Reminding the suggestive power

Poet Laureate Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan was born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was an oil well driller and sometime-prospector. She received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, Ryan has lived in Marin County. Her partner of 30 years is Carol Adair.

For more than 30 years, Ryan limited her professional responsibilities to the part-time teaching of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., thus leaving much of her life free for "a lot of mountain bike riding plus the idle maunderings poets feed upon." She said at one point that she has never taken a creative writing class, and in a 2004 interview in The Christian Science Monitor, she noted, "I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy."

In her poems Ryan enjoys re-examining the beauty of everyday phrases and mining the cracks in common human experience. Unlike many poets writing today, she seldom writes in the first person. She has said, "I don’t use ‘I’ because the personal is too hot and sticky for me to work with. I like the cooling properties of the impersonal." In her poem "Hide and Seek," for instance, she describes the feelings of the person hiding without ever saying, "I am hiding":

It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.

She describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader: "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."

Ryan’s poems are characterized by the deft use of unusual kinds of slant and internal rhyming–which she has referred to as "recombinant rhyme"–in combination with strong, exact rhymes and even puns.

The poems are peppered with wit and philosophical questioning and rely on short lines, often no more than two to three words each. She has said of her ascetic preferences, "An almost empty suitcase–that’s what I want my poems to be. A few things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying." Because her craft is both exacting and playfully elastic, it is possible for both readers who like formal poems and readers who like free verse to find her work rewarding.

John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said: "Halfway into a Ryan poem, one is ready for either a joke or a profundity; typically it ends in both. Before we know it the poem arrives at some unexpected, deep insight that likely will alter forever the way we see that thing."

Ryan has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition artist’s book, along with a number of essays. Her books are: "Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends" (1983), "Strangely Marked Metal" (Copper Beech, 1985), "Flamingo Watching" (Copper Beech, 1994), "Elephant Rocks" (Grove Press,1996), "Say Uncle" (Grove Press, 2000), "Believe It or Not!" (2002, Jungle Garden Press, edition of 125 copies), and "The Niagara River" (Grove Press, 2005).

Her awards include the Gold Medal for poetry, 2005, from the San Francisco Commonwealth Club; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001; the Union League Poetry Prize in 2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Her poems have been widely reprinted and internationally anthologized. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Ryan's "Mirage Oases" is one of the six poems that McClatchy selected:

Mirage Oases

First among places

susceptible to trespass

are mirage oases

whose graduated pools

and shaded grasses, palms

and speckled fishes give

before the lightest pressure

and are wrecked.

For they live

only in the kingdom

of suspended wishes,

thrive only at our pleasure

checked.

—Kay Ryan, 1997

Ryan and the short poem

Ryan's poems are often quite short. In one of the first essays on Ryan, Dana Gioia, wrote about this aspect of her poetry. "Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L.Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis– signals a return to concision and intensity." Gioia illustrated his essay with Ryan's poem, "Paired Things":

Paired Things

Who, who had only seen wings,

could extrapolate the

skinny sticks of things

birds use for land,

the backward way they bend,

the silly way they stand?

And who, only studying

birdtracks in the sand,

could think those little forks

had decamped on the wind?

So many paired things seem odd.

Who ever would have dreamed

the broad winged raven of despair

would quit the air and go

bandylegged upon the ground,

a common crow?

—Kay Ryan, 1997

Influences and affinities

Many reviewers have noted an affinity between Ryan's poetry and Marianne Moore's. Charlotte Muse suggests a comparative reading of "Mirage Oases" and Moore's "By Disposition of Angels

By Disposition of Angels

Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.

Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?

Something heard most clearly when not near it?

Above particularities,

These unparticularities praise cannot violate.

One has seen, in such steadiness undeflected,

How by darkness a star is perfected.

Star that does not ask me if I see it?

Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?

Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?

Mysteries expound mysteries.

Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,

no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,

too like him, and a-quiver forever.

—Marianne Moore, 1945

Lightness and seriousness

Ryan's "wit", "quirkiness", and "slyness" are often noted by reviewers of her poetry, but Jack Foley emphasizes her essential seriousness. In his review of Say Uncle he writes, "There is, in short, far more darkness than "light" in this brilliant, limited volume. Kay Ryan is a serious poet writing serious poems, and she resides on a serious planet (a word she rhymes with "had it"). Ryan can certainly be funny, but it is rarely without a sting."Some of these disjoint qualities in her work are illustrated by her poem "Outsider Art", which Harold Bloom selected for the anthology The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997

Outsider Art

Most of it’s too dreary

or too cherry red.

If it’s a chair, it’s

covered with things

the savior said

or should have said—

dense admonishments

in nail polish

too small to be read.

If it’s a picture,

the frame is either

burnt matches glued together

or a regular frame painted over

to extend the picture. There never

seems to be a surface equal

to the needs of these people.

Their purpose wraps

around the backs of things

and under arms;

they gouge and hatch

and glue on charms

till likable materials–

apple crates and canning funnels–

lose their rural ease. We are not

pleased the way we thought

we would be pleased.

— Kay Ryan, 1997

Some other poems

Bad Day

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

Dutch

Much of life

is Dutch

one-digit

operations

in which

legions of

big robust

people crouch

behind

badly cracked

dike systems

attached

by the thumbs

their wide

balloon-panted rumps

up-ended to the

northern sun

while, back

in town, little

black-suspendered

tulip magnates

stride around.

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

She can ill afford the chances she must take

In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

A packing-case places, and almost any slope

Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,

She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way

To something edible. With everything optimal,

She skirts the ditch which would convert

Her shell into a serving dish. She lives

Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.

Born with the vision from below

Manoel de Barros


Manoel de Barros, author of more than twenty collections of poetry, was born in the swamp region of Brazil known as the Pantanal in 1916. He received Brazil’s highest award for poetry, the Jabuti Prize, in both 1990 and 2002, the Nestle Poetry Prize in 1997 and 2006, and the Ministry of Culture’s Cecilia Meireles Prize in 1998. His life and work were the subject of Joel Pizzini’s 1989 film O Caramujo Flor.

At 82, with a new book out, Retrato do artista quando coisa (A portrait of the artist as a thing), 81 pages, Manoel de Barros can no longer be referred to as simply the "poet of the Pantanal". With 14 books published since 1937, today he is renowned by his critics as one of the great names of contemporary Brazilian poetry. Each year his popularity increases since being discovered by the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo hub of intelligence in the 80s. His work has been referred to as ecological, earthy and primitive. Of these labels the only one he appreciated was the last.

"One day they called me primitive:/ I was in ecstasy" he describes in one of the poems in his latest book. The truth is, the image most incorrect that one could have of Manoel de Barros, is one of a poet dedicated to singing the praises of the scenery and wildlife of the Pantanal. As he has reiterated uncountable times, his interest has returned to the small, humble, underrated things by the utilitarian reason in our society. The beings that his poetry is filled with are periwinkles, rocks, frogs, slugs, salamanders and at times, a heron.


"I was born with the vision from below" he summarized in Retrato do artista quando coisa. But it is not with the spirit of a photographer or entomologist with which he encompasses these beings, but rather with the objective of reaching the "epiphany of transformation", in other words, an illumination of the sacred mystery of life. The search is less intellectual than it is spiritual. Without mocking the solemnity of the poetry ("A poem, before anything else, is unuseful," he wrote in Arranjos para assobio (Arrangements to whistle) in 1982), Manoel de Barros agrees that it was an essential work in the search for knowledge.

As all great artists, Manoel does not conform to the incompleteness of man (which nevertheless he considers "the greatest asset") and their incapacity to integrate with the anonymous flow of nature. An artist's utopia is greater than all others': to abolish the distance between the subject who sees the universe and their actual universe. Verses suggesting "nature becomes sick of us" (O livro das ignorãças (The book of ignorance)) and commenting "It's necessary to be in the state of a tree" (Retrato do artista quando coisa) are most characteristic of the poet which suggest a wish to erase the limits between man and other beings of the world.

The root of the impulse towards cosmic integration—very similar to searching for "satori" in Zen-Buddhism or enlightenment—results in an absolute overthrow of syntax, which is seen as a form of imprisonment of analogous words through the domestication of beings by everyday logic.

An example of this tendency to overcome the barriers of language are the verses: "Where the river starts a fish, / river me thing / river me frog / river me tree" (O livro das ignorãnças). Nouns that become verbs, verbs that become adjectives—in the literature of Manoel de Barros the language is considered a live organism, fluid, unobstructed. His power of synthesis and condensing is each time greater—because of this his poems and books continue to diminish in size.

Unique Life

To arrive at the linguistic liberty and at the same time the formal purification, was a long road. The angle Manoel de Barros has on life is as individual as his poetry. Born in Cuiabá in 1916, he was raised as a farm boy, amongst the country animals on the rivers of the Pantanal region. He studied in a private school, but at a young age was already familiar with the great cities, beginning in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1930s, at the age of 20, he undertook an adventurous trip that included Bolivia and New York. He published his first book at 21 in 1937: Poemas concebidos sem pecado (Poems conceived without sin). No one noticed.

In the following decade, while living in Rio de Janeiro, he married Stella, the daughter of Minas Gerais farmers and his partner still today. In Rio, timid and withdrawn, he was unable to get close to the literary resources of the era. One interesting episode illustrates his situation. One day he got up the courage and found the home of his greatest idol, the poet Manuel Bandeira. "I knocked on the door of his apartment in Esplanada do Castelo, a neighborhood in Rio—and I waited, trembling with emotion. And, when the poet waited to open the door, I broke out running for the stairs, six or seven floors, with a pulse of 120, surely", he reported in an interview.

On another occasion, in the Pantanal, he was introduced to Guimarães Rosa, who visited the region. Timidly, Manoel exchanged information with the author of Sagarana regarding the animals and regional dialect of the Pantanal. The conversation was not very long, but the affinity between the two writers was evident. Manoel de Barros—who often is referred to as the "Guimarães Rosa of poetry"—confesses that it has taken a lot of strength to not succumb to the influence of the fictionist from Minas Gerais. Along with the books that he still plans to publish, there is a reconstitution, half true, half invented of his dialog with Rosa.

In 1949, with the death of his father, Manoel de Barros saw himself at a crossroads. He had to choose between continuing in Rio, anonymous and isolated, discretely publishing his books from time to time or return to the Pantanal region, to take care of the land he inherited from his father, in the Corumbá area. By his wife's suggestion, they became farmers.

Ever since, Manoel de Barros has divided his time between taking care of the land and creating poetry. He continued publishing his books (releasing four between 1956 and 1970), and slowly burrowed through the barrier of animosity, becoming recognized in growing circles of readers. His discovery was not ignored by the great centers of the Southeast, in 1980, when he sent his book, Arranjos para assobio, to the writer, drawer and humorist Millôr Fernandes, from Rio. Millôr liked his work so much that he personally made every effort to publicize the book amongst intellectuals and journalists in Rio. Soon after, Manoel became, in the middle of academics and great-thinkers, a type of cult author.

Newspapers and magazines began requesting interviews, in most cases with unsuccessful results. Contrary to the truth, the publicity and the social columns created a myth which referred to him as an "animal of the land" leading the life of a hermit that distanced himself from the world and only talked to animals. Beyond the initial timidness, the author manifests as amiable and talkative, capable of discussing everything from the animals of the region, to literature, cinema or plastic art—always offering his doubts wanting to avoid sounding like a professor.


Syntax of the Illiterate

Possibly the person who has become most captivated by the ambivalence of Manoel de Barros—a man in the confluence between beastly nature and a more refined culture—has to be the cinematographer, Joel Pizzini (Mato Grosso) who dedicated his short film, Caramujo Flor (Reticent Flower), in 1990, to the poet. The two sides of Manoel de Barros—modern and archaic, rural and urban, rustic and sophisticated—appears in the film divided into two "alter egos", one interpreted by Ney Matogrosso and the other by Rubens Correa.

The year 1990 was also the first time Manoel de Barros combined all of his work into a single volume, Gramática expositiva do chão (Expository grammar from the ground), which was almost entirely poetry, edited by Civilização Brasileira. Thanks to that collection, which has taken the title of one of his first books published in 1966, his work has become more accessible to a larger audience that was unaware of the author's first production.

Thanks to this it was discovered that Manoel de Barros since his first two books—Poemas concebidos sem pecado (1937) and Face imóvel (Immovable face) (1942)—had cultivated some of the core characteristics of his work: paying attention to linguistic creations in popular speech, childhood memories, humor and irony of the literary culture, etc.

Manoel de Barros, today, spends more time in the city (Campo Grande) than on the farm. Dividing his time between talking to the general public and writing, he seeks the awkward syntax of the illiterate, the crazed and children. "The normal definition of words is not good for a poem", he wrote in O guardador de águas (The keeper of the waters) (1989).

He writes every day by hand, in small notebooks. His greatest work will come later when he shapes what he has written, throwing out everything commonplace, redundant and predictable. Before he is satisfied with his poetry, his wife Stella gives her opinion of whether it is complete or needs more work.

That is how the "workshop" of one of most original poets of our time functions. The result of observation and lived experience because of an acute intelligence and an absolute generosity of words and life can be found in bookstores for all to read.

Some of his works

Excerpt

Man's biggest wealth

is his incompleteness.

With this I am wealthy. Words that accept me the way

I am—I don't accept.

I can't stand being just a guy who opens

doors, who pulls valves,

who watches the watch, who

buys bread at 6 in the afternoon,

who goes out there,

who sharpens the pencil,

who sees the grape, etc., etc.

Forgive me. But I need to be Others

I intend to revitalize man

from An Education on Invention

To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary

to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor

at three in the afternoon in the month of August.
In two years inertia and scrub grass will begin

to expand our mouths. We will suffer

a little lyrical decomposition

until the scrub grass emerges in our speech.
For now, I have designed the smell of the trees.

In War

The Mayor dispatched a messenger by horse with a letter to the Emperor.
The letter announced the city had been invaded by Paraguayan troops

and expressed a need for extra recourses.
Two months later, the messenger handed the letter to the Emperor.
When the recourses arrived, the Paraguayans were no longer there.
The Emperor’s men came with fifteen young women and a few provisions to eat

on the way.
I guess they ate them all.

Corumbá is a city whose population is well mixed with Paraguayans.

In the Time of Jaguars

Devotion

There was a high wall between our houses.

Difficult to send her a message.

There was no email.

Her father was a jaguar.

We tied notes to a rock bound to a rope

and I threw the rock into her backyard.

It was glorious.

But sometimes the note got stuck in the branches of the guava tree

and then it was agony.

So it was in the time of jaguars.

Portrait

As a child, he lengthened rivers.

He walked slowly, obscurely—half-formed

in silence.

He wanted to be the voice in which stones speak.

Landscapes wandered across his eyes.

His chants were full of fountains.

Like an aroma,

he stuck to things.

from Song of Seeing

Having lived many years in the scrub grass in the way of birds

The boy took on a bird’s kind of stare—

He obtained a fountain-esque vision.

He observed things the way birds observed them.

All the unnamed things.

Water wasn’t the word water yet.

Rock wasn’t the word rock.

They just were.

Words were free of grammar and could inhabit any position.

So it was the boy could inaugurate them as he pleased.

He could give rocks the costume of the sun.

He could give song the sun’s format.

And, if he wanted to end up a bee, it was only a matter of

opening the word bee and stepping inside it.

As if it were the infancy of language.

Six or Thirteen Things I Learned by Myself

1.

The necktie of a vulture is colorless.

Leaning into the shadow of a lone nail, the vulture is born.

Moonlight on the rooftops flusters the dogs.

Waters crystallize on the leg of a fly.

June bugs don’t use their wings when they track over excrement.

A poet is a creature who licks words and gets delirious.

In the bone of a lunatic’s speech are the lilies.

3.

There are four tree theories I know well.

First: that a shrub of garbage is mightier for its ants.

Second: that a plant of filth produces the most flaming fruits.

Third: in vines that strike through the cracks in walls a sensual power grows in the cavities. Fourth: that there are in lone trees a superior rapture for horizons.

7.

Intimate is the rain

If seen from a wall damp with flies;

If beetles appear in the foliage; If geckos stick to the mirrors;

If cigarettes, out of love, get lost in the trees;

And the dark dampens on our skin.

9.

In passing her vaginula over the poor things of the ground,

the slug leaves little liquid prints.

It influences my desire to slobber over words.

In a coitus with letters!

The slug chafes on the stone’s dryness.

It drips over the aridness of the desert that is the life of a stone.

It screws the stone.

The slug requires this desert to live.

11.

That the word “wall” not be a symbol

of obstacles to freedom

of repressed desires of childhood restrictions,

etcetera (those things the explorers find in the disclosures of mental arcana).

No.

The wall that allures me

is made of tiles, adobe applied

to the abdomen of a house.

I have a crawling taste

for going through entryways

coming down into the cracks in walls

through fissures, through crevices–lascivious

as ivy.

To be the tile’s blind lip.

The worm that glows.

12.

His France is useless.

It’s only good for playing violin.

From drinking water out of a hat the ants already know who he is.

It’s totally useless.

The same as saying:

a dust that likes what’s left of the soup is a fly.

He said one needs to be a nobody his whole life.

To be a developed nothing.

He said the origin of the artist is in this act of suicide.

13.

Place where there is decadence.

In which the houses begin to die and bats inhabit them.

In which the grasses enter, enter men, houses shut from the inside.

The moonlight will find only rocks vagabonds dogs.

Grounds besieged by abandon, given over to poverty.

Where men will have the strength of poverty.

And the ruins will bear fruit.

The name of redeemer from mirrors

Forough Farrokhzad

Forugh Farrokhzād (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January,1935-February 13,1967 was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably Iran's most significant female poet of the twentieth century. She was a brilliant modernist poet and an iconoclast.

Forugh (also spelled as Forough) was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar in 1935. She was the third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydon, Pouran, Gloria) and attended school until the ninth grade, then learning painting and sewing at a girl's school for the manual arts. At age sixteen or seventeen she was married to Parviz Shapour , an acclaimed satirist. Forugh continued her education with classes in painting and sewing and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. A year later, she had her only child, a son named Kāmyār (subject of A Poem for You).

Within two years, in 1954, Forough and her husband divorced. Parviz won custody of the child. She moved back to Tehran to write poetry and published her first volume, entitled The Captive, in 1955.

Forough, as a female divorcée writing controversial poetry with a strong feminine voice, became the focus of much negative attention and open disapproval. In 1958 she spent nine months in Europe and met film-maker/writer Ebrahim Golstan, who inspired her to express herself and live independently. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion before going to
Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy.

This 1962 film was called This House is Black and won awards world-wide. During 12 days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers, whom she adopted and had live in her mother's house.

In 1963 she published the volume Another Birth and by now her poetry was mature and sophisticated, also being a profound change from previous modern Iranian poetic conventions.
On February 13, 1967, at 4:30 pm, Forough died in a car accident at age thirty-two. In order to avoid hitting a school bus, she swerved her Jeep, which hit a stone wall; she died before reaching the hospital. Her poem 'Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season' was published posthumously and is considered the best-structured modern poem in poetry.

A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann's A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry, was published in 1987. Also about her is a chapter in Farzaneh Milani's work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992). She is the sister of the singer, poet and political activist Fereydoon Farrokhzad (1936 — 1992; assassinated in Bonn, Germany. Translations into English include those by Sholeh Wolpe, The Sad Little Fairy Maryam Dilmagahani , Sin: Selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad. Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries on her; The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004).


Some of her poems

Another Birth
My entire soul is a murky verse
Reiterating you within itself
Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings
In this verse, I sighed you, AH!
In this verse,
I grafted you to trees, water and fire
Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day
Perhaps life
Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Perhaps life is a child returning home from school
Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette
Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings
Or the puzzled passage of a passerby
Tipping his hat
Saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile

Perhaps life is that blocked moment
When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes
And in this there is a sense
Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon
And the reception of darkness
In a room the size of one solitude
My heart
The size of one love
Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,

At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots
At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed
At the songs of the canaries
Who sing the size of one window.

Ah
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me
My lot is going down an abandoned stairway
And joining with something in decay and nostalgia
My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories
And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
"I love
Your hands"

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
And the sparrows will lay eggs
In the hollows of my inky fingers
I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries
Round my ears
I will put dahlia petals on my nails
There is an alley
Where the boys who were once in love with me,
With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs
Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
Who was one night blown away by the wind
There is an alley which my heart
Has stolen from places of my childhood
The journey of a volume along the line of time
And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume
A volume conscious of an image
Returning from the feast of a mirror

This is the way
Someone dies
And someone remains
No fisherman will catch pearls
From a little stream flowing into a ditch

I
Know a sad little mermaid
Dwelling in the ocean
Softly, gently blowing
Her heart into a wooden flute
A sad little mermaid
Who dies with a kiss at night
And is born again with another kiss at dawn

Window

A window to see,

A window to hear,

A round window like an unending well:

It should reach to the core of the earth.

And should release into that kind, blue, even air.

A window that loads lonely little hands

by the nocturnal scent of the generous stars.

A window that invites the sun

to the glacial exile of blooms.

A window is enough for me.

I am coming from the land of puppets

And from the shade of painted trees

in the printed gardens of the fiction books.

And from the arid season of thrills of romance,

From deserted lanes of innocence,

From the years of pastel faced letters.


I am coming from behind bench of a tired class.

And from that confusing time

whilst I wrote the spell of “stone” on the board

and terrified birds fled from the cracking branches of the trees.


I arrive from beneath roots of the carnivorous trees,

And my mind is still filled by the fearful calls

of dried butterflies,

under heavy volume of blank, aged books.

When my trust was hung from the frail justice line of the town,

And in the roads, they were cutting the head of my torch,

When they had blind folded innocent eyes of my love,

When fresh blood erupted from all veins of my shaking dreams,

And when my life was nothing but the regular song of the grandfather clock,

I realized that I had to love,

I had to love madly.

A window is enough for me.

A window to the instance of insight, sight and peace,

Now that little walnut tree is so grown, grown, so grown,

that it can narrate the tale of wall

to its young leaves.



Ask the name of redeemer from mirrors:

You see,

This trembling ground underneath your feet

is lonelier than you.


The verdict of ruin arrived in prophetic, sealed notes,

And those infected clouds and incessant blasts perhaps,

flow from those sacred words.



My friend!

Don’t forget,

When you land on the moon,

engrave the date of the carnage of the blooms

on its sad, pale, wrinkled face.


Dreams always fall from their naive heights and die,

And on the soil, where old beliefs silently rest,

a little plant, with four tiny leaves, constantly grows.

I smell this plant.


A woman was buried in the chaste coffin of her hope.

Is she my young days?

A gentle god was taking nightly walks,

in the fresh air of the roofs.

Will I climb again, climb again

the curious steepness of the stairs

to greet him?


I feel that the time had left.

I feel that my share of instant is planted in the past.

I feel that this stand is just a virtual room between my hairs

and the hands of this sad, strange guest.


Talk to me,

I donate you all that kindness of streaming life

I expect you nothing but the reflection of its truth.

Talk to me,

You see,

In the shelter of my window,

I am attached to the sun.


Regret
Note : It is from her first published book.

Thou left me, Ô still naïve me,

I don’t believe this spite of thee.

I had faith in thy love like a prayer

Now I can not trust any other lover.


Thou left and gone with thee, my hope and bliss

Why would I yearn yet rapture of thy kiss?

Sure, I still long for thy love, by patience

In this bitter darkness, callous silence.

Remember that mad woman who rest

One long night, on thy shielding chest?

Engulfed by love, her trembling lips heaved a sigh

Desire laughed in her glistening eye.

“She was thirsty, dampened by thy burning lip,

She recited then her plea, her sheer worship.

Coiled around thy waist like twines of vines,

Ô those shimmering arms, in the moon light lines.”

“All tales of love, whispered to her

In her lone soul, they will linger,

But what remained from that wondrous night?

The strings of vines, dried; the moon light, died.”


Alas, thou left with haste and disregard!

I adored thee, how could thou depart?

Hey Judas! Return, I will hold thee tight

I want to lodge thee in my blazing heart!


The Gift

I am talking about the extremes of darkness

and from the edge of night.

I am talking about the thickness of absolute shade.


My darling!

If you are coming to my place

Bring me a torch

and put up for me

a little window

I will then watch

the noisy crowd of the happy lane.


Friday


My silent Friday,

My deserted Friday,

My Friday: sad, like old abandoned lanes.


My Friday:

The cold day of ailing, idle thoughts,

Moist day of long, evil bore,

loaded with grief,

grief for my faith, for my hope,

Oh, my Friday, this renouncing day…


Oh, this empty room,

Oh, this gloomy house…


These isolating walls from attacks of youth,

These collapsing roofs on my slight daydream of light,

In this place of lone, reflection and doubt,

In this space of shade, text, image and sign.


My life, like a mysterious river,

streamed into those silent, deserted days,

so calmly with a lot of pride.


My life, like a mysterious river,

Streamed into those empty, gloomy rooms,

so calmly with a lot of pride.


The Wave


To me you are a wave

never here, never there,

you are nowhere!

hurling, dragging, diffuse like a plague,

You're on the go for somewhere vague.


To me you are a revolting tide in an eternal glide:

Persistent, impatient, though restless and confused

silent in your heart, fretful in your acts.

The sea of regret is your native land.


Yes, you are a revolting tide!

So always on the ride,

in an eternal glide...


One night

I will wear a mask

made of the thirst of remote shores

And I’ll capture you in my absorbing sands,

eternally away from your naval native lands

Singing the Zion of her ancestors.

Rose Ausländer

Rose Ausländer, a German-speaking Jewish poet from Czernowitz/Bukovina who spent much of her life in exile in the United States and Germany, wrote that her true home was the word itself. Her poem Mutterland (Motherland) distinguishes between national identity and individual identity which is informed by language: “My fatherland is dead/they have buried it/in fire./I live/in my motherland/word” (Mein Vaterland ist tot/sie haben es begraben/im Feuer/Ich lebe/in meinem Mutterland/Wort).

Ausländer is known for her crystalline poems describing the natural wonders of the world, such as stars, butterflies and flowers, as well as her experiences in the Czernowitz ghetto during World War II and the Shoah, her life in exile, her travels through Europe, and her relationship to family and friends.

While her early poems are tightly structured and rhymed, her later poetry is influenced by the modern rhythms of free verse which she encountered while reading modern poetry during her exile in the United States and in her meetings with Paul Celan (Paul Antschel 1920–1970). She also translated Yiddish poems by Itzik Manger (1901–1969) into German and German poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) into English.

From 1948 to 1956, while in exile in New York, she wrote approximately thirty poems in English. Ausländer dedicated many of her poems to those who had inspired her personal philosophy and writing, such as the writers Heinrich Heine, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl and Marie Luise Kaschnitz, as well as the philosopher Constantin Brunner (1862–1937).

Ausländer’s lifetime correspondence with Brunner began when she sent him one of her early poems, Niagara Falls I. Upon receiving it Brunner replied that he had been standing in spirit with Ausländer before Niagara Falls (Ed. Braun, p. 5). Brunner’s death moved Ausländer to write the poem “Constantin Brunner In Memoriam,” which laments the loss of her long-time mentor yet ends on a hopeful note: “He is not dead, and his words float/in the space of the soul above our life” (“Er ist nicht tot, und seine Worte schweben/im Raum des Geistes über unserem Leben;” Ed. Braun, p. 191).

Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer was born May 11, 1901 in Czernowitz/Bukovina (Chernovtsy), at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, into an assimilated German-speaking Jewish family. She had one brother, Maximilian (1906–1993), who lived in Czernowitz until 1945 and then in Satu Mare until 1963, when he emigrated with his wife and two children to New York. Her father Sigmund Scherzer (1872–1920) was a salesman who in his youth had been educated to become a rabbi at the court of the Rabbi of Sadgora. Ausländer’s mother Etie Rifke (Binder) Scherzer (1884–1947), originally from Berlin, maintained a close relationship with her daughter, a bond described in Ausländer’s poetry.

From childhood on, Ausländer wrote about Jewish traditions in poems such as Sadagorer Chassid, Sabbat II, Ur, and an untitled poem in which she relates her own experiences of forced exile to the history of the Jewish people: “I/Moses-daughter/wander through the desert/A song/I hear/sand and stones weep/starvation” (Ich/Mosestochter/wandel durch die Wüste//Ein Lied/Ich hör/Sand und Steine weinen/Hungersnot) (Vogel and Gans, p. 44).

Ausländer also captured the landscape and culture of Czernowitz and the Bukovina in her poems Dorf in der Bukowina (Village in the Bukovina), Heimatstadt Czernowitz (Hometown Czernowitz), and Czernowitz vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Czernowitz before the Second World War), a poem that recalls her idyllic childhood and the multiple cultures and languages coexisting in this geographic area: “Vier Sprachen/verständigen sich/Viele Dichter blühten dort auf/deutsche jiddische Verse/verwöhnten die Luft//Bis Bomben fielen/atmete glücklich die Stadt” (Four languages/communicate/Many poets blossomed there/German Yiddish verses/graced the air/Until bombs fell/the city breathed happily” (Vogel and Gans, p. 33).

From 1907 to 1919 Ausländer attended the Volksschule and the Lyzeum Czernowitz. Due to the war she lived and attended school in Vienna from 1916 to 1918. After receiving her high school diploma in Czernowitz in 1919 she went on to study literature and philosophy at the city’s university. In 1920 her father’s death prompted her to emigrate the following year to Minneapolis/St. Paul and Winona in the US together with Ignaz Ausländer, later her husband.

For the next two years Rose Ausländer was assistant editor of the magazine Westlicher Herold and editor of the calendar anthology American Herold (until 1927). Her first poems were also published during this time. In 1923 she moved to New York, where she worked as a bank employee, and on October 19 married Ignaz Ausländer, who managed an automobile garage in New York. In 1926 Ausländer received her American citizenship and became co-founder of the Constantin-Brunner-Circle in New York.

At the end of 1926 Ausländer traveled to Czernowitz and separated from her husband, whom she divorced on May 8, 1930. In 1927 she spent one month visiting Constantin Brunner in Berlin after which she returned to Czernowitz in 1928 to take care of her ailing mother. At the end of 1928 she returned to New York with Helios Hecht, a graphologist, journalist and magazine editor, with whom she lived until 1935.

During the first months of 1931 she returned to Czernowitz, where she published poems in newspapers, magazines and anthologies, while working as a journalist, translator and English instructor. In 1934 she lost her American citizenship because she had been out of the country for more than three years. After 1935, when she separated from Hecht, she lived mainly in Bucharest, working at a chemical factory. In 1939, when her first book Der Regenbogen (The Rainbow) was published in Czernowitz with the support of her mentor Alfred Margul-Sperber, a company secretary at the Bowery Savings Bank, she traveled to Paris and New York.

From 1941 to spring of 1944 German troops occupied Czernowitz and Ausländer was forced to live in the Jewish ghetto of the city. Her collection of poems, Ghettomotive (Ghetto Motifs), describes her experience of horror during the Shoah. After the ghetto was dissolved, she was no longer able to leave the city and was forced to labor and hide in cellars to escape deportation and death.

Of this experience she writes in the poem Mit giftblauem Feuer (With Poison-Blue Fire): “Wir stiegen in den Keller, er roch nach Gruft./Treue Ratten tanzten mit unsern Nerven” (“We descended into the cellar, it smelled like a tomb./Loyal rats danced with our nerves”). Ausländer expressed her need to write as a means of survival during this traumatic time: “And while we waited for death, some of us lived in dream-words, our traumatized home in the homelessness. Writing was life. Survival” (Vogel and Gans, p. 84).

Of the sixty thousand Jews who had lived in Czernowitz, only five thousand survived the Shoah (Braun, ed. Vol. 1, 1985, p. 10). Erwachen (Awake) describes the Shoah: “I observe/the building/of a gigantic gallows/for me/and/my people” (Ich beobachte/den Bau/gigantischer Galgen/für mich/und/mein Volk). In a later poem, Phönix (Phoenix), she portrays the Jewish people as having risen from the ashes of the Shoah: “Phönix/mein Volk/das verbrannte/auferstanden […]” (Phoenix/my people/the burned/arisen/[…]).

When the Russians occupied the Bukovina in the spring of 1944 the Jews were liberated, enabling Ausländer to work in Czernowitz’s town library. In August 1946 she traveled to Bucharest from where she emigrated to New York the following month in the hope of also obtaining a visa for her mother, her brother and his family. The news of her mother’s death in 1947 in Satu Mare, Romania caused Ausländer to have a physical and psychological breakdown, after which she was ill for a year (Braun, ed. Vol. 1, 1985, p. 12).

She wrote numerous poems about her devotion to her mother, even after her death, as documented in the poem Die Mutter (The Mother): “Oh that the dead rise in us/ and always absolutely live in us./How did she enter, the mother, layer upon layer?/I am her shadow and she my light” (O daß die Toten sich in uns erheben/und immer unbedingter in uns leben./Wie trat sie ein, die Mutter, Schicht um Schicht?/Ich bin ihr Schatten und sie mein Licht) (Ed. Braun, p. 299).

Ausländer later also translated Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem My Mother, which captured Ausländer’s feelings of loss at her own mother’s death. The first stanza of Lasker-Schüler’s poem translated by Ausländer reads: “Was she the great angel/who walked at my side? Or is my mother buried/under the sky of smoke?” The concluding stanza describes a mother-daughter symbiosis that Ausländer herself had experienced: “I shall always be alone now/as the great angel/who walked at my side” (Ed. Braun, p. 347).

From 1953 to 1961 Ausländer worked as a foreign correspondent at the transport company Freedman and Slater in New York. During that time, from May to November 1957, she also traveled in France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands. During her trip through Europe she met Paul Celan on three separate occasions, after which her own metaphors and images became more multi-dimensional and abstract (Vogel and Gans, 118). In May 1963 she traveled to Vienna, where she met her brother and his family, who had come to a refugee camp from Romania.

Describing her month in Jerusalem in 1964, Ausländer wrote the poem Jerusalem in German, translating and modifying the same poem into an English version which begins: “I have never been in Jerusalem./When I hang my blue-white scarf/toward east,/Jerusalem swings to me/with Temple and Solomon’s Song” (Vogel and Gans, 173).

Ausländer returned to New York to plan her move to Vienna but then decided against Austria before finally settling in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1965. It was during this year that Blinder Sommer (Blind Summer), her first book publication since 1939, appeared. The bulk of her work, however, was published after 1965. In 1968 and 1969 Ausländer spent her last year in the United States. In 1972 she moved to the Nelly-Sachs-Haus of the Jewish Community of Düsseldorf.

From 1978 until her death ten years later Ausländer was confined to bed due to arthritis. During this period she was rediscovered by Dr. Helmut Braun, who was searching for authors to be published by his newly-founded publishing house, Helmut Braun Verlag, Cologne. During Ausländer’s bed-rest Braun wrote down all the poems that were in the author’s memory and made sure to promote and publish her works.

In June, 1986 Ausländer dictated her last poem to Helmut Braun: “Give up/the dream/lives/my life/to the end” (Gib auf/der Traum/lebt/mein Leben/zu Ende). That same month she revised 120 poems that she had written between 1965 and 1978 (Vogel and Gans, p. 211). Ausländer died in Düsseldorf on January 3, 1988 and was buried at the Jewish Cemetery in the city’s Nordfriedhof (North Cemetery). During her life Ausländer was awarded the Droste-Prize of Meersburg (1967), the Ida-Dehmel-Prize, the Andreas-Gryphius Prize, the Roswitha-Medallion of Bad Gandersheim (1980) and the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Art (1984).

Ausländer owned only two suitcases throughout her life, traveling with them from country to country. At her death they remained with her brother Max in New York until his death, after which they became part of Ausländer’s posthumous collection, now housed at the Heinrich Heine Institut in Düsseldorf and managed by Dr. Helmut Braun. Since 1998 the privately-owned Kronenhaus in Manderscheid has a literature center dedicated to Rose Ausländer which offers books by and about Ausländer.

In a poem, Verregnete Abreise (Rainy Departure), her suitcases are symbolic of her life in exile: “I hear the heart of the/locomotive beating in each/suitcase” (“Ich höre das Herz der/Lokomotive in jedem/Gepäckstück pochen,” Vogel and Gans, p. 176). For Ausländer, whose life was touched by sorrow and loss, the Shoah and exile, words became her steadfast companion, her homeland, her home.

Ausländer “wrote life out of words”: “When I/fled from childhood/my happiness/suffocated/in foreign lands/When I/in the ghetto/stiffened/froze/my heart/in the cellar hiding place/I, the survivor/of horror/write out of words/life” (Als ich/aus der/Kindheit floh/erstickte/mein Glück/in der Fremde/Als ich/im Ghetto/erstarrte/erfror/mein Herz/im Kellerversteck//Ich Überlebende/des Grauens/schreibe aus Worten/Leben) (Vogel und Gans, p. 206).

Asking herself in the poem Trauer II (Mourning II) “How/to endure/the unending sorrow?” (Wie/die undendliche Trauer/ertragen?), Ausländer replies to herself and the world: “Search for/a tiny glowing spark/in the darkness” (Such/ein Fünkchen Glanz/in der Finsternis).

Despite her encounter with the horrors of the Shoah, Ausländer believed that the true beauty of the world was invincible and that the power of the word would relay this message of hope to humanity. In Mein Reich (My Kingdom), Ausländer described her realm: “My small room/is a giant kingdom/I don’t wish to rule/but to serve” (Mein kleines Zimmer/ist ein Riesenreich/Nicht herrschen will ich-/Dienen), and made evident her desire to serve humanity with her poetry.

SELECTED WORKS BY ROSE AUSLÄNDER (in German and English)

Blinder Sommer. Vienna: 1965; Wir wohnen in Babylon. Gedichte. Frankfurt a.M.: 1984–1992; Die Sonne fällt. Gedichte. Frankfurt a.M.: 1984–1992; Braun, Helmut, ed. Ausländer, Rose. Die Erde war ein atlasweißes Feld. Gedichte 1927–1956. Frankfurt a.M.: 1985; Melin, Charlotte, ed. and trans. German Poetry in Transition. 1945–1990. Bilingual Edition. Hanover: 1999.

Published Posthumously (German and English)

Works in sixteen volumes edited by Helmut Brown

Wir ziehen mit den dunklen Flüssen. Gedichte (Volume 1) 1993; Denn wo ist Heimat? (Volume 2) 1994; Ausländer, Rose. Ed. Helmut Braun. The Forbidden Tree. Englische Gedichte (Volume 3) 1995; Die Musik ist zerbrochen (Volume 4) 1993; Wir pflanzen Zedern. Gedichte (Volume 5) 1993; Wir wohnen in Babylon (Volume 6) 1992; Gelassen atmet der Tag (Volume 7) 1992; Sanduhrschritt (Volume 8) 1994; Treffpunkt der Winde. (Volume 9) 1991; Hinter allen Worten (Volume 10) 1992; Die Sonne fällt (Volume 11) 1992; Und nenne dich Glück (Volume 12) 1994; Brief aus Rosen (Volume 13) 1994; Schweigen auf deinen Lippen (Volume 14) 1994; Die Nacht hat zahllos Augen (Volume 15) 1995; Schattenwald (Volume 16) 1995.

Works in eight volumes with index edited by Helmut Braun

Die Erde war ein atlasweißes Feld. (Volume 1) 1985; Die Sichel mäht die/Zeit zu Heu. (Volume 2) 1985; Hügel/aus Ather/unwiderruflich. (Volume 3) 1984; Im Aschenregen/die Spur deines Namens. (Volume 4) 1984; Ich höre das Herz/des Oleanders. (Volume 5) 1984; Wieder ein Tag aus Glut und Wind. (Volume 6) 1986; Und preise die kühlende/Liebe der Luft (Volume 7) 1988; Jeder Tropfen/ein Tag. (Volume 8) 1990; Ausländer, Rose. Andere Zeichen. Gedichte. Nachwort von Marie Luise Kaschnitz. 1975; Ausländer, Rose. Im Atemhaus wohnen. Gedichte. Mit einem Porträt von Jürgen Serke. 1981; Ausländer, Rose. Der Mohn ist noch nicht rot. Gedichte. Ed. Harald Vogel. 1994; Ausländer, Rose. Immer zurück nach Pruth. Ein Leben in Gedichten. Ed. Helmut Braun. 1989; Ausländer, Rose. Regenwörter. Ed. Helmut Braun. 1995; Ausländer, Rose. Alles kann Motiv sein. In Helmut Braun, ed. Ich fliege auf der Luftschaukel Europa-Amerika-Europa. Rose Ausländer in Czernowitz und New York. 1994; Ausländer, Rose. Selected Poems. Translated from the German by Ewald Osers. London: 1977; Ausländer, Rose. Shadows in the Mirror. Translation by Freed Weininger. Tel Aviv: 1981; Ausländer, Rose. Jeder Tropfen ein Tag: Gedichte aus dem Nachlass. 1990; Ausländer, Rose. Johanna Blömeke, ed. Gedichte nach dem Holocaust. 1995.

Some of her poems

MY NIGHTINGALE



My mother was a doe in another time.

Her honey-brown eyes

and her loveliness

survive from that moment.

Here she was---

half an angel and half humankind---

the center was mother.

When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be

she made this answer to me: a nightingale.

Now she is a nightingale.

Every night, night after night, I hear her

in the garden of my sleepless dream.

She is singing the Zion of her ancestors.

She is singing the long-ago Austria.

She is singing the hills and beech-woods

of Bukowina.

My nightingale

sings lullabies to me

night after night

in the garden of my sleepless dream.

Chinatown

Narrow lanes

crosswise and crossway

mustard-scented

vertical lined names

about buddhas and gewgaw

In the basement

the twilight smells like

chinese lanterns and limes

over bridges of paper

music of the rodlets

on porcelain

where red lobster lies between

stems and sap

Peacocks open blue fans

on silky sleeves

Little Woman in a Kimono

conjures tea-spirits

in the can

6000 years

slit in black eyes

hiding the heritage

around the silent quarter

see the chinese wall

sky-high drawn by

tgin paintbrushes and

confucious´lessons



Resounding silence

Some rescued themselves

Out of the night

hands are crawling

crimson-red with blood

of the slayed

It was a resounding show

a sight of fire

firemusic

Then death was silent

he was silent

It was a resounding silence

between the branches

stars were smiling

The rescued

wait at the harbour

miscarried ships are resting

They are like cradles

without mother and child


Selling

In spring

I sell

violets from lost gardens

In summer paper-roses

Asters from words

in autumn

In winter

ice-flowers from the window

of my dead mother

So I live

into the day

into the night

At night

I praise

moon and stars

until sun rises

and sells me

to the day