on Aurora Americana, poems by Myronn Hardy
Commenting on the creative role of the elegy, Peter Gizzi said of his own practice, “It is a way to transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.” Stark choices are implied in this statement — preferences of temperament and expression that pertain to poetry in general. There are broken hearts aplenty in our poetry, and their ache is profound. But Gizzi points us toward what A. R. Ammons meant when he insisted, “It’s a disposition, a poem is, rather than an exposition.”
In his sixth poetry collection, Aurora Americana, Myronn Hardy refuses to understate the daunting source of his agitation. Having lived for nearly a decade in Morocco, Hardy returned to the U. S. in 2018 to find a country reverting to its worst impulses. But in the latest poems, he is disinterested in speaking too insistently on the primacy of his wounds – though the baseness of his antagonists is foregrounded. For a Hardy poem to succeed, it must do something other than simply mourn its exile from – and its worrisome return to — a broken commonwealth. In “Fanon in Tunis After Tunis,” he writes, “I’m asking why / the world has become this. Silent sirens. This / epidemic . This twisting of a wretched thing.” His understanding is incomplete – but incompleteness allows meaning to incorporate – to begin to overcome — what thwarts or curbs it. The halting progress of his lines and sudden instances of jaggedness in his diction suggest a mode of speaking that lags behind its subject.
Hardy’s notes tell us that the opening poem, the eight-part “Aurora Americana,” is spoken in turn by “an antebellum black doll, a 45 supporter/voter, an imagined Central Park Five member, and his very young daughter.” The doll, discarded in the icy cold, says, “Forgotten in this northern place. / They’ve forgotten what I’ve not. / The dark is without forgetting.” Then, the 45-supporter: “I voted for snow frost crystals. / I see them falling. / I’ve been falling into myself.” The speeches affect me like arias, sung on a stage with minimal scenery – short phrases, primal perceptions, voices rising and falling in pitch but not indulging the charms of tone and attitude. The narrative frame appears in flashes. The social use of this poetry isn’t based on a fostering of empathic chumminess between reader and voice – though a tentative kinship is possible. Hardy’s mission, socially speaking, is to help restore the purity and force of a language that has been diluted and warped by deceptive power-speak.
The Hiss
You hear the hiss of something unseen.
You stand outside the house built in a previous century.
A woman occupies the parlor.
She waits on the sofa observing timid shadows
marred with holes. Hear the marching the horror
of hooves against hardened dirt.
There was joy in that house around
the table when steam blossomed from stew.
You were in that room.
Loved someone in that room.
You hear the hiss of it without warning its
nearness to ear.
Close your eyes to pull the world
in the world that almost was.
The loss of a once-rich world, rich with a latitude now inherited, is one thing. The loss of a violently foreshortened world and its aftermath of un-belonging is something else. “The Hiss” asks us for the impossible, and we begin to comply. You were inside, you are outside, you are in your own envisioned world. The counterpoint to “horror” is just now taking shape in this language, tentatively. Its sound is a retort to a hiss.
Hardy names his antagonist, a jester, a liquidator, as in “The Turning”: “Even the evil among us / see him circling. // See the man they have made / king killing us all.” These declarations comprise the most straightforward indictments here. Yet even more affective is “The Moth in the Dryer” tumbling in “the cyclone of my shirts” – “A thing struggling struggle itself / among that which will kill it.” The poem ends with a skein of associations:
Outside the pungency of pesticides
sprayed the previous night makes me cough.
Your wings have detached.
You’re swirling with the cyclone
as a boy blows a sphere of thistles
detaching into a field
of Queen Anne’s lace.
He’s alone but speaks
as if he were not.
The swifts see him as they
dash assail the moths remaining.
What airplanes sprayed over
soy field killed my aunt
Jennie Lee. We’re
so small here.
The ruination Hardy depicts may be final – but not its significance. The damaged thing, the life we all sustain and witness, may suffer in fragments, but Hardy proceeds fiercely, not tempted to illuminate the shards gaudily for the sake of a facile empathy. Referring to locations around the globe – Beirut, Aleppo, Lisbon and other places – the poems reinforce the sense that “We’re making what we are” wherever we are. This poetry is a countervailing force against forgetting what we are – the humanity in danger and the humanity demanding the privilege of forgetfulness. But Hardy demands and accrues nothing for himself:
I’m writing in dust.
What I’m writing will become dust.
I’m the premonition
of dust exiled here.
[Published by Princeton University Press on October 10, 2023, 120 pages, $19.95 paperback]
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on In The Glittering Maw: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour, translated from the French by C. Francis Fisher
Joyce Patricia Adès was born in England in 1928 and grew up in Cairo speaking English and Ladino. Her mother died when Joyce was 15. In 1947 at age 18, she married her first husband who died just six months later. Grieving and shocked, she immersed herself in poetry. None of her early work survives, but she later described the work as raging, deranged, and “a kind of revolt” – the onset of her lifelong surrealist expression. In 1949, she married her Francophone husband, Samir Mansour, polished her French, and visited Paris, which led to the publication of her first poetry collection, Cris, in 1953. Then, in 1954 as the Nassar regime began confiscating the assets of Jews, she and Samir were expelled and emigrated to Paris where Mansour was embraced by André Breton and the literary Surrealists. She and Breton remained close friends until his death in 1966.
Mansour described Surrealism as “une simple manière de voir“ or “just a way of looking,” but her work bristles with the contradictions and obsessions unique to her psyche. Unlike Breton’s poetry, Mansour’s work often spurns sequencing, and fuses the extremes of emotion in a plunge down the page. C. Francis Fisher’s new selected translations, in the bilingual In The Glittering Maw, capture both the precision of phrase and the leaps between utterances that typify Mansour’s output. The poems simultaneously seem desperately personal and liberatingly spectral. Fisher begins with five poems from Mansour’s third book, Rapaces or Birds of Prey (1960), and then samples work from six other collections up to The Great Never (Le Grand Jamais, 1981). (Three more books would follow through 1986).
You Abandon Me Nightly (1965)
My hours flow impassively
At the bottom of the mirror speckled with bronze
Clouds parade by
In this deep pond where my face trembles
Slippery like tears on yesterday‘s malaise
Leaves shudder on the trellis of memory
Shudder and whirl and yet stand still
Somewhere in my depths a mold crystallizes
The Skull Screen of Memory (1977)
The eye sleeps like an oyster in the depths of the bay
The image writhes beneath wet veils
Without hearing the spiraling roll
Of heavy talismans
That
toll
the hour
Without tearing off the erotic tunic
Of the great myope
Imaginary
Without blinking
The eye speaks and the town catches fire
Murky water inhales
The streets sink
The smoky flame of alcohol
Waves from the hollow gaze
ABSENT
The reflection grinds its teeth in the mirror
The eye freezes
Who knows the face of the one who precedes him
On the wandering bridge of centrifugal madness
The hairy pig eats the pearl
[Published by World Poetry Books on May 21, 2024, 183 pages, $20.00 softcover]
To read excerpts from Mansour’s Emerald Wounds, translated by Emilie Moorhouse (City Lights, 2023) published On The Seawall, click here.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
on Book of Exercises II by George Seferis, translated from the Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg
The work of Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is most prominently positioned when the topic of modern Greek poetry comes up. He created candid and bold homoerotic poems decades before others dared to do so. Often set in antiquity, the poems address many of the anxieties, desires, cultural interests and political concerns that we claim as our own. Cavafy is also a diasporic poet whose displacement resonates with us. But the modern Greek poet who first engrossed me was George Seferis (1900-71) who, like Cavafy, was a traveler who worried about and addressed the forces of disorder in the world. Also like Cavafy, he experienced displacement early in his life when in 1914 his Greek family was forced into exile from Smyrna (Izmir) in Turkey along with 1.5 million others.
For many readers, Seferis work, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1963 (he was the first Greek recipient), changed the way Greece itself was regarded – from a showcase of mythic relics to a vividly perceived and bustling nation. And yet Seferis, again like Cavafy, evokes the classics and history of Greece. But unlike Cavafy, Seferis lived and worked within the mainstream of European affairs. He studied law at the Sorbonne in the 1920’s and served for years as a Greek diplomat; from 1957 to 1962, he was Greece’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Paying a visit to T. S. Eliot at his office at Faber and Faber, Seferis complained that his public responsibilities were wearisome and that he wanted to quit. Eliot, who had worked in a bank, responded, “One must have another job. You cannot devote yourself to poetry alone, because I believe a great part of poetic creation is unconscious and there must be times when one is occupied with other things.” Despite his career, Seferis created poetry that embraced the liminal and the speculative, even if the poems were often framed by their locations and situations. Still, he complained that he had “two masters.”
As translator Jennifer R. Kellogg notes in her introduction, “Where Seferis uses traditional form forms and meter, I have created the same effect with the rhythm and rhyme in English, and in some cases meter.” At the same time, she has projected “a consistent voice and personality” – a voice that has been tempered by — and is used to contemplating — the tragic sweep of human events. Kellogg has given us the most resonant Seferis versions to date.
The Latin “selva oscura” means a “a dark wood” – but it also may connote a moment or period in life when one is confused or lost. In “Selva Oscura,” we find Seferis using the first-person with more weight than usual:
Selva Oscura
When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive darkness
the color of dawn; I sense it on your fingertips.
Forget the lie that helped you live.
Bare your feet, bare your eyes—
very few things remain when we’ve bared ourselves
but in the end we can see them exactly as they are.
When I close my eyes I always find myself on a path,
the yards ruined to the right and left and in the corner
the house with window panes beaten by the sun, empty.
I thought of your fingertips beating against the panes.
I thought of your heart beating behind the panes
and the very few things that set a man apart from others
and are never overcome.
You don’t know anything because you looked at the sun.
Your blood dripped into the black leaves of the laurel bush.
I see the nightingale and the marbled moon of evenings past,
when I dragged your blood into the river, dyeing it red.
I ponder—when I ponder—I ponder
my veins and the mystery of your hands,
guiding carefully, descending step by step.
When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive garden.
(May 1937)
As the war approached in 1940, Seferis self-published three collections – the first included everything he had published through 1936, the second included unpublished work entitled Book of Exercises, and the third collected work from 1937 to 1940 called Logbook. In 1962, upon leaving his diplomatic post, he collected his then recent unpublished work as Book of Exercises II which appeared the next year. Kellogg’s organization of the work confuses me. First, she gives us excerpts from Days 5 (1945-51). This is followed by a section of “Final Poems” (1968-71), and a long miscellaneous selection of Circumstantial Poems(1931-1971). Finally, there is Calligraphies (1941-42) – and she calls the whole thing Book of Exercises II. I don’t get it.
But I cherish Seferis’ work and Kellogg’s renditions are highly attuned to their sources. He concluded his Nobel Speech with the following: “The world is changing. Its movements are speeding up. One might say that it is characteristic of the new generation to point out abysses, whether in the human soul or in the universe about us. The concept of duration has changed. It is a sorrowful and restless young generation. I understand its difficulties; they are, after all, not so different from ours. A great worker for our liberty, Righas Pheraios, has taught us: ‘Free thoughts are good thoughts.’ But I should like our youth to think at the same time of the saying engraved on the lintel above the gate of your university at Uppsala: ‘Free thoughts are good; just thoughts are better.’”
[Published by World Poetry on November 14, 2024, 224 pages, $22.00US/$29.00CAN]