Tag Aquarius

* contemplating one-sidedness via bill knott

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This week’s poem is another gem from Bill Knott.

I’m always happy to run into poems that take on an overlooked part of life and refresh it, make it new by simple acknowledgement. In the case of Knott’s poem “Paradise,” the act of reading a book with facing translations is blown up for the meeting of worlds and circumstances that it is. The choice of words to describe what he terms “Righthandland” – gutter, damned, pulp, tongue – and what it means to dwell as a reader in one language with only glimpses of the original is spot-on. Enjoy!

* the music facing *

* notes from Lefthandland *

Paradise – Bill Knott

Always reading the recto
translation of a verso
original, my eye fades.
I notice how the paper
here on this side seems
darker than its opposite:
it is brighter over there
on the lefthand page, the
words of the real poem
give it that glow which
the prized act of creation
emits.  We who must live
here in Righthandland
are damned no matter
how hard we try to rhyme
minds with that perfect
realm across the gutter.
Even if our pulp comes
from the same stock,
we fear closing the book
will bring us face to face,
mouth to mouth with
that tongue we’ve always
lost, and can never kiss.

***

Happy nevering!

Jose

* flying beyond the surface with ernesto cardenal

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

The Parrots – Ernesto Cardenal

My friend Michel is an army officer
in Somoto up near the Honduran border,
and he told me he had found some contraband parrots
waiting to be smuggled to the United States
to learn to speak English there.

There were 186 parrots
with 47 already dead in their cages.
He drove them back where they’d been taken from
and as the lorry approached a place known as The Plains
near the mountains which were these parrots’ home
(behind those plains the mountains stand up huge)
the parrots got excited, started beating their wings
and shoving against their cage-sides.

When the cages were let open
they all shot out like an arrow shower
straight for their mountains.

The Revolution did the same for us I think:
It freed us from the cages
where they trapped us to talk English,
it gave us back the country
from which we were uprooted,
their green mountains restored to the parrots
by parrot-green comrades.

But there were 47 that died.

* cardenal *

* cardenal *

For the past two weeks I’ve been doing my best to share with my intermediate composition students what it means to problematize. Last week, one student neatly summed it up as “asking questions to see beyond the surface.” I was so fond of that definition that I’ve adopted it into my day to day thinking.

Poems, in a way, do this kind of questioning, whether explicitly or implicitly. Robert Frost couldn’t just let the two guys build their wall, he had to go and write a poem about it. What else the act of putting words to what we experience but an admission of wanting to understand, to “see beyond the surface?”

This week’s poem, by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, takes us beyond the surface of a story about parrots into what he would understand and have the reader understand with him. The voice remains straightforward to the point that we don’t notice when the “surface” of the story is broken and when the deeper levels of political and personal meaning start to take flight around us.

***

I wanted to take a moment and say thank you to everyone for the good wishes on the release of my new chapbook, Reasons (not) to Dance. The show of support and kindness here and elsewhere has meant the world to me. I am extremely proud of this project. To officially be a “microcuentista” and add what I can to the rich traditions of the prose poem, flash fiction, short-short, microcuento, etc. is an honor. Thank you for being along for the ride!

See you next Friday!

Jose