Jonathan Galassi's novel, Muse, is published today.

Some lines inspired by the book on poetry, editing, and love:

What Memory Forgets

Mnemosyne is the mother of the nine muses; one can’t expect her to be a good mother of that many.
Memory is mother of the muses, but they forget her.
She has no grandchildren.
The muses are virgins.

I’ve forgotten what I want to remember.
I remember what I want to forget.

In the palace of Mnemosyne, the candles burn out and you must feel one’s way in the dark. You have to remember the palace in your head or you will knock into things. Some things need to be broken, so one can examine their secret interiors. Memory needs to lose things. You don’t remember what you don’t lose.

What we have forgotten tinges what remains.

How many things we’ve forgotten would we now wish had pained us, so we would not have lost them?

This is a love story, which means it is not altogether factual.

Even the happiest love story ends in death.

It is good if your muse is stupid, especially about you.

It’s humiliating, I know, the way your muse stares off into space, and hardly notices that you exist.  You’ll write better if you can see through yourself, too.

Poetry knows that it goes on longer than we do.
Writers and editors share the loneliness of literature.

Nothing’s more imaginary than fame.

Fortune may smile, but she is blind.

Every book is a window, and every window is a mirror, as well.

While you read a book, it reads you back.

Writers weave lies like cocoons and then their souls change inside to something they were not.  But who would call a butterfly a lie?

Authors create imaginary worlds to catch real editors.

Writing would be wonderful without all these wretched words.

Editors play Hermes, raiding the tomb of the writers’ desk and dragging its contents to the eternal underworld of literature.

Editors are inclined to be orderly, but every book, as Cocteau said, is a dictionary out of order.  So how can one tell when a book is in order, since its intent is to disrupt the order of society?

Hidden Gems

    “Why is the heart alone in the chest?” Ona Gritz asks in her book of poems, Geode.
     She doesn’t give an easy answer, but in the poems you feel her heart at work.
     The collection takes one through her life, and she covers an impressive amount of territory without a single shallow note.  I have often found, in poems of trouble, the difficulties are set out like a sad offering at a flea market.  As is.  But Gritz uses each difficulty as a catapult to lift her vision, to look deeper into things, and further into future, or the past, or the lives of others.
     The beginnings and ends of her poems are double-edged.  When her father says, “a man of twenty / only wants one thing / and when I get pregnant, don’t come running to him,” she writes:
              how unfair a man is,
              this man, the first one I loved.
     In a poem about waiting for a late justice, at the hour of her marriage, she writes,
             How fully I want to love.
             Of course, anything one does fully
             is a journey alone.  But I don’t yet know this.
     I appreciated the perspective shifts.  Some poems were honed to a single, stunning image; others took you to the startling line by a meandering drive; they reflected what she called the shifting ‘ratio of love to heartbreak.’
      Most poems about relationships are stuck in the claustral space of the poet’s current thoughts.  Gritz’s poems about her relationships are not just memories, but interrogations of memory, layers of moments, words address to dead relatives, and notes to and from her past selves.
       I loved the poems about her blind lover, and the doors of perception he opened to her.  She notes that when your lover is blind, your fashion advice is gospel, and “You can stop shaving your legs.”
       The poem, “Route 2” begins:
             Why is divorce so expensive,
             Lynn asks . . ..
             Because it’s worth it.
      Humor is tragedy examined closely, and inside tragedy lies a seed of humor: humor is the flower and tragedy is the seed, each lies within the other in an endless unfolding.
       “People change and forget to tell each other,” Lillian Hellman said.  They even forget to tell themselves.  In this book, Gritz tells us, in order to grasp it all herself.  It’s a pleasure to accompany her.
      There is nothing sanctimonious in this volume, but every connection is sacred.  She speaks of the unpromising texture of the geode, which, when broken, reveals startling brilliance.  Each poem in Ona Gritz’s Geode was a rough moment opened by her hard work to offer us insight from the heart.

Laura Maffei's poetry

I read Laura Maffei’s book of tanka, “Drops from her Umbrella.”  I loved the quiet shock of the sharp turn in the small space of a short, traditional Japanese form:

Halloween—

infant Batman

in my arms

barely aware of this world

that needs saving

Maffei uncovers the quiet chaos of our private life:

how much laundry

is too much

the dark tangle

of many sleeves 

inside the machine

She plays with traditional poetry material in sharp lines:

tight buds

against the gray sky

this spring

you might, I tell them,

want to wait a while

Maffei can write originally about desire—no mean feat.

let’s not

fall for each other

this new guy tells me

little metal cell phone

hot on my ear

not unlike 

Death himself

a man in a black sports car

flirts with me

at sixty-five miles per hour

I loved the shocking juxtapositions:

sunny day

unexpectedly 

a hearse

in my rear-view mirror

and the long line behind it

These poems are long stories made short, honed to that moment when something strikes the mind like a match, so one is burned and enlightened with her.  The language is so pure it perversely conveys emotion.

Inspired by Spielberg's film, Lincoln

There is one photograph of Lincoln’s second inaugural address.  It had rained for weeks, but crowds jostled to witness him speak.  Crowds pressed those on the edge of the balcony so they leaned halfway over the railings.  On the graded ground beneath the marble steps, the crowd strains visibly toward the point above, where the president stood, his body the one thing blurred, as if the world had stopped turning, but he was passing through.

He spoke briefly, a single handwritten sheet.

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

He folded the sheet roughly, like a note of no further interest.  He lowered his head and turned from the crowd to walk back to the White House.

Recently, three more photographs have been found—mislabeled in the National Archive.  Soldiers with bayonets lined the path through which Lincoln passed.  If you look close, on the left behind a flag, you may see the woman in a ragged dress who pressed through and plucked his sleeve.  He turned and paused to let her speak.  We can only imagine her words:

“When the war’s won, your battle will be lost,” she whispered.  “In the theater of war, there is no third wall.  You cannot draw a line of fire.”

Lincoln leaned closer, as if her face reminded her of a mourner in recent dream.

“The last act will be played with a curtain for a winding sheet, but your enemies shall be hung with the curtain wrapped around their heads.”

“Don’t listen to such nonsense,” an aid said.  Lincoln was too inclined to predict his own assassination.  He’d joked on the walk over, “Is it time for me to walk to my scaffold?”  He felt that, having drawn the great nation through this nightmare, could he wake unscathed?  Would he lie in peace if he had not paid, as so many did, with his own blood?

Poem from Osip Mandelstam

The taunting form of your face

eluded my grasp in the cloud.

God, I called out by mistake—

I’d never called him aloud.

God’s name unfurled from my chest

like a bird from a cage and

soared through the thick, swirling mist.

Behind the bare cage I stand.

                  trans. Holly Woodward

Osip Mandelstam's poem

My mouth is frozen cold—

my skin is shivering,

but the sky dances gold,

commanding me to sing:

Weep, suffer love, know it,

and don’t drop the frail ball,

you tormented poet,

that I’ve lightly let fall.

So this is the real tie

to heaven’s secret realms,

in this heavy, dark sky—

the sadness overwhelms.

What if, above that shop,

this star shining so hard

were suddenly to drop

through my heart like a shard?

translated by Holly Woodward

Two judgments bookend Mandelstam’s work:

Osip’s mother wanted her son to enter a more secure profession than poetry and dragged him at eighteen to the eminent editor, Makovsky. She demanded that he read the boy’s poems and decide on the spot if they showed any talent. If not, she would forbid her son to write. The editor glanced at a few verses and was about to dismiss them. But Makovsky said that he saw in the boy’s face “such an intense, agonized beseeching, that he won me to his side—for poetry and against the skin trade.” He turned to the mother and said gravely, “Yes, Madam, your son has talent.” He then had to publish the poems.

A second judgment came n 1934, under Stalin’s escalating reign of terror. Mandelstam recited to five people a short verse that mocked a man with a cockroach mustache. He never wrote the lines down.

When a copy arrived on Stalin’s desk, everyone in Moscow knew it. Stalin called Boris Pasternak and asked him, “Mandelstam is the best living Russian poet, isn’t he?’ “Yes,” Pasternak answered. Stalin bellowed, “So why haven’t you called me to defend him?”

Daisy from my Mother's Grave

My great-grandmother, Elizabeth Woodward, wrote poems as a girl growing up in Brooklyn. Her ten children left her with little time to write, but some of her childhood verse was published in the New York papers. This poem in memory of her mother she kept to herself. Into this page of her journal she slipped a tiny wild daisy from her mother’s grave in Green-Wood Cemetery.

To a Daisy from my Mother’s Grave, 1852

When hills and meads were brown and bare

And wintry winds swept chilly by

This little daisy blossomed fair

Beneath a cold and foreign sky.

Sweet little flower, it raised its head

Within the Greenwood’s hallowed ground

And smiled above the lovely dead

The last which graced that quiet mound.

In youth the hand of her now cold

Beneath the spot that marked thy smile,

Oft plucked the daisy from the mould

In her and thine own native isle.

Yet like thee from the English shore

Transplanted neath the western sky

She passed away life’s transient hour

Midst peaceful scenes at last to die.

Tis thine to boast no colors gay

Tis thine no stately green to wear

So would affection stoop to pay

A tribute to the one so dear.

I doubly prize the little gem

Since blooming on my mother’s grave

My father snipped thy tender stem

To me this simple flower gave.

Sweet daisy we would learn from thee

To scorn no power that we may hold

The humblest offering that may be

Is oft more dear than gems or gold.

A poem by Robert Desnos in my translation from the French

L'anneau de Moebius



Le chemin sur lequel je cours


Ne sera pas le même quand je ferai demi-tour


J'ai beau le suivre tout droit


Il me ramène à un autre endroit


Je tourne en rond mais le ciel change


Hier j'étais un enfant 


Je suis un homme maintenent


Le monde est une drôle de chose


Et la rose parmi les roses


Ne ressemble pas à une autre rose.

Mobius Ring

The road I run along

today is not the same one

I set out upon, and went straight on

it takes me back beyond where I’d begun

I've come round but the sky

is not the same. Yesterday I

was a child now I am a man

the world grows, a shifting design

and every single rose, you’ll find

is different than the rose in mind.

Translated by Holly Woodward

Adapted fromWikipedia:

Robert Desnos was a French surrealist poet who fought in the Résistance during the Nazi occupation. The Gestapo arrested and deported him to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg, and Terezin.

One day, Desnos and other prisoners were taken in the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon the truck stopped and the guards ordered them off. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. He told her that she would have a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.

The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before, they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed.

Desnos died in "Malá pevnost", which was an inner part of Terezín used only for political prisoners, from typhoid, only weeks after the camp's liberation. The poems he wrote during his imprisonment were accidentally destroyed after his death.

In memory of my father

Blue Hunter

On his birthday, three decades after his death,

my father’s soul feels so far off—lost.

I wrote his other child, though we rarely met.

She said she thought of him too, on Ayers Rock—

his memory still encircled the earth

a hundred years after his birth.

The one gift I know his two daughters share,

the one light that reaches from here to there,

he taught me at night on our back lawn,

great Orion, killed by his own love.

Dad showed me the nova where new stars form,

his blue knee, Rigel, and Betelgeuse above—

it’s dying, but the emptiness is so vast

we will feel nothing of its shattering blast.

If I could grasp the distance of that star,

would the dark years between us feel so far?