|
"Writing poetry is not a way of saying what one already has the words for, but a way of saying what one didn't know one knew.”
Marvin Bell
Everyone who writes has had those frustrating moments of laying fugitive first words on a blank page. Despite Mallarme's admonition to Descartes, some poems do begin with ideas. So, the idea is there, running back and forth, but the words are hidden under it. No matter how you coax it, tease it, threaten it, that one line that would let the poem issue forth doesn't let you touch it. I've started poems with gibberish just to have something on the page. I've started new poems under the lines of old ones. I've tried it all, found lines, borrowed lines, and still, somedays, they'll just sit and stare back at me.
In the past couple of months, I've had some success with jump-starting the process by creating translingual collage poems. I've actually come up with a couple of new works that I like. This is a type of transformation poem which borrows the work of another poet or writer. Not with the idea of using the writers words or his intent as my own, but with the purpose of finding one phrase or word that has an aesthetic promise. Once in a while, I'm lucky and a whole poem runs into my hands. But usually, I take the words or phrases and build around them, shuffling them to meet an idea of my own. All poets do this. It makes sense, but my new-found process comes in when the pivotal phrase you need won't materialize.
I'm not sure what made me think it would ever work in the first place. I suppose like many of my poetic endeavors, I considered it a game. A friend, poet and teacher, Tad Richards, had translated one of my poems into French. He had also parlayed the work of another of our writers' group into German. I was struck by how well I liked the look of it. Just prior to this, I had been working on transformation poems, taking a poem's intent a step further with new words. However, when I began the translingual collage projects that really wasn't what I had intended to do. The whole thing was a bit serendipitious.
Playing with an online translator, I took one of the Richards' poems and translated it into French. When it came out, I wasn't pleased with it; so clicking the back button, I re-translated into English. And what I put in wasn't what came out. The sum and substance of the original work was markedly changed by all this cyber-travel. Intent was lost, the patterns of speech were altered. The poem was no longer the poem it had been. Also, with the translator I had used (www.freetranslation.com) the form of the poem was also lost, since it returned to me in paragraph form. Here's the original poem by Richards:
STRANGER
One night a woman sleeps
with a stranger
they've made love
and she's watched his head
slide from his neck's locked hinge
his mouth go limp
his breathing
disconnect from hers
entered his privacy
on one elbow
she's watched his
chest go in and out
memorized a face he
won't even show
to himself
then curled into him
his arm across her breast
when they wake up
not strangers
they make love again
but that's almost beside
the point which is
the next night
wakeful next to him
her husband's the stranger
This is written in Richards' innovative 5/4 form. But when it come back from cyber-translation, it had lost the remarkable shape. At this point, I knew I really wasn't working with "Strangers" any longer. Curiosity got the best of me and I went a little further. The French version and the back-snap translation follow:
Une nuit qu'une femme dort avec un étranger qu'ils a fait aime et elle est regardée sa tête glisse de son cou a a verrouillé le gond sa bouche va boite son respire débranche du sien a est entré son intimité sur un coude elle est regardée sa poitrine va dans et hors a appris par coeur un le fait face à ne montrera pas même à se alors la boucle dans lui son arme à travers elle le sein quand ils ne se réveillent pas d'étranger qu'ils font aiment encore mais qu'est presque hors de propos qui est le wakeful de nuit prochain à côté de lui elle mari est l'étranger
A night that a woman sleeps with a foreigner that they did like and she is looked at his head slips of his neck has locked the gond his mouth goes drunk his breathe of his has entered his intimacy on an elbow she is looked at his chest goes in and out memorized a the face will not show even to itself in him his weapon through she the breast when they do not awaken themselves any foreigner that they do like again but that is almost outside matters that the wakeful of harmed next next to him she husband is the foreigner
An idea bounced in: If this is what happened with English to French and back, what would happen if I took the "not so literal translation" and bastardized it once again? I did. This time it was German. Looked interesting, but I don't know any German. So back to English. This is what happened:
Eine Nacht haben der eine Frau mit einem Ausländer den sie gemocht schläft und sie wird seinem Kopf Rutschen seines Halses den gond sein Mund betrunken seiner débranche von seinem seine Vertrautheit auf einen Ellenbogen sie seine Brust in angeschaut haben verschlossen geht atmet hat eingetragen wird angeschaut geht und aus memorized wird ein das Gesicht sogar zu itselfin ihn seine Waffe durch sie die Brust zeigen nichtSie erwecken sich irgendein Ausländer den sie wieder nicht mögen aber das ist fast außerhalb Materien, daß der wakeful von geschadet nächst neben ihm sie Ehemann der Ausländer ist
The woman one with a foreigner liked sleeps a night that it and will be regarded locked go breathes registered is regarded go it its head landslide of its neck the gond mouth drunk its gone away of its its intimacy on an elbow it its breast in and becomes out of memorized a the face even itselfin it its weapon through itnichtSie do not appear awake again likes to be damaged is the breast any foreigner that it however that almost superficial, that the wakeful of next next to it it husband of the foreigners
At this point, I was seeing some of Richards' poem still surviving, but a new story was coming through. And it was my story. One of the things I believe about poetry is that, whether I am a reader or a writer, poems become autobiographical. Not in the sense that these things have happened to me in reality , but that I can place my internal self in the situation. So, in anything I write, parts of me are in that work. My intention and my game changed. I wanted to write my own poem using some of these words.
The next phase of the process was the gathering of the words or phrases that would go into my own poem. Since I use the computer to write and it involves cutting and pasting words found onto a new page, I refer to this method of writing as "collage." A collage is made by borrowing, reshaping and adding a little original twist to common objects. As a form of visual art, collage and assemblage have been practiced by artists such Picasso, Stankiewicz and Samaras. Eclectic bits of this and that are joined to make a sculpture with a meaning unlike like any of its original parts. I had used this as a method of writing and recording moments in time before. Taking bits of conversations, memos, notes and using them verbatim to make a poem. Found lines are a staple of the writer, but, this time, I had semi-created the found lines.
I started to pick out the words and phrases that "felt right." There was really no pattern as to where to start or finish. The words and phrases were just pulled out on the basis of what my ear heard in them. The order was random. Nothing at this point was definite, so I was fine with the disjointed look of the lines. I failed to save my original theft of words but I offer the following as an example of collaging:
sleeps a night
damaged is the breast
wakeful of next
memorized a the face
intimacy on an elbow
its weapon
almost superficial
husband of the foreigners
neck the gond mouth drunk
do not appear awake
registered is regarded
locked go breathes
becomes out of memorized
The Richards' poem may still be there, but if it is, it's been trampled. Now was my chance to steal the lines and write my own poem. This is the work of poets; to smooth or roughen the edges of words and sounds to which we lend to our voices. To take the gifts of vowels and consonants and let them speak for us. What I did next, I can't really explain, but you know what it was. If you write creatively, you do. I turned the phrases around. I pushed them here and there. Hopefully, as Billy Collins recommends, I held them to the light. A poem formed from these words and from somewhere in the middle of me. Kate McQaude, one of Tad Richards' students wrote on an online workshop bulletin board, "we all think the truth but it's different when we actually speak it," which makes a lot of sense for a poet. Because our thoughts go directly from our insides to the page where someone else can find the truth as they see it. These words just happened to be available for the truth I was thinking. It's incredible when that happens. The finished poem I came up with is here:
some sleep
it no longer belongs to her
On a night when some sleep
she begins to review
old strategies
aware that her husband
lying still beside her
has gone away alone
the foreigner
takes the inside space
gets too close
rises with her chest
grows larger as she breathes
his mouth goes to her throat
her bones, her stomach
if she turns now
to hold herself with an elbow
he won't be remembered
he'll be replaced by a fiscal report
with semi-blank pages
by all the Yeats she can't recall
and her own end-stopped lines
by her daughter on a school bus
crossing flooded desert washes
by the car's timing belt
slipping in rush hour traffic
the barely superficial
like the breast under her
with its new density
joined to foreigners
So that's the process. Borrow someone's words, or even use your own, translate them, clone the translation once or twice, pick out the words that call to you, and shuffle them into a new poem. When I showed this to Professor Richards, he recognized his own poem in this one, despite the fact that there are really few similarities. When you do this, you have to beware of sticking to closely to the original. The purpose of the translingual collage is to put something on a page that will help with that initial anxiety of finding words.
What you do with the words, and what they will become, depends on your own ideas, aesthetic and talent.
P.S. from Tad:
Not long after reading Marshock's essay, in a cannibalistic sort of mood, I translingual/collaged my own poem, and came up with this.
DRAGONS
When dragons hunt
each other
they know all the tricks
aren't fooled by old wives' tales
go for its head
bring virgins
a French dragon knows
American dragons
like to sleep with
foreigners
she seeks out her prey
in rural New York state
he's drawn in by
the rolling
landslide of her neck
she puts on a tableau
studied passion
lists forward
sighs as she tells him
she likes to be damaged
he stays his claw
and she's won
once he curls against
her he will not be seen
awake again
Forché: The Country Between Us remains her best selling book, and will probably always be the source of her most anthologized poems, but The Angel of History marks growth and ambition as a poet. Forché’s witness, in this book, extends from her firsthand observation of war and destruction in El Salvador and Beirut to historical recreations of the atrocities of war in France, Germany and Japan. She moves away from the lyric "I" of The Country Between Us, and the accounts of her personal confrontation with the world of warfare and suffering, to create a poem at once longer and more fragmented, in the tradition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, incorporating many voices, mostly the voices of the lost. In terms of scope and of poetic innovation, The Angel of History moves a long way from The Country Between Us, and its ambition was generally recognized and applauded by critics and readers alike.
The recording angel whom Forché summons is taken from an essay by Walter Benjamin, who describes the angel of history with a face "turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet." That wreckage is counted in images as horrific as any in modern poetry, from the dead girl who "was thought to be with child/ Until it was discovered that her belly had already been cut open/ And a man's head placed where the child would have been" to the red flower which the speaker casually dislikes because its particular shade reminds her "of a woman’s brain crushed under a roof."
The angel speaks through many voices, often left deliberately ambiguous and difficult to identify. Voices heard in the book include Forché’s Czech immigrant grandmother, Anna; a suicidal patient in a Paris hospital who has survived the Nazis only to conclude that God is a psychopath; the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, whose last poems were found on his corpse in a mass grave of concentration camp prisoners; a Hiroshima survivor, now a tour guide at the Garden Shukkei-en, in a section of the poem that is better able to exist separately, and so is most often anthologized. The woman, in summing up her thoughts near the end of the poem, tells a tourist/listener from America that "We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness/ But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close."
Forché’s fourth book, Blue Hour, found her moving away from both lyric "I" and recording angel, though traces of both personae still appear. The dramatic fragmentation of polyphonic voices was largely replaced by a different kind of fragmentation, that associated with poets like John Ashbery and especially Jorie Graham (since Forché eschews Ashbery’s tongue in cheek), in which the poet appears to want to engage the world one on one, and examine personal issues like motherhood and family history, but knows that perhaps too many poems have been written on those themes already, and that "but this is me writing it" may not be enough to set it apart. Interestingly, the negative criticism of Blue Hour comes from those who see a different aspect of "but this is me writing it" – the dependence on flat statement, on judgmentalism, the eschewing of poetic devices like metaphor and tension of language within a line.
The book’s title is a literal translation of a French phrase that refers to the time of night when darkness gradually turns into dawn, and that functions as a governing metaphor for the book — that time when the most dramatic change of all, that of dark into light, is occurring, but the observer can never quite put her finger on how it’s happening, or the degree of change; the time between sleep and waking, when dreams and thought interact, and afterwards one can never say for certain which was which. The centerpiece of the book is "On Earth," a 46-page abecedarian, a form which allows Forché to work with an organizing principle which is both demanding and random. In addition to the literary antecedents this calls to mind, Forché is working very much in the tradition of the late twentieth century minimalist composers, particularly Terry Riley, whose "In C" applies the same structural principals of repetition and overlapping.
Forché’s concern for finding a voice with which to bear witness has extended beyond poetry, and resulted in her editing a book called Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, featuring essays by such authors as Philip Lopate, William Least-Heat Moon, Annie Dillard, Honor Moore and Diane Ackerman.
Further Reading. Selected Primary Sources: Forché, Carolyn, Gathering the Tribes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); ---, The Country Between Us (New York: Harper Perennial, 1981); ---, ”El Salvador: An Aide Memoire” (American Poetry Review 10.4 [July-August 1981]: 3-8; Alegria, Claribel, transl. by ---, Flowers From The Volcano (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); Desnos, Robert, transl. by --- and William Kulik, The Selected Poems Of Robert Desnos (New York: The Ecco Press, 1991); ---, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); ---, The Angel of History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995); Alegria, Claribel, transl. by ---, Sorrow (Willimantic CT, Curbstone Press, 1999); ---, Blue Hour (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Secondary Sources: Cott, Jonathan, interview (Rolling Stone [April 14, 1983]: 81, 83-87, 110-111); Stone, Carole, “Elegy as Political Expression in Women's Poetry: Akhmatova, Levertov, Forche” (College Literature 19.1 [February 1991]: 84-91; O'Rourke, Meghan, “She's So Heavy” (The Nation 276.22 [June 9, 2003]: 33-36)
|