>Mahmoud Darwish's "Here The Birds' Journey Ends"

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“Here The Birds’ Journey Ends,” The New Yorker August 25, 2008

            It’s strange to me how many poets in the elder years write so consistently about that line between life and death, that line they so soon, according to their ages, are about to cross.  Maybe it’s not strange, thinking about it…we do seem to write what most consumes our thoughts—conscious or subconscious—and perhaps those in their golden years become preoccupied with how few of those years are left, with what a truly unknown future both brings and leaves behind.  In my early thirties, a wise conjecture about this is difficult for me to make.  Regardless, Darwish, who died less than a month ago, seems to fall right in line with his “Here The Birds’ Journey Ends.”  Rather beautifully written (translated by Fady Joudah), it’s a calm meditation on life’s passing.

            Part of the poem’s beauty is born by its ten long lines: generally speaking, the longer the line of poetry, the more fluid its rhythms.  Consistent with that observation, much of Darwish’s language in “Here The Birds’” has a sweeping grace.  All but the last sentence stretches across two lines or more, many are perpetuated with “and,” and every line is lengthy, the shortest stretching 14 syllables.  As well, though clearly not a metrical poem, several lines tend toward the iambic, such as “We are the ones who forge the sky’s copper, the sky that will carve roads” and “Soon we will descend the widow’s descent in the memory fields / and raise our tent to the final winds: blow, for the poem to live, and blow / on the poem’s road.”  That these lines contain iambs is neither here nor there.  It’s the fact they are rhythmically patterened that matters, as the pattern of beats helps give this poem its elegance.

            Though the title says the journey ends, it could just easily say the journey begins.  Darwish’ second line states, “after us there will be a horizon for the new birds,” a sentiment he repeats verbatim in his last line.  He echoes it near the middle with “After us, the plants will grow and grow.”  These images make the poem less about life’s end and more about transient nature.  Life as a force persists whether I or Darwish or his birds do not.  Life as a force is eternal; the end (much less the beginning) as we perceive it is arbitrary.  Darwish’s use of birds fits this idea nicely too.  They are a common symbol for life’s transition to death, for the spirit and spirit-world, and, though they offer no surprises in the poem, they fit it easily and comfortably.

            It’s possible, too, that Darwish could be writing about Palestinian-Iranian-American conflict, indicating all such historical madness will eventually reach its peaceful end.  He writes we will “make amends with our names above the distant cloud slopes.”  While no clear reference to peace in the Middle East, its possible the poem can be taken there by such a line.  Darwish, after all, who believed strongly in the Palestinian cause (though not necessarily its governments’ methods for pursuing it), and was on no certain terms a friend of Israel, sought peace, a human peace more so, I think, than an ethnic one.

            Then again, he claimed his poems were often misunderstand politically.  If he wrote a poem about his mother, it was about his mother, not about his mother-land.  If he wrote “Here The Birds” about the passage of a life within life’s greater scope, likely that’s the case—unlikely its about the passage of any nation’s from this life into the next, from this history into another.

            A final note, it’s interesting to me that his repeated line—“and after us there will be a horizon for the new birds”—is so rhythmically, tonally flat.  It’s bad poetry in its own way.  At the same, it’s what might be the poem’s greatest success.  So often poems about death and dying (yadda-yadda) romanticize the subject, thus those sweeping rhythms I earlier indicated (Longfellow’s “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” comes to mind as I think about this).  But here’s a case in which the final thoughts are expressed rather flatly.  Not bluntly, but flatly, laden with the emotional acceptance of a truth that is indifferent to its writer.  And his readers.

>C.K. Stead's "Isola Bella

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“Isola Bella,” The New Yorker, Aug. 25 2008

            I know very little about C.K. Stead except for that he’s an elderly New Zealander and a prolific writer of poetry and prose with numerous books to his name (a brief, but worthy bio of him can be found at the New Zealand Book Council website).  I know just as little about Isola Bella: it’s a very small island in Lago Maggiore of northern Italy (bordering France) and is the precise size of the palazzo the affluent Italian Carlo Borromeo III built there for his wife, Isabella, in 1632.  That having been said, Stead’s “Isola Bella” is a quaint semi-lyric, semi-narrative about a moment on the islet in which the speaker gets something other than what he came for.

            Ten tercets long, the poem is built of two-beat and three-beat lines of a loosely trochaic meter.  “In the stony garden / with the bronze plaque / that misquotes her” the poem begins, dropping us into the palazzo’s magnificent, prodigious (from what I understand) garden.  The basic pacing of the lines persists, which keeps the poem lilting along, almost gleefully, as though the speaker is having a heck of a time meeting Isabella—or the island itself (the poem’s “she” never made explicitly clear).  This dancing-like rhythm is created, too, with constant enjambments.  The beat-structure makes for short lines, which make for fragmented phrases and sentences, and as a result our ears listen more to Stead’s poetic phrase than to his sentence(s), which construct the poem’s length.  The sentences, for their part, are rather short.  Most are made of short phrases, though they may strung together to build longer clauses.  Consider the opening stanza plus a few lines of the second: “In the stony garden / with the bronze plaque / that misquotes her // she called down / from the terrace, ‘Friend or / for?’”  The sentence proper (as in subject-verb) doesn’t begin until line four, the first three lines consisting of two, four-word prepositional phrases and one, three-word relative pronoun clause respectively.  Pretty clipped diction, here.  The sentence core—“she called down”—is only three words long, and it is followed by a three-word prepositional phrase that’s succeeded with a three-word question.  And, so far, Stead’s only used three bi-syllabic words.  The rest are all monosyllabic.

            The effect of all this is the poem’s gleeful cadence.  Whether or not we know what the speaker is up to, why he is at the island, what his relationship is to it (to the “she”), we can’t help but feel a little uplifted by the poem’s rhythms.  It’s as if the speaker is a tourist getting his first experience with some kind of exotic, singular beauty he’s heard so much about but of which he’s allowed only a distanced view.  He’s standing in the same garden as she is, but they don’t occupy anything close to the same space.  The poem’s opening is reminiscent of the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in this way: heightened moment, yes, but things just ain’t gonna pan out the way the speaker would like them to. 

            The imagery detailing the woman supports this conflict: “Her hair / was a shiny cap, / her face a mask,” her smile is only a “half- / smile,” and she shadows herself beneath a parasol.  If her hair is capped, then it’s covered.  The lovely, flowing locks we’ve been trained to associate with the typical maiden in her balcony on high just aren’t there.  Any emotion she might reveal isn’t, as it’s masked.  Even her welcoming smile seems forced, distanced.  Her inquiry of “Friend or / foe?” precedes these few details, our first real clue that the poem’s “she” is guarded to visitors. 

The speaker is quick to shift his gaze as a result.  In response to her question, he answers “Friend of friends.”  Rather than introduce himself by name, he backs off.  He puts up a wall just as she has.  And the names he mentions seem…spurious.  Half-truths.  The ellipses between them—“Lawrence…/ Carco…Bertie Russell…”—indicate he’s considering what/whom he should say next.  This tonal shift creates tension with the poem’s rhythms and seems to lie at the heart of the speaker’s central problem: here’s this beautiful woman/island that isn’t meeting his expectations.  How, now, does he conduct himself?

            After the exchange, one other name is mentioned but only in the speaker’s internal monologue, the conversation dead.  And the name, Jack, is entirely anonymous, representing an unknown identity and furthering the notion that the speaker and his subject share no common ground.  Nevertheless, he doesn’t seem too jaded by this glitch in his plan, whatever that may be, and salvages some semblance of beauty from the experience.  Stead writes how sunlight “glittered” in the bay water and in the trees, how the palazzo imitates the color of its Alpine backdrop.  The final image is of the sea as it “preened itself in / the sky’s blue mirror,” which is a pretty inversion.  “Preened” does carry negative, connotative weight, but the final product is nonetheless a pretty one.  Perhaps the speaker, despite the initial setbacks, is able to stand back and still get what he came for: a picture.

>Matthew Dickman's "Trouble"

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“Trouble,” The New Yorker August 11/18 2008

            “Trouble” is a poem of quirky dichotomy.  On one hand, we have the vast majority of the content: suicide after suicide after suicide—slight narrative moment—more suicide.  On the other hand, we have the vast tone: uninspired, calm, taciturn.  While the content could dip into the depressive, the tone never quite allows it.  In fact, as it makes me pine nostalgic, if not sentimental, for lost actors, actresses, etc.—the litany of suicides—it makes me chuckle a bit at the pointless, foolishness of it all, of taking life/death so seriously.  And it ends with a bit of a chuckle, the notion day after day, we (at the least speaker) carry on amidst all this quasi-tragedy with some semblance of self-control.

            What I like most about Dickman’s list of suicides is that it is composed primarily of rather extraordinary people, people who have made some claim on fame via a pretty face (Marilyn Monroe), pretty acting skills (Marlon Brando), pretty poems (Sara Teasdale), and a pretty life’s work worthy of a Nobel (Harold Pinter).  These are regarded as uncommon folk.  Special folk.  Yet, when lumped together almost in statistical fashion—as if the poem is a ticker of names more so than the lives the names represent—they seem completely common.  They become faces in the crowd no different, really, than you or me, subject to the same pains and triumphs.  The fact they committed suicide becomes as arbitrary as their fame, as their claims to fame.

            So what’s the trouble?  Got me.  Dickman closes the poem “In the morning I get out of bed, I brush / my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best. / I want to be good to myself.”  Maybe it’s the simple pleasures the speaker enjoys, the whole putting pants on one-leg-at-a-time, that’s the trouble.  That that's it.  Maybe it’s that there’s so little we can control in our lives…might as well forget about all that really matters because it doesn’t really matter.  What matters most is what happens in your little micro-micro-micro world, and even that’s up for grabs.  This sentiment is echoed by the little asides throughout the poem, the quick turn-aways from the suicide-listing like “Sometimes / you can look at the clouds or the trees / and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground” and “I like / the way geese sound above the river.  I like / the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they're beautiful.”  Simple, unadorned, absurd, ineffable pleasures.  All that fame and fortune and the struggle to acquire it—to create it in the case of many of the artists in Dickman’s list—just doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things.  So, clean your teeth.

            Some of the little words about this poem I’ve read around the web indicate it's a bit depressing, but a look at craft shows otherwise.  The poem is so blasé via tone, really a result of lineation and phrase-making, that it’s impossible to become depressing.  Barring minor deviations (such as a one-word introductory clause and a compound sentence), all but two sentences are built subject-verb.  One is an If-then sentence (so introductory-clause-followed-by-main-clause complex sentence) aside about reading a book when traveling, “especially by train,” and the other is the penultimate sentence quoted earlier, which begins with a short prepositional phrase (“In the morning)” not separated from the main clause with a comma.  Both sentences essentially say the same thing: you can fix neither the world’s problems nor your own, but you can take care of yourself psychologically, physically in the interim (so, clean your teeth and feel good about it).  But it’s the consistency of the other sentences that makes the poem's tone so banal.  They lull readers into monotony, effectively dulling the usual emotions we associate with death and suicide.

            As well, many of the lines are long to longer, which draws out the rhythms of Dickman’s sentences; the smattering of shorter lines keeps the poem from actually growing rhythmic.  The poem retains the tone of a rather drab, almost disinterested conversationalist who's tired of telling the same old stories.  The lines themselves are comfortably enjambed, a few are endstopped, so contextual tensions are further allayed.  Those few lines that are more unnaturally broken don’t feel that way because too much poem asks us to ignore—in terms of pause—line breaks to a degree.  Really, I wonder how many advantages other than subtle pacing this prose-poem acquires by using lineation at all.  True, many of the lines have a conceptual or imagistic integrity to them, but many of the other lineation-born effects of poetry are dulled here.

            But, if polarization of form and content is part of what’s at play, then that dullness seems a well-made choice.  What few other Dickman poems I’ve read (from The Fishouse in particular) bear a similar effect.  I’ll be curious to see what his new, first book is like.