Will the real Dante translator please stand up!

Translators of Dante have the unenviable job of adapting to a contemporary sensibility not just a celebrated  religious-allegorical method but all or any combination of the following as well: a hendecasyllabic verse line; a 33-syllable terza rima verse paragraph (with interlocking rhymes) serving as the nucleus of a larger pattern of 33 canti per 3 cantiche; a very condensed syntax with generous sprinklings of latinisms and neologisms, brachylogies and rhetorical topoi;  rich chronicles of history and mythology; and a tendency, prevalent everywhere, to alternate between scholasticism and a more recognizable Florentine vernacular, always skilfully combined in the interests of conversion narrative. And, of course, the whole must be tempered by a gnawing sense of the injustice of the poet-pilgrim forced into involuntary exile. It is a text of poetry and theology rendered in an exquisitely beautiful lyricism. Dante's great because he's managed to do all of this.

The translator's task is no less than to give a sense of the greatness of a poet and a whole poem composed of these its constitutive parts. I think the translator who comes closest to the original in spirit and design ought quite rightfully to wear the poet's laurels, too. Who is then qualified to walk in the great poet-pilgrim's shoes? The academic (Dantisti), the educated reader whose first language is Italian, the autodidact poring tirelessly over every line, or the poet with a side interest in translation? I suppose the same could be asked of the Dante reader. I suppose I could even ask (as a forced deference to the postmodernist era), Is Dante translation even worth doing anymore? It's certainly hard to imagine any writing class instructors today touting the inherent advantages of familiarity with the Commedia (preferably in its original form), both as a model of imitation and great classical text. It seems a politics of art, premised on the virtues of 'non-meaning', may have done in the great Florentine bard after all.

I do, however, stubbornly persist in the belief that the classics have value and that poetical works, up to the present age, inspired and informed by them have always borne the best fruit: going even so far as to state categorically that familiarity with the best poetry specimens is a necessary (but never sufficient) condition of significant poetry. Translations have always seemed to give off varying degrees of scintillations of the lighted jewel held in the great master's hand. And since Dante is the poet de l'alta luce che da sé è vera, the Dante translation can be nothing but approximation, as if in the estimation we needed to determine a verse's nearness to the celestial vision as well. Identifying the lineaments of the splendid poetical jewel is always in Dante a type of devotion, whether we like it or not. It's something for which most of us are probably temperamentally unready.

 I have randomly listed 3 candidates for the distinction of being the 'best' rendition of lines 118-129 from Paradiso, Canto VI (of course, among the possible hundreds already in existence). But how we define the 'best' translation is precisely what is at stake here. The Paradiso excerpt is by no means atypical. Perhaps we'd do better to look at translation just as the sort of homage-bearing exercise it always seems to be, looking in each for intimations only of a Dantean ideal given to us almost whole over the centuries, an ideal that's worth pursuing for the reason John Henry Cardinal Newman said spiritual truths are worth pursuing, namely, because they are "implicitly true". Perhaps all the translator and reader of Dante can do is follow Cardinal Newman's injunction to regard any "skill" as "a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science" (from An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent). Guided by hopefully just this "instinct", I'd like to comment on three versions of the Paradiso passage and try making comparisons to something that's still strangely (and uncompromisingly) a literary ideal.

Ma nel commensurar d’i nostri gaggi
col merto è parte di nostra letizia,
perché non li vedem minor né maggi.

Quindi addolcisce la viva giustizia
in noi l’affetto sì, che non si puote
torcer già mai ad alcuna nequizia.

Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.
                                     (PD, VI, 118-129)
_____________________

Instinctively, I like least the translation (Sisson's) that looks too smooth (almost glib), too relatively untroubled by all the usual challenges in the original. The poet, translator and critic glosses too confidently over the difficult and technical intersections purposely to be found between a state of fallenness and redemption: happiness that results, for example, from a correspondence of rewards to desert is almost a cliche as coming nowhere near the agony of moral ambivalence rooted in that one word "merto" (properly defined as "merit" only by Samperi). Sisson fails to strike the proper polyphonic tone. There are no affinities between 'music' and 'salvation'.Nor are there places in Sisson for pause and reflection as there ought to be : certainly none of the challenge of unearthing tough syntax for the "gem" concealed within. How can he see when he can't hear? "Gaggi" is unsurprisingly given (except in Samperi) as "rewards", as if a thing to be held by right, and the road ahead always skips too merrily.  The problem is that harmonies ("Diverse voci") too sweet and enticing are barely distinguishable from sin. The final Tenth heaven looks too bland and uniform here for anyone's bother.

But in the appropriateness of our rewards
To our desert is part of our happiness,
Not to see them either more or less.

By this means the living justice so softens
Our affections that they may not be
Ever twisted by any iniquity.

Different voices make notes sound sweet;
And so different stations in our life
Make a sweet harmony among these spheres.
                               (C. H. Sisson)

Does poet and America's first translator of Dante fare any better? Here the poet in Longfellow works too much against him: trying to fan a spark into bonfires (sparks fly everywhere in Paradiso) draws attention only to itself. Beginning every line with a capital (and a capitalized "Justice" above all) is a silly affectation, and "herein" and "evermore" look as much out of place here as they do even in nineteenth-century poetry: didn't Longfellow know that Dante studiously avoided archaisms (except for rhetorical effect) and preferred to invent his own words wherever even the vernacular failed? The "instinct" for the original Dante is so errant in Longfellow that even rhymes, had the great versifier attempted them, would have all but obliterated the "terza rima". Translation here is pure dictionary work. "Portion", for example, only portions out as in a children's story whereas the more judicious "part" can at least make the reader feel the true edginess of  incomplete joy (as every step in the climb to heaven is necessarily designed to show). In Longfellow, souls, not the true bodies in which souls always chafe, sit too sweetly awaiting their turn on the dance floor. A poet whose idea of "dolce armonia" is "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" hasn't really budged an inch.

But in commensuration of our wages
With our desert is portion of our joy,
Because we see them neither less nor greater.

Herein doth living Justice sweeten so
Affection in us, that for evermore
It cannot warp to any iniquity.

Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres

                           (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

About three words separate Samperi from the others. He sings with a true Dantean heaviness in his heart: a kind of plodding literalness always pervades the true poet-pilgrim's chronicle (Perhaps only some of that is felt in this short passage). And against the greyness of exertion, physical and spiritual,  angels in Dante as in life, and their fulgurating movements, appear without the intermediaries of  technique ("sanza mezzo"): always studded with their own painful brilliances  (as in Celan), always grainy and sharp as their speech. That's the best that can be said for them: the rest is a matter of images and endless analogies and commentary. Because Samperi is he who walks also the twisting to"iniquity" (and the difference here is not slight) must be felt precisely in that "to". Samper says in Habitudinem that "To in Truth shows/the Imprint".It's not directional so much as torsional effort. The path to the light always runs obliquely to competing spheres and that requires "twisting". Furthermore, "pledges" are cold and insensate things and they don't always pay (as Sisson and Longfellow stupidly thought). The contractarian burden from which the journey to the Empyrean meant to free him could only have weighed him down the more: terrestrial life (especially in the eastside) is hard to shed even in flight. Best to make a virtue out of necessity. So Aquinas enjoins Dante in the Fourth heaven to walk with leaden feet, like someone worn out with reflection on invisible things: "E questo ti sia sempre piombo a' piedi,/per farti mover lento com' uom lasso/ e al sì e al no che tu non vedi". Redemption works rather like the endless turn of "wheels" that is all there is of heaven's own too distantly "sweet harmony". Again, Celan comes to mind.

Frank Samperi wins the laurels...

 

But in the commensuration of our pledges
  with merit is part of our joy,
  because we see them neither less nor greater.
Hence the living justice so sweetens
  affection in us, that it can never
  be twisted to any iniquity.
Diverse voices make sweet notes;
  thus diverse seats in our life
  render sweet harmony among these wheels
                                   (Frank Samperi)

A few good blogs

I'd like very much to restrict my reading to only the very finest poetry blogs and towards that end I'd appreciate getting some feedback from my few (very few) loyal "Word-Dreamer: poetics" readers out there. I want only il miglior fabbro.

I'd like to add to the blogs already listed (in sidebar) under "A Few Good Blogs". Please, do make recommendations.

My criteria for an outstanding (because I will settle for nothing less than an outstanding) poetry blog are as follows. A poetry blog must be:

(a) averse to anything that is academic in background, outlook, or attitudes;

(b) accessible to an intelligent and sensitive readership;

(c) in no way self-absorbed;

(d) always respectful and generous;

(e) informative;

(f) suspicious of any blinkered affiliations to a single poetry style, viewpoint and methodology (usually to the exclusion of the rest);

(g) always eager to display original writing, translation work and commentary on vital poetical themes and issues; and

(h) active.

I thank you all in advance!

Happy 50th, Marilyn

"I so fell in love at that point
 That there had been nothing hitherto
  Which had so bound me with sweet chains"
                                         (Dante, Paradiso)


What could possibly be the inducement to write an anniversary post on an actress I was barely old enough to remember when she died and who'd always come to me filtered anyways through media & Hollywood legend? Is a  half-decade as great a feat in death as in life? Why always this chronic soft-headed veneration where Marilyn's concerned? A lot's happened since.

"...in her eyes there blazed such a smile"

I think it's rather remarkable that talk of her anniversary--exactly fifty years this Sunday, 5 August-- coincides with my rereading of Dante's Paradiso. If, in other words, I had a choice of any Beatrice, who better than Marilyn to lead the way to my personal Empyrean. Not to the promiscuous , hypocritical and treacherous hell she'd gone to her grave with (plenty of that to go around!) but the heaven of hell she'd made for aging poetical guys like me. I've never really stopped feeling that the "eternal feminine" in dark cat eye glasses is the thing. The wisdom in a woman's eyes is always a good place to begin the journey, too. Ah, Marilyn, what stroppy triune god wouldn't have reflected that back to me as essential light...

"You are not now on earth, as you think you are"

If you think about it, she really wasn't ever of this earth. So where's the journey with her going to lead, anyways? The only heaven Marilyn's ever likely to take the greying heart to is the indelectably mortal one of eyes, hair and chin or just perhaps the bewitching simulacra (between Marilyn and the rest) that end in two tombs: hers and the empty one above reserved for Hefner, her greatest boy-man devotee. And if it's true that vision precedes love, she attracts still with the thrumming excitatory star-pulse of every boy-man. Myself included. It becomes decidedly clearer as I proceed.

"And so my lady said: 'Show forth the heat
  Of your desire..."

I've done nothing but show it. Stupid ingratitude is all anyone'll get for this, of course. As the girl with orange-red hair used to pose in cemeteries and had left everything behind in a desert town, so goes the journey of the poet devotee where Marilyn's the fatally delectable object. I recall her saying once, The heart turns against you, down to its goodly pit. So what if my guide had died excommunicate, clutching her pillow, face to the phone. The soft light of her pillow...

"But none the less, all lying set aside"

So I can't turn back, not with that mirror and all the reflected eyes, smile and lips to spur me on, pointing to Hef's empty tomb. No saving Mary on earth could compare to that.


"The rest of the blessed who appeared content
  At first to form a lily on the 'M'"

Yes, 'M' for  Marilyn, fifty years later. Which is as far as I've gotten with my puny eagle song.

Questionings of a daughter

A poem I wrote a few years back when rhymes were all the rage. I then thought (and perhaps I still do) that 'rhymes' with the aid of some abstractions could take the edge off some pretty terrible moments.
___________________


Seated on his right, heart open and glowing,
she fills calendars with dates and casts for saints
days in her most adorable White going!
Fear of nights, dabbed in shades, & Dad's complaints

can't be assuaged, she thinks, by strings of x's and o's
Face resting in linen, she stares him in the eye
and, lowering like lids, two orchid lids, shows
a grey-veined floor's a Space where daughters can lie

Tic tac toe! the comb hairs and bees spin the wheel,
make a move and be the boss by flexing me--
am I free to run in parks, or rise to skies of teal,
sewn, like reeds, in stinky ponds of Galilee?

She pats Dad on the hand tic tac! just like that,
determined to prove marble's not so hard on the knees
The stars don't impress her much either so
the sweeter to be-- I have to pee, excuse me, please

Jessica Ghawi

Sometimes life's cruelties are too unbearable to utter, except through poetry.

_____________________________

"Eulogy" by Kevin Young (which I dedicate to Jessica)


To allow silence
To admit it in us

Always moving
Just past

senses, the darkness
What swallows us

and we live amongst
What lives amongst us...

                           

On Looking into Hutchison's "Sacred Stories"

It's always been a habit of mine to read transfixed to a single impression, to one significant moment and place: to the one truth that seems to speak for the rest. And when I'd found it in Joseph Hutchison's book of verses Thread of the Real, I knew I could now begin. "Sacred stories" is that bearer of truth and a starting-point, seeming to me marvelously representative of an entire work and perhaps of an entire body of work (though I've known the poet for only a few short years and am unacquainted with his other writings). And yet it is its own singularly unique self at the same time. Heraclitus is the work's epigraphical center, and with good reason.The single poem I've chosen--or rather the primacy of the poem-- must serve as a first and final step into the poet's Heraclitean waters.  And it does. In fact, any line from it will always suffice to give you a marvelous sense of the whole opening before you. Such as.

     "But true to your class,/you keep on dreaming of being let in" (Impression)

Reading from "Sacred Stories" will make Hutchison's world look neither illusive nor allusive. Words do stand for things. But things just don't follow after, servilely obedient to plain succession. It's a chronicle of "sacred stories" and sacred stories here are never at outs with the world.The whole (in true conflux) preserves a significant sameness--call it tradition, perhaps-- though respecting life's bruising particularities. And people, places and events have made a world of difference in the poet's life. To be found expertly interlaced in every poem are biographical details, excursions through landscapes and the generous lyrical insights they give: such as the admonition from a dear mentor George McWhirter and his rhapsodical "foothills and plains" to let it "be enough" ("Thread of the Real,or the old woman "with stick-legs" found adrift in a poet-narrator's dream ("Adrift"), or the "crazed razor" tribute-poem to South Korean poet Ko Un ("After Ko Un's Flowers of a Moment") or even a sense of the latter's own misplaced Eastern ritual settling uncomfortably on the poet himself. Impressions as beguilingly varied as these always suffice.

     "Breezy golden light/on the mountain"(Place)

Such things as "smoky quartz" and "mauve thistles" ("Three Sentences Toward Evening After an Early Spring Storm"), "mesmerizing" waters ("Kooser Creek") and an old woman's "ragged cards" ("Solitaire") come up hurriedly to the poet who's always attentive enough to fix them as parts of his own uniquely rough idyll.  But, despite even the "Sacred Stories" beginnings and a line like "Breezy golden light/on the mountain", there's no jump over the border into convenient symbolism or metaphor. There's no resting in cozy southern hemispheres. It's not easy to go beyond the gravelly experiences of the poetry alone, somewhere to rest the Yeatsian head. And it takes a kind of daring to move on with the journey, following the thread of the real, into places like the winsome murmurings in a spring ("The Spring"), "blazing bees" in Montana ("Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana): and, perhaps most daring of all, the derelict behind his "cardboard sign" ("Crossroads"). Wherever you go and look, there's a type of claritas that stings rather than sings ("Claritas").

     "...how bleak/this valley was before/their ancestors sailed" (Moment)

What a faithful gathering there is of American soldier, jihadist and torturer("Tests of Faith") now that the Signifier and Signified have finally split! And wherever there's the show of some poetic justice, with imaginative truth put forward, the reader still asks how this ghoulish mélange's possible at all. The answer is fated to come, of course, as the equation in public opinion of severed child limbs with one caged dictator, who picks at his lice ("Opinions"), of "slaughtered fighters" with skillful CNN camera work ("Ambushed by a Scene on CNN"). The American audience is always assured of media objectivity, notwithstanding the glaring two-headed monsters, assured typically to a point of numbing imbecility. Hutchison discloses an American media that do not reveal shadows on the border: but that rather crackle and burst with their own deadly "shock and awe". To read is to see more of the same pathetic resumption of war glory. Here is the stream's silent treacherous deep end.

    "Sacred Stories"(Truth)

But there is truth in the poet's heart, the sense of sacredness in change itself that the whole work never lets go, of which I take his "Sacred Stories" poem at the end to be the embodiment. But not in the sense of being transcendent over the Colorado mountains and plains but as just this abiding restless permanency to be found everywhere (which I take is Hutchison's own sense of the sacred). Take any line from it and read: the real that threads through begins and ends here  Take an impression such as that given by the narrative obstinacy of "pine tree/people" and "iron-jawed" settlers and see it refracted in an old woman's "ragged cards"; take a moment such as when "big desks" and "pistols" in 1929 successfully substitute rapacious "Easy Street fortunes" for aboriginal stillness and see even here the same two-headed beast in CNN coverage of severed child limbs.

Since "No stories here/mention you" there is entrance only through imagination. None of the self-absorbed "technics" of contemporary poetry here. To be "let in" is to both be a part of the unsettling dust up of history and rely on your own imaginative wits. The stories, though no longer constant to paradigms of the past, can be yet as pleasant as folksy Niedecker tributes, biblical passages and "rough-barked" characterizations; as houses and yards, valleys and ancestors. But we shouldn't be taken in. There is a truth keen as poet's westwarding dreams that's never veiled or only half revealed, for poetic effect only. Again, though something may appear independently, like good camera work or a signifier/signified split, it can only be a reflection of everything else. When everything's already known, you don't seem to matter at all, only "dreaming of being let in."

I admit my reading of Thread of the Real may be a little fanciful but then it does take some imaginative effort to follow what I've seen as the most skillful threading of parts. And picking "Sacred Stories" as a beginning may seem even more wilful (even self-absorbed). But if this were true, Hutchison would have stopped me at the gates. I do urge anyone to repeat my little inquiry into Hutchison's "Sacred Stories", and feel the same tenacity of impressions, moments and events I've felt: the same Heraclitean truth at work. Or choose another poem, such as "Mortality", my favourite in Hutchison's collection.  And having dropped the intrusive you, to step courageously into the stream.

Sacred Stories

Breezy golden light
on the mountain.
Breath by breath,

you climb the rope
of listening and vision
down into the valley,

where the pine-tree
people have already
slipped into a tall,

swaying sleep, while
(in their slim shadows)
the grass people lean,

whispering their most
sacred story: how bleak
this valley was before

their ancestors sailed
an ocean of wind
into its barren folds.

                  *

Your ancestors came
from Germany via Ukraine,
from Ireland and Scotland.
Dirt farmers, mostly,

mostly half-assed about it,
buying rocky ground (sight
unseen, but cheap), then
trundling west in Conestogas,

iron-jawed women birthing
and burying along the trail.
Wherever they settled, they'd
one day head to town and glare

into a lens for a family portrait.
What can you buy with joy,
their lampblack eyes would ask,
on this enemy Earth?

                        *

Here where Arapaho and Ute
hunted deer in summer, cut poles
for tents, told sacred stories--here
your people platted cramped parcels,
hammered cabins out of scabrous

pine logs, so that moneyed types
could flee the flatland swelter
and odious foreign laborers. Then:
1929. At big desks of burnished oak,
ruined men pressed pistol barrels

to their heads, leaving only a stench
of saltpeter and scorched pomade.
Soon the elite sanctuary's gates
were flung wide to almost anyone
with cash. If not for those shattered

Easy Street fortunes, there'd be no
you pondering these pines, that grass,
that ginger-furred fox, that Taoist
flash of a magpie into the leafy brush.
Why this melancholy, then? You grasp

the meaning of your past, the present
with its evening sun bleeding down
beyond the ridge. No stories here
mention you. But true to your class,
you keep on dreaming of being let in.

The people's poetry: a discussion

Milt Acorn, founder of People's Poetry

Reprinted with permission here is Chris Faier's post on an excellent discussion of People's Poetry, the only alternative there exists in Canada (imo) to the prevailing academic and mainstream poetries. I'm happy to have shared the discussion with Canada's foremost 'people's poets' Chris Faiers and James Deahl.
______________________________________

Deahl/Faiers & DiDiodato discussions on People's Poetry

July 7, 2012

Dear Chris & Chase,

Below is a draft of my definition of People's poetry.

What do you think?

. . . James, Norma, & Rocky


People’s Poetry

by James Deahl


Although its roots lie deep in the Confederation Period (1880-1899), people’s literature as we know it today, both in poetry and in fiction, has been the central literary tradition in Canada since the mid-1920s when Frederick Philip Grove published his first Canadian novel, Settlers of the Marsh, in 1925. Grove’s poetic counterpart was Dorothy Livesay, who published her first collection, Green Pitcher, in 1928 and whose Day and Night (Governor General’s Award for Poetry, 1944) would set a standard for People’s Poetry that would be followed by Milton Acorn, George Bowering, and Ted Plantos, among others.

People’s Poetry is founded on two concepts: 1. That progress can be seen in the human universe — in terms of what might be called “social physics”, this means that society moves from disorder to order (thus, society improves, becomes more fair and less governed by social Darwinism); and 2. That humanity is perfectible within history. That is, humans play a (if not the) major role in their personal and collective salvation from the flaws of human nature.

 From these two principles it follows that: People’s Poetry promotes peace, equality, and human goodness; People’s Poetry opposes racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination; People’s Poetry opposes classism and class systems. It is, in short, art made for the people, not the elite. People’s Poetry works to preserve and enrich our natural and human environment.

In practice, People’s Poetry tends to: be committed to Modernist concepts while retaining key Romantic ideals; support Socialist / Social-Democratic political movements; oppose large-scale capitalism and its attendant “business culture”; encourage all people to participate in building their culture.

From the days when Grove and Livesay were writing and publishing their early books, realism joined with idealism has been the hallmark feature of people’s literature in Canada. This sets it apart from Post-modern, Imagist, and Confessional poetries, which also are present in our contemporary literature. Leading People’s Poets today include John B. Lee, Robert Priest, Ronnie R. Brown, and Chris Faiers.


            Note: People’s Poetry is a term generally used only in Canada. In the United States this type of writing is usually referred to as Populist Poetry, and in Britain as Public Poetry.



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late July 7- early July 8th, 2012

Dear James,
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read & discuss your draft definition of (Canadian) People's Poetry. We were both fortunate to have the definitive Canadian People's Poet, Milt, as a comrade (in the Canadian Liberation Movement: CLM), as a friend (and roommate), and as a poetry mentor.

Knowing Milt so well, perhaps it's easier to define what a People's poet is, and that basically everything a People's Poet writes then becomes some aspect of People's Poetry. Some poets may write a People's poem from time to time, but not necessarily be considered representative People's Poets. Likewise, a true PP, like Milt, wrote lots of poems which, if read individually, wouldn't necessarily be obvious examples of People's Poetry, but which did form parts of his development, or explored aspects of his broadest world view.

I believe you pretty well nailed the development of People's Poetry and most of its primary features, but for the above reason I intuit that it's more practical to apply a definition to poets, rather than to the individual poems they create.

peace & poetry power!
Chris ... and Chase wrffffffffffffffffffffffff! (hi Rocky)

p.s. Another poet I consider a prime exemplar of PP is bill bissett. Like Milt, bill has encouraged progressive poetry through a broad range of activities, such as founding & operating blewointmentpress, doing countless tours across Canada (and Europe), mentoring and encouraging other poets, and constantly exploring and expanding our knowledge & practice of poetry, consciousness and social progress.

p.p.s. I'd like to post this discussion on my blog - I'm sure it would stimulate some feedback & perhaps even some controversy. OK with you?

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July 8, 2012

Dear Chris,

You are quite correct in the observation you made yesterday. There is People’s Poetry as a literary movement, then there are individual People’s Poems, and finally there are People’s Poets.

A true People’s Poet is one who writes People’s Poetry most of the time: Acorn, Livesay, Souster, bissett, etc. There are not many of those still around.

Then there are those who start writing People’s Poetry before moving on to another type of poetry, but who always acknowledge their roots in People’s Poetry. George Bowering comes to mind. (He has always acknowledged his great debt to the poetry of Acorn, Livesay, and Purdy.) And so does Irving Layton.

And there are individual People’s Poems such as my “On The Line”, “The Great Lakes Shipping Strike”, and “Hiorra”.

What we see today are a great many Canadian poets (actually the majority) who have come out of the People’s Poetry Movement, but who seldom write a true People’s Poem today. Souster and bissett are among our few living poets who have devoted their lives to writing for The People. But Souster is 91 years old. bissett is 72.

Actually, Norma can be viewed as a People’s Poet in that she was inspired to write poetry at all (and she had already turned 40 at the time) by first reading Souster and a bit later by reading Layton’s A Red Carpet for the Sun (he was still writing P.P. at that time). She still writes for The People. But my sweetheart will turn 84 in less than two months.

It is perhaps not good that our People’s Poets are all Senior Citizens, but I simply do not see younger poets who devote themselves to the Canadian people and to the struggles of their people like Livesay and Acorn did.

Nonetheless, all the time I meet younger poets (by that I mean poets in their 40s) who admire Purdy or Livesay or Acorn or bissett.

A bit odd. What do you think, old Buddy?


Poetry Power!

. . . James

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July 8

Hi James,
Yes, I like your clarification of three distinct aspects of People's Poetry: as a literary movement, individual poems, and then People's Poets. I find the distinctions very helpful and astute.

And something else you relate which I hadn't thought of is that some are People's Poets for the earlier part of their literary life (career is so inaccurate in Canada!), and then they go on to other things, while some poets develop into People's Poets later in life (like Norma, and perhaps Robert Priest).

Another issue is the quality of the poetry. There are many political activists who write People's Poetry, but most of them are more committed to their activism than to their poetry. And so the poetry suffers. On last night's walk along the river with Chase, I mused that if Milt had been a 'better' progressive activist, if he had been capable of organizing Canadian unions, say, then his attention might have been focused there and we would have lost our best national poet.

I'm also biased towards considering non-academic and blue collar poets as more likely candidates for being People's Poets. I'm thinking of Martin Durkin, the young prole who closes the Purdy tribute anthology, AND LEFT A PLACE TO STAND ON. Of course Purdy, and MIlt, and even Ray Souster all worked at prosaic day jobs - they had to earn their bread and butter among the people, not sheltered in ivory towers, and their poetry reflects this.

And there is an 'outsider' element to People's Poetry. All the best PP have been outsiders - thinking esp. of bill bissett here - there is an almost shamanistic pattern in the lives of our best People's Poets - a separation from the tribe, and then a rejoining, with the means of communicating the new experiences gained during the separations necessary for tribal growth being the poetry.

And yes, it's sad, but completely understandable that there are so few younger dedicated People's Poets. It isn't any sort of career by the standards of our capitalist and materialistic society. So the young poets become profs, or journalists, or give up on poetry and literature completely as a primary lifelong activity. As I've said in a few emails, I've recently been hanging out with poet/novelist/raconteur/hipster Jim Christy. He's now 67, and still hard scrabbling for paying literary and artistic gigs. I've joked that he should receive some sort of lifetime guaranteed income - Canada Council? Ontario Arts Council? some private foundation?

Maybe that's part of the test of the mettle of Canada's People's Poets - surviving in a culture which needs your work so desperately, but which will consciously neglect you to the point of leaving you bedridden in your own excrement in a flophouse (Milt at the Waverley Hotel). With examples like this, no wonder so few are genuinely following the path Milt trail blazed.

peace & poetry power!
Chris and Chase ... wrffffffffffffffffffffff! (glad my dog ESP was working last night!)

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Conrad DiDiodato has left a new comment on your post "Deahl/Faiers discussions on People's Poetry":

Great discussion, guys

I'd just like to add that (imo) the real American exponent of the People's Poetry movement ideal in Canada was probably Cid Corman. He worked tirelessly all his life (mostly from Kyoto Japan) to publish, support and encourage mostly non-mainstream, non-academic poets. There was once a Corman-Souster relationship that resulted in Souster's inclusion in some issues of Corman's "Origin" literary mag.

But certainly Milt Acorn is the quintessential people's poet: and particularly for the reasons that made him also(from what people who knew him have told me) instantly likeable as a person: I guess it's true to the say the people's poet emphasizes the person of the poet over any fake ('illustrated')personas or methodologies. The poem is the person, the poem being always the indelible imprint of the person.

I'd like one day soon to continue this vital discussion at my site.

A good day to you both!



Posted by Conrad DiDiodato to Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 8 July 2012 09:57

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July 8, 2012 - part 2


Dear Chris,


I have long noted that the poets who enjoy what I call “comfortable money” are almost all professors with their Ph.Ds. Then there are a great many poets who have a much lower income than the average Canadian. (I worked at wage-slavery from the age or 21 until I was 61 — four decades. In only one of those years did I have an annual much income above the official “poverty line”, otherwise known as the “low income cut-off” to government folk. Some years I earned only half of a poverty line income!)


While it must be acknowledged that some People’s Poets did teach university, by far the majority of our People’s Poets did not. Some I know worked as dishwashers, taxi drivers, loggers, bookshop clerks, and hospital orderlies. (I was a “professional” dishwasher myself on three occasions.) Very few People’s Poets ever earned $100,000 per year.


A comfortable income is more likely to be found among the writers of other types of poetry.


What do these facts mean? Hell if I know. All I do know is that when I was a student at West Virginia Wesleyan I had to decide on an academic career or poetry. I was certain I could not pursue both. (Here I speak only for myself since I cannot speak for any other person.) Thus, at age 66 I am poor but happy, and I have written a few books that are, at least in my opinion, pretty good.


I must add here that some professor/poets I have known (once upon a time I was a member of the inner circle of the League of Canadian Poets) turned out to be decent people. And I must also add that a few People’s Poets turned out to be complete jerks. In short: bad people can write good poetry and good people can write bad poetry.

Again, these are simply facts. Make of them what you will.


Fraternally,

. . . James

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Conrad DiDiodato has left a new comment on your post "Deahl/Faiers & DiDiodato discussions on People's P...":

James,

the academic is generally unfavourable to the people's poet (as I've discovered) for two reasons: 1. academics don't write or don't encourage anyone to write til they've been vetted and approved by the right'committees' or 'review boards' and then university presses who round out the process (I ask you, Who would ever have published Silliman's monstrosity of book of poems titled "the Alphabet" if not the Alabama Press to which, of course, Silliman is attached via his 'review board' friends Bernstein and Lazer?)I've always maintained that the academics and, in Canada, the arts funding regime, have virtually monopolized publication in the arts.

2. academics who happen to teach writing, working in cahoots with the academic publishing industry, create instant ready-made audiences (in the form of their own classes)for their own published goods. Academics can't publish under any other more normal conditions--let's face it, who's going to read an academic's dull droning prose if they don't have to?-- It's for this reason I detest Kootenay-style writing regimes since academics posing as litterateurs create a need for the services only they can provide (It's sort of like the iPhone user's addiction to Apps: without them the addiction to instant texting and networking can't be fed).

I also maintain that the academics are directly responsible for the terrible state of poetry in Canada. This conclusion follows directly from the above-mentioned two observations re: academic presses. If the public isn't the final arbiter of taste, and the academic has free rein to do whatever they wish in their classes,the type of poetry that 'sells' and will be published in mainstream mags will always tend to be wildly experimental, elitist and anti-communal.



Posted by Conrad DiDiodato to Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 8 July 2012 16:57

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July 11, 2012


Dear Chris and Chase,


Thank you for sending the Umbrella. Nice piece on AcornFest.


Have you seen the Jeff Seffinga definition of People’s Poetry? If not, here it is:


"Milton Acorn's poetry defines the People's Poetry Tradition. Subtle in his emotions, his power and directness come from the images drawn from everyday island life. Dedicated to the class struggle, Acorn peopled his poems with working men and women of the visage of Canada, and paid unceasing tribute to their suffering, their humble crafts and their utter reliability. With an authentic working-class voice, Acorn's poetry reflects the uncanny ability to replicate the nuance and cadence of everyday speech so that the delicacy of his imagery is also fraught with the wrath of hardship."


Fraternally,

. . . James