Russian Word For Today (2/9)

This is a short one (after a long sentence yesterday, Gogol gifted me a two word beauty today (worth searching for the context,* but I won't bore you with it here...). This word is a wonderful onomatopoeia. 

Он содрогнулся. (Ohn sadragNOOLsia)

He shuddered.

----

* If you go to the link, scroll down to the middle of p. 256. Know, however, that there is a long em (or double em?) dash before the word "He" in the Russian, as though time has stopped for Piskarev and this shudder is a reaction to time starting again.

Poem for 2/9/23 - Paradise Lost: Book 12 (1674 version) BY JOHN MILTON

                                                                                                                        (William Blake)

I am a big fan of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, which is based in part on Paradise Lost. Reading an introduction to the epic by Pullman, I was reminded of the last lines of Book 12, where Milton makes clear that the loss of Paradise (or, as Pullman understands it, childhood) is momentarily sad, but that the focus of one's life must be the future, with "The World...all before them..." (See Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling [2018], p. 55.)

Paradise Lost: Book 12 (1674 version)

BY JOHN MILTON

                                    High in Front advanc't,
The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz'd
Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan Air adust,
Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way. (Lines 632-649)

Russian Word of the Day (or perhaps of the week...)

I've taken to reading a page or two of Gogol every morning, marveling at how readily I can read it and how much I'm enjoying it--why, I keep asking myself, couldn't I read this way when I was actually studying for my Ph.D.? Oh well.

In any case, I had the thought that since I'm looking up only one or two words every morning (and that looking them up on Google Translate is a lot less laborious than leafing through a dictionary), I would keep a record of the words I enjoy the most... Will this be a one-time thing? Will I actually stick with it? Time will tell. I never thought I would stick to posting poems, so perhaps, perhaps...

From Gogol's "Nevsky Prospect" 

мишурный (MeeSHOORnyi) - tawdry, vain, meretricious, gimcrack, gingerbread (I imagine in the sense of a gingerbread Victorian)

Боже, куда зашел он! Сначала он не хотел верить и начал пристальнее всматриваться в предметы, наполнявшие комнату; но голые стены и окна без занавес не показывали никакого присутствия заботливой хозяйки; изношенные лица этих жалких созданий, из которых одна села почти перед его носом и так же спокойно его рассматривала, как пятно на чужом платье, — все это уверило его, что он зашел в тот отвратительный приют, где основал свое жилище жалкий разврат, порожденный мишурною образованностию и страшным многолюдством столицы. 

God, where had he come! At first he refused to believe it and began studying the objects that filled the room more attentively; but the bare walls and curtainless windows showed no presence of a thoughtful housewife; the worn faces of these pathetic creatures, one of whom sat down almost in front of his nose and gazed at him as calmly as at a spot on someone’s clothes—all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. 

THE COLLECTED TALES OF NIKOLAI GOGOL, trans. RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY (1998), p. 255.

Poem for 2/8/23 - Substitution by Anne Spencer

 

Substitution

Anne Spencer

Is Life itself but many ways of thought, Does thinking furl the poets’ Pleiades, Is in His slightest convolution wrought These mantled worlds and their men-freighted seas? He thinks—and being comes to ardent things: The splendor of the day-spent sun, love’s birth,— Or dreams a little, while creation swings The circle of His mind and Time’s full girth . . . As here within this noisy peopled room My thought leans forward . . . quick! you’re lifted clear Of brick and frame to moonlit garden bloom,— Absurdly easy, now, our walking, dear, Talking, my leaning close to touch your face . . . His All-Mind bids us keep this sacred place! “Substitution” first appeared in Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927).

Poem for 2/7/23 - Negro Hero (For Dorie Miller) by Gwendolyn Brooks

Negro Hero (For Dorie Miller)

by Gwendolyn Brooks 

I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.
However I have heard that sometimes you have to deal
Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
Or they will haul themselves and you to the trash and the fish beneath.
(When I think of this, I do not worry about a few
Chipped teeth.)

It is good I gave glory, it is good I put gold on their name.
Or there would have been spikes in the afterward hands.
But let us speak only of my success and the pictures in the Caucasian dailies
As well as the Negro weeklies. For I am a gem.
(They are not concerned that it was hardly The Enemy my fight was against
But them.) 

It was a tall time. And of course my blood was
Boiling about in my head and straining and howling and singing me on.
Of course I was rolled on wheels of my boy itch to get at the gun.
Of course all the delicate rehearsal shots of my childhood massed in mirage before me.
Of course I was child
And my first swallow of the liquor of battle bleeding black air dying and demon noise
Made me wild. 

It was kinder than that, though, and I showed like a banner my kindness.
I loved. And a man will guard when he loves.
Their white-gowned democracy was my fair lady.
With her knife lying cold, straight, in the softness of her sweet-flowing sleeve.
But for the sake of the dear smiling mouth and the stuttered promise I toyed with my life.
I threw back! — I would not remember
Entirely the knife. 

Still–am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright enough to be spilled,
Was my constant back-question–are they clear
On this? Or do I intrude even now?
Am I clean enough to kill for them, do they wish me to kill
For them or is my place while death licks his lips and strides to them
In the galley still? 

(In a southern city a white man said
Indeed, I’d rather be dead;
Indeed, I’d rather be shot in the head
Or ridden to waste on the back of a flood
Than saved by the drop of a black man’s blood.) 

Naturally, the important thing is, I helped to save them, them and a part of their democracy.
Even if I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to do that for them.
And I am feeling well and settled in myself because I believe it was a good job,
Despite this possible horror: that they might prefer the
Preservation of their law in all its sick dignity and their knives
To the continuation of their creed
And their lives.  

This poem is included in Gwendolyn Brooks, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper & Row, 1st edition 1971. Available through Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5089232M/The_world_of_Gwendolyn_Brooks.

Poem for 2/2/23 - A Poet Witnesses a Bold Mission by James Dickey

 

A Poet Witnesses a Bold Mission

by James Dickey (February 2, 1923 - January 19, 1997)

(Dickey was commissioned by Life Magazine to write a poem about the launch of the Apollo 7 mission in 1968. It was published Nov. 1, 1968 in Life Magazine; click here to see page in Google Books. I found a reference to this poem in an article about Dickey’s centennial in The Atlantic by Christopher Buckley: “America’s Byron.” See more about this poem and Dickey's subsequent poem about the Apollo 8 mission here.)

Someone brought in an elk head.

It has become a kind of custom for the astronauts to give the commander of the next flight “something to take with him.”

Two nights before the flight, the elk head sat in a chair, the glass eyes unfathomable, and the men moved in the room and talked, and if you were near enough to the elk, you could see the astronauts in tiny replicas of themselves, in the animal eye.

One was saying his greatest ambition was to learn to play the guitar. Another was showing a poem he had written. It was good; he was proud of it. Another had just come in from hunting doves. His name was Schirra and the elk head was for him.

The great branching antlers were part of the earth--of the earth that is natural and wild and lovable, nothing at all like the awesome rocket these brave, competent men would ride.

The elk was part of what would be left behind when Schira and the others carried the human consciousness outward from where it has always been.

In a sense they are all poets, expanders of consciousness beyond its known limits. Because of them. the death-cold and blazing craters of the moon will think with us, and the waterless oceans of Mars: the glowing fogs of Venus will say what they are.

And those places will change us also. We have not lived them yet, and perhaps have no language adequate to them. But these men will find that, too, as they plunge with their fragile and full humanity, with their wives and children, with their gardens and grocery lists and head colds and ideas for poems and the clowns of their childhood circuses--as they plunge with all of us--up from the flame-trench, up from the Launch Umbilical Tower, up from the elk and the butterfly, up from the meadows and rivers and mountains and the beds of wives into the universal cavern, into the mathematical abyss, to find us--and return, to tell us what we will be.

Poem for 2/1/23 - Ardor by Donald Hall

 

                 Ardor

                    by Donald Hall 

Nursing her I felt alive

in the animal moment,

scenting the predator.

Her death was the worst thing

that could happen,

and caring for her was best. 

 

After she died I screamed,

upsetting the depressed dog.

Now I no longer

address the wall covered

with many photographs,

nor call her “you”

in a poem. She recedes

into the granite museum

of Jane Kenyon 1947-1995. 

 

I long for the absent

woman of different faces

who makes metaphors

and chops onion, drinking

a glass of Chardonnay,

oiling the wok, humming

to herself, maybe thinking

how to conclude a poem.

When I make love now,

something is awry.

Last autumn a woman said,

“I mistrust your ardor.” 

 

This winter in Florida

I loathed the old couples

my age who promenaded

in their slack flesh 

holding hands. I gazed

at young women with outrage

and desire – unable to love

or to work, or to die. 

 

Hours are slow and weeks 

rapid in their vacancy.

Each day lapses as I recite

my complaints. Lust is grief

that has turned over in bed

to look the other way.