Airmail (35 page)

What does “stick legs” mean?

Your grounded and grinded friend

Tomas T.

I am nervous now that the Göteborg ladies will be too quick with translations of you—Rolf Aggestam will push hard to get
our
book published this spring. Title of the book? Proposal...TT

31 Jan, ’77

Dear Tomas,

Here are a few thoughts, first about the foreword. I do want you to include the second paragraph. I know that it is a bit incoherent, so I’ll set down here a version maybe slightly more sensible! It contains the idea, poorly said, I’m afraid, that one advantage of the human being’s having invented language is that now, while he’s using it, new thoughts occur! I think the calmness of the prose poems helps these “new thoughts” to appear, while the person is writing the prose poem. That’s why I used the metaphor of the bird building a nest—he is working...Language is the nest human beings make...

At the end there I’m saying that for strange reasons “big rivers” like
Paradise Lost
contain few of the intimate thoughts of Milton, few tiny quirky joys that make a man suddenly dance a little in his office.

A FEW DETAILS: I meant a
relatively
new form in English, rather than an entirely new form. I can’t tell what “bhovande” implies;
needy
is the exact opposite of the adjectives we usually apply to gods. It is used for very old people living in hotels, or women with many children whose husband has abandoned them.

If you want to, just leave out “overjaget” entirely. The sentence would then read: “och ge den till museernas musa.” I haven’t decided whether in the English version I should keep “superego” or not. Carol suggested dropping it, but it may make a connection for some that “museernas musa” might not. Tell me what I should do!

I made a change in the next sentence. The second draft reads:

Carol was a little worried about the violence of the example I gave of a “man” as opposed to “humanity”—it is actually a classmate of mine who put in the tiles in our bathroom, and after being kicked out of the house (his house) for being drunk all the time, returned one morning at 6 AM and shot himself in the back yard. I don’t know how you feel about that. Another possibility would be: “We have been asked to write about ‘humanity,’ not about the plumber next door who reads Eckhart and has eight children.”

Take whichever you like best.

Later, there seems to be a bit of confusion between “Takes place” which just means “happens” and the longing that each event would have its own space or place in the poem.

I think we should be sure that “Rain in August” is included in the book! Don’t you have a translation of it?

“Stick legs” just suggests how the thin legs of an old lady would look to the eye picking them up quickly...it comes from a potato with “matchstick legs”...

Thank you for doing this! I think you’ve done it well! Except of course for your grudge against big rivers and artesian wells...As I mentioned, artesian wells are simply wells whose water flows upward without being pumped...that has never been my luck...

Now a few notes on “Tomales Bay.” It looks fine! As for the machine, I had the same problem in English as you do in Swedish...I wrote it first as “crane,” which is our word for a lifting mechanism with a long cable hanging down, used to load ships and such things.

I was then much irritated to realize that we had a bird called “crane” also. So I reluctantly went to “derrick” in order to avoid confusing the reader with the pun on crane. I only realized it was not a machine, when I saw it move. So that is why the exclamation mark appears here...it was a shock...one could say, “han lever” or even “it is moving...alive!” I don’t know “gar sen iväg”...what happened was that he glimpsed us at the same second, and started to walk away from us, and nearer the shore...he was probably in five or six inches of water...

We aren’t exactly “hjalplost”—we had oars, but the fog came down so quickly we didn’t know where we were...we couldn’t see the shore at all, nor the sea we were heading toward...

The first glimpse of the sea lions, when they come up from their “havskrubbor,” should give a strong fragrance from the birth of Christ in the manger. We rarely use the word “manger” these days, except in reference to that story. The Magi are the Wise Men, all right...use whatever translation for these three that would have been used in 19th century Swedish translations of the Bible...MAGI—It is such a wonderful, fragrant word in English! The billfold is the ordinary leather folding thing for credit cards and folding money that all Americans carry in their back pockets.

Well enough of this. You already know too much. Poems are best when there are incredible mysteries in them, that is, when you don’t understand English. I’m afraid you’re not making enough mistakes...

I’m not sure whom you mean by the ladies in Göteborg...Is that the sleepless translator of
Sleepers
? Ingegerd Friberg wrote me a curious letter. She wanted to have exclusive rights on
This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood,
and had a publisher ready to bring it out right now...and I was to tell no one! Of course I was flattered, and imagined flying to Sweden with a trenchcoat and hat brim snapped down over my eyes, passing over the corrections in the garage basement of an expensive apartment house at 3 AM...But I told her that I had already sent some to you months ago, and in any case, you were my old friend, and had pick of any that you wanted to translate...So that ended it...

So adieu, I must take the girls to a band concert.....

Love from your friend,

the poetic chauffeur

Robert

Different title?

It’s odd but in this century not many original things have been said in an elevated or “raised” voice. It seems that the more original thoughts have appeared spoken in a quiet and low voice. Yesterday I read an Australian poet who writes both “lined” and prose poems, and I noticed that his speech followed more natural rhythms and word order in his prose poems than in his poems. In a prose poem we often feel a man or woman talking not before a crowd, but in a low voice to someone he is sure is listening.

It’s possible that while a bird is building her nest an idea for a song she or he has never sung rises to its small head. So there are certain thoughts and impulses to thoughts in us that flow upward and into language only when the psyche is calm, and while language is being used. Buried impulses toward joy are carried upward on the artesian well of the prose poem that seem not to want to rise in the excited sunlight of the big rivers.

The prose poem is for poets in English a relatively new form, but I don’t believe a new form in poetry rises accidentally, or only to amuse readers. It arrives because without it some feelings or half buried thoughts in us would remain beneath the consciousness, unsure of themselves, unable to break through.

There are beings made of white marble who watch us whenever we write. They represent the dissatisfaction of the dead with their own poetry. Much stiffness in line poetry is a sympathetic body reaction to these pale, needy divinities, who stand behind the man or woman writing, as pale as those Greek statues in museums, once all brilliant reds and yellows, now a dead white, all the paint flaked off, so that even their eyeballs are white. These white-eyeballed creatures make us nervous, as they try to take poetry away from wildness, and give it back to the superego, to the muse of museums. The man or woman writing a poem in this century has to deal with these white shapes, outdoing them by returning the red and green to the statues—Yeats does that—or by doing something they don’t notice. Sometimes when I am writing a prose poem, I have the feeling I can go about my business without these white-eyeball people making so many demands. I don’t mean that no one should write poems in lines, but I believe intimacy is important in a poem, and the prose poem helps with that.

Sometimes the spirit even begins to flow upward a little in the language of the prose poem. So prose poems perhaps resemble home or private religion; lined poems are more like public churches. The ancient world had both, and strangely, had different gods for the public religion than for the private, which were appropriately called “Mysteries.”

A marvelous thing about the prose poem is how well it absorbs detail. One August day watching a rain shower, I was astounded at how many separate events were taking place, each taking place only once. Each needed to be given space in the poem separately, and I was glad for the prose poem form. The poem is called “August Rain.” Even with it I missed most of the events I was watching.

I have a feeling that the contemporary poem longs for what takes place only once. All of us who have passed through the compulsory educational system find ourselves often unable to write the detail for years. We have been pushed too early into generalization. We have been asked to write about “humanity,” not about the plumber next door who shot himself in the stomach in front of his own house. A prose poem by contrast does not ask for general statements, it urges us to return to the original perception—before the conclusion rushed in, provided by the mind. For example, one doesn’t actually see “people crossing a street.” One sees first the glint off the side of some shiny object moving, then the indefinably odd walk a figure with stick legs makes, then a child’s red cap, then an arm swinging with some green substance on it, and after a few seconds, the brain reports: “It is people crossing the street when the light went green.” In my high school papers I always gave the conclusion before the evidence; I reported, “Humanity wants to be free,” or “The dignity of man cannot be corrupted.” I like the way the prose poem so easily allows the original perception to live, so that in a good prose poem—just as in a good lined poem—it’s possible that every noun could be a singular noun! Not one plural noun in the whole poem! I fail at that again and again, and reading my own prose poems I see that the plural consciousness is still with me, but the prose poem helps us to balance that with what takes place only once.

Robert Bly

Västerås 28-2-77

Dear Robert,

the ornithologists don’t agree, but here is a possible translation of the missing part of the foreword:

The rest seems OK. “Ganska” means “relatively” in Swedish—don’t think about the German word “ganz” which ist etwas ganz anderes. As for the plumber I think I will ask Aggestam which is the best. Why did you change the sentence about Yeats? I don’t like the new version because the word “triping” does not appear in my dictionary. There is a noun “tripe” meaning “inälvor” (intestines) but no verb.

I am leaving on Thursday morning for Germany and Switzerland, AT LAST. I will go by train all the way. The winter is awful here, snow every day.

Can you keep Charleston and New Orleans warm one year, or half a year or so? I don’t think I can go this spring but I am longing very much to do a reading trip again, and not too far away in the future. I have had no invitation for a public reading outside Västerås for almost a year. They simply don’t want me! Shocking isn’t it? I am not even persecuted. And my books are sold out except for the latest 2, but
Stigar
will be sold out this week in the cheap sale drive. So there I am, without books, without platforms,—it is time to cross the Atlantic again.

I will write to you from EUROPE. Write soon. I will be back on March 12.

Love    Tomas

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