***

Imperceptible
It withers in the world,
This flower-like human heart.

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

***

Two things wilt without warning,
bleeding away their colors:
a flower and a man’s heart.

Translated by Michael R. Burch

思ひつつぬればや人の見えつらむ夢としりせばさめざらましを

Omoitsutsu
Nureba ya hito no
Meitsuramu
Yume to shiriseba
Samezaramashi wo

Thinking about him
I slept, only to have him
Appear before me—
Had I known it was a dream
I should never have wakened.

Translated by Donald Keene

***

Was it then because
I fell asleep with yearning thoughts
That he appeared to me?
Had I known it was a dream
I never would have awakened.

Translated by Edwin A. Cranston

***

Was it that I went to sleep
Thinking of him,
That he came in my dreams?
Had I known it a dream
I should not have wakened.

Translated by Geoffrey Bownas

***

I fell asleep thinking of him,
And he came to me.
If I had known it was only a dream
I would have never awakened

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

***

Did he appear
because I fell asleep
thinking of him?
If only I’d known I was dreaming,
I’d never have wakened.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani

***

I nodded off thinking about you
only to have your appear in my dreams.
Had I known that I slept,
I’d have never awakened!

Translated by Michael R. Burch

いとせめてこひしき時はむばたまの夜の衣をかへしてぞきる

Ito semete
Koishiki toki wa
Mubatama no
Yoru no koromo o
Kaeshite zo kiru

When longing for him
Tortures me beyond endurance,
I reverse my robe —
Garb of night, black as leopard-flower berries —
And wear it inside out.

Translated by Helen Craig McCullough

***

When love presses me
Relentless in the glistening night
I take off my robe,
Then lie down to sleep again,
Wearing it inside out.

Translated by Edwin A. Cranston

***

When my desire
grows too fierce
I wear my bed clothes
inside out,
dark as the night’s rough husk.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

***

I feel desire so intensely
in the lily-seed darkness
that tonight I’ll turn my robe inside-out
before donning it.

Translated by Michael R. Burch

LINKS

The Ono no Komachi page on the Waka Poetry site with links to poems in original Japanese.

Ono no Komachi: Modern English Translations by Michael R. Burch.

Japanese and English quotations from the poetry of Ono no Komachi.

Jane Hirshfield discusses the poetry of Ono no Komachi.

An e-text of her poems (in Japanese).

Ono no Komachi and the Standard of Japanese Female Beauty.

Ono no Komachi: A Waka Poet Renowned for her Beauty.

Burning in the Fires of Longing: The Kokinshu Poetry of Ono no Komachi, an essay and translations by Charles Cabell.

Summoning the Spirit: Poems of Komachi

The Wikipedia page on Ono no Komachi.

Beach Sandals – Brief poems by Anna Swir

Anna Swir (1909-1984), the name by which the Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska is known in the English-speaking world, was born in the capital city, Warsaw. Her father, Jan Świrszczyński, was an avant-garde painter and her mother was a former singer who had given up a professional career to take care of her family. Anna Swir’s Poems About My Father and My Mother (unpublished until after her death) relate the story of her early childhood  as the family moved from home to home within Warsaw. She grew up in virtual poverty and had to interrupt her education in order to work. She supported herself as she grew older, managing to attend university where she studied medieval and baroque Polish literature. By the 1930s, when her first poems were being published, she was working for a teachers’ association. In 1934, her poem “Noon” was awarded first prize in a poetry competition sponsored by Literary News. In 1936 she published her first book, Poems and Prose. These early brief poems, writes Czeslaw Milosz in his introduction to Talking to My Body, bear the marks both of her upbringing in the artistic milieu (images taken from paintings and albums of reproductions) and of her fascination with the Middle Ages. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, precipitating World War II. Anna Swir joined the Polish resistance and worked as a waitress and as a military nurse in Warsaw while continuing to write for underground journals and participating in clandestine poetry readings. In 1944, while working as a nurse treating soldiers at a military hospital she expected to be executed for her resistance activities, as she recounts in her collection Building the Barricade. Milosz quotes Swir’s summary of this period of her life: War made me another person. Only then did my own life and the life of my contemporaries enter my poems.

One crucial impact of the war on her life was her displacement from Warsaw to Krakow.  For a time, she worked as a literary supervisor at the theatre there where she wrote and adapted plays. She also wrote children’s books, producing over 50 titles—an accomplishment that won her a literary prize in 1973. During the Stalinist years her plays written for adult audiences reflected the spirit of socialist realism, though after Stalin’s death, in 1953, she was able to turn to more psychological and political drama. She also wrote contemporary comedies for popular entertainment, translated poetry, produced opera librettos, and adapted literary works for the stage, radio and television while continuing to write her own poetry privately. She would eventually collect and publish these poems in a series of volumes, beginning in 1958, and these poems established her literary reputation.

When she was 44, she met and married actor Jan Adamski. (The priest who married them, and who later baptised their daughter, Ludmila, was Karol Wojtyla, later to become Pope John Paul II.) Her Catholicism is evident in the poetry in its incarnational matter where the centrality of the flesh and the joys and agonies of embodiment recur throughout the poems, so much so that Milosz would eventually use the phrase, Talking to My Body, as the title of his volume of English translations of Swir’s poems. Of her personal life at this time Milosz once said, The marriage didn’t last long. Then she separated and she had some lovers.

She never married again, but she eventually entered into a lasting relationship with another man, whose identity is known only as “Jozef,” the life companion to whom she dedicated her book, Happy As a Dog’s Tail  (1978). In later years she became a vegetarian and practiced yoga and gymnastics on a regular basis. She also enjoyed jogging and long cross-country walks, activities that served to set her further outside the literary mainstream, both in terms of her life and her work. She wrote unadorned poetry of physical experience in a direct style. In 1984, Milosz, who was in the process of translating a book-length selection of her poems, wrote to inform her of the project. Though she told him that she was pleased that he was translating her poetry, she did not disclose that she was in the final throes of the cancer from which she would die on September 30, 1984. She is buried in the Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow.

Her final poem, Tomorrow They Will Carve Me, written while on her deathbed, reads

Death came and stood by me.
I said: I am ready.
I am lying in the surgery clinic in Krakow.
Tomorrow
they will carve me.

There is much strength in me. I can live,
can run, dance, and sing.
All that is in me, but if necessary
I will go.

Today
I make account of my life.
I was a sinner,
I was beating my head against earth,
I implored from the earth and the sky
forgiveness.

I was pretty and ugly,
wise and stupid,
very happy and very unhappy
often I had wings
and would float in air.

I trod a thousand paths in the sun and in snow,
I danced with my friend under the stars.
I saw love
in many human eyes.
I ate with delight
my slice of happiness.

Now I am lying in the surgery clinic in Krakow.
It stands by me.
Tomorrow
they will carve me.
Through the window the trees of May, beautiful like life,
and in me, humility, fear, and peace.

 

 

ANNA SWIR: POETRY AND TRANSLATION

I do not speak Polish. I do not read Polish. Yes there is something clever, caustic and evocative in the poems below and in the longer ones available on the Poetry Foundation site that transcends translation. Anna Swir is like a more carnal Emily Dickinson or a more spiritual Sylvia Plath. As she put it memorably, A poet should be as sensitive as an aching tooth. There is an ache and an acute sensitivity to body and soul in her best poetry as is evident below and in the more extensive poems. She was not well-known or much celebrated in her native Poland. (Even today the Wikipedia page on the Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow, which also contains the graves of Georg Trakl and Wislawa Szymborska,  does not mention her in its list of notable internments.) Czeslaw Milosz explains why he introduced her work to a wider, English speaking audience: he translated her poems in order to repair injustice, because she was underestimated. I consider her a very important poet. But she was somehow in the shade. First of all, she had great difficulty in finding proper expression for her experiences, her war experiences. And then later she had difficulty finding this proper expression also for her love experiences. So she was a latecomer in a way. And for that reason she was not highly known. In 1985, Milosz published Happy as a Dog’s Tail, the first collection in English to consist solely of Swir’s poems. All of the poems were translated by Milosz, in partnership with Leonard Nathan, and consisted of poems from her mature volumes . In 1996, Milosz and Nathan re-edited the volume, adding an additional 65 poems and removing 31 that had been in the first edition, and renamed the book Talking to My Body. New translations of the poems have appeared in  Building the Barricade, translated by Piotr Florczyk in 2009. I leave it to Milosz, in a posthumous tribute, to sum up the enduring appeal of Anna Swir’s poetry: Opening myself to her verses, I have been more and more conquered by her extraordinary, powerful, exuberant, and joyous personality . . . her calm in accepting reality, whether it brought bliss or suffering. A mood of detachment is visible in her late poems. To have met such a person through her poems has inclined me to faith and optimism . . . In her later poems it was apparent that she had been gradually moving toward a supreme quietude.

 

Brief Poems by Anna Swir

TRANSLATED BY CZESLAW MILOSZ AND LEONARD NATHAN

BEACH SANDALS

I swam away from myself.
Do not call me.
Swim away from yourself, too.

We will swim away, leaving our bodies
on the shore
like a pair of beach sandals.

***

LOVE WITH RUCKSACKS

Two rucksacks,
two grey heads.
And the roads of all the world
for wandering.

***

A DOUBLE RAPTURE

Because there is no me
and because I feel
how much there is no me.

***

I PROTEST

Dying
is the hardest
work of all.

The old and sick
should be exempt from it.

***

ANXIETY

You make among the trees
a nest for our love.
But look at the flowers
you’ve crushed.

***

I AM FILLED WITH LOVE

I am filled with love
as a great tree with the wind,
as a sponge with the ocean,
as a great life with suffering,
as time with death.

***

I CANNOT

I envy you. Every moment
You can leave me.

I cannot
leave myself.

 

THEY SAVED ME

Twenty-four hours
I was dying of fever.

Twenty-four hours
mother knelt
and prayed by my bed.

Twenty-four hours
father lay, face down
on the floor.

They saved me.

***

SAD LOVERS

Like an eye and an eyelid
United by a tear.

***

FOUR VERY FAT LEGS

I am jolly as if I were
very fat.
As if I had four
very fat legs. As if I jumped very high
on my four very fat legs.
As if I barked
cheerfully and very loudly
with those four very fat legs.
That’s how jolly I am today.

***

THERE IS A LIGHT IN ME

Whether in daytime or in nighttime
I always carry inside
a light.
In the middle of noise and turmoil
I carry silence.
Always I carry light and silence.

***

THAT WOULD NOT BE GOOD

When I am alone
I am afraid to turn
too quickly.

What is behind my back
may not, after all, be ready
to take a shape suitable
for human eyes.

And that would not be good.

***

SHE DOES NOT REMEMBER

She was an evil stepmother.
In her old age she is slowly dying
in an empty hovel.

She shudders
like a clutch of burnt paper.
She does not remember that she was evil.
But she knows
that she feels cold.

***

THE GREATEST LOVE

She is sixty. She lives
the greatest love of her life.

She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,
her hair streams in the wind.
Her dear one says:
“You have hair like pearls.”

Her children say:
“Old fool.”

***

THING INDESCRIBABLE

Out of suffering, power is born.
Out of power, suffering is born.

Two words for one
indescribable
thing

***

TO THAT WHICH IS MOST IMPORTANT

Were I able to shut
My eyes, ears, legs, hands
And walk into myself
For a thousand years,
Perhaps I would reach
—I do not know its name—
what matters most.

 

TRANSLATED BY OTHERS

TWO POTATOES

I carried two potatoes
a woman came up to me.

She wanted to buy two potatoes
She had children.

I didn’t give her two potatoes
I hid two potatoes.

I had a mother.

translated by Piotr Florczyk

***

MAN AND CENTIPEDE

I will survive.

I’ll find the deepest basement,
shut myself inside, won’t let anybody in,
I’ll dig a hole in the ground,
chew out the bricks,
I’ll hide in the wall, I’ll go into the wall
like a centipede.

Everyone will die, and I
will survive.

translated by Piotr Florczyk

***

LET THEM COUNT CORPSES

Those who gave the first order to fight
let them now count our corpses.

Let them go through the streets
that are not there
through the city
that is not there
let them count for weeks for months
let them count our corpses
till death.

translated by Piotr Florczyk

***

You Died

You really died in me, not when
another gave me joy.
You died in me
when another gave me pain.

translated by Margaret Marshment and Grazyua Baran

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY COLLECTIONS IN POLISH

Wiersze i proza (Poems and Prose) (1936)

Liryki zebrane (Collected Poems) (1958)

Czarne słowa (Black Words) (1967)

Wiatr (Wind) (1970)

Jestem baba (I am a Woman) (1972)

Poezje wybrane (Selected Poems) (1973)

Budowałam barykadę (Building the Barricade) (1974)

Szczęśliwa jak psi ogon (Happy as a Dog’s Tail) (1978)

Cierpienie i radość (Suffering and Joy) (1985)

 

COLLECTIONS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Thirty-four Poems on the Warsaw Uprising (1977), New York. Transl.: Magnus Jan Kryński, Robert A. Maguire.

Building the Barricade (1979), Kraków. Transl.: Magnus Jan Kryński, Robert A. Maguire.

Happy as a Dog’s Tail (1985), San Diego. Transl.: Czesław Miłosz & Leonard Nathan.

Fat Like the Sun (1986), London. Transl.: M. Marshment, G. Baran.

Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) Transl.: Czesław Miłosz & Leonard Nathan.

Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir Tr. by Piotr Florczyk (Calypso Editions, 2011).

 

LINKS

Poems and a brief biography on the My Poetic Side website.

Anna Swir & the Poetics of Embodiment by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.

Poems by Anna Swir on The Gladdest Thing.

Poems by Anna Swir on A Longhouse Birdhouse.

Czeslaw Milosz discusses his translations and her poetry with The San Diego Reader.

The Anna Swir page on the Biographies II site.

An interview with Piotr Florcyz on translating Anna Swir.

Pearls and Toads, Yeast and Froth: Relationships in Anna Świrszczyńska’s Poetry; an essay by Laura Miller-Purrenhage.