poetry

Seamus Heaney: Tonight He Dines With Yeats

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Seamus Heany
I received this note from our Poetry Editor, Jim Gustafson today on the passing of Seamus Heaney.

Jim wrote:

“This morning I learned that Seamus Heaney died at 74 years old. He was just seven years older than I. He was an important poet to me and to the world, for that matter. I would not have any enthusiasm to argue against those who would say he was our greatest living poet.

News of  his death stirred that something that makes me want to try to write a poem. I thought of his 1995 Nobel Lecture which I occasionally listened to as I walk. In that talk he says, “I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.” With that in mind, I began to write. I watched my words come out in the slow sentimental drips that come in mourning and thought it best to move-on in prose, where sentimentality is allowed to whisper.

Heaney was never far from the shadow of his father. Like Roethke and others, there is a connection between poet, father, and earth that cannot be shaken. In his book Death of a Naturalist, his poem “Follower” recalls how, as he father plowed the Irish field, he followed behind “tripping, falling and /yapping always.” The poem ends with the lines:

But Today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

Perhaps I feel close to Seamus Heaney because we share fathers who won’t go away. Perhaps it is our mutual awareness that our fathers’ toil made it possible for us to escape the fields. Whatever it was, he is the sort of poet who enters the room with his words. And in all the days ahead, when we read his poems, he will be behind them. He will not stumble, nor will he go away.”

Well said.

 

The Space Between “A” and “The”

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I happened upon this old radio interview with William Carlos Williams today. About three minutes into the broadcast, William recites his famous “Red Wheelbarrow” poem, but he makes a small in size, large in implications mistake. Take a listen to the early portion of this video:

http://youtu.be/3mLzU3dF6gY

(Do take the time to listen to the whole interview. Though for our purposes today, we need not listen any further than five minutes in or so.)

Williams says:

so much depends
upon

the red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

But the poem is actually about “a red wheel barrow.” (Allow me to pause here to mention the word wheelbarrow has no hyphenation in the poem, a both frustrating and fascinating mistake or decision.)

So what is the difference between a red wheelbarrow and the red wheelbarrow? To some, I imagine there is no difference. The scene is so compact and discreet, it might as well be the red wheelbarrow because there are no others presented, no rival wheelbarrows.

However, I think the red wheelbarrow is different — if only in slight degrees. The red wheelbarrow implies there are multiple wheelbarrows. It implies there is something singular and specific about this certain red wheelbarrow, in this certain location. It in some ways turns our focus to the dew and chickens and the color red, the distinguishing elements of the wheelbarrow.

The word the in this instance carries a degree of undertones, a subtext of something peculiar or even sinister. By specifying the red wheelbarrow, it suggests there are other wheelbarrows. And since it would not be the working red wheelbarrow or something to imply it is the only usable wheelbarrow (as the original poem suggests) makes me wonder if perhaps there is something even more important than the wheelbarrow’s farm-related duties. Perhaps there is dried blood at the base of the wheelbarrow. Suddenly the pastoral, slice-of-farm-life poem contains a whiff of murder mystery.

Is that drawing a bit much from the difference of a single article? Yes, probably, maybe. It was the natural path my mind wandered when I first considered the difference between the two words, so maybe it is not so radical? Or maybe, if the poem had always been the, I would have never trod down that line of thought.

But we can at least suggest this: When a poet has only twelve words to convey a meaning or scene, so much depends upon the space between a and the.

Shivani Mehta

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THE CAPTIVES

By Shivani Mehta

In 1438 the dying were buried before they were dead, thirty seconds before their eyes closed. To look at the faces of the dead was thought to bring a lifetime of bad luck.  The family of the soon-to-be deceased stood by the freshly dug grave, waited to catch their loved one’s last breath as it slipped through a crack in the casket.  The youngest daughter was charged with catching the breath, which sounded like a sparrow sighing when squeezed in the palm of a hand.  The heart of a willow tree was shaped into a container to hold the breath, its edges sealed with wax.  Breath-catching continued for almost two centuries until it was abolished in the mid-1600s.  One evening in late summer, all captive breaths were set free.  A cacophony of sound split the sky’s curved dome.  The night braced against trillions of dusty sighs.

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Shivani MehtaShivani Mehta was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. She moved to New York to attend Hamilton College and then earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law. Her prose poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Coachella Review, Cold Mountain Review, Fjord’s Review, The Normal School, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Shivani is the accomplished mother of toddler twins. Incredibly, they sleep long enough to allow her to write prose poems. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, children, dog, two cats, and several fish.

 

Shevani Mehta

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THE DRESS-MAKER

By Shivani Mehta

When my twin sister and I were young our mother was a dress-maker.  Beautiful dresses were all around us, dresses we weren’t allowed to touch, dresses made of crepe, cambric, calamanco, faille.  At night we wore nightgowns mother sewed us from sack-cloth and imagined how those other dresses might feel in our hands, against our bodies, wondered if lace skimming up a thigh might sound like the deliberate unhurried tearing of the thinnest parchment.  On our eleventh birthday, mother gave us each a pair of patchwork wings, sewn from leftover scraps of fabric.  With needle and thread she stitched the wings onto our backs.  Our school uniforms had to be let out to accommodate the wings which, even when folded, brushed the backs of our ankles.  I remember how my sister and I held hands as we stood on the ledge of the attic window, how we soared into the sky, how our wings knew what to do, how our mother’s voice calling for us to come back shrank to a tiny point, like the volume on a stereo turned down too fast.

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Shivani MehtaShivani Mehta was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. She moved to New York to attend Hamilton College and then earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law. Her prose poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Coachella Review, Cold Mountain Review, Fjord’s Review, The Normal School, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Shivani is the accomplished mother of toddler twins. Incredibly, they sleep long enough to allow her to write prose poems. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, children, dog, two cats, and several fish.