Brookline Poetry Series

On Friday night I went with my sister to a reading at the Brookline Booksmith
. Tonight didn't feature any readers, rather you were meant to bring and read one of your favorite poems. And memorize it if you could. I chose Borges' "Ars Poetica" which lends a phrase to the title of this blog.




ARS POETICA

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of the days of man and of his years,
To transmute the outrage of the years
Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,

To see in death sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold - such is poetry,
Which is immortal and poor. Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our own face.

They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.

It is also like the river with no end
That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And is another, like the river with no end.

(translated by W. S. Merwin)




It's an easy enough poem to memorize, given its repetitions. I'm still not sure what the poem means to me. There is something in it that resists the urge to put art outside of life. The river and time are things that we live, that we have to make poetry out of.

As always, I had a great time, and I think it was fun for my sister - it's not the kind of thing she gets to do much in Fort Lauderdale. It's a great bookstore, too. I don't go enough, but at least the readings give me an excuse to visit Coolidge Corner.

Anne Sexton at Forest Hills

It's been a warm November and today saw our first bit of rain in weeks. Can't complain.

We had my friend Heidi over today for tea and sandwiches and then headed over to the Forest Hills Cemetery for a reading of Anne Sexton's poems. It was an abbreviated show, since the chapel is being renovated and it had to be held in a smaller, outdoor space. They had it at the entrance to the receiving tomb, which has a roof at least. I had taken shelter under it before, never knowing what it was.

It's where they used to keep bodies in the winter because they couldn't dig through the frozen ground. We got to sneak inside and see the drawers and creepy chambers. Very cool.

Anyway, the reading was good. A fellow named Bob Clawson read. he had known Anne Sexton and even recorded with her in a band. I haven't really read her, but I would like to now. He had brought some of the recordings with her and played them. After the reading we went to Anne Sexton's grave.

On our walk back home through the cemetery it was getting dark. We got to see a great horned owl. It was a nice incursion on my built, urban life from that other world we don't see.

* * *

We saw Adam Clay read at the So and So on Saturday. I liked his stuff a lot. Trevor got his book.

E. E. Cummings

We had my friend Soma to tea today before we went over to the Cemetery for the E. E. Cummings reading. He gets sort of a bad rap from a lot of younger contemporary poets, I've heard, but I still think he's worth a read. He's one the of the first poets I read, which I'm sure is true for a lot of people. In school we read a lot of his dainty, whimsical poems, but I'll never forget Mrs. Streibich reading "I sing of Olaf glad and big" back in 11th grade.

I often walk by his grave in the Cemetery when I'm walking the dog. I'm slowly reading his collected poems. There's a lot in there. I don't think he'll ever fade into obscurity.

Fulcrum

I went to a reading tonight sponsored by the New England Poetry Club at the Yenching Library at Harvard. It was Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich, the editors of Fulcrum magazine. They're Russian, married to each other and live in Cambridge. Both very good poets and so easy to talk to, which is a rare delight. Philip was sure he recognized me from somewhere, and I get the feeling we have met, but I can't remember where. He also went to Harvard, so I'm sure our circles overlapped at some point.

Even though I'm fully in temp-slavery, I couldn't resist buying both their books. Gogol in Rome, by Katia Kapovich, and Monkey Time, by Philip Nikolayev. I can't wait to read them.

Major Jackson at the Booksmith

Last Friday Trevor and I decided to check out Major Jackson's reading at the Brookline Booksmith. My friend Meghan has been talking up the Brookline Poetry Series, but I never had the chance to go. Gail Mazur was the first person to tell me about Major Jackson's poems, so had checked out Leaving Saturn and really dug it.

When I got to the Booksmith, I hadn't realized there was an open-mike component following the featured readers. I apologized to Trevor is advance and told him that we could try to sneak out if he wanted. Normally I have a horror of open-mikes. I have to say, though, the open mike turned out to be great, a real gem. I can see why Meghan tries to make it every month.

The funny thing that Trevor and I both noticed was that there weren't that many people our age in the crowd. It was mostly Boomers. Still, it seems like such a great group of people that I think we may try to become regulars.

Major Jackson was really good, too. His blend of hip hop sensibility and erudition really appealed to me, so I picked up his latest book, Hoops.

Reading

I was invited to read at the So and So series on Saturday night. It was exciting, as it was my first non-school public reading. I was more nervous than I usually am at reading, so I hope I didn't bore anybody. I read with two of my Emerson classmates and a fellow who's a Stegner fellow at Stanford this year.

Reading some of my poems, I realized what a tool public reading can be in crafting poems. I'm not talking about seeing what the audience likes and doesn't like and then revising accordingly. I just noticed as I was reading that sometimes I felt there were parts where I didn't feel honest. Those were the parts that aren't done, or else I would be more confident about them.

It was fun, though, and it certainly appealed to the Leo in me.

Borges and Blindness

I've been reading Jorge Luis Borges' collected fictions. He writes a lot about his blindness. As an experiment, I walked around the apartment for a few minutes with eyes closed. I was amazed at how disorienting it is. The noises became crisper, the breezes from the fans easier to detect, but my balance isn't so hot.

I wonder how much we work our eyes when we don't need to, especially considering that the national pastime is sitting in front of a screen that flashes lights directly into out retinas. Borges had memorized a lot of poetry before he went blind, so he had a lot to draw from when he lost the ability to read.

I wonder whether the real role of poetry is to commit to memory those things worthy (and possible). Then I thought of ears and realized their underused role in my own creative process. What if I were to go blind? I need to use memory and my ears as tools.

I wonder if I read to much, too. I brought no books onto the train today (which is where I do most of my reading, it seems). It's shocking how the eyes jump when watching passing scenery. Not much more than they move when reading, I suppose.