always engaged in revision

[HIS LIFE WAS THE PRACTICE]

 

His   life   was    the    practice   of   forming   a   single

sentence  which,  as   he  grew    older,  he   tried   to

simplify,   reduce  its  compound-complex  structure

into one statement ruled by the  separate, inviolate

pronoun within which he attempted  to live,  always

engaged in revision and the act of becoming;  as the

distilled   statement   gradually   became  a   fleeting

inquiry, a mild interrogative, which he repeated and

refined,   making  it  increasingly  concise, almost, at

his  conclusion,  producing no  more  than  a  distinct

sound,  not  quite a word, less than a  cry,  which his

death  erased  leaving  the question mark hanging in

the   air,   like  a  broken  halo,  emblem  of  his  birth,

evolution and release: a full life.

STEPHEN DOBYNS

 

You can read another of Stephen Dobyns’ poems, Yellow Beak, here (recommended!): http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16845

 

He is a poet and an author, including the detective stories featuring Charlie Bradshaw, each title of which has Saratoga as the first word.

 

Here’s 2 somethings from The Porcupine’s Kisses:

 

Look at this dark night: no stars, no moon. Look at this crowd of

people. Do you know one better than the other?

 

It isn’t yours until you can stand to see it break.

 

The Porcupine’s Kisses (Poets, Penguin)

 

His book of essays on poetry, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry, looks like a good way to pull myself further into this new world of the poem that I have started to enter. Here’s a bit more about Dobyns, from the Amazon.com review:

 

Dobyns, the author of eight volumes of poetry (and 17 novels), believes, like Baudelaire, that “each poem … has an optimum number of words [and] an optimum number of pieces of information … and to go over or under even by one word weakens the whole.” Poetry, he says, belongs to the reader, not the writer, and as readers, “at the close of the poem, we must not only feel that our expectations have been met but that our lives have been increased, if only to a small degree.” And, if that’s not challenge enough for the writer, add to it “that the conclusion of a given piece must appear both inevitable and surprising.”

Best Words, Best Order, 2nd Edition: Essays on Poetry

 

I’d add that a good story always seems that way — inevitable and surprising, just like a good life. Surprising at the time, but in hindsight, how could it have gone any other way?

TO A RED-HAIRED BEGGAR GIRL

 

Baudelaire, a French poet who lived and died in the 1800’s, is one who deserves his reputation for being a bad influence. Some of his poems are sensual, others are lusty, perverse, abusive or disgusting — many were suppressed during his life.  A selection of his first lines from the end of the wonderful little book of his poems I have here illustrates the range — to read them (and the poems themselves) is to feel a bit shaken (My wife is dead, so now I’m free) unclean (I spent the night with a gruesome Jewish whore), intrigued (My darling was naked, or nearly, for knowing my heart..), or desiring (Long let me inhale, deeply, the odor of your hair). Odor, scent, and the power of smell have force in his poetry, and I have at least one more poem to share from this book, but for now, I’ll just place this poem here, almost juvenile in its sexiness — one of the more innocent of his poems in this excellent translation, but an evocative poem for this evening.

A few notes first:

strophes – these are pairs of stanzas – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strophes

Belleau – a poet of 1500’s, the French Renaissance. ” most known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things and his poems about precious stones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remy_Belleau

Patchouli is an essential ingredient in many perfumes, it has a strong heavy odor.

 

TO A RED-HAIRED BEGGAR GIRL

 

Gaping tatters in each garment prove

your calling is not only beggary

but beauty as well,

 

and to a poet equally ‘reduced,’

the frail and freckled body you display

makes its own appeal –

 

queens in velvet buskins take the stage

less regally than you wade through the mud

on your wooden clogs.

 

What if, instead of these indecent rags,

the splendid train of a brocaded gown

rustled at your heels,

 

and rather than town stockings, just suppose

curious glances sliding up your thigh

met with a gold dirk!

 

And then if, for our sins, those flimsy knots

released two perfect little breasts that shine

brighter than your eyes,

 

and your own arms consented to reveal

the rest, though archly feigning to fend off

hands that go too far . . .

 

Strands of pearls and strophes by Belleau

arriving — imagine! — endless streams

‘from an admirer’;

 

riffraff — talented and otherwise –

offering tributes to the slippered feet

glimpsed from below stairs;

 

gentlemen sending flunkeys to find out

who owns the carriage always told to ‘wait’

at your smart address

 

where in the boudoir, kisses count for more

than quarterings, although the cast includes

a Bourbon or two!

 

– Meanwhile, here you are, begging scraps

doled out by the local table d’hôte

at the kitchen door

 

and scavenging discarded finery

worth forty sous, a price which (pardon me!)

I cannot afford . . .

 

Go, then, my Beauty, with nor ornament

– patchouli or pearl chocker — but your own

starveling nakedness!

 

Charles Baudelaire

Les Fleurs Du Mal

translated by Richard Howard.

Baudelaire: Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)