The 1987 McWhirter translation of Jose Emilio Pacheco’s selected poems is reviewed in the current issue of the Literary Review of Canada. I have been sitting this morning by the ocean with poems from his first book, The Elements of the Night.
You can read these poems at the Internet Archive. Beautiful. Simple language, reflection on very few elements of his world but occasionally drilling deep into an undiscovered image. Poems worth sitting with.
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The current issue of the New Yorker has a poem by Adrienne Su called “Lament” which ends with the lines “the reasons to gather/have never been clearer/The dinner is gravy.” Reading the poem sent me down a little rabbit hole of her work and stumbled into her writing about food and culture.
Her website offers me an essay called “The Last Bite: A Culinary Meditation on Arlene Schechet’s “Head on a Plate” Porcelains” which conjures up:
A head on a plate initially evokes a stray Brussels sprout—the last bite, which the diner could not finish. It is not the despised Brussels sprout of yore but the aspirational appetizer or side in a good restaurant: tumbled with bacon, pecans, or blue cheese (or all three), or seared with honey and soy sauce and a sprinkling of white pepper. It remains alone on the plate not because it is unappealing but because the eater took or received too many and now must contemplate throwing it away, which incites guilt. It is too small to justify a take-out container, but stuffing oneself when not hungry is also a form of waste, so the conscientious restaurant patron sits, shooing away the server attempting to clear the table, hoping to feel hunger again before others start talking about dessert or calling for the check.
This piece also contains a recipe,
A search in Libby for her books offers me several samples from recent works including Peach State in which the poem “Substitutions” offers couplets that contrast life in traditional human community with the modernity of an immigrant’s reality in Atlanta: “Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar/Letters ,for a family gathered//A Cuisinart, for many hands/Petty burglars for warring bands//A baby’s room, for tight quarters/Passing cars, for neighbours”
I love her work.
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The last line from a prose poem by Grace Yee called “Living Among Trees” From the latest issue of Heat:
…I know that when lightning strikes a giant sequoia and burns out its heart, you can step inside the trunk, look up at the sky and hold it.
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I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.
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I’m returning to Bowen Island after a week in Ottawa working and visiting friends and the old haunts we occupied back in 91-94 when we lived there. Some things are the same, like The Manx pub which opened the same week we arrived right at the end of our block. Or good old Octopus Books, now in the Glebe where I bought Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s latest book The Theory of Water. Of course much in Ottawa has changed since the early 90s, and it is fun to find new places like The Rowan where, among other things, we ate a plate of salt-roasted carrots that had been grilled. It was one of the finest things I have ever tasted.
Being back in Ottawa also brought me to a state of mind that was a little bit slower. We lived there long before smart phones and social media had been invented. I spent many days in Ottawa writing poems, reading journals and lingering over words. I served a short stint as an associate editor of ARC magazine, so I always associate Ottawa with its literary scene.
During this trip, I travelled with the latest issue of Poetry and a couple of poems stand out.
Try. Elegy at Middle River by Courtney Kampa which threw me to the ground.
Or how about this one from Rigoberto Gonzales called The Luna Moth Has No Mouth which is both astonishing and true.
Gonzales, by the way, won the Ruth Lilly Poetry prize and in his reflections on his craft published in the October edition of Poetry, he remembers a line he wrote years ago which someone quoted on Twitter: “what is a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.” That is some lovely.