Reading what writers who identify as poets say about verse can be waftish and atomized like verse itself. Straight talk doesn’t go with the territory. Richard Deming introduces the Poetry – March 2023 portfolio celebrating Ann Lauterbach with a 1-page amuse-bouche. He works references to Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams into his beginning:
In her work — fierce, complexly lyric — we see some of Beckett’s struggles with silence… In Lauterbach’s poems we catch sympathetic resonances of Williams’s insistence on particulars as the engine for esthetic insight.
Then he quotes a paragraph by Lauterbach herself, from her 2008 book of essays titled The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. I’ll paraphrase it. She says loftily that the artist’s job is to “release materials” into a “middle ground” in order to connect with someone else, but also to foment awareness of people who are elsewhere, even far away. Something like that.
In his last paragraph, Professor Deming says this:
[Lauterbach’s] poems are, again and ever, an act of the mind testing the integrity — structural, moral — of the world.
In his finale he uses the word “wonder” 8 times, including this:
A wonder without sentimentality, a complex, difficult wonder that needs at last to be earned. A wonder like that.
Ending is a pirouette:
Did I say “wonder”? I meant “a world.” Ann Lauterbach means the world. Let’s put it that way. What else is there?
Make of it what you will. It’s starkly free of particulars about the work it introduces, which is just as well. What follows it is a flight of Lauterbach’s materials — a tray of versecraft specimens for the reader to roll on the tongue, earning his wonder.
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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Arabic Poetry Note: A. J. Arberry (1905-1969)
Given the exiguous outbound appeal I muster, I work hard at not being longwinded. I revel, though, in venting puffs of comment on my adventure with Arabic and its poetry.
A.J. Arberry’s essential anthology of 31 poets spans a period from mid-6th-century A.D. until mid-20th-century. The British scholar’s slightly old-fashioned English translations (he calls al-Khansa’ a “poetess”) sit opposite the Arabic texts he scrupulously edited, providing strategic voweling and useful notes, references and biographies, not to mention a formidable introductory essay. The volume is a primer — and a crucial resource for me at this stage.
From schooling in Arabic that started adventitiously at the University of Barcelona and proceeded deliberately at UNC, I’m in reasonable control of Arabic morphology and syntax despite a hiatus wasted in earning a mediocre living; I know enough for the incredible Wright’s grammar to be useful when needed. Building up recognition and recall vocabulary is the job now. It’s enthralling. Classical verses are packed like sticks of dynamite. I read them slowly and aloud, consulting Hans Wehr and Lane for voweling and meanings. I transliterate the verses, and I draw them. By then they’re largely memorized.
Arberry’s translations provide valuable guidance, but they aren’t the last word for me. I don’t contest them, of course; it’s simply that for their virtues of style and readability his versions don’t always track the Arabic as closely as I need. I want to own the verses in my personal English so as to feel I’ve caught what powers them in their element as best I can. Literal translations serve me more than literary ones.
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved