In
1916, the Swiss-born poet and novelist we know as Blaise Cendrars became a
French citizen. He was not quite 30 and already a leader of the Modernist
movement.
He
had also lost his right arm fighting in the French Foreign Legion in Champagne.
When the next war rolled around, Cendrars was with the British Expeditionary
Force during the German invasion in 1940; the book he wrote about it was seized
by the Gestapo before it could be published.
Like
that was ever going to silence him.
Cendrars
wrote many poems about his experience in World War I. I love today’s because of
him likening his lost hand to a constellation.
“Orion”
C'est mon étoile
Elle a la forme d'une main
C'est ma main montée au ciel
Durant toute la guerre je voyais
Orion par un créneau
Quand les
Zeppelins venaient bombarder
Paris ils
venaient toujours d'Orion
Aujourd'hui je l'ai au-dessus de ma tête
Le grand mât perce la paume de cette main qui doit
souffrir
Comme ma main coupée me fait souffrir percée qu'elle
est par un dard continuel
It’s
my constellation
It’s
shaped like a hand
It’s
my own hand high in the sky
All
through the war through a gap I saw Orion
The
Zeppelins that came to bomb Paris always came from Orion
Today
it’s above my head
The
long pole pierces the palm of the hand that must suffer
As
my severed hand makes me suffer pierced constantly by a spear
This
year marks the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian revolt against its
Communist government (and Soviet overlords). What started as a student march on
the Parliament building in Budapest on 23 October looked for a few days as
though it would crack open the Warsaw Pact. But within a couple of weeks the
Red Army invaded and even more repressive measures were imposed on the country,
symbolized in such photos as this one:
Hungary’s
in one of those dicey geopolitical situations, standing in the path between
Russian and German interests. During the Second World War the country was an
Axis ally, and engaged in some unsuccessful secret attempts to negotiate an
armistice with the Western Allies while fighting off the Soviets, which
resulted in a German invasion in March, 1944. Between then and Germany’s
surrender in April, 1945, 450,000 Jews and 28,000 Roma were murdered; there was
almost no Hungarian resistance to this policy of deportation and murder.
One of
the victims was the poet Miklós Radnóti. During the war Radnóti was conscripted
into the Hungarian army; being a Jew, he was assigned to an unarmed labor
battalion on the eastern front. He continued to write poetry, which we know
about because, as the end approached, he bribed one of his Hungarian guards to
smuggle his notebook of poems out. In November 1944, on a forced march, Radnóti
was killed, with about 3200 comrades.
Like
poets everywhere, Radnóti wrote about the human experience. In his case, of
course, that experience included imprisonment and the expectation of being
murdered. For example:
“The
Hunted”
From my window I see a hillside,
it cannot see me at all;
I’m still, verse trickles from my pen
but nothing matters in hiding;
I see, though cannot grasp this solemn,
old-fashioned grace: as ever,
the moon emerges onto the sky and
the cherry tree bursts into
blossom.
Since
the end of the war, Radnóti has been recognized as a national treasure in
Hungary. Funny how that works out.
As a culture, Persia has given us a good number of poets.
Omar Kayyam, Rumi and a whole flock of others, including the one for today, a
15th Century writer known as Hafiz.
A common theme for these poets is love, in all its
complexities. Hafiz is no exception. For example:
“All the Hemispheres”
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Yesterday I participated in a WalkMS event, as I’ve done
for a few years. This time it was in Northern Virginia, where the
temperature was about 25 degrees lower than it’s been for the walks I did in
the Valley They Call Silicon.
I’ll confess that I found the organization of this event
somewhat slapdash in comparison with the West Coast ones. Well—smaller and less
collegial. It was a nice walk through some of the newest and oldest parts of
Reston, but the start and finish were underwhelming. They put up the MS arch
only minutes before the start:
And it didn’t last for even the first finishers less than
an hour later:
I also missed the encouragement we got along the way in
years past. Perhaps it’s because they run a bunch of these things all over the
greater DC area during the month of April (the one in Manassas on Saturday
actually had snow), and they’re a little pro forma about it.
Nothing pro-forma about the participants; there may not
have been the numbers of teams I’ve seen in the past, but everyone is serious
about the reason for the walk.
And thus my reason for gratitude. I’m thankful for the people
who haul their asses out of bed on weekend mornings to walk one or three miles
in the snow and cold (or the sunshine and heat) to raise money to help bring an
end to a miserable bastard of a disease. And I’m grateful that I was part of it
again.
Time for another round of Irish for National Poetry Month.
So let’s hear from Seamus Heaney, who was born in Ulster, but whose Nationalist
sensibilities led him to move to the Republic.
Heaney was a master of language—in addition to his own
works, he translated Irish poetry, Beowulf
and Horace, to much acclaim. He was also a teacher, notably in distinguished
appointments to Harvard and then Oxford. Here’s what he had to say about his
work: “When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes
consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a
rhyme surprised and extends the fixed relations between words that in itself
protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in
all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at
limit.”
When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995,
the committee cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt
everyday miracles and the living past.”
Many of those works were about Ireland and Irish
history, including “Requiem for the Croppies,” which he published on the 50th
anniversary of the Easter
Rising. The poem commemorates the 1798 rebellion, which was
Heaney’s way of honoring the events of 1916. What you need to know is that the
rebels of 1798 were called croppy boys (reference to their close-cropped hair,
which contrasted with the perukes of the ruling English); they fought with
pikes (Catholics could not legally own firearms); and the grain they carried
was their rations.
“Requiem for the Croppies”
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.
The imagery of the mass graves sprouting grain invokes both
ineffable sorrow and the hope of resurrection. In Heaney’s view, the barley fed
by the blood of the croppy boys grew like dragons' teeth into the Easter Rising, and—eventually—to the
independence of Ireland.
You
hear the words Jack Kerouac and you think road trip, right? You think the
quintessential post-war male flip-the-bird-at-society
drug-and-alcohol-propelled stream-of-consciousness adventure.
Well,
okay. Does it kill your buzz to know that Kerouac was actually a devout Roman
Catholic who also delved deeply into the introspection of Buddhism?
Propelled
by drugs and alcohol, of course. But still.
And he
wrote poetry that reflects all of this. Mexico
City Blues is an example, written largely during a 1955 stay in Mexico City
and the product of a whole lot of marijuana and morphine. It’s a collection of
242 pieces, which Kerouac called choruses, exploring what poets explore—existence,
meaning, the whole megillah.
It’s
really hard to choose just one to share for National Poetry Month, but today I’ll go with number 235. Close
your eyes and imagine yourself in a cellar club on poetry slam night, breathing
in cigarette smoke and drinking strong, bad coffee. You may express your
appreciation with the snapping of fingers.
It’s
not possible to have National Poetry Month without something from Lewis
Carroll. Every time you think poets are going to disappear into their
self-importance, Carroll keeps it real.
This
year’s entry is from Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, brought to us by the Mock Turtle. In case you, like Alice,
don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is, here’s the illustration by John Tenniel:
Because
the Mock Turtle is “the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” as the Queen
informs us. The Mock Turtle's a rather melancholy creature, having once been a
real turtle (although we’re never told how he transmogrified). Also, he’s a
complete mish-mash of the animals that end up in the eponymous Victorian soup.
If
you’ve got a strong stomach, here’s a recipe for it from a Mrs. Fowle (and I
didn’t make that name up):
“Take
a large calf's head. Scald off the hair. Boil it until the horn is tender, then
cut it into slices about the size of your finger, with as little lean as
possible. Have ready three pints of good mutton or veal broth, put in it half a
pint of Madeira wine, half a teaspoonful of thyme, pepper, a large onion, and
the peel of a lemon chop't very small. A ¼ of a pint of oysters chop't very
small, and their liquor; a little salt, the juice of two large onions, some
sweet herbs, and the brains chop't. Stand all these together for about an hour,
and send it up to the table with the forcemeat balls made small and the yolks
of hard eggs.”
(As
an aside, a few years ago I was enjoying The Swamp in
the California Academy of Science. You know—the one with Claude, the albino
alligator. CalAcademy has a number of volunteer docents—mostly retired-looking
folks—who really know their onions. Or, in this case, their reptiles. I was
chatting with one of them and he told me that the terrapins there were rescue
sea turtles: many years before, the fish and wildlife folks had got a tip about
a shipment of sea turtles coming into SFO, apparently headed for a very upscale
dinner party. It’s illegal to import them, so the feds scooped up the turtles
and they ended up in The Swamp. Maybe the diners got mock turtle soup instead.
It would serve them right.)
Anyway,
back to Wonderland. The Mock Turtle, the Gryphon and Alice have one of those
wonderlandish conversations, and there are a couple of musical interludes.
“Beautiful Soup” is apparently Carroll’s parody of the popular song “Star of
the Evening”. I find it slightly creepily charming that the Mock Turtle,
presumably destined for the tureen himself, sings so eloquently about soup. But
that’s Wonderland for you.
We’ve
not had anything from Sappho for a
couple of years of National Poetry Month, so let’s remedy
that.
You’ll
recall that very little of her work is around these days because in 380 C.E. the early
Christian church fathers destroyed most of everything she produced. She had at
least two strikes against her, being female and pre-Christian, so all that’s
left is a couple of poems and fragments.
In
“Girls, [you] be ardent”, we get some hard truth: so much of literature speaks
of the strengths and beauties of youth, not so much of the ravages of age. Yet
it’s mortals’ fate to grow old (if you’re lucky). Even if you marry into the
family of gods.
(When Eos
stole Tithonus to be her lover, she petitioned Zeus to grant the man
immortality, but she forgot to specify that she wanted eternal youth. And she
got precisely what she’d asked for.)
Girls, you be ardent for the
fragrant-blossomed
Muses’ lovely gifts, for the clear
melodious lyre:
The
year 1916 seemed to increase the carnage of World War I by an order of
magnitude on the Western Front. Between Verdun (ten
months) and the Somme
(four-and-a-half months) alone, you could have filled the 400,000
slots at Arlington National Cemetery and still have needed to dig
another 150,000 graves.
So
we’ll have some poetry from the First World War this month.
First
up, let’s go with Rudyard Kipling, a man who believed so passionately in the
war that he wrote propaganda for the British government. He viewed it as a
crusade against (German) barbarism, although it cost him dearly.
Kipling’s
only son John was 16 when the war started. He tried to join the Royal Navy, but
failed the physical examination due to extremely poor eyesight. He failed that
same physical twice for the British Army before Kipling pulled strings with
Lord Roberts, and got John a commission in the Irish Guards (one of the premier
regiments). Second Lieutenant John Kipling sailed for France the day after his
18th birthday in August 1915 and was killed at the Battle of Loos a
month later.
Well,
technically he was reported wounded and missing, which set Kipling and his wife
Caroline into that twilight of shattering grief and vicious uncertainty. Was John dead? Might he yet come back?
Could there be hope? Is it better to hope for a clean death? They searched for
months, calling in favors from the great and the good in search of definitive
news. They never got it.
The
poem “My Boy Jack” was written after John’s death. It was included in a book
called Sea Warfare, about the Battle
of Jutland, so it wasn’t specifically about John. The frequent mention of winds
and tide are naval references, and you can hear Kipling’s belief that even terrible
sacrifice was worthwhile.
“My
Boy Jack”
'Have
you news of my boy Jack? '
Not this
tide.
'When
d'you think that he'll come back? '
Not
with this wind blowing, and this tide.
'Has
anyone else had word of him? '
Not
this tide.
For
what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not
with this wind blowing and this tide.
'Oh,
dear, what comfort can I find? '
None
this tide,
Nor
any tide,
Except
he did not shame his kind-
Not
even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then
hold your head up all the more,
This
tide,
And
every tide;
Because
he was the son you bore,
And
gave to that wind blowing and that tide!
Following
the war, Kipling joined the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the
Commonwealth War Graves Commission), which built and maintains military
cemeteries around the world. They’re beautiful places, like Arlington, gardens
of the dead. Kipling chose the phrase “Their Name Liveth For Evermore”, which
appears on the Stones of Remembrance in the larger cemeteries. It’s from
Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
He
also chose the inscription “The Glorious Dead” on the Cenotaph in Whitehall,
site of the annual Remembrance
Sunday observance in London. Last November, Welsh singer Cerys
Matthews recited “My Boy Jack” at that ceremony, prefaced by an excerpt from a Times report of October 1915 about the
numbers of only sons lost that month.
Nearly
20 years ago, British actor/writer David Haig wrote a play called My Boy Jack about Kipling and the war;
it was made into a BBC film in 2007. Haig does an excellent job of setting the
stage with the poet’s war fervor, showing the measures he took to get his son
(played by Daniel Radcliffe) into the war and his pride at the boy’s military position.
When the notification comes that John is missing at Loos, Rudyard and Caroline enter
into this frantic fugue of trying to get information from anyone—field marshal
to private—of their son, hoping to find him, and find him safe.
What I
really love about this film is that, even as they work their connections
without compunction in search of news of John, they never seem to make that
other connection, the one between Kipling’s work to get men and boys to enlist
in their thousands and the grief that those thousands of families suffer. Never
once do they think to console anyone else who’s suffered this loss.
John
was numbered among the lost-but-never-found until this year. He was initially
reported as wounded and missing, but the wound had apparently ripped off his
lower jaw, and his body was not found on the field. In 1991, it was determined
that a grave a couple of kilometers from the battle site was his. This was
disputed in 2002 by very reputable battlefield historians, but in January of
this year the identification was confirmed. The Commonwealth War Graves
Commission now lists him as buried in St. Mary’s ADS (Advanced Dressing
Station) Cemetery in Haisnes, France.
There
are nearly 2000 other Commonwealth dead lying with him. More than two-thirds of
them are unidentified.
For
National Poetry month two years ago we
traveled to Korea to savor some sijo—poems
with restricted syllable counts and distinctive parts for exploring an idea. And
we met Hwang Jin-i, a 16th Century gisaeng, or officially-designated (but low status) entertainer. (It
was a whole thing—gisaeng were
thoroughly trained in fine arts, poetry and other writing, as well as in
medical care and needlework. I suppose you’d call them the Korean equivalent of
geisha.)
Hwang
is considered one of the best writers of sijo
ever. She apparently was good at other aspects of the gisaeng job; there’ve been novels, films, operas and TV shows built
around her life and legend, on both sides of the DMZ. Her professional name was
Myeongwol, or “Bright Moon”, so the second example may be a play on words,
which is entirely consistent with the rules of sijo.
