}} May 2014 |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










May 2014

Volume II | Issue 5

In spite of the heat gods and goddesses, mythic heroes and muses, roses, black cherry and brooms journey across our pages this May. We present, with deep delight, new translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems by David Need and poems by Jim Schley and Kala Krishnan Ramesh.

As Robert Musil asserted, Rainer Maria Rilke was ‘the greatest lyric poet the Germans have seen since the Middle Ages.’ Frequently translated, Rilke’s abiding appeal to poets and scholars is perhaps his interest in the nature of transformation – spiritual, mental and physical – and his play in language. Poet and professor David Need’s translations of the acclaimed Sonnets to Orpheus from the German brim with fresh luminosity: Put up no marker. Let roses/ bloom each year for his memory./ Orpheus is there. His metamorphosis/ in this and that. We should not trouble// with another name. It’s the same for all times—/ when he sings, it’s Orpheus. He comes and goes. These fold into David Need’s remarkable translations Roses: The Late French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (forthcoming end May, order with rilkesroses@wordpress.com). In his introduction he writes, ‘Rilke’s Roses calls us into a more intimate relationship with things, asking us to consider the material world as sister of our imagination, rather than nameless patient of our ideas.’ Patrick Pritchett of Harvard University observes David Need succeeds in, ‘…restoring his (Rilke’s) uncanny mystery, his harrowing commitment to dwell along the perilous and empowering borderline between inner necessity and a manufactured world of dead objects… All aperture and cusp, fold and further fold, the flesh of the rose’s petals permits both a bantering playfulness and the most profound experience of evanescence and fragility. Because they die into themselves each day, Rilke’s roses are always undergoing loss and transformation; they are his highest allegories for praise and finitude, Orpheus and Eurydice conjoined.’ Here’s an extract: Day after day, I watch you who hesitate/ in your sheath, clasped too tight./ Rose who, when born, imitates in reverse/ the slow ways of the dead.// Does your indescribable state make you understand/ in a mingling in which all is silenced/ that ineffable harmony of nothingness and being/ that we ignore?

‘Quite simply the most beautiful book of poems I’ve ever seen,’ Christopher Merrill writes of Jim Schley poems. We present excerpts from his collection, As When, In Season. Jim Scheley writes as parent, husband, artist and journeyman through life with formal assurance, gravity and musicality. In the middle section of the book are vibrant contemporary odes to the muses of ancient Greek mythology (with a brilliant coda titled Self-Portrait as Jehanne d’Arc, also excerpted) which he states in an interview are, ‘ …nine portraits of women who have been crucial inspirers and teachers for me, though not without pain: viz., the pain of learning… I realized that I had inadvertently (or deliberately) misunderstood the clichéd depiction of female muses (erotic, intellectual, aesthetic) as catalysts for work by male artists; instead, I set out to construct a suite of odes that pay homage, a gallery of portraits of female muses who are each in some sense virtuoso and master of a certain domain: history, epic, sacred song, comedy, tragedy.’ Here is an extract from For Urania: Muse of Cosmology: Ainigma, typographic cipher whose rhyme/ swivels steady but loose, eddy in a stream./ You were actress then artist, made a poet// by catastrophe. Turned to words, in fact:/ when all’s said and gone, quivering across time,/ and voluminous. Look: picture as a painter would/ blazing huts in a circular village, colonial settlement/ constructed orderly as the solar system. Poet Jim Schley, who is also Managing Editor of the famed Tupelo Press, invites us to be pilgrims like him – quivering across time – on a search for the potentiality that bubbles beneath our surface existence while keenly observing its fraying skin.

Poet, reviewer and professor Kala Krishnan Ramesh has chosen to be reticent with her verse until recently, she informs in an e-mail; we are happy to present six new poems by one of India’s outstanding though lesser known poets – a position that will quickly be rectified. A clue to her deliberate masking of her poetic persona may lie in her review of a Nobel prize winning novelist where she writes, ‘Most serious readers are aware of the defects of reading without looking at the politics inherent in the writing; most have learnt also that a writer’s politics lies in the concord he negotiates between who and where he is and what he chooses to look at and write about.’ She’s possibly asking us to get the politics, situate, and search ourselves as we search her work. Kala Krishnan Ramesh torches us with her imagistic reflections of mythic power and individual insight; she offers us no reprieve in her lyrical, questing hymns to the gods but this: where, she questions, do we stand with capricious gods who allure and alarm, disturb and enflame our imagination? Drawing from the corpus of ancient Tamil poetics where god is ascribed the powers of lover, king and deity of all realms she furthers these with powerful contemporary idiom and registers that shift from the first person to the choral, from the circumscribed immediacy of the colloquial to the outward-looking theistic call. Kala Krishnan Ramesh cuts to the core where the triad of belief, selfhood and societal claims storm our being. Here’s an excerpt from When the Goddess Prepares for War: When She waits, it is us She relies on to stand as/ guards at the gates, the ramparts, the doors and/ windows; when She tires, it is our kind bosoms/ that rock her, our voices that lullaby. We also do/ her accounts and take efficient care of things on/ her behalf. We also carry her Guide Poem to Murugan – 2 that deflects this assurance with the frailty of the writing self: When you’ve finished – after you’re re-worked, edited and saved, that’s when he’ll strike. His/ weapons are silent and deadly and in an instant your carefully built poem and everything in it will/ be gone: rows of streets, townships and citadels, all your ports and libraries – they will be nothing/ but dust…

These poems demand to be celebrated. Read on.

Priya