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Two poems by Nicanor Parra
Ode to Solitude By Pablo Neruda (Ken Krabbenhoft translated) O solitude, beautiful word: crab- grass grows between your syllables! But you are only a pale word, fool’s gold and counterfeit coin! I painted solitary in literary strokes, dressed it in a tie I had copied from a book, and the shirt of sleep. But I first really saw it when I was by myself. I’d never seen an animal quite like it: it looks like a hairy spider or the flies that hover over dung, and its camel paws have suckers like a deep-sea snake. It stinks like a warehouse piled high with brown hides of rats and seals that have been rotting forever. Solitude, I want you to stop lying through the mouths of books. Consider the brooding young poet: he’s looking for a black marble slab to seduce the sleeping senorita; in your honor he erects a simple statue that he’ll forget the morning of his wedding. But in the half-light of those early years we boys stumble across her and take her for a black goddess shipped from distant islands. We play with her torso and pledge the perfect reverence of childhood. As for the creativity Of solitude: it’s a lie. Seeds don’t live singly underneath the soil: it takes hordes of them to insure the deep harmony of our lives, and water is but the transparent mother of invisible submarine choirs. The desert Is the earth’s solitude, and mankind’s solitude is sterile like the desert. The same hours, nights and days wrap the whole planet in their cloak— but they leave nothing in the desert. Solitude does not accept seeds. A ship on the sea isn’t the only image of its beauty It flies over the water like a dove, end product of wondrous collaborations between fires and stokers, navigators and stars, men’s arms and flags in congregation, shared loves and destinies. In its search for self-expression music sought out the choir’s coral hardness. It was written not by a single man but by a whole score of musical relations. And this word which I poise here suspended from a branch, this song that yearns solely for the solitude of your lips to repeat it— the air inscribes it at my side, lives that were lived long before me. And you, who are reading my ode: you’ve used it against your own solitude. We’ve never met, and yet it’s your hands that wrote these lines, with mine.— April 22, 2010 12:23 a.m.
Two poems by Nicanor Parra
re: #9: Yes, I wrote it. In a poetry class as an undergrad. We were to choose a poet and try to emulate whatever seemed to mark the essence, the recognizability of the poet's style. It's been a long time since I thought about any of this, but here goes: I chose also to take issue with a few ways Neruda characterized solitude, and denied its existence. It is a strange poem in this way, in a way that to me characterizes Neruda--seriousness abruptly interrupts or is interrupted by a kind of offhandedness, and an irreverence. Sometimes an almost silliness. Speaking of, I agree with Neruda about the silliness of young or trite poets writing about solitude or prostituting the concept of solitude as a privileged or necessary ‘headspace’ in which one writes about themes of love, etc. (there’s the theme of “opposites” here, as Neruda’s collection is called “Odes to Opposites,” but I do not think their misuse of a concept undoes or negates it. I also took issue with the idea of the desert as an unfertile or uncreative place, or that solitude is an unproductive state of mind (again--if solitude even existed, he says). I don't blame Neruda for taking issue with solitude; he was exiled for so many years himself, and surely knew it in many ways, as the poem does yet demonstrate. But perhaps his socio-political beliefs could not let him write of solitude, finally, as itself, or he was too self-conscious to indulge himself such a theme. Ironically, he ends by doing what the young poets do in naivete; he indulges in a counter-fantasy that solitude doesn’t really exist the way we think of it—yet, solitude is creative and fertile, as is the desert, and there is a solitude one feels in order to be able to create, to write. There are many seeds that DO exist and grow singly under the soil, and even in the most intimate of human exchanges, there is a kind of solitude possible—see my image of the young mother breastfeeding; both she and the child are lapsed into their own reveries, miles from one another. We exist and produce work together, yet apart, even as we are together. Neruda ends with a statement about shared human consciousness, a continuity of human brotherhood and tradition deeper than any solitude he could imagine, but though I would take it even further, and speak of a psychological continuity that binds us together as human beings, we are still agents of solitude, conscribed to live or think at times in solitude, whoever we may be. Of course, it has, as I say, been quite a long time. Doubtless, I could reread his poem and find that there is so much more to say than I have. At any rate, it is both an embarrassment and an honor to place my poem here next his! :) (Poem to follow)— April 22, 2010 12:23 a.m.
Two poems by Nicanor Parra
Ok, nan, I'll give it up. Wasn't a Neruda poem--c'est a moi! I wrote it :) (As a response to Neruda's ode to solitude, since I disagreed with an important point in his poem)— April 21, 2010 12:51 a.m.
Two poems by Nicanor Parra
I so agree, Nan! Am dying to hear what Gringo thinks about this one, too, since he speaks the Spanish and does translation here and there.— April 20, 2010 2:48 p.m.
a homage to one of Cuddles favorite poems
Wowwwww. Never ceases. Hand me the nearest ear. :)— April 20, 2010 2:44 p.m.
a homage to one of Cuddles favorite poems
re: #10: Lorca rocks. Looks like we have some poetic tastes in common.— April 20, 2010 10:57 a.m.
a homage to one of Cuddles favorite poems
Nan's writing has been [fans throat rapidly] hot all the while, Joe! Where you bin? :)— April 20, 2010 10:56 a.m.
Volume Two
If that is so, bring on the talent, man! ;) By the by, my cousin has a book on some connection between irregular mental health, let's say, and creative production. I forget what he says--but the guy's a neurologist, so you can imagine it's interesting stuff. Re: songstresses: I was not talking about the hair and glamour, actually--unless we imagine the hair and glamour and glitz in their glib little scatting voices. I don't know if the greats need the gritty pasts but whatever they had, they certainly had the voices and the feeling, the "thing." :)— April 20, 2010 10:53 a.m.
Volume Two
Oh yeah, and I do appreciate Mariah Carey's talent, but am also tired of the parade of vocalists you mention. We like Deschanel perhaps because she sounds more like a jazz artist--maybe it's time to find some of them we can like? My problem with contemp. jazz female vocalists is that they sound lame, and so--loungey--without a lounge pass! Talking about Diana Krall and everyone who tries to sound like her, and Alison Krauss, ugh ...Scatting phonily around with the standards rightly sung only by the greats, like Holliday, Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, etc. etc.— April 20, 2010 8:36 a.m.
Two poems by Nicanor Parra
Ok, here it is. Ken Krabbenhoft translated these odes--I don't know what refried thinks, but I like his translating style--not knowing Spanish, of course--but it seems he does Neruda some justice here: Ode to Solitude Solitude I must argue for you your consistency, your constancy which will outlast my breath anyway; when I say 'solitude' it is solid, too--a hair's crack, or a breath, and then it smooths longhollow, sieves the night, filters me like a starfish from silt run through Solitude you are a white beach I try with limbs spread yet your width lies only beyond my stretch, this makes you solitude. You throw me from the deep these moments, seeds or wriggling fish. You give me the ground for works to do in the sun's warmth no magic, just the space for it where I build on collage of salt and loam, chalk cliffs of my fertile desert rising from the surrounding solitude-- I used to think mine at will; could raise my eyes inward, conduct the heavy fall of a drape of silence, but more like the blanket thrown over the bird's cage, making night of its mind's song. I said my solitude superior even to the bird's, my night will have sharp music of jasmine, the casement oiled open to the damp voice of my own thought firmly spread, I thought, but solitude is already there, woven into the flesh, threading each cell and leaks out like ink, or scent, one time jasmine, another rose, or nothing. A collision with another pushes it back only a little, knows it necessary to the intimate; as in swell of child’s suckling, baby’s mouth, attention falls away to seed in the feeding rhythm, fingers clasp at the screen of mother’s face; both gazes rest swells apart. Oh solitude you don’t accept seeds; you are a fact of them; give sense of place and form. A seed in water is solitude, a warm spill, a sink into earth for the taking root. In hordes, seeds each fall where they do, singly wear the shell which cracks toward light with the slow, lithe reach of green at beyond— I thought you could be broken, a stem --brittle solitude, or a coastline sent receding from the waves, with the breath pause. But you’re always there, connecting breakers far and near, a low white hum even-toned under each cap of the moving crowd.— April 20, 2010 7:35 a.m.