Tag literature

adrienne rich & knowing

José Angel Araguz 3 Comments

There’s an Adrienne Rich quote I’ve been carrying in my pocket for about a month now, bugging friends with it and dropping it into conversation whenever possible. It goes:

The learning of poetic craft was much easier than knowing what to do with it — with the powers, temptations, privileges, potential deceptions, and two-edged weapons of language.

These words come from the foreword to her selected poems, The Fact of a Doorframe. Here, she is discussing her earlier work, how the crucible of youth and experience were changing the stakes of her writing. I feel these words at the core of me as I begin to near the end of my PhD studies. What are the reasons for this degree? What can it do? More than anything, I find myself answering these questions with action. That the knowledge and experience gained in the process of education can be shared with others. That I can turn around help make things clearer for others by engaging and imparting the tools.

portrait_of_marie_curie_1867_-_1934_polish_chemist_wellcome_m0004624These are things that are embodied in the beginnings of this blog, which I created to share poetry and thoughts on poetry. I see these ambitions also reflected in my book reviews: That listening can also be action, and in reviews, one listens and relates what they hear so that others can listen as well. Words, in this way, become a source of power, one capable of mutability as much as connection.

This week’s poem engages with the idea of power via the figure of Marie Curie. In the poem, Rich’s speaker engages with the cost of power, and what must be dealt with as we fulfill the needs and ambitions of it. What comes across by the end is the speaker’s capacity for empathy, their ability to listen and evoke Curie’s relationship with power, and show it for the dual struggle and triumph it was.

Power – Adrienne Rich

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

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Happy listening!

José

p.s. Special thanks to Steven Sanchez for introducing me to this poem!

breathing with Steven Sanchez

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

bodyIn my microreview & interview of Steven Sanchez’s To My Body (Glass Poetry Press), I focused primarily on the use of imagery throughout the collection to explore the presence of both the physical and experiential body in a poem. It is more than fitting, then, that this week’s poem, “Human Breath Is Eroding The Sistine Chapel,” takes the body metaphors and further unpacks them in an ekphrastic poem that adds new threads of myth to a familiar image.

The travel of this particular poem is where much of the image work is done. The title starts off by placing the image of Michelangelo’s painting in the reader’s mind. We are, like the speaker, considering the famous image and this fact about human breath and erosion. A few lines in, the poem shifts and imposes over this first image the image of the speaker’s hotel room ceiling, their meditation suddenly taking on a more intimate tone. This intimacy is complicated by the third shift of the poem as the speaker digs into memory. Here, the two imposed images so far in the poem are clouded, literally, by the frost breath of the memory.

These three moves present different takes on human breath: it can erode a painting on a ceiling; it can convey smoke in a hotel room; and it is what words are carried on in speech. In each take, breath leaves the human body to have an effect elsewhere. The nature of these effects is at times unmanageable, yet we continue to look, hoping to see something of ourselves in time.

god2-sistine_chapel

Human Breath Is Eroding The Sistine Chapel – Steven Sanchez

Where else do words tarnish
paint and plaster like smoke

on wallpaper, remnants of strangers
I feel close to? The dark matter

of their lungs and mouths scours
the textured ceiling. I light up and lie

down on the motel bed, becoming
Michelangelo on my back, cigarette

stroking the air. I see the world
like I used to, making cold angels

on the white expanse of my backyard
where I watched winter enter

and leave my body, transforming
words into something invisible,

almost tangible, like Adam’s left
hand that will never reach God.

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To My Body by Steven Sanchez can be purchased from Glass Poetry Press.

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Happy breathing!

José