Bookish Gardener

For P.

The King of love my shepherd is,
whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am his,
and he is mine for ever.

Where streams of living water flow,
my ransomed soul he leadeth,
and where the verdant pastures grow,
with food celestial feedeth.

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,
but yet in love He sought me,
and on his shoulder gently laid,
and home, rejoicing, brought me.

In death's dark vale I fear no ill
with thee, dear Lord, beside me;
thy rod and staff my comfort still,
thy cross before to guide me.

Thou spread'st a table in my sight;
thy unction grace bestoweth;
and O what transport of delight
from thy pure chalice floweth!

And so through all the length of days
thy goodness faileth never:
Good Shepherd, may I sing thy praise
within thy house for ever.

Henry Williams Baker

Goodbye, gardening friend.

Snowdrop

Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

There is a time when nature seems to make
A stern determination not to wake;
When the snows melt, and swollen streams run deep,
And plashy pools the sere brown herbage steep;
When first the snowdrop dares the storm endure,
The only thing on earth which then looks pure...

from "The Sons of the Soil: A Poem," Sarah Stickney Ellis

The book artist's garden

I've come to own a work of art that's meant to be seen, read and touched. Here's how it happened: we wandered into the art gallery at Overture one evening, waiting for the doors to open before a concert. On exhibit were works by Walter Hamady, the artist who has been creating books from The Perishable Press, his private press, since 1964. The press is in Mt. Horeb, just about a half-hour away.

I fell in love, with a thud, with the very first piece in the exhibition. Under a Plexiglas poster-size pane were mounted a few leaves from Hamady's book These Chairs, opened to his poem "Jidu's Chairs", written for and to his late grandfather ("Jidu" being Arabic for grandfather):

and I see you still, in the evening
when all the birds are singing
and all the things that grow in the earth
ready for the night.

The pages are printed on Shadwell, the press's handmade paper, named after Thomas Jefferson's birthplace. The typeface is beauteous Sabon Antiqua, handset. The title page bears a drawing, by Jack Beal, of a chair. The poetry makes the eyes brim:

from the green chair in the front bedroom
you could see my garden,
or the remains of where my garden was last year,
which is your garden
in the tradition you have made me in.

These are the lines I'll recite in the garden this summer...

and I don't know why there is such pleasure
in seeing things grow or the pleasure
in remembering how things have grown, the
Koosa and Okra and Betinjin that as a family
we grew at the edge of town on Mackin road—
was it the eating of the fruits?

...as I sow, tend and harvest my favorite cucurbits, mallows and nightshades, cousa squash, okra and eggplant.

The piece was offered for sale at the gallery, much to my surprise and delight. When we brought it home after the exhibition closed and unpeeled it from its bubble-wrapped layers, we were taken aback. The Plexiglas face wasn't attached to the piece's mat or backing. An oversight? No. It took a while for it to dawn on me that these pages of These Chairs were meant to be removed and read in hand...or at least once before being settled back into its protective frame. So I did, holding the thick marbled papers and running my fingers over the recessed imprints of the handset type...and found a few more pages of printed text that had been hidden under the leaves that were on display. First, the poem called "A Letter To Jidu," describing the day the artist learns of his grandfather's death:

Outside it was very still, and down the hill in back
I thought about never seeing you again,
how I thought you'd live forever to see this place
and give me some pointers on the garden—
maybe we could go down and pick a little watercress
like we used to on uncle Sol's farm near Kearsley Lake.

And an end page with an inscription dated Good Friday 1971, describing the making of the book, and its being printed in a limited run of 98 copies. Ninety-eight copies: for a minute my mind boggles at the thought. Can you imagine a blog being deliberately programmed to go to a 404 error after 98 page views? I love and revel in what technology makes possible, in the exponential, almost infinite ability to disperse a text so widely that it has the chance to be read by the someone by whom it was meant to be read. And yet I'm counterintuitively drawn to this notion of extreme limitation, of a page that can only be held in the hands of not more than ninety-eight human beings, and, being perishable, will, unless curated in temperature, humidity and light-controlled circumstances, crumble to dust in time. And so, in the closing words of "Jidu's Chairs":

There was a housing development begun before you
left for the old country, you didn't seem to mind.
I was fifteen then and nearly twice that now
and know
that nothing sits still, the world is a garden:
there is no end to it.

Weather report

I Saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;—
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

Where are the songs of Summer?—With the sun,
Oping the dusky eyelids of the south,
Till shade and silence waken up as one,
And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth.
Where are the merry birds?—Away, away,
On panting wings through the inclement skies,
Lest owls should prey
Undazzled at noonday,
And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes.

Where are the blooms of Summer?—In the west,
Blushing their last to the last sunny hours,
When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest
Like tearful Proserpine, snatch'd from her flow'rs
To a most gloomy breast.
Where is the pride of Summer,—the green prime,—
The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three
On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,—and one upon the old oak-tree!
Where is the Dryad's immortality?—
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly's green eternity.

The squirrel gloats on his accomplish'd hoard,
The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain,
And honey bees have stored
The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing'd across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a love-rosary,
Whilst all the wither'd world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drownèd past
In the hush'd mind's mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray. 

O go and sit with her, and be o'ershaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair:
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;—
There is enough of wither'd everywhere
To make her bower,—and enough of gloom;
There is enough of sadness to invite,
If only for the rose that died, whose doom
Is Beauty's,—she that with the living bloom
Of conscious cheeks most beautifies the light:
There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,—
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

                              Thomas Hood, "Autumn"

   

Fallen, fallen

Another autumnal equinox, another Rilke poem. As it did last year, Rilke's poetry came back into visible orbit for me via this summer's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival. The final program of the music series featured a performance of Peter Lieberson's "Rilke Songs", composed to five poems from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (I:4, "O ihr Zärlichen"; II:1, "Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!; II:12, "Wolle die Wandlung"; II,5, "Blumenmuskel"; and II:29, "Stiller Freund"). Wanting to familiarize myself with the poems before the program, I found myself in the poetry stacks of the B&N, four different translations propped open to the first of the poems, and relied on instinctive reaction to choose Edward Snow's translation, which, after more hours in its company, still reads just right to me.

I moved onto reading Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William Gass, which sends me into a little orbit of my own. The academic stilt of its title is misleading; this is a very personal and personable book. Rilke emerges as a three-dimensional human from the strokes of Gass's biographical sketch in the opening chapter. Somehow I'm unexpectedly relieved that the revered Rilke is flawed and real, not out of indulgence (I don't believe that it's okay to be a jerk so long as you produce great art) or sympathy (...nor that it's okay to be a jerk if you are oh so sensitive), but because unflattering truth is always better than hagiographical spin. Rilke, the poet of the Big Idea, believed in and worshiped passion...but mostly in his head. The existential losses of youth, love and life are celebrated in his poetry, but unsung, and perhaps unknown to the poet, are what he's lost by having passed up the chance to be a good father, and having never experienced an honest day's hard work. Why is it that Rilke's poetry is now even more appealing to me even after the unveiling of these hairy warts? Gass gets at this mystery in describing Rilke's poems as "lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself...lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength."

As advertised, the meat of Gass's book is the philosophy and practice of poetry translation. Gass lays out and examines selected stanzas in multiple iterations by several different translators (including himself), parsing them with time-honored methods of literary criticism, his own poetic sensibility, and sometimes just a little bit of Simon Cowell ("Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid", he says about their translations of the first stanza of II:12 of the Sonnets). After reading Gass, I'm grateful for the bounty of English translations available on bookstore shelves, and hopeful that I can get closer to the essence of the elephant by putting all the blind men in a room and listening to each of their stories.

But where were we? Oh, yes. It's the first day of fall. Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn"):

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Gass translates the first stanza: "The leaves are falling, falling from far away, / as though a distant garden died above us; / they fall, fall with denial in their wave."

"Herbst" is recited and sung in German, set to acoustic guitar accompaniment, here.

The way I want to hear this poem today is in the Edward Snow translation, set to music for voices by Joshua Shank (scroll down the post for the translation), which was brought to us earlier this year through the good offices of The Fredösphere. (Links to a sound file of its performance and its score can be found in the first paragraph of this post.)

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Poet's daffodil

Narcissus poeticus

in time of daffodils(who know

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

                E. E. Cummings

Japanese gardens

This is the ceiling of the tea house at Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Illinois, which are just over an hour south of Madison. I visited the gardens for the first time today. I tend to be ungenerously skeptical about and, yes, sometimes even a little disapproving of Occidental fetishization of the Ways of the East, so I went in with neutral expectations. Two hours later, I was profoundly regretting that I had not arranged my schedule to allow me to stay all day. These gardens are an experience. They are already green with lush spring growth, and the trilling drone of the pond frogs (in the height of mating season, we were told) outdid the soothing white noise of the coursing waterfalls. There were a few rare botanical wonders (flowering dogwood trees in both pink and white, tree peonies in bud, cinnamon bark maples), but most of the gardens are filled with readily available garden-variety (so to speak) plants such as groundcover pachysandra, viburnums, green and gold spireas, yews, pines, Japanese maples, Siberian irises, and hostas and more hostas decidedly not of the rare and expensive collector varieties, all arranged to exquisite effect. True to type, these gardens emphasize foliage over flowers, but numerous azaleas were blooming, including what looked to be Rhododendron mucronulatum, sometimes known as the "Snow Azalea," "Manchurian azalea," or "Korean rhododendron," which blooms before its leaves emerge in the spring.

There's a haiku by Issa that hits the spot:

Hyaku ryō no
ishi ni mo makenu
tsutsuji kana

Here's a translation of this haiku into English by David Lanoue, from his Haiku of Kobayashi Issa site. And, hey! I'll give it a shot too, taking advantage of the very convenient syllable counts of the subject azalea's botanical name:

Beaucoup-bucks boulder
outrocked by Rhododendron
mucronulatum.

Inspiration: the Photo-haiku Gallery, a site where visitors can post photos and post their own haiku to photos. I enjoyed the page with this photo of a Japanese garden, and chuckled (no, make that laughed out loud) at one of the accompanying haikus (scroll down the page; it's the one that begins with "summery garden"). I've included more photos from today's garden visit in the extended post, just in case you might be so inspired too.

Awed by Audubon

Bring in a little spring with these visual, musical and poetic riffs on John James Audubon's The Birds of America, courtesy of the Musée de la civilisation. (Caveat: I'm guessing that the site might be difficult to appreciate fully without a high-speed internet connection.) I'm ever so grateful to ever so humble (who has more on Audubon) for this link.

Quake crow kern

What do I know. I'm a mom, and I ply a trade by day. I spent too many years in classrooms after high school, but only a handful were in the humanities end of the liberal arts. I can't take in more than one poem at a time, any more than I can stand to trudge dutifully through an art museum merely to take in a microsecond look at a collection of the masters. I have a very simple test for whether a poem is good (for me) or not: it either bangs the gong, or it doesn't. I have read more good poetry online in the past couple of years of reading blogs than I probably have elsewhere in the past couple of decades. I would never have been moved to write about poems, ever, if it hadn't been for blogging. The best thing I read about poetry recently was written by Rachel Dacus in this post: "We read poetry because it is more difficult, and layered, than other forms of writing. We prize its obscurities, as long as we can barely keep up with them." And the saddest poetry experience I've had recently was to find that Dinsmoor is no longer on the web. I went back to hear A's audio poems again, but now they're gone, like an ephemeral sand painting.

The muse Hortensia

This poem is posted here with the kind permission of the poet, musician and photographer extraordinaire Katrin Talbot. Thank you, Katrin.