Week 9: RETURN

Morris Graves, 1940s

 A very good evening, you all. So many openings in the work--each one meaningful...

Here's another of the old poems. This one from Li Po, in a very free translation by Ezra Pound (the poem becoming Pound's own...which is how things work, sometimes...)

The new word: RETURN



Ezra Pound (translator)

          The River-Merchant's Wife (Li Po)

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
      As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Week 8: WANDER / ROAM

Huang Kung Wang, Dwelling in the Fu-Ch'un Mountains, handscroll detail

The new word: WANDER / ROAM

The poems--as an inspiration, or sometimes simply as an opening to what poets do--which may translate into what you do... There's a always a play between the what and the how. The materials being words, rather than charcoal or color.

Po Chü-i (from T'ang Dynasty China) wrote this more than a thousand years ago. He inspired generations of writers (and painters) who followed... The translator is David Hinton.

The story here cuts close--but the hope (even veiled) remains very great...

Setting a Migrant Goose Free
Po Chü-i

Snows heavy in Hsun-yang this tenth-year winter,
riverwater spawns ice, tree branches break and fall,

and hungry birds flock east and west by the hundred,
a migrant goose crying starvation loudest among them.

Pecking through snow for grass, sleeping nights on ice,
its cold wings lumber slower and slower up into flight,

and soon it’s tangled in a river-boy’s net, carried away
snug in his arms, and put for sale alive in the market.

Once a man of the north, I’m accused and exiled here.
Man and bird: though different, we’re both visitors,

and it hurts a visiting man to see a visiting bird’s pain,
so I pay the ransom and set you free. Goose, o soaring

goose rising into the clouds – where will you fly now?
Don’t fly northwest: that’s the last place you should go.

There in Huai-hsi, rebels still loose, there’s no peace,
just a million armoured soldiers long massed for battle:

imperial and rebel armies grown old facing each other.
Starved and exhausted – they’d love to get hold of you,

those tough soldiers. They’d shoot you and have a feast,
then pluck your wings clean to feather their arrows.

_____

(Po Chü-i,  translated by David Hinton)

Week 7: GUIDE

Gustav Klimpt, Palas Athene

The new word: GUIDE

We each have different connections with the past. Nate's music (music-becoming-form), Lauren's anchor--the fold-down image of her parents, attentively threaded, Christina's traces of Nairobi (each one necessary)--Ari's night flight to Philadelphia, Michelle's flower and grasses, Jorge's understandings of love and friendship (and loss), Katia's only-by-Katia's layering of marks. Suok's blues, Kat's whites, and Maël's--Maël's what--maybe Maël's calm restlessness... All points of entry into your individual worlds. 

Oh yes--Eulaila Rae--your many different facets. And many possible openings...

_______

ITHACA

C.P. Cavafy

translated from modern Greek by Rae Dalven

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

Week 6: REACH

 

Pierre Bonnard

The new word: REACH

_________


Larry Levis

In a Country

My love and I are inventing a country, which we 
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were 
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw 
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the 
river, there will be no way out. There is already a 
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke. 
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more 
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can 
never erase.

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were 
lying in bed, watching our country: we could 
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and 
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw 
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out 
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had 
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn't sure. 
There were birds calling. The creaking of our 
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if 
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly, 
for the last time.

Week 5: ANCHOR

Richard Diebenkorn

Good gathering last night--I pushed you a bit in terms of letting the work open. It's that time in the semester when we know each other well enough--each new piece becoming part of a family. That said, it was a pleasure to look at the things you've been making--the experiments and variety are good, and everyone's into the projects. What more could we ask?

Thanks to Katia again for setting up the blog site and inviting everyone. Take a look at her first post--and add your own. It will make a good record--and I like (in particular) the shared aspect of the endeavor...

Here's the link: http://vs280.blogspot.com/

_____
 
The new word: ANCHOR

And a poem, with a prose addition, by Yehuda Amichai. It's the second part that pertains.

Tourists by Yehuda Amichai

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.


Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Week 4: MEND

R.B.Kitaj

Last night's class--another good evening. Many of you are doing ambitious work. A couple need to push harder. Remember our various discussions of materiality. And Christina's question--about the "defamiliarization" of the representational image in order to be able to see it again as form... And whether there's ever a form without some kind of representational implication... Leonardo spoke of looking at the shapes in plaster walls--seeing their possible meanings. It's easy to do this with maps as well--the shapes of countries for example (an abstract concept to be sure, especially since an overview at that scale is never available to us). Siberia and Alaska (this was my own childhood image, from a map my father had framed and mounted on the wall above our beds)--a goat leaning forward to kiss a moose...

But seen the other way, take any seemingly familiar representational image--squint at it, or turn it upside down--and suddenly you've returned it to the world of form. In other words, we work from both approaches--as in R.B. Kitaj's charcoal drawing from about 1980, below. A good place to be... 
______

The new word: MEND

Which has a very physical component--but relates to the word heal--which in turn is related to the idea of making whole... Whenever and wherever possible. But why is this so? Relationship between fragment and whole. What makes a work complete? How do we get it there?

Pierre Renoir film (1915):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK12sFDOU54
________

 

The Day Lady Died

Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                           I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing


Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. 
Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. 

Week 3: JOIN

The new word: JOIN

Very enjoyable evening, last.  The work and the discussion--good spirit. I liked where many of you took the projects--and the way the group came together in discussion--a good dynamic. So, we'll continue!

For the word JOIN recall that I said you mighty consider JOIN / MERGE and see where the two words together take you...

Also, thanks to Katia for taking the lead on a class blog. Great idea. Please set it up at www.blogspot.com (a google site)--the comments function is straightforward and easy to access. I'll send Katia everyone's name and email. She'll create the blog so that you're invited participants--that means everyone can add their own posts, as well as comment on each other's posts..

Here's the link to the film of the Cossack horsemen that we watched together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwa9iB2zOsU&feature=related
________

And the poem by Po Chü-i, from the T'ang Dynasty in China--middle 700's. (As Ezra Pound once put it, "poetry is news that stays news.")


Beside the Pond, Under Bamboo

A path winds past brambleweave fence and simple home,
jade-green: ten acres of idle dwelling, a pond gracing half.

After eating my fill and dozing refreshed at the window,
I wander off under the trees, alone, my feet light as air,

for water clarifies the spirit no less than a perfect friend,
and bamboo is a master that frees the mind to emptiness.

Why worry about that world of people, why plague mind
and ruin eyes in search of a kindred spirit here or there?

Po Chü-i
(translated by David Hinton)