Rogue poets of the megalopolis March 18, 2009
Posted by Jenny in literature, poetry.Tags: Mexico City, poetry, Roberto Bolano, Savage Detectives
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I have been reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. (The “n” in Bolano should have a squiggle over it—pretend it’s there.) Much of it takes place in Mexico City. Bands of poets roam through the—I was going to say labyrinth, but that’s a cliche in Latin American literature, the sort of cliche despised by Bolano—they roam through the monstrous alphabet of the city.
Like gangs of thugs, they have leaders and allegiances and feuds. The young Juan Garcia Madero is invited to join the visceral realists, and he joyously accepts, although he is not sure what “visceral realist” actually means. He and his friends stay out in cafes and talk about poetry hour after hour, or they meet with an aging literary type who knew some of their avant garde heroes, and they drink “Los Suicidos” mezcal with him as they argue the merits of various writers. They constantly steal books. They have multiple and complicated sexual relationships. They smoke pot. They recite Rimbaud on the dance floor of a seedy club at 3:00 in the morning.
This is a world that barely exists in North America. We have a severe shortage of fierce and roguish poets. The ones that do exist languish like wild animals in a zoo. It’s in the poverty-ridden, dangerous parts of the world that people find it absolutely essential to make that connection between ideals and everyday life. I’ve learned about that from my Colombian friends.
Roberto Bolano
Mom and cosmology March 12, 2009
Posted by Jenny in memoir, nature, philosophy, poetry.Tags: age of universe, Barbara Bennett, cosmology, memoir, philosophy of science, poetry
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Barbara Bennett
Many people remember my mother as a nice little old lady. And they are right—she was nice, she was little (she grew steadily smaller over the last 10 or 15 years of her life), and one certainly can’t dispute the fact that, at the end, she was old. When she departed on July 3, 2007, her age was 84.
It was just that when you chatted with her over a cup of tea, she might want to talk about the philosophy of science or a new development in astronomy rather than Florida vacations or grandchildren. This was not only an unusual interest; it was one that she had come to relatively late, in mid-life, in the course of her perpetual exploration of the world of ideas. Her interest could not be explained by the usual determinants of childhood experience, college education, or any circumstance involving friends or acquaintances. There was, perhaps, a larger proportion of philosophers than usual within the extended family—my uncle was a philosophy professor—but by and large she came to the subject independently.
In her 50s and into her 60s, she attended university courses in the philosophy of science, eventually publishing a paper about epistemological realism in the context of quantum physics. And, having a mind that always sought connections—those shining moments of insight that come from linking things never before thought of together—she made a connection between the philosophy of science and the subject of nature, her other enduring interest. And she wrote poems about that connection.
Some who read her poems did not like the way she connected the concrete and the abstract. I think the real problem was that those readers simply had no taste for the abstract. They told my mother that she would do better to write about personal experiences—something more confessional, perhaps.
I am glad to say that she rejected that advice.
I would like to share a poem written by my mother. It is called “A New Cosmology.”
By the pulsing light of Cepheids
lucid as in crystal micro-time,
shocked astronomers weigh the age of the farthest
stars and find in wild illogic they
are older even than the universe.
What stars are these that pass like fossil seeds
ambered in archaic time between
extinction and rebirth?
The world collapsing
into darkness, a new time, another
universe will gather up the seeds
of stars, and over eons open out
and flower to become a painted cosmos
never dreamed before. Then what frail
language will be scribbled on the sky
to read the enigmatic stars anew?
Galaxy clusters seen through Hubble telescope
A river valley seen in an interesting way January 22, 2009
Posted by Jenny in literature, nature, travel.Tags: East Lyn River, Exmoor, poetry, Ted Hughes
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East Lyn River in Exmoor (more about this in a later post)
I think what I like best about this poem by Ted Hughes is that it’s really all verbs. All sorts of things are going on in his river valley. It’s not different nouns stacked on top of each other, it’s big processes intensely happening.
In the Dark Violin of the Valley
All night a music
Like a needle sewing body
And soul together, and sewing soul
And sky together and sky and earth
Together and sewing the river to the sea.
In the dark skull of the valley
A lancing, fathoming music
Searching the bones, engraving
On the draughty limits of ghost
In an entanglement of stars.
In the dark belly of the valley
A coming and going music
Cutting the bed-rock deeper
To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music
The valley dark rapt
Hunched over its river, the night attentive
Bowed over its valley, the river
Crying a violin in a grave
All the dead singing in the river
The river throbbing, the river the aorta
And the hills unconscious with listening.
