Champagne at the bus stop

Only my second post this month. I returned from a Zen retreat after just three days when a person close to me became ill. He was - still is - in a lot of pain, on morphine at times. We spend most of the time in silence. He seems to like it as much as I do.

Judy Hojin Kimmel

The retreat was led by Hojin Kimmel of the Zen Mountains and Rivers Order. She ran an art workshop on the first day  - something they call journalling; I learnt some useful ways of expressing oneself a la Natalie Goldberg, painting and writing in concert, practical methods of managing.

During the morning before I left, it happened that I looked up towards the altar where she was sitting and had a perception of emptiness, as if no one was there. 

Earlier this month, I enjoyed reading a graphic novel entitled Persepolis, by  Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon, 2007), an autobiography revealing the effect of fundamentalist Islam on a young girl in Iran. Someone had lent me the book, and as soon as I finished it, I bought my own copy, the complete work in two volumes: the first  is better, I think. The illustrations are plain line drawings, black and white, most expressive. The story has been pared down and down, very good.

A recent experience: I was one of the winners in a translation competition with a translation of Rosa Ausalender's Dichten. Rosa Auslaender managed to survive the Holocaust and returned to Germany after the war. She is regarded as an important 20th century poet, a friend of Celan's. Her most famous poem is entitled Motherland:

Mutterland


Mein Vaterland ist tot
sie haben es begraben
im Feuer


Ich lebe
in meinem Mutterland
Wort
 
The local Goethe Institut and the German lecturers at Victoria University organised an exhibition of her poems in German, with wonderful photos, accompanied by translations of varying quality - some were by established translators, some by students, some by Google Translate. A translation workshop was great fun: Lloyd Jones read a translation he'd worked on, and so did Kate Camp, beautiful.

I don't feel that my work is as good as theirs by any means  - but maybe it has the quality of being faithful to Rose Auslaender's words. I am not sure how pleased she would be herself. She may have liked some of the minimalist translations, which allow a lot of air around the words, letting them float.

The four winning entries will be posted in bus-stops around Wellington for two weeks. My friends say, let's party in the bus stop, drink champagne! It will be fun!

Poet Lynn Jenner

On a different scale altogether: Lynn Jenner's book Dear Sweet Harry won  the Best First Book of Poetry Award in the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards - congratulations, Lynn!

An endless folly

Lynn Jenner has won the Adam Prize for the best portfolio of her year in the Creative Writing course at the Institute for Modern Letters at VUW - the course that is generally known as 'Bill Manhire's course'. Richly deserved - I have heard poems from the poets who studied with her and enjoyed them too. Lynn's work is very very good.

After many years, have re-read Carlos Castaneda and am struck about how good his writing is - fluent and descriptive. The book is A Separate Reality, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Further conversations with Don Juan - there are two subtitles for some reason. (Penguin Books reissue 2003, first printed in 1971).

An impatience grew in me with all the stories about smoking drugs, being dunked in water and washed, seeing allies or green mists, hearing cracking branches, being very afraid, questions being answered by Don Juan laughing merrily, or heartily and not saying anything, it felt invented, or the product of the drugs, except for about 3 passages which stand out, which seem real. Someone else (it's a library book) had turned over the corner of the page where one of these passages featured, perhaps having a similar reaction to me: This is what matters, this is the important bit.

In the original, it is written as a dialogue. Castaneda's questions have been left out here.

Don Juan says (p. 226):

"You talk to yourself too much. You must stop talking to yourself. [...] You're not unique in that. Every one of us does that. We carry on internal talk. [...]We talk about our internal world. In fact, we maintain our world with our internal talk. [...] The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so. [...] ...you confuse the world with what people do. [...]What we do as people gives us comfort, and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are only shields and we let them dominate and topple our lives... [...] The world is incomprehensible. we won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!...a warrior [ a truth-seeker] treats the world as an endless mystery and what people do as an endless folly."

Don Juan mentions the folly of human actions earlier, referring to his own vain attempts to influence his grandson into a more thoughtful life-style.

Tried a couple of other books, including a biography of Allen Ginsberg, and a detective story translated from the Japanese, but a few pages were enough - the first far too detailed, the second too slow and stilted.
Back to the library with them.

Adrift

Have drifted away from poetry again, reading prose. So silly, I should focus on poetry for the moment.

Found a lovely poem by Elizabeth Smither on the web, in The Listener, (July 21-27, 2007, Vol 209, No 3506) entitled Plaits:

I had two plaits: one thick,

an anaconda plait, and the other

more like a thin grass snake.

For copyright reasons, I can't put the whole thing, though it is not very long. Here are the last one and a half lines:

...so though I could not see justice,

I could feel how it was distributed.

For the full poem, go here.

* * *

Last Monday, attended the annual reading of poetry and prose by creative writing students of the MA programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University (commonly known here as "Bill Manhire's programme").

Lynn Jenner read two impressive poems, both anti-war. One of them is about her thoughts after the birth of her son, thoughts of cutting off part of his index finger to ensure that he may never be able to shoot - "a Russian thought". People were impressed.

The second half of the readings is today.

* * *

Listening to a recording of Bill Manhire reading his poetry at Whitireia on Thursday was a stimulating exercise - was able to write four poems in succession immediately afterwards - no idea what they are worth at this stage. The best stimulus for writing poetry is to be exposed to it, again and again.

So searched for and found a collection of 3 CDs of poetry read by the poets themselves, including Dylan Thomas and May Sarton, from the central library in Wellington.



Wellington Central Library - photo from their website

I love the central library, not just the books, but the building and the service - time and again I have taken out a book that was a "Librarian's Choice", and it has proven a joy - think Per Petersen's In the wake - so I now trust them (almost) completely.