Sam Shepard's lifetime achievement award: tales of a real American West

Sam Shepard, as one interviewer recently wrote, "is a startlingly unique figure in American cultural life. He's a Pulitizer-Prize winning playwright, a movie star, a musician, a screenwriter, a director, a poet. His companion since 1983 is another movie star: Jessica Lange. All of which makes him possibly the only American celebrity who can straddle the gap between The New Yorker and US Weekly, who would be a plausible guest for both Charlie Rose and Oprah Winfrey."

For his 45 plays and continued fiction writing, Saturday he received a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Tribune. His most recent book of sketches and short stories, Day Out of Days, shows that Shepard is still a man interested in the workings of fate, the self-driven destinies of road-weary and resigned midwestern characters that have populated his work for decades. It's a familiar voice, and a view of the accumulated flotsam of Americans' increasingly sped-up lives:

"Who scrambled all this stuff in here with no seeming regard for associative order, shape, or color? Without the slightest care for where it might all wind up. Just randomly pinned to cupboards and door frames, slipping sideways; gathering spotted stove grease and fly shit."

(from "Kitchen")

Well, everyone is entitled to clean out their cupboards occasionally. Writers, especially so, tend to rummage through their own gray rooms of the mind where all the stuff is kept. They have to; often they find a good story, maybe half of a novel, or something worthy only as kindling for the fireplace -- it's hard to tell until it's out of the bottom drawer. A kitchen seems an apt metaphor for Sam Shepard's latest collection Day Out of Days, not for the quality of the writing (which is considerable, and consistently entertaining) but for its rummaged and haphazard array.

That's not to say the collection isn't appealing, it just seems jumbled. Fans of Shepard's writing will find familiar elements -- his characters carry on the most American of quests, to keep moving even as the decay of fate, time or age continues its unstoppable advance. There is the panorama of Western landscapes, winding ribbons of asphalt and despair, that are settings for Shepard's variety of pre-apocalyptic stories, ones without the actual end of days but mostly focused on emotional and physical ruin.

The longer stories frequently take on the character of Shepard's plays, with a cast of restless misfits, broken and forsaken relationships in dry and dusty Texas towns, Montana grassland, and Arizona deserts -- even as there are elements of literary conjuring, a brand of Borges-like fantasy, as in the story "Highway 70":

"He’s not used to this kind of labor. He’s grown accustomed to a soft, passive existence where nothing happens, nothing counts; where no single day ever stands out more than any other single day; where dreaming and waking all run together; where all the people in his life have disappeared and his main pursuits are napping and watching Mexican soap operas cast with dark-haired weeping beauties and the fantasies they evoke. He suddenly collapses under a concrete viaduct and drops the basket beside him. The head rolls out and comes to rest with the black gaping hole of the severed neck sticking straight up. The man stares into the hole, gasping for air, and listens to the voice of the head speaking very calmly: 'We just need to make a right turn here, after the bridge, and then follow the irrigation ditch. It’s not very far.'”

As good as the longer pieces are, the mosaic of styles (stories, lyrics, short pieces of dialogue) that mean to link the longer elements together don't carry the flow of the book as well. It's a tricky approach to a writer's output as multifaceted as Shepard's work as playwright, novelist, and lyric writer. The writer's overstuffed drawer of manuscripts must have seemed intriguing. The results are less so, and seem only in need of more work, a little more consideration.

Still, Day Out of Days is worth reading for pleasure and the sure craft of Shepard's writing. Even in his briefest sketches Shepard has the eye for the telling detail and sharply-drawn character. As it is the collection has the feel of a Dylan album, fractured, reflective and observant, and very contemporaary in its concerns: a man is trapped in a restaurant, forcing him to listen to an endless loop of music; a vacationing American family gets wrapped up in its own dysfunction and misses the beauty of the Mexican countryside; an actor returns to his hometown.

But Shepard has staked out his own literary territory made of equal parts longing and restlessness. Even as his characters are sure the big answers lay just out of their grasp, over the next hill -- continuing the Beat idea of happiness in endless journeys of superhighways and enough gas -- sometimes happiness can be found simply by walking out the door:

"What’s all this shit for? Some display for who? For me? What for? Some guest or other? I have no guests. You know that. I’m no host. Never have been. Maybe the old Sonoran man who drops off split oak but no real visitors, that’s for sure. Everyone knows to stay far away. Especially now with the tiger-brindled pit bull out front. The screaming burro kicking buckets down the hill. The fighting gallo in attack mode. I’m in this bunker all my own, surrounded by mysterious stuff. It may be time to take a break and walk back out into the dripping black woods where I know the hollowed-out Grandaddy Sycamore sits and waits for you to climb inside and breathe up into its bone-white aching arms."

Escape, chance, the whims of fate: all of these are themes uniting the stories in Day Out of Days. The barren landscapes are metaphors for personal desperation, and there is the promise of rest at the end of these journeys -- but like noontime in the desert, hope and expectation can vanish like a mirage.

Ferlinghetti at 91: "The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology" (2008)

"Don't use the telephone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry."
(Jack Kerouac to Edward Dahlberg)

The current release of the film Howl brings focus to the battles faced by small publishers in an earlier and conservative age, as well as being a timely reminder of continued threats to freedom of speech in our present one. The struggle for the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to free expression is never over.

The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology (City Lights Books, 2008; originally published in 1997) is a neat little square brick of a book that reminds readers how words can (and did) spark a revolution, not just in poetry but in the culture as a whole. Jonathan Williams, the North Carolina publisher of the Jargon Society, said he turned down the original manuscript of "Howl" -- it would have sold 500 copies at his tiny press, he said, and that would have been the end of it. Literary history, it seems, had other plans.

Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned 91 this year, and his City Lights Press continues to thrive. His little books were portable enough to be taken everywhere, freewheeling enough to include poets from William Carlos Williams to Andrei Voznesensky ("like a huge bottle of kerosene" -- words as Molotov cocktails), and, eventually, threatening enough to bring a challenge to American obscenity laws. In the bare-knuckle brawl of the commercialized internet, the idea of poetry as a force this powerful seems like a miracle.

It was. And although the movement soon acquired a name, the resulting beat generation wasn't as unified as either its detractors or supporters claimed. There certainly were urban scenes that attracted the disaffected and the romantic, the seekers of soul, and left-leaning artists who congregated in like-misery. Yet it's striking to see the variety of expression represented here, from the apparently spontaneous combustion of Ginsberg's "Howl," to Robert Duncan ("Sleep is a Deep and Many Voiced Flood"), to Malcolm Lowry's near-painterly Joseph Conrad and "his coiled work:" Lowry's meditation on Conrad is far from the template of beat poetry or its hallmarks, but it's filled with the movement's twisting tension and energy, if not its imagery:

Yet some mariner's ferment in his blood

-- Though truant heat will hear the iron trevail

And song of ships that ride their easting down --

Sustains him to subdue or be subdued.

In sleep all night he grapples with a sail!

But words beyond the life of ships dream on.

From the beginning, Ferlinghetti writes in the introduction, his aim was "to publish across the board ... and not just publishing (that pitfall of the little press) just 'our gang.'" In a short span City Lights published Ponsot, Levertov, Corso, Ginsberg, Duncan. Beat's most enduring, emotional and romantic notion was that the personal was poetic, meeting injustice with righteous anger, confronting conformity with the individual vision. ("I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life," from Diane DiPrima's "Revolutionary Letter No. 1.") All of these ideas, today, are so familiar as to seem obvious, if not second-hand. But the best poems here share an immediacy and sharpness of observation that remains in the mind's eye, like Ferlinghetti's

the El

with its flyhung fans

and its signs reading

SPITTING IS FORBIDDEN

Critics and readers have argued that the failure of beat poetry has been one of scale -- the personal somehow erasing the universal -- as if readers are waiting for a return of some idea of "the proper uses" of poetry. Yet there isn't a universal idea left untouched in the City Lights anthology. War and love and death and daily life have never been more topical, or dealt with more directly.

Near the end of an extremely important discourse

the great man of state stumbling

on a beautiful hollow phrase

falls over it

and undone with gaping mouth

gasping

shows his teeth

and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning

exposes the nerve of war

the delicate question of money

(Jacques Prevert, "The Discourse on Peace," translated by Ferlinghetti)

More to the critics' point, beat poetry was an immediate reaction to the post-war politics of fear and annihilation; Kerouac's often-quoted observation, "first thought, best thought," was an acknowledgement that there may be no time left for second thoughts before the human slate gets wiped clean.

Consider the cold-war politics of the Cuban missile crisis against the Swiftian suggestion of Kerouac's "Poem" (1962): "I demand that the human race / cease multiplying its kind / and bow out / I advise it / And as punishment & reward / for making this plea I know / I'll be reborn / the last human / Everybody else dead and I'm / an old woman roaming the earth / groaning in caves / sleeping on mats ...."

Ferlinghetti at 90th birthday celebration, March 2009
(photo by Christina Koci Hernandez)

Ferlinghetti's selection is chronological, so that the poems can be read in their City Lights context; Corso and Kaufman, Patchen and Rexroth, plus a variety of poems by Yevtushenko and Garcia Lorca and Mayakovsky, frame a great deal of work by Ginsberg and Kerouac, of course. Any omissions are due to Ferlinghetti's own "ignorance, inattention, ill-timing, or bad luck," he slyly writes in the introduction -- fans will note this essential poem gone missing, or that one -- but there are surprises enough, though it's assumed that the anthology is meant for the general reader. And, wonder of wonders in this oversized and overstuffed age, it's a collection still compact enough to carry around with you.

Sixty years of The 'Paris Review' interviews (all of them) available online

That Kentucky man-of-rare-letters Ed McClanahan once remarked of his own method of writing that sometimes he followed his nose, sometimes his muse, and sometimes his muse's nose. One of the continuing pleasures of the internet's endless hall-of-mirrors is that occasionally one is able to reflectively follow all three at the same time. The Paris Review interviews -- nearly sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again.

Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviews in their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all.

As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Terry Southern's witty 1958 talk with Henry Green.) In a unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

A previously unpublished Ray Bradbury interview from the 1970s: "A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame." Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen all make appearances. And here's Guy Davenport on his education, sounding a common note of many writers everywhere trying to find their voice: “I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

Aldous Huxley, Reynolds Price, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, Seamus Heaney: for any reader, spending an hour with a great author is easy; far more difficult is stopping at a sane and necessary point amid the sheer volume of interviews. One unexpected idea sparks another and sends a reader scurrying from Shelby Foote's ruminations on dip-pens to Sam Shepard's views on the terrible price of story endings: “I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” Much the same can be said of Ted Berrigan's and Aram Saroyan's complete 1968 interview with an increasingly drunken Jack Kerouac, as the talk literally careens around served drinks and proffered drugs:

INTERVIEWER What do you think about the hippies and the LSD scene?

KEROUAC They're already changing, I shouldn't be able to make a judgment. And they're not all of the same mind. The Diggers are different . . . I don't know one hippie anyhow . . . I think they think I'm a truck-driver. And I am. As for LSD, it's bad for people with incidence of heart disease in the family [knocks microphone off footstool . . . recovers it]. Is there any reason why you can see anything good in this here mortality?

INTERVIEWER Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?

KEROUAC You said you had a little white beard in your belly. Why is there a little white beard in your mortality belly?

INTERVIEWER Let me think about it. Actually it's a little white pill.

KEROUAC A little white pill?

INTERVIEWER It's good.

KEROUAC Give me.

INTERVIEWER We should wait till the scene cools a little.

KEROUAC Right. This little white pill is a little white beard in your mortality which advises you and advertises to you that you will be growing long fingernails in the graves of Peru.

With an online collection as broad as The Paris Review interviews there are many surprises, and readers will bring their own judgements as to what can be glanced at or read in depth after a few interviewer's questions. I might have to read more of the stories of T.C. Boyle after reading his 2000 comments, and there are scores of writers whose work I'm just as eager to discover for the first time.

Other than some well-known names, the recent group of 2010 interviews is less interesting, but that's more than likely due to my own lack of reading than any fault of the writers being interviewed. Still, it may give the reader pause to consider that in the craft of writing, even Stephen King can have his moments of doubt no matter how unexpected:

"Every book is different each time you revise it. Because when you finish the book, you say to yourself, This isn’t what I meant to write at all. At some point, when you’re actually writing the book, you realize that. But if you try to steer it, you’re like a pitcher trying to steer a fastball, and you screw everything up. As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books."

Barry Hannah: "Language and memory are what it's all about"

"This Sunday morning Man Mortimer and Max Raymond sat in the pews of the same church, a little white steepled one in a glen set among live oaks and three acres of clover. The jungle swamps encroached on and squared the glen, deep green to black. Loud birds and alligators groaning in their mating season roamed in songs from bayou to bayou. Some fish walked on land in this season."

(from Yonder Stands Your Orphan)

Barry Hannah's novels are a traveling circus, full of wonders and (luckily for readers) writing that is just as entertaining. He wanders a Southern route this side of Gothic, but that faded and overworked territory -- land of the Jim Beam dysfunctional, the bloody macabre, or the just plain good-ol'boy weird -- really doesn't contain him.

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), was a funny coming-of-age tale nominated for the National Book Award. He achieved some fame with his book of stories, High Lonesome (1996); his last, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Grove Press, 2001), a lyrical tale of murder and mayhem, evoked comparisons to "Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Peter Dexter and Clyde Edgerton all squished together." That's some company, and each with their own potent mix of summer honeysuckle and rye whiskey.

Hannah has gone on ahead to scout new and even more mysterious locations (the Oxford, Mississippi writer died unexpectedly March 1, at the age of 67). He should enjoy discussing the dissipation of family and kin with Mr. Faulkner himself after having won the Faulkner Prize for Geronimo Rex. Here he talks to Fiona Maazel in an excerpt from a 2001 interview published in BOMB magazine, and in it he describes the idea of the novel's small town characters -- a group that gathers on a pier to trade boasts and outright lies, that is aging rapidly but not yet wisely, and familiar to themselves in their habits.

Barry Hannah: I wanted to get a grouping. It’s kind of an Our Town. Only darker. And more conscious of real evil. These folks appeared in my stories. I already had a cast, except for Man Mortimer and a few others.

Fiona Maazel: Right, the pier crowd. Why do you keep returning to them, to these old cranks who figure in so many of your other stories?

BH: Obviously, I’m obsessed with the people on the pier. People desperate and older and almost frantic to have a moment of clarity and some peace. I just found it to be a comfortable theater to work in. I also wanted to see how they would react to modern, true evil.

FM: They are all old, but they seem to lack the one thing the old are supposed to have, namely wisdom.

BH: They are the uneasy old.

FM: You do have a lot of stuff in the novel about how people need to seek out evil and hurt and pain to feel vivified, to feel alive, uneasy or not.

BH: That’s right. Max Raymond certainly does. He even says so. It does seem strange that one would make that conscious choice. I actually believe that’s why people live in big cities. They kind of like the idea of the Mafia around.

FM: Funny, I actually think evil is more likely to find me out where you live in Mississippi—that if I were a homicidal maniac, I’d do my worst in the country. But I think that’s a city phobia.

BH: Nothing bad has ever happened to me in Manhattan. But nothing like what’s happened in my book has ever happened to me in Mississippi, either.

FM: At least one of the organizing principles of the book seems to be the lake where all these old zombies congregate. I know that lakes and water in general show up a lot in your work.

BH: You’ve got it. Water is contemplative. It’s a magnet. Except for Dr. Harvard, none of these characters are well-off vacationers. It’s not a high-scale lake, you know. It’s a fishing lake. It’s more rural, more isolated. It’s more possible for evil such as Man Mortimer to exist there. And nobody seems able to strike against it. There’s no organization. The sheriff himself is unqualified and inept. It’s a kind of backwater place where the civilized codes don’t work. ...

FM: On some level, though, isn’t there fear that you will end up laughing at your characters instead of with them?

BH: You do both. You laugh with them and at them over the course of a novel, certainly. But it seems like I just cannot write in a straight, stern manner for very long before I find that these are human beings, and that the things you read in the paper will always surpass everything you put down. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m a master of the grotesque. I think I’m exploring through human comedy. ...

Hannah's dark humor comes from simply not looking away: "Those that don't avert their eyes are the real artists," he told an interviewer in 1997. "A man will reveal himself quickly, as if a witness at a trial. ... They say that the most natural writer born in America was Mark Twain. He just seems to have begun talking. I think that’s what I’m after."

Dante's Inferno gets an update and a video-game: good news for swaggering hero-poets

Bowler hats, tommy guns, and spats: illustrator Seymour Chwast's updated Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation looks like a 1930s Hollywood detective movie, telegraphing Dante's ultimately hopeful message in cinematic black-and-white. If Chwast's version of the Divine Comedy begs no comparison to the art of illustrator Gustave Doré, well, it's a safe bet the 19th century engraver never imagined Dante as a Dashiell Hammett character, either.

Chwast's first graphic novel is full of innovative and clever images, although high-school Miss Grundys may wail at the simplified story. "Captain" Charon's lake is now a neon-lit chasm he zooms across in a speedboat and floozies of Florence lounge in cocktail dresses. The damned wear Yale varsity sweaters. Dante still searches for the truth with the poet Virgil, now as his guide in a tuxedo and bowler.

Some things, however, stay true to the original: for most readers, as well as the artists that have illustrated the Comedy over centuries, the torments of Hell are still more thrilling to depict than the transcendence of Heaven -- and for Chwast make for much wittier visuals.

Not to be trumped by mere words and pictures on a page, Electronic Arts has developed a videogame of Dante's Inferno that ratchets up the action to make Dante a fallen crusader swaggering his way through hell, battling Satan himself for the love of Beatrice.

"He fundamentally mapped hell with this poem," says Jonathan Knight, the game's executive producer. "He's created a visual topography, and there's a tremendous amount of structure, geography, weather — and monsters."

A graphic novel and a videogame based on the work of a 14th-century visionary seem a victory of sorts for the image of fearless and swashbuckling hero-poets, if not for truth in literature. It's unlikely there'll be corresponding releases for Purgatory or Heaven -- spiritual redemption is less exciting for gamers, presumably. Who knows -- that still leaves the battle for Heaven in Milton's "Paradise Lost" for some enterprising game company to try.

UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith responds to site hacking in mid-October

Kenneth Goldsmith (photo by David Velasco, 2008)

After the recent hacking of UbuWeb, a heated discussion broke out on the most prominent experimental film listserv, Frameworks, discussing the tactics of Ubu. There was clearly a lot of misunderstanding regarding what UbuWeb is about. Ubu's founder, Kenneth Goldsmith, was compelled to make a response. Here are excerpts. The entire letter can be read on the UbuWeb site.

An Open Letter to the Frameworks Community

October, 18, 2010
(responding to this thread on the Frameworks discussion list)


To the Frameworks Community,

I have been reading your thread on UbuWeb's hacking on the list with great interest. It seems that with a few exceptions, the list is generally positive (with reservations) about Ubu, something that makes me happy. Ubu is a friend, not a foe.

A few things: first of all, Ubu doesn't touch money. We don't make a cent. We don't accept grants or donations. Nor do we -- or shall we ever -- sell anything on the site. No one makes a salary here and the work is all done voluntarily (more love hours than can ever be repaid). Our bandwidth and server space is donated by universities.

We know that UbuWeb is not very good. In terms of films, the selection is random and the quality is often poor. The accompanying text to the films can be crummy, mostly poached from whatever is available around the net. So are the films: they are mostly grabbed from private closed file-sharing communities and made available for the public, hence the often lousy quality of the films. It could be done much better.

Yet, in terms of how we've gone about building the archive, if we had to ask for permission, we wouldn't exist. Because we have no money, we don't ask permission. Asking permission always involves paperwork and negotiations, lawyers, and bank accounts. Yuk. But by doing things the wrong way, we've been able to pretty much overnight build an archive that's made publically accessible for free of charge to anyone. And that in turn has attracted a great number of film and video makers to want to contribute their works to the archive legitimately. The fastest growing part of Ubu's film section is by younger and living artists who want to be a part of Ubu. But if you want your works off Ubu, we never question it and remove it immediately; it's your work after all. We will try to convince you otherwise, but we will never leave anything there that an artist or copyright holder wants removed.

Ubu presents orphaned and out-of-print works. Sometimes we had inadvertently host works that are in print and commercially available for a reasonable price. While this is strictly against our policy, it happens. (With an army of interns and students and myself the only one in charge, it's sometimes hard to keep the whole thing together.) Then someone tells us that we're doing it and we take it down immediately and apologize. Ouch. The last thing Ubu wants to do is to harm those who are trying to legitimately sell works. For this reason, we don't host, for example, any films by Brakhage: they're in print and affordable for anyone who wants them on DVD or through Netflix. Fantastic. [The "wall of shame" was a stupid, juvenile move and we removed a few years ago it when we heard from Joel Bachar that it was hurtful to the community.] ....


Likewise, a younger generation is starting to see that works must take a variety of forms and distributive methods, which happen at the same time without cancelling each other out. The young, prominent video artist Ryan Trecartin has all his work on Ubu, hi-res copies are distributed by EAI, The Elizabeth Dee Gallery represent his work (and sells his videos there), while showing in museums around the world. Clearly Ryan's career hasn't been hurt by this approach. You can see his Ryan Trecartin's Ubu page here (all permissioned).

... In terms of sales and rentals ("Ubu is bad for business"), you'd know better than me. But when Peter Gidal approached Ubu and requested that his films be included in our archive, we were thrilled to host a number of them. I met Peter in NYC a few months ago and asked him what the effect of having his films on Ubu had been. He said, in terms of sales and rentals, it was exactly the same, but in terms of interest, he felt there was a big uptick from students and scholars by virtue of being able to see and study that which was unavailable before. Ubu is used mostly by students and in the classroom. Sadly, as many of you have noted, academic budgets don't generally provide for adequate rental or projection money. I know this firsthand: my wife, the video artist Cheryl Donegan -- who teaches video at two prominent East Coast institutions -- is given approximately $200 per semester (if that) for rentals. Good luck.

... Cinema, as you know too well, is a social experience; Ubu pales by comparison. It will never be a substitute. But sadly, for many -- unable to live near the urban centers where such fare is shown, trapped by economics, geography, career, circumstance, health, family, etc. -- Ubu is the only lifeline to this kind of work. As such, we believe that we do more good in the world than harm.

I think that, in the end, Ubu is a provocation to your community to go ahead and do it right, do it better, to render Ubu obsolete. Why should there only be one UbuWeb? You have the tools, the resources, the artwork and the knowledge base to do it so much better than I'm doing it. I fell into this as Ubu has grown organically (we do it because we can) and am clearly not the best person to be representing experimental cinema. Ubu would love you to step in and help make it better. Or, better yet, put us out of business by doing it correctly, the way it should have been done in the first place.

Kenneth Goldsmith
UbuWeb

A poem for November: "figure: MAP (AT TIDE)", by Sonam Kachru

(Sajjad Malik, http://kashmirblackandwhite.com)

figure: MAP (AT TIDE)


--"And if the seasons defeat our garden?"

1

What fear after the flowers if our eyes recede
And we ebb with unfamiliar light, against
Discolored skin, at tide -- the cutting shores,
The crueler seasons?
Here are yet mothers, and every bit as kind
As the stranger sea; we are taught, and teach
Our children to live as at the ends
Of cut stem or of leaf, or at the break in bone
With the wit of calluses; to take our tea with salt,
Wash one another clean with mud.
Are here not mothers, with a knife
To keep under the pillow of a child at night
To sever them from sleep, if their sleep
Be unkind, or inviting: to forgive us
Should we trespass in the light of morning
With a too beautiful or even unmarred face
Even as we forgive those who recede
And do not wake?

What if this be not light we once knew
To gather to it all that is bright
In a clean room in a swept house,
In the splendid accord of flowers
Pressed to absolute, almost up-to breath,
Condense at the window above the translucent flesh--
Her first turnips; to abound,
By the un-mute edges in spring,
In water we drew from mirror-blank wells,
Moldy taps set in mottled walls, to remember
Something of winter. Still,
The light is not nothing -- to show us nothing
Of the nothing new with us --
But is some scaled thing,
Or unwelcome thought,
Coiled in a damp corner in a fevered brain,
Alive to all that un-still still lives
And passes through us, and is caught
As little dust In little light.


Here is the country, if any, for amateur theology
For, doubtless, God wanted this blue country,
Eventually, to tire of the gravel-throated songs
The drowned hyacinth songs -- O,
O, O, O
But he kills me everyday ...
Did you see him this fall
Embrace me to winter? --
And tire of her tears
That flowed as prayer in her rivers,
Ash in her songs;
The gentle, whetted songs
For crueler mouths, all heartless birds
Our stones no longer breed
From the thirst of snow, the silence in reeds.

By Sonam Kachru. Opening quote: Dina Nath Nadim, Bombur ta Yambarzal, 20th century.

(Material in italics from the author's translation of a song by Habba Khatun, circa 16th century. This excerpt of a poem in five parts originally appeared October 13 at Kachru's website, Argumentative Indians.)

On his blog, Kachru, born in Kashmir and living in Chicago, writes: "my wife and I live a very happy, emotionally rich life. Our dog complains, but then she is too smart for her own good. She eats more often than we do." The author also requests visitors to his site "honk if you would like to see more" of this poem.