The Be-Loving Imaginer

PODCAST #4: GOETHE AND HAFIZ | be the scripture you sing

by

Martin Bidney

As be-loving imaginer I have no greater mentor-friend than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust and Germany’s number one poet. How did he set me an example in both life and art? When he read the 1814 edition of Hafiz’ Divan (or Collection) newly translated (for the first time into any European language!) by the marvelously talented scholar-poet Joseph von Hammer, Goethe decided this medieval Persian Muslim pub poet was his “twin brother” and worked for five years until at last his multicultural dialogue-reply was finished: the West-East Divan of 1819. The Hafiz masterwork had transformed Goethe’s life.

I am Goethe’s spiritual brother as he was twin brother to Hafiz – I’m brother to them both. Poem 2, “Hegira,” shows Goethe patterning the new book on the examples of the traveler Hafiz and of Muhammad himself, who journeyed from Mecca to Medina. So in my verse reply I show how I’m trying to “be the scripture I sing,” a fellow traveler with the two men throughout my book West-East Divan: The Poems, with ‘Notes and Essays’: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues.

In “Unbounded,” the poem where Goethe identified his “twin brother,” the German Hafiz-admirer declares the Persian mentor to be akin to him as poet, drinker, and lover. So I study what Goethe thought on all three topics. Medieval Persian society interpreted quite liberally Muhammad’s remarks on wine, tending to see them as warning about excess, not as commanding abstention. In Poems 197-200, I show how Goethe shares the Hafizian light-hearted attitude to drinking. 

In this last poem of this group, “Cupboy, come! Another cup!” I note two kinds of breakthrough. (1) Goethe wittily confides that Muhammad’s dissuasion from wine-indulgence was brought on by the Prophet’s wish to be the only one drunk – drunk on God. Second, there’s a hint of homoerotic love in the relation of the tavern customer in the lyric to the tavern waiter he’s conversing with.

Therefore, to elucidate Goethe’s attitude of bisexual inclusion and acceptance, I study poem 8 by Hafiz, in Poems of Wine and Romance, which contains 103 Hafizian lyrics I translated (with a verse reply to each). Of course Goethe, Germany’s greatest love poet, also shines in love lyrics addressed to women, as we see in Poem 227, “It is good.” 

In poem 13, “Past and Present,” we find the aging Goethe, who’s over sixty, enjoying pleasurable memories and again paying grateful tribute to Hafiz, the master enjoyer. I conclude with Goethe’s finest love poem of all, “You in a thousand forms may hide,” where the beloved lady is said to deserve a multitude of laudatory names, comparable to the 99 which – as Hafiz had known well – the Qur’an gives to God.

PODCAST #3:  RILKE: LOVE AND CONFLICT | be the scripture you sing 

by

Martin Bidney

Rainer Maria Rilke, greatest 20th century poet writing in German, enters the imaginal worlds of Buddhism, Islam, and the ancient Greeks in a be-loving way, seeking to embody the traditions he sings of. When I “interview” him in my book Rilke’s Melodic and Metrical Art Vol I, I seek to create a word music of empathy in “replying” to Rilke as my mentor, friend, teacher, and dialogue partner.

In dialogue 178 where we discuss the concluding poem in Rilke’s two-volume work New Poems (1907-8), I respond to his transcendent vision of Buddha with a simpler reaction from my own experience of viewing Buddha statues like the one Rilke described. Turning to the sonnet “Muhammad’s Calling,” I respond in dialogue 172 to the Prophet’s terrifying encounter with Angel Gabriel by telling, in my sonnet, of the parentally loving protections the Qur’an reciter would receive.

The dramatic contrast between these two Islam-related poems will only intensify in what we speak of next. In dialogue 75, Rilke portrays “Cretan Artemis” as formidably complex in combining the compassion of a midwife with the prowess of an archer-warrior. My reply, contrastingly, focuses on the way Artemis applied her obstetric skills the minute after she was born by helping twin brother Apollo issue from their mother’s body. Then, to develop more fully the idea of a pervading conflict in cultural history – and in human psychology – between the impulses to Love and War, I open our three ambitious final dialogues.

Dialogue 72 centers on Rilke’s “The Birth of Venus,” where the violence that concludes the poet’s presentation of this marvelous episode dramatizes the intimate linkage of love and war. Replying, I focus on Rilke’s image of the bloodied dolphin to begin an overview of love-and-war myths beginning with the leading of sailor-explorers by amiable, human-like dolphins to what would become the site of the powerfully enigmatic – and dolphin-named – Oracle at Delphi.

Why does Rilke’s “The Vase of Roses” in dialogue 73 begin with the image of two men clasped together in a perilous wrestling match? Clearly to ensure we never forget the linkage of the deities of Love and War, who extramaritally begot the harmless-looking Cupid, with his, at times, lethal darts. Responding, I focus rather on the flowers themselves, viewing them, for a complementary perspective, from the standpoint of mystical Sufi Persian love poets.

Finally, in dialogue 70, I react to Rilke’s profoundly empathetic neo-Grecian poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” by answering him with a lyric I translated from Russian which proves the strong affinity of Anna Akhmatova’s outlook with Rilke’s own. In “Lot’s Wife,” too, we come to see the need to look back, and we clearly comprehend the futility of prohibitions that would try to stop us!

PODCAST #2:  HOW THE QUR’AN TEACHES ME POETRY WRITING | be the scripture you sing

My Talk Show Poetry Exchanges with Passages from the Qur’an

by Martin Bidney

“Be-loving imaginers” can travel into any scripture of the world with the aim of immersion and then enjoy an invigorated emergence to write, in word songs, what they’ve learned. In 9 dialogue exchanges with quoted selections from the Islamic holy book (colloquies published in my East-West Poetry, SUNY Press, now available from Amazon), I show how the Qur’an is my tutor in both form and content. I savor the seventh-century text in the 1922 translation from the Arabic by Marmaduke Pickthall, an English writer who converted to Islam as an adult. He is so immensely gifted that his rendering of the Qur’an is one of the greatest masterworks in English. I’ve spent hundreds of hours opening up his text to random pages and writing poems whenever I was roused to song.

In dialogue 7, one of the noblest ruminations on Forgiveness I’ve ever encountered stimulates me to borrow the 7-beat iambic rhythm of its opening words and to elaborate the central idea that a mentality of Patience and Pardon is “at the steadfast heart of things.” In dialogue 18 I accelerate the 7-beat tempo and intensity of my treatment of forgiveness when another Qur’anic passage offers this theme. The Qur’an teaches me the implications of metaphor. In dialogue 23 I elaborate the Qur’anic likeness of a “goodly saying” to a fruitful tree. For me, it becomes the entire world as a huge equivalent to this – a symbolic world-tree, the Yggdrasil Ash of Norwegian myth.

In dialogue 25, taking the rhythm of a three-verse sequence and using it as my adopted song-vehicle, I apply the metaphor of the sequence to the modern world. A “revelation” ignored, dwellings hewn from the rocky hills to be “secure,” and then a “cry arising” – could this be a Florida condo near a warming ocean? In dialogue 62, taking the juxtaposed images of star and sperm, I show their unity as that of a flash or spurt of coming-into-Being. In dialogue 53 I borrow the form of question-and-answer (maybe a leader and a group?) to develop the given theme of a need for grateful awareness. In dialogue 58 I offer a more concise version of a masterly Prophetic soliloquy to give it the concentrated richness of verse drama.

Dialogue 59 features the Qur’anic sura made specially meaningful to me when I taught for a month at a desert settlement in Egypt, an hour from Cairo. A student asked, “What is your favorite sura?” “‘The Enshrouded One,’” I replied, “where Allah praises the Night,” as that is the time when my poetry comes. Finally, in dialogue 66 I reply to the passage where the Prophet’s message of Love and Care stems, I think, from the kindness he as orphan received from his foster mother. I’ve rarely felt so deeply thankful as when writing my response.

PODCAST #1: BISEXUAL SHAKESPEARE | be the scripture you sing

My Talk Show Verse Interview with the Narrator of the Sonnets

by Martin Bidney

As “be-loving imaginer,” I like to dialogue with poets by building a bridge that starts where my chosen mentor-poet lives. I do this by entering the poetic form the mentor-friend loves best. Naturally I con-verse with the fictive narrator of Shakespeare’s sonnets (14-line poems) in the beautiful stanza form he can teach me, and I try to emulate my teacher in a gentle rivalry. Shakespeare, like prophets of older times, left us a life-testament, an imagined bio-scripture or life-bible embodying lasting values. My motto, “Be the scripture you sing,” means this: while you emulate the word-songs of your chosen master, think about applying to your own mentality the values that his work embodies. I play the role of a talk-show host in 154 exchanges of sonnets with my “guest” to learn about love and art.

The theme of Shakespeare’s book is love. It offers an adventurously inclusive outlook, a generously welcoming approach to love which is emphatically bisexual. In dialogue 1, we discuss the readiness of the fictive narrator to describe his boyfriend as “beauty’s rose,” a metaphor traditionally used for women. In this opening poem, as in the 38 poems that follow, the speaker will beg his beauteous boyfriend to get married and have children, so as to pay forward his attractive gifts. In dialogue 4 we clarify what the narrator means by imploring the boyfriend not to “traffic with thyself alone.” In dialogue 6 I playfully respond to the speaker’s hope that the friend will have at least ten children by suggesting that, in the broad sense of “progeny,” I might apply this philoprogenitive attitude to the books I hope to write. In dialogue 9, I deal head-on with the obsessive quality of the somewhat hectoring requests: if the boyfriend gets happy and excited by falling in love with a woman, and if the speaker identifies with him, won’t the speaker get equally happy and excited, maybe even more so, with a double love?

In dialogue 18, noting that the boyfriend is lovelier than a summer’s day, I liken the speaker’s amorous attitude to that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in writing “In Memoriam” to memorialize his own boyfriend who died at sea, noted that “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”

The climax of my talk is dialogue 20, where the speaker tells us that Nature, while creating the boyfriend initially to be a woman, fell “a-doting” and gave the creature, along with a “woman’s face,” a male organ in addition, thus fitting him to be not only “prick’d out” for women’s pleasure but also perfectly designed to be “master-mistress” of the enamored bisexual contemplator. Finally, in conversation 109, we return to the original rose metaphor, with all its boundary-defying implications: “For nothing this wide universe I call / Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.”