The Be-Loving Imaginer

Synopsis for Podcast 22 Pushkin's Onegin with Replies  Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia’s most beloved poet. Eugene Onegin, called by Pushkin a “novel in verse,” is Russia’s favorite narrative poem and her most influential novel. The narrative – about what was widely called a “superfluous man” – sets a context for the works by Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov that were to follow.     From Lord Byron, Pushkin borrowed a clever device: the use of a casual narrator who becomes a fascinating character in the story. Tchaikovsky made Onegin into a great tragic opera, but he had to leave out the entertaining character of the narrator – plus all the delightful mood changes in the storyteller’s personality.     Form-faithful translator Martin Bidney has created a new genre of literature, the verse interview book. For every 14-line poem of Pushkin’s, Bidney writes a Pushkin-style “reply” poem! So the book becomes a total dialogue, really two verse novels in conversation. Utterly unprecedented. The translator as collocutor.

The Joys of Poetic Meter, Part 2:  Martin Bidney, a poet, translator, scholar, and critic who has published 33 volumes of verse, here offers on a zoom YouTube the first presentation in a two-part mini-course, "The Joys of Poetic Meter." The course, as a whole, explores the rhythmic forms of lines and stanzas from poems of the last 3000 years, including ancient Hebrew, Greek, Roman, British Renaissance, and modern German, plus poems he has written in varied beat-schemes. Readings dramatize the joy the wordsongs give, and discussions are lively.

The Joys of Poetic Meter, Part I:  

Martin Bidney, a poet, translator, scholar, and critic who has published 33 volumes of verse, here offers on a zoom YouTube the first presentation in a two-part mini-course, "The Joys of Poetic Meter." The course, as a whole, explores the rhythmic forms of lines and stanzas from poems of the last 3000 years, including ancient Hebrew, Greek, Roman, British Renaissance, and modern French, plus poems he has written in varied beat-schemes. Readings dramatize the joy the wordsongs give, and discussions are lively.

PODCAST #21: VALENTINE’S SPECIAL

Originally planned as video collage 9.4, this presentation became Episode #21 of “Martin Bidney, The Be-loving Imaginer” for two compelling reasons. (1) The Valentine’s Day presentation is the most joyous love song I have written. (2) “Love” is pre-eminently the mood of my “Be-loving Imaginer” offerings. Here is a poem that my Valentine’s Day song performance stimulated:

327 Song of Love

I wrote a love song, and a pleasure sweet

Could feel when singing this to a computer!

Be blest, kind Muse of Tech, who are my tutor –

You as my Valentine I also greet.

I started out with improvising. “Wing it!”

The goddess told me, “Loosen up the mind:

A carefree heart will new coherence find.

Abide in me, and I will help you sing it.”

I felt that vocal spirits treasure kept

For decades well protected while they slept…

Then David words had whispered: Shir ḥadash

(“New song”) and then he added yitkadash

(“Let it be sanctified”). And then I knew

My love I’d sing to Universal You.

PODCAST #20: WORDSONGS OF JEWISH TRADITION  In this interview book I converse with the commentator (and at times with the original author) who together produced a new, 3-volume version of the Tanya, an 18th century spiritual handbook, so that the modern reader can place the mystical thinking in a wide context of Hasidic anecdotes and legends. Schneur Zalman, the original author, provided what amounts to a runway for the modern interpreter, the late Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, can launch us on a tour of the many parables he knows and retells with wonderful charm and often witty humor.  I write wordsongs in reply to 108 songs of the Steinsaltz Tanya, 36 for each of the three volumes. I’ll give a few samples of these entertaining interviews.  Dialogue II.23 Unaware of What We Are Doing shows how the storyteller and the wordsong interpreter cooperate as (so it feels to me) a fruitful unity. Dialogue II.3 Without any desire to receive shows how we “take off” from a lively anecdote and together reach a helpful lesson. Dialogue II.1 Lined with Pillows highlights Rabbi Steinsaltz’ quite special fondness for quirky, peculiar stories about real people. Dialogue I.14 Six Mighty Horses features our shared love of a wide range of diverse human beings. My introduction of the theme of children leads us then to Dialogue III.5 Stress on Direct Perception.  I love to emphasize the central mood of the book, which is good humor and the love of life. Dialogue I.1 What’s the first is perfect for an opener. Dialogue I.3. The Talmud Relates tells us comedians have reserved seats in heaven. Humor is a kind of energetic vitality, or vital energy, a virtue praised in Dialogue I.4 We find the soul, telling of the delights of vigorous breathing. Dialogue I.9 I do not want shows me replying to the religious teacher’s affirmations with agreement, but from my somewhat different perspective as a poet. Dialogue III.10 The degree of intensity may be the best conclusion, to show an overall impression we get from the whole interview book: intensity of life is happiness.

PODCAST #19: VIRGIL’S ECLOGUES WITH VERSE REPLIES On the back cover I write, summing up the global importance of this ancient Roman work: “One of the major bisexual imaginings in world literature, the Eclogues of Virgil are ancient Roman musical masterworks, rivaling the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Every wordsong in the group of ten is a one-act play, and every character is a music lover. Love and Death are always with us, to enjoy and to suffer, but word music is the great transcender: Art redeems Life.  Since the works in this collection are rather longer than those I’ve worked with before, I’ll recite, among Virgil’s poems, only Eclogue Two, featuring the love soliloquy of Corydon, lamenting the inattention of his male friend Alexis and pleading for a more encouraging response to the would-be lover’s gifts and requests.  I then recite “Virgil and Shakespeare,” the opening section of my verse reply to the eclogue, important in highlighting a central fact about the Virgilian achievement in this volume: as a triumph of bisexual lyrical imagining, it is the precursor of the Shakespeare Sonnets.

PODCAST #17: INDIAN, PERSIAN, ARABIAN POEMS

I have an astonishing opportunity to acquaint you with Indian, Persian, and Arabian poems in perfectly crafted versions, thanks to the mid-19th-century German translator, scholar, and poet Friedrich Rückert, who learned 44 languages, including Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabian.  In talk-show interview style, I offer English versions of Rückert’s poetic treasures, each one followed by a “reply” poem of my own in closely similar style.

To show how enlivening the interaction can be, let me start with Dialogue 64, The Dream Form. In Dialogue 65 Guidance in Love you’ll hear a dialogue in a highly unusual stanza form, faithfully followed by me from the folk poet. Dialogue 51, Verses in the Desert offers an alarming view of love for me to cope with…

Of high entertainment value are the many stories we’re given. Dialogue 52, The Hermit and the Hound is a short narrative masterpiece. Dialogue 115, Most Handsome Gift to the Handsome is a neatly paired couple of clever tales, the second one by Persian poet Rumi. And I love the clever girl featured in Dialogue 127, Abulaina. Finally, Dialogue 128, Al-Mansur’s Death on a Pilgrimage is an extremely short story followed by a relaxed reply.

Love stories are outstanding in this collection. Dialogue 1 and poem 2 of the books opening story Aja and Indumati by the greatest ancient poet of India Kalidasa, shows a typical feature of love narratives in a Hindu context: two sets of characters – the human and the preter-human (gods. who are intensified versions of ourselves). Dialogue 43, Stages of Love features the love-philosophy of Bhatrihari, a man who tried seven times to become a monk.

PODCAST #16, A MUSIC LOVER’S ART

This book is filled with poems about classical and folk music I love. Let’s begin with Mozart, a composer everyone loves because his music is so packed with great tunes, and his personality is youthfully impulsive. Try “The ‘trumpet concerto’” (312).

Beethoven equals him in popularity, and I join in, translating Nikolai Zabolotsky’s “Beethoven” (314) and offering a “reply” to the great “Ode to Joy” in my brief lyric, “Beethoven’s Ninth” (318).

I could hardly choose from the many I’ve done on Bach: a sample is “Thoughts on a Bach Cantata Strophe” (276).

Schubert’s “Alder King” (246) stimulated a lively reply

Let’s try composers from a variety of nationalities. American Samuel Barber is a great favorite of mine, and he stimulated “I want to write what never wasn’t there” (329).  “Old Man River” from the Kern-Hammerstein “Show Boat” (119) entranced me.

 Verdi’s (“La Traviata,” 96) at Glimmerglass affected me strongly. 

Russian composer Moussorgsky I love for his “Song of the Flea” (168), and about Stravinsky I wrote in “Rite of Spring?” (332). 

Finnish composer Sibelius is perfect in his orchestral piece “Tapiola” (217).

Spanish “Sarasate” (71) kindled my interest in the music of Spanish verses, too (“Song arising to the mouth,” 269).

Another national folk tradition comes through in O’Carolan’s tune to which Thomas Moore set his poem “The Young May Moon,” but I have written new lyrics to it! (see Planxty Peyton, 59).

Today’s freestyle chat has 4 parts, all stemming from Roger Brooks’ book The Power of Being Rich: 10 Essential Principles to Manifest What You Already Have. As dialogic interpreter, my bold beginning is to suggest that Roger’s admirable volume might equally well be titled The Power of Rich Being. Roger wants to show people how to conceive and advance a practical enterprise by starting with a feeling of abundant Being, fullness of Being, plenitude of Being. It starts with confidence, which is nothing more than faith – faith in yourself. Gratitude for your gifts is both starting point and end result.

Next, I show that the exchange of approaches between Roger and me amplifies the meaning of the book we’re discussing, and this deepening or broadening of significance is the essence of friendship. Friendship is mutual mentorship, reciprocal shared learning. I invented the new literary genre of the verse interview to develop dialogue-friendships of this kind with writers I admire. In Shakespair I answer all the Bard’s 154 love sonnets with Shakespearean-style sonnets on facing pages. What an extraordinary human experience! But it’s also, for me, very ordinary in that my poetic “career” began when I discovered it was more fun to write e-mails in sonnets rather than in the usual conversational prose.

In part 3 I show how Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, relates the theme of rich being to that of friendship. In his poem “Breathing,” he tells us that the tension of inhaling and the relaxation of exhaling are two types of “grace” or vital taking-and-giving, the healthiness of rich Being. Next, he writes a myth of Lucifer or Satan as uneasy in the continual society of God or Elohim. Satan leaves them to be on his own, but gets lonely. Using Jesus as a role model, Satan decides to return to harmony with the Elohim. But, being the kind of person he is, Satan eventually gets restless and has to leave again. What results is a pendular movement between Solitude and Friendship. The “devil” loves it, and so will we. This alternation I correlate to the contrasts in the “Breathing” poem between inhaling and exhaling. Moral and psychological “breathing” means alternating between taking and giving, between self-affirming (inhaling) and self-transcendence (exhaling), between “Selving” and “Unselving,” two wonderful word coinages of Goethe. This alternation is deeply, powerfully lifegiving. It enriches our Being.

Finally, in part 4, I show how the gift of a gingko-patterned coffee cup from a potter friend (artist mentor), added to reverie-thoughts on the November window landscape (reminding me of the paintings of painter Andrew Wyeth, another artist mentor), produced a dialogue-response in the form of a newly composed sonnet.

PODCAST #15: ANGELUS, GUIDE TO GOD WITHIN

by

Martin Bidney

Angelus Silesius, the Silesian Angel, was the name Johannes Scheffler took when he converted from the Lutheran to the Catholic Church. But as witty mystic poet, he aims to bring his imagining Heart to oneness with ULTIMATE BEING, THE GOD BEHIND THE NAMES and formulations. His poetry book, “Cherubinischer Wandersmann,” could be translated Companion Angel. Living in a century of religious wars, he wants, through introspection, to find harmony.

Mystic = Greek myein = to close the eyes. Looking inward, Angelus finds the oneness of the Beating Heart with the Boundless. Immensely daring imaginative calisthenics through intense love can expand the heart so that it, too, is boundless. I interview Angelus 86 times, commenting on his deep and innovative metaphors. The Boundless itself is a metaphor – a closely related one is Horizon, the Ultimate Being we can’t reach. Look in your heart to find the boundless – I use this thought of Angelus as my own personal motto (Dialogue 200).

Exploring the Boundless – Beyond the Names

Dialogue 115. The Uncreated Ocean.

Dialogue 119. The Over-Godhead.

Dialogue 120. Love brings us to the Over-God.

Dialogue 116. I’m as big and as small as God.

Dialogue 117. God’s the fire, I’m the shine.

Dialogue 140. Become all things & thus a god.

Poet as Mary and God as Her Child

Dialogue 121. Let me be Mary and bear God.

Dialogue 132. I want to be Mary!

Dialogue 136. God allows for all metaphoric family roles.