At an absorbing informal meeting of a dozen people at a faculty/graduate-student reading group on poetry yesterday, we talked about a half dozen different topics that came up from our reading of two poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and different translations of those poems by Langston Hughes and Achy Obejas, and also about an essay by English poet Dick Davis about how English poetry can be seen as a sequence of changes brought about by translation into English of poetry from outside England, from Chaucer to Ezra Pound (Davis does not specifically address American poetry in his essay). Our poet colleague Mary Kinzie wondered if the loss of pronounced word-endings in English after Chaucer’s time was an important reason why rhyme declined; I said that I thought that the decline of rhyme in English was a result of poets (in different periods) having narrowly defined rhyme as full rhyme rather than, as in some other languages and literary histories, regarding it as a broader range of kinds of phonetic repetitions, including many that are not full rhyme.

In other words, even though poets like to say that English is rhyme-poor compared to inflected languages with lots of frequently repeated word-endings, I was arguing that the abandonment of rhyme (several times, and most widespread during the twentieth century) was based on literary choice rather than on any linguistic limitations of the sounds of English. (And in fact, the poets of ancient Greek and Latin, which are very inflected languages, chose not to use rhyme, while later, medieval, poets writing in Latin did so.)

This may sound like an arcane discussion that is of little interest to readers of poetry, and yet it points to how our understanding of poetry itself is not “natural” but rather the result of historical choices, of the influence of poets and critics whose dominant opinions may have less to do with the truth value of what they say than with the particular advantage in their own historical moment of looking at poetry one way instead of another. So most readers of poetry and most American poets, might feel that rhyming is not “natural,” but the truth it that it is no less natural than not rhyming. Meanwhile readers who are less in touch with what twentieth-century poets have done–like listeners who have heard few works by twentieth-century composers–may yearn for poetry with rhyme simply because much the poetry they learned as schoolchildren was from the nineteenth century, when a lot of poetry rhymed, and when classical music conformed to a paradigm of harmony that was superseded by twentieth-century music (to various degrees, agreeable or not to one listener or another, depending on the composer).

It’s not hard to demonstrate that any particular poetic quality or element is not “natural” in the sense that it is inherent in poetry itself. Just as we all begin to learn from birth how to sort out which phonemes of our mother-tongue(s) we need to pay attention to, and begin to stop paying attention to the others and in fact eventually lose the ability to hear those others, so poets learn to pay attention to which elements and resources of poetry they need to pay attention to in order to write what is regarded in their historical moment and their culture as poetry (several sorts of poetry, usually), and stop paying attention to other elements and resources, and in fact may eventually lose the ability even to notice how those other ones work. Or at least may convince themselves that those other ones are of no great importance. And thus we gets “schools,” movements, exclusions, dominance, and so on. All of which in fact makes poetry richer overall as a practice of meaning-making, because the multiplicity of poetry frees poets of different persuasions to extend the capacities of poetry in different directions.

But no one should think that learning how to write a poem or read one is as “natural” as learning one’s mother tongue(s). This is so, even though there are poetic practices still in use that are amazingly old—as old as the earliest traces we can find of what poetry was, even long before there was writing. Any poetic practice that old, even if it is not “natural,” must be a response to an appetite in the human mind for certain things that language did then, and still does now. Language as a vehicle, a capacity, an appetite, for thought and feeling, I should say.

Ed Roberson’s new book of poems, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), opens with these lines:

I entered as a man enters

a labyrinth,      seeing

from hairline fracture to abyss

the magnified whisper

of memory      not finish its sentence

whole [...]

Roberson is the master of a hauntingly meditative rhythm of thought and perception, precisely scored (musically) by means of the poetic line. How can thought and perception be anything but meditative? you ask. What I am trying to articulate is my sense of an utterance that unwinds syntactically not in the order of the expected narrative structuring of a personal anecdote or of reference to a personal circumstance, but rather, in the form of the poet telling what he (or I should say his poetic alter ego, his poetic self, the self created in and by the poem) is thinking while simultaneous questioning and responding to his own thought.

Roberson’s interiority makes it possible for him to write “Somewhere I’m the disappointment in myself,” when he is in “A Bout Of” (the title) “One of those malarias of memory” (the first line). “Somewhere” seems somewhere else, still within him. “You’ve gained the language used for not speaking” (“A Small Residue”), he writes to himself–ruefully yet not without a hint of the achievement of this. He does not say that it is a language not used for thinking.

He has a gift of startling and just metaphors. To characterize the sudden access of an unexpected thought, he writes of a “Manic Tack” (which in the poem eventuates in manic talk):

When you flip the side of the sail

the wind is in     –I’ve heard you use

the word–     but the pop      that whack sound

it makes and the boat jumps forward

what is that?       –that’s how it feels

when      what one opinion says is a chemical

change in my brain and next thing

I know my clothes are all over

the room like angry whitecaps

my face near being a wave off

my head [...]

And he writes:

The shadow barcode of the tiger–

scanned through

the grasses

we are just now understanding

that we too register in

the deeper darkness–

turns up a receipt

statement of experience

somehow we know

has some due.

This poem makes several turns, bringing into articulation additional metaphors for what is finally a sense of existential, even if not political, freedom.

Roberson has produced acrobatic leaps and counter-leaps of thought, including a somewhat startling arrival, in some poems, at a bluntness about race in America. “The Depths of an Old Wrong” and “A Small Residue,” which I quoted above, are mostly about “what white folks will say” and what, in response, Roberson will … “sing.”

In other poems his compressed, sometimes halting, sometimes rushing syntax and thought reach inward from episode and image to the very edge of being, and of being alive; I’m thinking of the five short poems that follow the overall title of “Rush,” and also of the autobiographical sequence “’There are many stops along the way ‘.” Roberson’s sense of the ultimate justification for and of a life is at once a kind of doubt and an exhilarating doubleness of thought; he says one thing and his very own lines may both fulfill it and oppose it, in the way they move.

And all of that is in part one of this two-part book. Read into part two and you will find much more—a way of writing that seems to have gone around a corner from part one. Graceful, and no less a close study of the edge between life and death, but different in tone.

Looking up from the work on my desk—the pleasing, illuminating but demanding scrutiny of draft translations by Spanish poet and translator Jordi Doce of some of my poems for a small bilingual edition to be published in Spain by Littera Libros—I see in the books around me so many extraneous attractions, distractions.  Projects as yet unfinished–that’s the connotation of the particular books nearest at hand, many from the university library. One in particular that I happen to find myself looking at (I would like to figure out what unconscious train of thought led me to look at it unaware, and then come to awareness that I was looking at it) makes me feel that it is an enormous privilege to be able to hold it in my own hands and make use of it.  It comes from very far away and long ago.

I hesitate even to name it, but really I shouldn’t worry that anyone who might read these words of mine would ever covet it, although surely it is rare. To me it seems far more precious than the money that would be required to replace it, if that were possible: Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1918, Volume XIV: Eskimo Songs, subtitled Songs of the Copper Eskimos, by Helen H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Southern Party—1913-16. Published in Ottawa by F. A. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1925. Yes, of course, already one thinks of it as the fruit of colonization within a country’s own borders–no matter how much one might be grateful for traces of the amazingly intrepid Copper Eskimos and, for that matter, the Euro-Canadians who trekked long and hard to get to Canadian Arctic in 1913!

And one knows that the collection of the songs must have been flawed, that at least some songs would never have been sung to them, and that others would only have been sung in a way that did not violate their special qualities, perhaps sacred or shamanistic, and that the relations between anthropologists and indigenous people must have been fraught with manipulation on both sides, power on one side, lack of it on the other. How accurate are the transcriptions and translations of the songs? And what particular preparations, circumstances, distractions, difficulties, of the Southern Party (on “the Arctic mainland and the adjacent islands”) might have made their findings more useful or less, to those who want, nearly a hundred years later, to ponder their document?  Producing this songbook, bigger in trim size than a hymnal and fully as thick, was a terribly complex project and must have required the most extraordinary meticulousness, patience, keenness, stamina, and seriousness, with its musical scores, charts presenting musical analysis, a beautiful hand-written transcription (in an alphabet evidently invented for a language with phonemes beyond those of English), of the verse running beneath the musical notes in each song.  And at the back, for each, there is an italicized transliteration of the verse and a translation into English.

I tracked this book down by following a lead in the work of Brian Swann, poet and long-time student and champion of Native American poetry.  Severed from the singers, from the time and world and life experience and cultural practices and thought of those singers, the songs are cryptic—and perhaps some of their mystery is the result of imperfect translation.   But I rather think that it comes from the prior fact that the anthropologists had little in their own lives that corresponded to that far northern world, experience, culture, thought, singing and perhaps–to use a phrase from classics–”song culture.”  Even what seems cryptic to us might have been well translated in some terms, but it came into a language and a culture that had no way to understand fully what it was encountering.  And I would think that the anthropologists themselves acknowledged that.

Sung by a girl from Prince Albert Sound, here is a song that begins with many repetitions of syllables that perhaps express at the least the presence and the emphatic effort of the singer: ye ye yai ye ya i ya ye yai ya and more. Such are the “prelude” and “refrain.” The verses are these:

1.1 Seeing that I was longing for it,

I gave it a name, this spirit.

1.2 Much blood pours from me [my nose] unexpectedly.

I gave it a name, seeing that I recognized it.

2.1 I have not finished it [my song] however.

Whither my little sister, my little Kaniraq [has she gone].

2.2 Much blood pours from me unexpectedly.

Whither my little sister–I have not finished it however.

There are ways of thinking about this, especially with the ways of reading poetry, that make it begin to signify obliquely and powerfully.  And Freud to one side, Jung to another, are looking on as we think.  As are scholars of oral culture and of ancient poetry in the west.

The collectors of the songs write in a footnote: “This is one of the songs that was taught by the Prince Albert sound Eskimos to the ******* [I cannot reproduce this word, which uses characters of a non-Roman alphabet invented to represent the indigenous] Eskimos during the summer of 1915. The words are said to have been taken from three separate songs.”

What, you may wonder, is my interest in this book? I admit that this celebration of it is for its own sake. But there is yet another project awaiting me in which I take up the search for a particular metaphor through a few disparate cultures, trying to think with that metaphor about writing.  Perhaps at some point I will report on what I was beginning to find when other duties intervened, many months ago, and other duties intervened upon those, and so on, preventing me from finishing my song.  Or rather, I seem to have invited my own self-preventing.  I think I felt it would take longer to think through this problem that I would be able to sustain my thinking.

Anyway, now I go back to translations that press me more urgently…