Bookish Gardener

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.

"The flowers I called Christ's when I was four."

Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks has arrived at the National Gallery in London...see the painting and read about the painting's flowers at the Human Flower Project. This painting adds another dimension to the poem "Supernatural Love" (the subject of this prior post), the final line of which is the title of this post.

Principio sedes apibus statioque petenda, or: Irstfay indfay away omehay orfay ethay eesbay

More buzz about bees...there's a new translation by David Ferry in the latest Atlantic Monthly (ensconced here behind the subscriber wall, alas, but including audio of the poet reading his English translation as well as in the original Latin) of a portion of Virgil's Georgic IV (alternate English translation here; Latin here) which, it turns out, is all about honey bees. My year or so of high school Latin was way too much Caesar and woeful little Virgil, but don't call it a dead language: why, you could have heard it spoken on television on two separate occasions just yesterday (Xander's "Librum incendere!" on a Buffy rerun, and, of course, the famous "Wingardium leviosa!" in a movie-channel airing of one of the Harry Potter films).

Willy-nilly silly

My twenty-five cent copy of Richard Armour's Punctured Poems: Famous First and Infamous Second Lines is doing a fine job of tickling my verrah sophisticated sense of humah. As you might gather from the title, Armour has taken first lines from some well-known poems and paired them with new second lines of his own creation. (My favorite, adapting Blake's "The Tiger": "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,/ What has caused you to ignite?") The collection even includes these garden-themed couplets:

    I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
    I've stood in the sun, with a hose, for hours.
         (from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Cloud")

    A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot,
    But only if God wotters it a lot.
         (from Thomas Edward Brown, "My Garden")

    There is a garden in her face;
    She uses every inch of space.
         (from Thomas Campion, "Cherry-Ripe")

(If this blog be adjudged too silly, and this award misled in decision, I must acquiesce in its rescission, à la Milli Vanilli.)

Fall into poetry (updated)

The Brahms Quintet in B minor for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 115, was the final work performed at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival earlier this month. John Harbison introduced the piece by sharing a story about trying to teach the piece to an ensemble of high school musicians. (When worlds collide! Bright-eyed, uncalloused souls and late Brahms.) To help his students "get it", he read the Rilke poem "Herbsttag [Autumn Day]" to them, and he read it to us that evening, translating from the German on the spot.

Here's the poem in four English translations, with Rilke's original at the end. (John Roll: tell Scott that there's a William Gass translation included here too.) And here's the thing: even if you have only a smattering of German, it's worth reading the original poem aloud—even without a contemporaneous understanding of the German—the better to appreciate the poem's "music". I've taken that term from Jared Carter, who talks about the "musical qualities of the spoken word" in poetry in this interview (scroll to just above the photograph of the blackberries to get to that part, but really, read the whole thing). While nothing can wholly make up for the imperfection of reading in translation, it may be that hearing the sound of the original poem is a step that shouldn't be skipped, especially when reading poetry in translation. Try it with this Basho haiku: natsugusa ya / tsuwamonodomo no / yume no ato. It's about summer grass, but is autumnal in feeling, as you'll see from its fourteen-plus translations at Bemsha Swing and Language Log.

Today's the first day of autumn, but summer's still playing catch-up for now. The tomatoes are still ripening, the tender annuals are still going strong, and the roses are in torrid re-bloom, all while the neighborhood's burning bushes have already turned on their matte crimson blush. Right now, the garden is in maximum overlap, with two seasons of bloom converging for a brief moment before the inevitable. It doesn't feel like fall yet, but it will soon, and then maybe it will feel like this poem from Awake at Dawn. Read it aloud.

Update, September 23, 2004: Language Log contributes an interlinear reading of the first stanza of "Herbsttag", (update, September 24, 2004:) plus a link to an mp3 of a full reading of the poem in the original German. And don't miss Robert the Llama Butcher's poetic thoughts on fall, accompanied by Keats's "To Autumn". "To Autumn" received this textual "reading" by Sven Birkerts and audio readings by Birkerts, Emily Hiestand, Stanley Plumly, and C. K. Williams, as part of the Atlantic Monthly Online's "Soundings" series (subscriber-only links, alas).

Passionflower

Quest in a Ghazal

Last night she asked you for a passion flower --
that sweet lover's metaphor, a passion flower!

How would you know one if you found it,
having never seen before, a passion flower?

You search old books of myth and alchemy,
in all the convoluted lore, a passion flower.

And yet, it seems outlandish and exotic,
growing on some far-off shore, a passion flower.

Why does she want it anyway, this wrangler's girl,
the sort who'd call "a bore" a passion flower?

She'd be much happier with a mountain meadow
all abloom with hellebore. A passion flower!

Better humor her for now, and offer this
ghazal of rhymes galore: your passion flower.

Taylor Graham

(Reprinted by permission of the poet. Thank you, Taylor.)

The ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle") is a Persian and Urdu poetry form that has influenced and inspired poets in many other languages. Read more about it here. The ghazal has also become its own genre of music and song in India and Pakistan, as described here.

The passionflower pictured above ("Passiflora caerulea. Native of Paraguay.") is just about open, after three months of nothing but foliage. The widely reported symbolism of the passionflower is rivaled in its bogosity only by The DaVinci Code, if you ask me (sniff), but I do like how the flower's used in this stained glass window from a Texas church.

Clove and Carnation

What luck: I scored the last two quart pots of cheddar pinks at the big-box home improvement store this past weekend. More specifically, these are Dianthus gratianopolitanus 'Firewitch'. Like all pinks, the petals are serrated, as if cut by, uh, pinking shears. This dianthus is single-flowered in form, and has a vivid (but not harsh) color that's sometimes described as "magenta" (although it's not in-your-face) and sometimes described as "pink" (although it's not wimpy). It has soft, elegant needles for foliage, in a color that's blue-green, dusted with silver, which sets off the blooms to perfection.

Once I looked up the botanical name, I remembered that this was the flower Elisabeth Sheldon talked about wanting to fall face-down into with her last breath (see this prior post). I thought that was a nifty idea then, but now I realize that I didn't really, fully get it. The whole point, you see, is the scent of the flower, which you can't appreciate without plunging your face into the blooms, which are often described as "clove-scented". (But no, not quite like the cigarette favored by the Spartacist Youth Leaguer who thinks that showering regularly is too boo-zwah.) The fragrance is delicate and lovely, but so subtle that if you return to the flower too quickly, to partake of more, you lose it all, and smell nothing.

Pinks are (glossing over nuances that aren't really relevant here) carnations, and I always think of this poem when I think of the carnation: "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. (This links to the poem via Amazon.com's "search inside the book" feature, which requires registration if you're not already a customer; here's another link to a copy of the poem which contains some typos that I hope aren't too distracting.) I read this poem when it was first published in the Atlantic Monthly, and I only remember falling instantly in love with it, and then needing to go take a long walk around the block immediately after reading it. I tore the page with the poem out of the magazine and kept it until The Lamplit Answer (Schnackenberg's first collection containing the poem) was published, returning to it many, many times over the years. Even now, more than twenty years later, the effect of the poem hasn't diminished. Carnation/carnatio/clou/clove/love: you think, at first, what a clever puzzle, just before it hits you, right in the gut. I'll think of this poem whenever I look at my new dianthus (Greek for flower of the gods), and I'll think, Good Lord, what a beautiful plant.


Postscript: While paging through The Lamplit Answer, I came across Schnackenberg's poem on Darwin, "Darwin in 1881". It's stunning, and I've updated my prior post on Darwin to include a bit of it, here.


The Lamplit Answer. Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. ASIN 0374519781.

Required reading

the way she hipped the door aside, the whack
of trowel on the earth. Here peonies. Clipped pink,

From the poem "She Says Come Here Near the Window Diaphanous" from Awake at Dawn. After you read the whole thing, you'll want to scroll on and on through the amazing work on this site.

Milkweed and Monarch...

...being the name of this poem by Paul Muldoon. From Dispositive, via Crescat Sententia.

The poem's not really about monarch butterflies or Asclepias plants, but hey--it's February--anything that turns my thoughts in that direction is more than welcome. My first-grader and I have a deal--he wants an Asclepias planted in the garden for his birthday (late April), with the hope of attracting monarch butterflies (and, more importantly, the wondrous monarch caterpillar). A clay-friendly cultivar of Asclepias tuberosa is on order, and I'll be starting some seeds of Asclepias curassavica later in the season. Check out this site for a list of the various Asclepias species that monarchs and monarch relatives find especially nosh-worthy.