End-User CSS Stylesheets for poetry pages

One case for a poetry browser or at least end-user stylesheets for CSS has to be the blood-red on black Rilke pages.

Most browsers will now let you specify a style sheet to try to ensure that text will be your chosen colour or font and the background neither blazing white or utterly black.

A poetry browser would provide a better set of links for a page than a simple bookmark and a more useful way of making notes or linking alternate translations.

Rilke has many translators and I favour one for this and another for that.  Then there is the question that underlies the issue that I raised yesterday: access to views of source texts, canonical editions, author corrections.

Bookmarks do not provide this and tools such as Microsoft OneNote, while helpful, are far from what I find useful.  A poem does need an outliner.  It needs an unobtrusive mode of presentation and then options - but perhaps not the "full morphic" of early Self and of the current Squeak Smalltalk 4.1 release.

For the Rilke page, I wish that this Chrome browser had a simple right-click to "sane view".  All right - "preferred view".  It is what we routinely get with astronomy charts: white on black or black on white.  To save battery power for text on my netbook I often opt for yellow text on a deep blue background. I never opt for a the default white background as I prefer something closer to "linen".

Many browsers allow a default to be set for the minimum font size to be permitted so that text remains readable for the user - for the reader of a poem.

My ideas for poetry browsers are usually tracked by my "aule" posts and pages for "aule browser" and "aule pages" as either aule-browser or eclectic-pencil.

My alternative poetry pages can be found at poets.aule-browser.com but will require the reliable MIT Curl plugin as I use the Curl language for the poetry markup.

One useful option is to be able to switch easily to an invisible HTML BODY element and a black or very dark background rather than using an annoying screensaver.  It's like closing a book on a real bookmark for a moment to reflect, to pause or to contemplate.  I think of it as the silence missing between tracks of separate compositions on audio media ... or radio broadcasts ... or before mandatory applause.

Will the web ever give us a programmable option for a blank screen for a few moments after obnoxious adverts?  Just the time to count to ten before they display red text on a black background ...

Question: last line should end with Schoß  or  Schooß  as both are on the web in text and in web images such as that at Google Books ?

Regardless, the Cohn translation falters at the end.  For feathers, see http://www.earthlife.net/birds/feathers.html with calamus, rachis, barb, barbules and filoplumes, remiges, retrices, inferior umbilicus.

I have tried

feeling, as he now felt, the root 

of each and every quill 

warming, reddening, in this flesh.

as you have to reject "every inch" and "quivering" out of hand.  I would like something of the cygnet fledging but have not arrived at it yet.

San Juan de la Cruz / John of the Cross / noche

If you search Google Books for

aunque es de noche

you may note a curiosity that is even more widespread on web pages.

Some editions close the "fonte" poem with that phrase and not with

aunque de noche

This is not the case in Willis Barnstone's translation of "The Poems of Saint John of the Cross".

The preceding stanza appears to introduce this subtlety as it closes with the one other variant in the poem.

But how to confirm what may have been the original text?

Do these errors on the web arise from copy-n-paste ?

Bly's Machado: frutas redondas

I find two words, "frutas redondas" in Machado's Ricuerdo infantil

con sus frutas redondas y risueñas

which in Robert Bly's translation is

with their fruit round and joyful

and would have preferred

with fruits rotund and joyous

I have walked past orange trees heavy with fruit, globular fruit.

What precedes this in the translated stanza is "the square" and now we have "round" - but that is not the Spanish, where Bly could have retained "plaza".

"risueñas" translates readily in French, but Bly could not turn to "smiling" or "gay".

The plaza is immediately peopled with the young: was it empty before this? What was as if hanging on limbs, heavy?  And the poem closes with these heavy figures.  Do they smile at one another as they pass in the plaza? (not yet having fallen to rot, neglect.)

A white tennis ball is placed in a short story .. by Heinrich Böll?  The professor had married one of his students more than twenty years his junior.  He stated plainly that this object in the story had not relation to the young woman of the boy's fancy.  Machado was not so simple.

When we smile, a face softens.  Smiling is not joyous: perhaps "rotund and soft".  Winter has come, and perhaps the fruit is no longer firm.

"rincones" - see the Italian, Portuguese and Romanians for a feeling so unlike that of  "nooks of dead cities".  The translation is too literal: I find a "nook" in a busy house or library, not a necropolis. "recesses" would have had some humour.  And a hint of "rince", putrid, putrefaction, from the French.

Do you offer a child an orange without a smile?  Did she offer him "frutas redondas" without smiling?

Matt Fair and W.B. Sinclair: writers, irony and kindness

Matthew Fair of Victoria, B.C. is an "audio" creative artist/writer.  We were both reel-to-reel zealots when we met.  He's half-Irish and while I am legally one-quarter, the truth is I am 1/8th here and a few fractions there ...  Okay.  The truth is out.  My maternal great-grandfather was an Englishman of the occupyig army and I know nothing of his Irish wife as I know not a single cousin - they were alive in Victoria but I did not know they were there.  I may have sold them a book, checked them into a room or sorted their mail.  They may have cursed my damn bicycle in the rain.  More likley they were as suspicious of Matt as they were of Susan Musgrave.

Truth in poetry.

Michael Hamburger is dead and I do not yet have a poem for Matt.  John Dovener White, who may have forgotten that I have his copy of "Wintering Out" judged me a talker - after all he knew how to make a few bucks writing what others wanted to read.  Matt gave me the benefit of the doubt, as did Walter Bruce Sinclair, bookseller, thinker, writer and musician.  But as guitarists, Matt and Bruce did not connect - and less so as talkers and thinkers.  Even Sam Beckett was not a bond.

Matt had known such terrible poverty at the time he was getting to know Leonard Cohen's garage in Montreal (but with Mary, from Long Island.)

But I could see the connection which they could not: Matt was with rubenesque Mary, on her way to being a biologist and Bruce was with sportive Jane, on her way to being a biologist.

Matt was as kindly and bemused as he was brutally honest.  Bruce was more bemused and thoughtfully kind.  Matt would make you rice; Bruce would buy you a grilled cheese.  Both were writers.

Matt began accumulating and editing audio: what people actually said.  Bruce's irony would not see the need to preserve what they had said.

Bruce's "cantos" are unfinished; Matt's tapes have moved to digital.

There is no creative, edited, audio space for the Mayan or Aztec on Minoan marketplace, agora, bustop.  Matt will leave us with that for Victoria and its airwaves..  I think of it as a coounter-part to the miles of magnetic tape, tons of magnetic tape, recording hours of psychotherapeutic ventures and now deteriorating into noise and ferrous dust in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome.

I never knew Bruce's corporate father, but I did know George Fair, anarchist, house painter and one-time lighthouse keeper.  And I miss George.  Like other colourful men who were not my father, I could adore him withut painful ambivalence.

A poem for Matt Fair will require more than wit and erudition and irony and humour and rythmn and wordcraft and surprising originality - and to much of any one ingrediant will spoil that effort.  And he must hear it from the heart - no doubt while walking along a Pacific beach.

A poem for Bruce Sinclair will be fine in an e-mail although he might be pleased to see it in print and he will not hold his breath to see it in the window of a private small bookstore owned by a real bookseller.  He knows the limitations of my Greek, my lack of his Sanskrit and the many other facets of his erudition from differential geometry to St. John.  But he sold me the Penguin Book of Irish Poetry though I would rather have bought it from a daughter of Alice Munro farther up that street in Victoria.  He may owe me Robert Musil.  I owe him Sandy Bull on banjo and a Sunday morning hearing ragas transcribed to the Appalachian style that may have been favoured by some Shifflets and their Scots neighbours out of Ireland.

blue dome

This the 82nd of Bliss Carman's Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics ( 100 + epilogue.)

OVER the roofs the honey-coloured moon, With purple shadows on the silver grass, And the warm south-wind on the curving sea, While we two, lovers past all turmoil now, Watch from the window the white sails come in,
Bearing what unknown ventures safe to port! So falls the hour of twilight and of love With wizardry to loose the hearts of men, And there is nothing more in this great world Than thou and I, and the blue dome of dusk

It is somewhat vexing as a construction. It is not just that with purple shadows and a rising moon that the sails coming into port are white; it is not just that it is not usually safe to be under much sail when coming into port (here Dumas is more convincing); it is not just that we cannot both watch from the window and be under the blue dome of dusk.

What vexes me is his thesis in its setting: we are looking over rooftops and others are borne safely home or into new lands - and yet there is just the two of us.

With wizardry to loose the hearts of men,

is only able to lead from the comma into

And there is nothing more ...

for this persona - is this irony?  Is there a cabin boy on that ship?  Will there be sailors in the bar?

Is there a clue here in

While we two, lovers past all turmoil now,

rather than

While we two lovers, past all turmoil now,

or do I mistake an error in the printing for a metrical choice conveying the poet's intention?

An alternate reading: the "sheets" may be where they lie watching white curtains furl and luff in the evening breeze as they need not be standing at the window but looking towards that window, as given by
Watch [while/as]
   from the window, the white sails come in
but I think not.

What fails for me is the "white" and then the "blue".  Such care was taken in the colour of the moon, the shadows, the grass, and then none for the luffing sails and none for the glory that is a clear, moonless sky at dusk, a dome of every blue we might imagine, every blue we might ever hope to glimpse or that might send a chill down our spine on entering beneath a great constructed dome adorned in paints, gold leaf inscribing azure or cerulean hues.

Perhaps the new moon setting, seemingly unnoticed, leaves the blue dome to enclose us alone, but not with the yellow moon rising in the east.  That night has only just begun.

Title Poem

I was irked to hear a poet say of his celebrated book that first the title came to him and then months passed as he worked at (or did he say "waited for" ? ) a poem to be the "title poem".

On that basis so many poets would struggle to write a piece to be titled "New Collected Poems" - especially when the collection is new but not all of the poems are new.

A local poet can sport many badges of the authentic, the regional, and I distrust them all - age especially, that years make for "genuine".  Some prefatory remark had primed me to be irked so readily.

And I could not swear that a title has never occurred to me before a poem took full shape.  This must often be the case with the poem commissioned or demanded by some occasion, the death of a poet, the death of a parent, a sibling, a child, a mentor, or a spouse.  A muse.  A beloved cat. Monody.

Robert Hass must have known he would one day write a piece in memory of Milosz.

But though irked, I did not boo or groan.  The Greeks were not so reticent, nor, I imagine,  was the real Dr. Johnson.  See the many remarks of Pepys on sermons as found in his diaries.

Assignment: write something with the title "The Death of Virgil".  Truly, this
is irksome to consider.

But can a title be decisive in the sales of a book of poetry?  Is it because of how that title will appear on the page in the reviews?  Is it that so many titles of books of poetry are not memorable, and the title poem less so?

For painters with work for a gallery, the name of the show is needed for the brochure, the poster, the rest of the mechanics of commerce.

And with fame, eponymous will triumph, as does the name of Heaney for a few pages of a foreward to a thick book by many hands.  More than the title, the name will move so many to pull the book from the bookseller's shelf - and that purchase is essential to the survival of just what - authentic, genuine, poetry?

If a poet is to be trusted by the attentive listener, reader, then sometimes the less said, the better.

Temptation: to talk to your listening audience for a longer time than that which will be taken to read the work.  Translations of fragments and short gems to be excused in advance - along with the reading of commissioned epitaphs.

Critical Comment: "that awkward effort to shock your reader mars your work."

Doubtful Response: "and I do that to provoke this very discussion!"

Of that title poem, the poet said that his reading might fall or falter between the poem as remembered in its coming to him and the poem as transcribed from memory by him.  Then it should have been read until so revised as to be ready to be read from the printed book, for it is now confessed to be less than ready to support the title.   Imagine the architect, standing in the foyer before those gathered for the occasion, and making this declaration of his structure, its design, its finishings and furnishings.

Perhaps the next printing, the next edition, will find the poem revised - or under a new title.

Buck Rogers and lucid dreaming

 
Added a poem on lucid dreaming, eros and Buck Rogers at poems.aule-browser.com entitled "1958, 1963, 1970" which three dates break down as roughly
 -- last recalled night-terrors before relegation to a basement room
 -- the peak of my "Buck Rogers" recall and my sci-fi reading years
 -- first weekend dates at the movies and the end of reading sci-fi

Obscured in those dates are the fall 1967 to summer 1971 misadventures in the CDN DND Militia and alcohol.  Oh vey.
The fire, Dec 1964. The death of my grandmother, May 1969.  The highway accident, May 1970. The end of trumpet but a return to the stage.  Some of my mother's most violent breakdowns. Two girls walked home, spring 1969, spring 1971.

The horse mower of the heron poem is summer 1971.  No mention of poultry barns or ice cream.  By fall 1967 (?)  Howard Harder and his family were dead; by fall 1971, Glenn Saunderson was dead and Paul Hodgson when - that spring?  My younger brother, Jeff, with whom I shared that room, died a few years ago.
The bully in one town was always replaced by another in the next.  That was a constant, as much as my mother's deterioration.

All of these strain on the lines, constrain the effort to distill a poem that explorers my lack of recall of a female form in "Buck Rogers" in spite of my uninterrupted interest in girls for as long as I have recall to the years before school and further back than most would countenance as even possible, let alone believable.  Such a memory has been a burden and worse - a plague - for my mother in her troubled life and even now, in her faltering last days or weeks or months.  In me, memory impairs the need and the imperative to forgive and, if you cannot forgive, forget.

"1958, 1963, 1970" read without comment at Molly's in Fredericton today when the fred-ezone let me down again, failing to grant me an IP to access my own pages to read more settled, revised work, at an open-mike.

No poems were read in French, but two were read in Spanish and then in English by Nela Rio, a terrific surprise.

empty pocket

   
In Anne Carson's "Plainwater" the queen-wolf, "her face empty as a pocket"

Simon's "rat-faced girl" has something despicable about it, but we also have Randall Jarrell's recipes in the library, Al Purdy's golden oaks in the fall [not far from his use of Blackfoot "sqws" - itself not a term used by the Blackfoot before the British, the English-speaking, in "Alberta" and not readily excused.]

That the empty pocket can offer no alms?  But comfort in jeans is empty pockets.
In empty pockets, our hands find warmth.

No trusted poet with blue ink?  A timid editor?   I think of recent flaws in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, a writer not knowing to use "burnish" for metal burrs on ground metal, that we do not pluck roses, we cut a stem - unless as a sorry euphemism.

In the first century, a pocket is itself an  anachronism.

The effect becomes a flaw, unlike darkroom technique.

Or a pun:  Lupa, "loupes" ["various magnifying lenses"] ?

Geddes Merwin

 
Gary Geddes' 5th Edition includes no W.S. Merwin?

But it does contain a few of his own pieces ... [ a lack-luster reading of Merwin "To the New Year" closed the Tucson ceremony after Obama's speech with his quote from The Book of Job - the reading of the Merwin poem was the one inclusive moment of the speeches and readings and a fitting closure when followed by the hymn.]

Bellying Sails

William Carlos Williams "The Yachts" may have a nexus with the four-cornered sheet in contrast to the Lateen sail (three-cornered?) of Breugel's landscape with Icarus.

William Carlos Williams' "Danse Russe" and Venus Kallipygos / Callipygian · dance ruse

William Carlos Williams "Danse Russe" has a ruse and the trope moves about the sculpture Venus Callipygian or Venus Kallipygos of Naples.

Sadly, "Danse Russe" is absent from the most common paperback collection of his work.

The poem can be heard at Project Gutenberg and it can be read here.

The moment would make a great scene in a film (so much more so than Mark Ruffalo in his white pants in Spotless Mind.)

"Danse Russe" -  unlike Rimbaud's "Vénus Anadyomène" with its medical cue.  And was William's torso that of an Apollo? An Ares?  Note: the sun.

I would argue that the white disc of the sun is the full moon, with the shining trees and the mist.  The drawn blinds are yellow due to the incandescent lamp.  He is in his north room, not in the light of a lunatic.  Key word: grotesque as in grotto.  He is not draped in his white shirt like a serf or a belted Cossack - he is undraped as is the admiring Venus.

The fascination with the Venus looking upon herself and a Venus reconstructed, reinvented.  We are very far from Narcissus here and from perception and mere reflection as knowledge.

Did he imagine those other writers in Paris?  Is his "north" room New England?  Well, Paris is very much to the north in France, and even more so viewed from Greece, or even Naples.  But in may merely be that a north room in New England has no moonlight.  But he is casting shadows while before a mirror.  His song is deceptively simple.

Could the Venus, partially undraped, contemplating herself, be satisfied in a poem?

Suppose you only had a fragment of the statue - or the poem?  And im nu, there it is: ν the Greek 'n' - for this song, this lyric, is not "lonely" but "lovely".

Russe - another alphabet - in which the 'N' is our 'H', Helen is Хелен.  And in Gaelic, his Kathleen?

You might say that his ditty points to Αφροδίτη.

But if my interpretation can be defended, consider how it had been inaccessible if my text of "Danse russe" were in translation?  And that could be the final clue in the title chosen by Wm. Carlos Williams.

Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture: a note on the germane, but unspoken.

The is an interesting instance and moment in Seamus Heaney's Nobel lecture: the guttural.


I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot.


What he gives us one layer below, is the Irish sympathy - the sympathies in Dublin and elsewhere - for the German national project in opposition to the British.  Heinrich Böll's  Irisches Tagebuch for County Mayo did make such mention, if my memory serves me ... and Heaney would later choose Dublin as his stepping stone.  The gutturals of which he spoke - unlike the mere strident sibilants - cannot be passed over - the poet was choosing his memorable words, official words (Heinrich Böll's prize came 23 years earlier, and not for poetry.) The "sweep" and the "short bursts" cannot be ignored in this reading.

"Wideness" is in keeping with a German linguistic tendency - and "wide" itself comes to us from the same root as the Dutch and the German words.  The "wideness" of language and the world.  Not the "wise" and the "wisdom".

And one such point of arrival was Dublin.  He came out of Casteldawson, County Londonderry.  Here is how he begins his lecture:

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm


Here is the Gailic: Gearmáinis, the word for things German — and a translation for germane might be?

For one of my many "german cousins", the late Heather Elaine Solomon, née Shiplett/Shifflet, a McKay or Mackay, a Coles/Scott, a Bahá'í and a teacher in the Canadian Arctic, a student of sociology and a believer in the good in mankind.

One Reason

A page from the small black artist's book from Claire, beginning,

The reason to read in public

and meant to be read aloud in the café on an odd Sunday

should appear as poems.aule-browser.com/one-reason.html


 

 

 

 

 
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