KPFA - Cover to Cover with Jack Foley

My mind returns always to poetry

Not as a task but as a blessed relief

It is the spontaneous, generous gift, “grace,”

“Free, and totally unexpected, and

Undeserved.” Someone remarked

About Flannery O’Connor’s characters

That they were all seeking grace

But grace, like poetry, cannot be sought

My mind returns to poetry

Not as a task and certainly not as a job

But as a sudden, spontaneous, often surprising

Lifting of consciousness, a blessing surely,

Like the moment when your sins are entirely forgiven

Or the moment when you understand

That the person looking at you

Loves you entirely and without reserve

And would, if it were possible, take on your death.

“Poetry,” wrote W.H. Auden, famously,

“Makes nothing happen,” but I think this is wrong.

Poetry IS the happening, the chance encounter with the angel,

The sudden blessedness.

It announces itself as a “feeling,”

A piece of “music” in the mind

That tells you, “Now is the time.”

It does not transform the world like a program to end unemployment

Or a vaccine that will cure coronavirus,

It transforms YOU–you become a beacon, a light,

The sudden, submissive vehicle of a consciousness

That holds you and forces you, often reluctantly,

To stand unalterably in its shining.

Today is the birthday of KPFA-FM.

It is 71, nine years younger than I,

Though I have been broadcasting on it since 1988.

For more years than most people have been alive

KPFA has honored not only the political,

The transformation of the world,

But the transformation that occurs within the listener,

The transformation that comes with the infusion of words and ideas.

Echoing Cocteau, Jack Spicer said the poet

Was a radio.

The device becomes the person

When your ears are tuned to a channel of endless, eloquent hope.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A COMMUNITY RADIO STATION OF VERY LONG STANDING

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A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley.

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A celebration of the art of poetry, hosted by jack Foley.

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Jack looked into his files and discovered a show with the late, wonderful Carolyn Kizer. It aired in 1996.

Wikipedia: Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. According to an article at the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, “Kizer reach[ed] into mythology in poems like ‘Semele Recycled”; into politics, into feminism, especially in her series of poems called “Pro Femina”; into science, the natural world, music, and translations and commentaries on Japanese and Chinese literatures.”

Jack writes,

Ecco Press asked Carolyn Kizer to contribute to its volume of Dante translations. Kizer responded by translating Inferno, Canto XVII, into what she calls “antique hipster”:

“Yo, Dan, just give a look at this repulsive creature

Called Fraud, the wall-buster; He’s the prime polluter,

The poison in his tail’s an added feature.”

Then Virgil gave the high sign to that stink

Of rottenness, to make a three-point landing on the shore . . . .

It is an amazing effect–a little like translating Paradise Lost into baby talk. Dante’s “Ecco” (like the press), usually translated, “Lo,” becomes here “Yo.” “Wall-buster is an accurate rendering of “rompe i muri,” but it carries overtones of “ball-buster,” a term with which a “pro feminist” like Kizer was surely familiar. “The prime polluter” (Dante’s “colei che tutto ‘l mundo appuzza“) brings us even more definitely into the twentieth century with its ecological concerns, but a moment later the end rhyme of “creature / feature,” alive with echoes of ancient American television, returns us to at least the suggestion of terza rima. Virgil signals the monster, “that stink / Of rottenness,” to make a landing, and we go on with Dante’s story.

Kizer’s version was, she tells us, “quite properly rejected for irreverence and

‘not fitting in'” by the editors at Ecco Press. She published it under the title, “In Hell with Virg and Dan,” first in the magazine 13th Moon and then in her book, Harping On. A note to the poem states, “I just don’t care for Dante’s obsessions with shit and revenge. For me, he ranks up there with St. Paul as one of the most destructive literary geniuses of all time.”

This is Kizer’s poem, “The Intruder”:

My mother—preferring the strange to the tame:

Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,

Frog’s belly distended with finny young,

Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool,

Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves,

Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all

Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she

Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,

And held the little horror to the mirror, where

He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off.

Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing

Came clattering down like a small black shutter.

Still tranquil, she began, “It’s rather sweet …”

The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint

In the caught eyes. Then we saw,

And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow,

Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed.

The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud,

Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth

Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor

Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion

For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life

Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,

Whose denizens can turn upon the world

With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw,

To sting or soil benevolence, alien

As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot.

She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,

She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

…

Jack remarks,

“The Intruder” shows contradictory impulses in the same person. Similarly, is Dante a hero of poetry or a villain of religion for Kizer? Clearly, he is both, and what is said about him depends entirely on which context you are emphasizing. This is one of the exhilarating aspects of this poet’s work: it is never possible to predict what she will say about anything; she is constantly shifting perspectives…Kizer’s poems are frequently very funny, but they are also very touching and personal, and various other things besides. They are evidence of a mind which stays wonderfully open to its own potential contradictions.

This is from “Anniversaries: Claremont Avenue, from 1945.” It’s a marvelous example of a loosely pentameter line and the subtleties of free rhyming. It also remains relevant to the problems we still experience in 2020.

It’s 1985: in pain, my Mother-in-law has died.

Appraisers from Doyle pick through her possessions:

old furniture blistered by sun and central heat.

Twenty-One Claremont is no longer ours.

Recollections are blistered and faded too:

My husband’s boyhood toys, my fragments of Chinese.

Mothers have disappeared. Wars come and go.

The past is present: what we choose to keep

by a process none of us can ever know.

Now those little girls are grandmothers

who must remember, after fifty years

the doll, the chill, the tears.

Greatness felled at a blow.

Memory fractured. Black and white apart.

No sense of direction, we Americans.

No place to go.

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Jack’s guest is, again, Lola Haskins. This is the Author’s Note to her new collection, Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare:

“The quotes in this book are taken from the diary the poet John Clare kept in 1841, describing his escape from Dr. Matthew [Allen’s] private insane asylum in Epping Forest and his subsequent struggle to reach his home in Northborough, where he hoped to reunite with Mary, who’d been his childhood sweetheart. He made the eighty-mile journey in four days, sleeping rough and staving off starvation by eating grass, which he said tasted like fresh bread. Six months after this odyssey, Clare was again declared mad and sent to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he died twenty-three years later.

“I chose this frame for my collection for three reasons: first, because having been solo my entire writing life, I too have often felt like the only soldier in my own army; second, because I thought it relevant that Clare’s journal addresses how hard it is to be free; and third, because the fact that “asylum” implies both lunacy and refuge resonates for me. I consider these poems improvisations because I see Clare’s changing mental states as matches and my poems as the resulting fires, fire that I hope may, from time to time, burn out of control.”

This is John Clare’s most famous poem, “I Am!”:

I am–yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes–

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live–like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

And this is by Lola Haskins:

In Tide Pools

lavender-spined urchins reside. And anemones with wavy mouths.

And periwinkle snails, full of themselves because they have been

given such a beautiful name. And over these low-dwellers, fine-

haired grasses drift as if underwater there were always a wind.

And since these communities, not touching, are like language

groups that have grown apart, it is not surprising that each has its

legends. In one, it is said that the Maker, taking pity on the rocks’

empty cups, filled them. In this way, the rocks, once beggars,

became kings. In another, that certain stars, unhappy to be among

multitudes, found solace in these smaller skies. Elsewhere, it is

said that long ago the dwellers in these valleys lived deep. But

slowly and slowly, wave-rush drew them upward. And now they

are visited every day by her who, breaking over them, leaves parts

of herself, which they drink and want for nothing. It is not only

humans who have religion. On the edge of the ocean, the finger

limpets see the Almighty, and cling.

Part Two of Two

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