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* the staying noise of jürgen becker

José Angel Araguz 6 Comments

Hazy_blue_hour_in_Grand_Canyon

Hell, Sartre Said, Is Other People – Jürgen Becker

L’heure bleu, it could be, but it’s
the do-it-yourself handyman who makes the mood
for his and my evening. Powerless this entire building –
seventh, eleventh, fourteenth floor; the man
drills into the walls, yet no one
sees him. In case I see him, I’ll, I’ll
do nothing. Like always, complaints go
in the poem, which makes a large staying noise.

translated by Okla Elliott

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One of my goals in starting this blog four years ago was to celebrate the short lyric, which I see as personal and brief expressions whose tradition extends back to the ancient Greek poet Sappho’s love poems. The way whole worlds, worlds within moments, can be evoked and experienced in a handful of lines is powerful.

Elliott-Cover-250x386I recently did a microreview/interview of Blackbirds in September, a book of German poet Jürgen Becker’s shorter poems. Time and again I was moved by the personal insight and wisdom found in lines about everyday life. If there are slice of life stories, then I believe the best short lyrics present slices of moments. A short lyric can, indeed, create “a large staying noise” by highlighting what one chooses to recall and archive in a poem as well as giving the reader the artifact of the poem with which to investigate life, the speaker’s and their own.

The following poem struck me as ingenious not simply for the formal structure but for the inventiveness with which the title’s set up is followed through.

Here, the short lyric serves as an insight to sensibility as much as theme and focus.

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Possibilities for Paintings – Jürgen Becker

Dark Tree in front of a Bright House.
Wishbodies.
Sad Eyes at the Shutting of Doors.
Wood and Milk; a Lamp.
The Wind, which Extends the Hand (in quotes).
Balloons, Dripping from the Mouth.
Peace in the Valley.
The Patience of Landmines.
Now the Meadow Grows through the House.
Leaping, over a Mark in the Air.
The Coasts of Exile (since 1957).
Winter Branches in Summer.
Triumph of Waiting.
Falling Pears. Lying Pears.
Bicycle on the Horizon.
Soldiers and Bicycle.
The Night of the 7th of November.
The Misery of the Liberated.
Glass, between Figures.
Groups of People before the Horizon.
Fog; the Fossilization of Fog.

translated by Okla Elliott

Check out my microreview/interview on this book and its translator on the Cincinnati Review blog! Thank you to translator Okla Elliott for making these poems available in English!

Happy noising!

José

* skimming with kelli russell agodon

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Reading through Kelli Russell Agodon’s collection, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, I was moved again and again by the kinship evoked between speaker and the poets addressed throughout the poems, but also between poet and craft, and poet to poet. In this week’s poem, “Yakima Ferry at Sunset,” this idea of kinship is there for me from the first line’s declaration:

Tonight I could write a thousand poems
no one should have to read . . .

This line brings to mind a line from Pablo Neruda:

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche . . .
(Tonight I can write the saddest lines . . .)

This kind of lyric echo speaks to the poet in me, or, rather the poets in me. At times I am the poet of Neruda’s line, lost in reverie and sorrow; at other times, I am the poet of Agodon’s line, possessed by writing, the sheer event of it inspired by the immediacy of a given moment and place.

I often go with my wife to look at fabric or yarn for the projects she’s working on. Walking through the aisles of material, I imagine the possibilities closed to me, but open to anyone who knows how to sew or knit. I can only compare it to the surge of feeling I get when I walk around the woods or body of water in just the right mood, or sit by a window at a café that happens to be in the right light, a feeling of: Today I could write . . . 

There’s no guarantee, only a glimpse. One can’t recreate this feeling, one can only acknowledge it for the call to words that it is, and get down what one can, “skimming the edges like every poet.”

sunset_mount1

Yakima Ferry at Sunset – Kelli Russell Agodon

Tonight I could write a thousand poems
no one should have to read.

All around me are hippie grandmothers
and grey-haired men with dreamcatchers

hanging from the rearview mirrors of their
Hondas. Everyone is irresistable tonight:

the man in his NRA t-shirt, the child
on the upper deck screaming about licorice,

the woman who cut in front of me to buy a latte.
I am skimming the edges like every poet

on this boat, starting my sentences
with the easiest words – I love, I love, I love

to travel home by ferry, the women
who smile at the men they don’t know,

how my tongue feels in my mouth,
a sort of heaviness that never leaves.

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Happy ferrying!

José