poetics

Erik Satie's desiccated embryos.

1.

At this time in 1913, Erik Satie began composing Embryons Desséchés, a triptych for piano. He would finish it in two months, inspired by words for strange crustaceans discovered in his Larousse dictionary, using these words as entry-points for an ironic portrait of Classical musicians and pieces.

When asked about memorable images, Jorge Luis Borges remembered the tigers in illustrated versions of childhood encyclopedias better than “the eyes or the smile of a woman.”


2.

How Satie describes the piece in the introduction to the score:

This work is absolutely incomprehensible, even to me. Of a singular depth, it always amazes me. I wrote it in spite of myself, driven by destiny. Maybe I wanted to be humorous? It would not surprise me and would be quite in my way. However, I will have no mercy for they who would ignore. May they know it.


Holothuroids.

Holothuroids.

3.

The first dryed-up embryo, “D’Holothurie”, is about a sea cucumber observed in the Bay of Saint-Malo, and Satie parodies here a popular 1830 French song, Loisa Puget’s "Mon rocher de Saint-Malo", by using it as the second subject in the dominant, while keeping the accompaniment in the tonic. The parodic final cadence builds on Puget’s refrain before ending pompously and repeatedly in the wrong key, which Satie has made to sound like the right one.

The second embryo, “d’Edriopthalma,” focuses on a crustacean with immobile eyes. Rather than parodying the "celebrated Mazurka by Schubert", as written in the score, Satie actually pokes fun at the famous funeral march from Chopin's sonata Op.35, rendering the soaring trio melody flat, mundane, and un-Romantic. Elements of Chopin’s posthumous funeral march (1837, op.72 No. 2) also appear in this creature with immobile eyes.

The third embryo, “De Podohthalma”, another crustacean with eyes on slim stalks, eyes held apart from the rest of the body, quotes the refrain from Fiametta’s “Orang-utang Song” (in Edmund Audran’s operetta, La Mascotte, 1880), where the orang-utang puts on pants to become an official councillor, a legitimate member of the Court that poses no threat to the established members — because he agrees to wear the costume. Backstory here includes the French song "Good King Dagobert" ("has put his culottes on backwards..."), written in the eighteenth century to mock the figure of the King.

The final cadence, “Cadence obligee (de l’auteur), or mandatory cadence by the author, parodies the 23 "ad libitum" optional cadences, found in certain virtuoso romantic piano works, particularly the finale of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

Satie’s composition can be taken as a critique of over-emphatic closure and grandiose closing strategies in music composition, which reminds me of our own tendencies as poets to want to make the poem end in something immense, and how immensity often results in melodrama or tonal displacement.


unnamed-10.jpg

4.

“The most challenging part of playing this piece by Satie is deciding on how to add timing. Satie doesn’t give us time signatures, so lots of this is left to the individual performer, including how much we want to parody the parodies.”

- My son on preparing to play Embryons Desséchés


5.

In 1991, Eliot Weinberger published an collage-essay, “Dreams from the Holothurians,” which traces the myth of Atlantis through the mouths of various explorers, politicians, religious leaders, philosophers, and thinkers across time.

There is no integument which connects one explanation to the other; Weinberger uses an exclamation — “Atlantis!”— to start each paragraph, and it is the word, itself, which, connects Mesoamerican myths to Herodotus:

Atlantis! Herodotus tells of a people in the west, the Atarantes, who have no names for individuals, and who curse the sun at noon for its heat. And west of them are the Atlantes, named for Mt. Atlas, which they call the Pillar of Heaven and whose peak is permanently hidden in the clouds. A people who eat no living thing, and never dream.

On and on we go through Francis Bacon etc. until Weinberger returns to the holothurians at the end, which is where the book, Outside Stories (New Directions) also ends, which is where, in a sense, the author begins.

unnamed-8.jpg
unnamed-9.jpg

6.

In a recent poem published in Sublunary Review, I used a tempo-marking which is more of a notation, from this piece by Satie to write a vestigial sonnet. “Pour charmer le gibier”. I also played with the translation of Satie’s marking — which the score translates as “to charm the victim”, and which I rendered as “to charm the game”.

As to why I translated the marking differently, moving from victim to game, perhaps this post helps to explain it. A piece without time signatures asks something different from the performer.

"Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay"

A National Poetry Month morning exercise inspired entirely by Oliver de la Paz’s "Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay" (which you can also hear read by the poet at the link)—and by my incredible, gorgeous, brilliant son.

Getting ready for work and preparing to drop him off at the Montessori preschool which eventually became untenable to his thriving.

Getting ready for work and preparing to drop him off at the Montessori preschool which eventually became untenable to his thriving.

*

1. Did your child lose acquired speech?

He has always been polylingual. I mean: he learned the language of puppies, cats, eagles, furred creatures he admired. The march of the penguins—his tears when the daddy penguin dropped the egg. The words moved from his mouth to his fingers, shimmering, twinkling, circling the brown curls of his head.

2. Did your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals?

He laughs with his whole body: it is as if the laugh lives inside him, inseparable from every nerve ending. A full-bodied laughter. He doesn’t point to things. Is this the question? What am I answering? He likes quiet. Unusual noises scare him. Football and fireworks scare him a lot. We try to leave town on those weekends.

3. Is your child’s voice louder than required?

I think I mentioned it is loud where we live. I never realized how loud lawnmowers and leafblowers could be, the endless screaming of inhuman machines. Given the surrounding sounds, his voice is very loud—his teachers say disruptive. My friends say: shouting. It is loud enough so he can hear himself speak over the noises in his head. My child’s voice is as loud as required. He could be a sportscaster, really.

He presses his invisible volume button when he needs to lower his voice in public spaces. The button is located right above his heart. Sometimes he presses it so intensely that he mutes himself.

4. Does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon?

He loves to sing. He sing-songs. He uses his voice to untangle the sounds inside a word from their shell. Did you realize each word has a shell around it? He opens each one carefully, slowly, with his mouth. And then he repacks it. He puts the soft sounds back into the hard shell. He will do this for hours. Often he uses his fingers and hands to help.

5. Does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)?

The toilet is connected to a series of underground pipes that swallow things. He has shown me this with a drawing. He puts toilet paper into the bowl and flushes with one hand over his ear, the other ear laying against his shoulder. It is true that the toilet paper disappears.

He started kindergarten late as a result. He was only fully potty-trained at six, and he will not use the school restroom. At home, he goes into the backyard, crouches near a tree to use the bathroom, the sparrows chairing overhead.

He cries and covers his ears when toilets flush. Always.

He says animals are his best friends. He trusts dogs and looks deep into their eyes. He does this even after one bites him on the ear and draws blood. I worry so much when people walk their dogs and he runs up to touch them. I worry those people don’t understand dogs are his best friends. I worry the dogs will hurt him again.

6. Does your child pull you around when he wants something?

He takes my hand to show me the ice cream. He stares at the freezer door until I open it. Then he looks directly at the ice cream and waits. The connection between our fingers which becomes a connected gaze is actually a blanket. We wrap ourselves in the blanket and eat birthday cake ice cream on the couch. Oh no—is that bad?

7. Does your child have difficulty expressing his needs and desires using gestures?

He takes my hand. He looks at things and waits. He crumples up on the floor when he is frustrated. After aligning all the ketchup and condiment bottles on the kitchen floor, he dances around them. Fingers twinkling. His eyes twinkle when his fingers twinkle in the air. The joy on his face is incredible—he knows what he needs to assemble it. He knows his joy’s patterns. The bottles, the trains arranged by color and size along the edge of a rug. His hands dancing, dancing.

8. Is there no spontaneous imitation of speech or communication from your child?

I don’t know what you mean. I know what he means. I know others don’t know what he means as I do not know what you mean by this question. Is this an answer? It feels like we aren’t communicating.

9. Does your child repeat words, parts of words, or tv commercials?

He repeats everything sing-songy. He loves vowels and fricatives. He repeats everything and takes it apart with such tenderness. Like a tiny monk studying the matins, the motion of music toward song. He chants a lot.

10. Does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)?

Yes! Yes! He’s been doing this more and I read in a book that repetition is how kids learn new words so I’m excited and hopeful about his vocabulary. He loves repeating alphabet flashcards. He does it by himself. He sits in his teddy chair and repeats flashcards for hours. And train words. And “Outside.” He says “Outside” thirteen times in a row when he wants to go swing. He sings it. He sings it and stares at the window.

11. Does your child have difficulty sustaining a conversation?

Not with himself. He has monologues. He meanders into new places with them. Twinkling places. But he won’t answer questions unless they are related to trains. Or bottles. Or whatever is fascinating him at that moment.

12. Does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pauses?

I don’t know. I mean, yes. I mean he recites what is happening in his mind as if I am not there. When he is finished, he crawls into my lap and repeats the word mommy. I mean a word is an island that protects him from all the other words and mean kids at school.

13. Does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)?

Yes. He was born egalitarian—he doesn’t he see status or authority or prestige or charisma. He loves puppies and penguins.

Last week, I had to leave work and get him from school because the principal said he was acting hysterically. In that office, he was so tiny, sitting in a large leather chair, his cheeks reddened, his eyes rimmed by tears. The principal said he disrespected a teacher and refused to apologize. He looked up at me, his lower lip trembling: “No, mommy, no. No no no. The teacher said dinosaurs were 2,000 years old. No no no mommy. The teacher lied. Lied lied lied.”

I took him home. He wouldn’t apologize until the teacher took back what she said. The teacher would not take it back. I’m not sure what will happen with school. I can’t differentiate between respect, apology, and fact.

14. Does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)?

He said I love you for the first time recently. He said it to a tiger at the zoo. He stared through the bars and said, “Tiger, I love you.” He was so happy. His fingers danced around his eyes.

Poems for broken things

I can’t get over Carl Phillips’ “Dirt Being Dirt”. Here it is in its entirety:

Dirt Being Dirt

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking
straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have
foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon,
it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly
ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless: the tuxedo’s corsage,
fog when lit scatteredly, swift, from behind—swing of a torch, the lone
match, struck, then wind-shut…How far is instinct from a thing
like belief? Not far, apparently. At what point is believing so close
to knowing, that any difference between the two isn’t worth the fuss,
finally? A tamer of wolves tames no foxes, he used to say, as if avoiding
the question. But never meaning to. You broke it. Now wear it broken.

In a note, Phillips says: “I think this poem is circling the idea of refusing to change the self, even when it’s understood as deeply flawed, given that we have to believe in something…”

I love the way the poem circles around the point where belief and knowledge converge into something that feels essential. And I love the short syntax of the final line, the command whose tone is almost reassuring or encouraging rather than distant. I think that tone is the most difficult to capture—the tone of a voice complicit in human intimacy, in the brokenness and resolve of that.

How is staying whole part of coexisting with one’s ongoing brokenness? Why is the temptation for redemption such a strong narrative trope in poetics, and how much more do we risk by refusing it? I don’t have answers. But here are more poems about broken things….

What’s Broken” by Dorianne Laux

Broken Things” by GC Waldrep

Broken Things” by Sara Teasdale

I Will Keep Broken Things” by Alice Walker

“The God of Broken Things” by Yusef Komunyakaa

Ode to Broken Things” by Pablo Neruda

And then, as an adage, as a mantra: Carl Phillips’ “Gold Leaf”. One of my favorite poems to share with my teen son when he is dancing with despair. As one must in this world sometimes.

Open Letter to the Trustees of the "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad"

William A. Lowell, Esq.
Charles A. Cheever, Esq. 
Choate, Hall & Stewart
Two International Place
Boston, Massachusetts 02110

October 10, 2019

Dear Mr. Lowell and Mr. Cheever,

One of the greatest things about America is the fact that, as citizens, we pledge our allegiance not just to a flag but to a hope of a better future, to building that future over this country’s history of racism, enslavement of Black persons, and native erasure. Since recent years have demonstrated reactionary regress inspired by xenophobia and America-First mentalities, I am writing this letter in the hope that you will consider the legacy that the Amy Lowell Scholarship leaves by basing it's application criteria so intensely (and profusely) around defining "Americans" as those citizens who were "born here."

As a child of defectors who was born in Romania, my experience growing up in Alabama was that of being told no matter how much I learned, no matter how passionate my academic and intellectual engagement, I could not be President of this country. My thoughts on leadership didn’t matter. My citizenship, itself, reflected my second-class status. Meanwhile, my neo-Confederate friends could lead the Chambers of Commerce and state governments with an eye to the Presidency.

I've been inspired by the poetry community's dedication to human rights, equality, and justice, and I am concerned about the way that huge funding is still off-limits to poets who were not born here and yet have paid their lives, their tax dollars, and their dreams to this country.

The "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad" seems, on its surface, to be driven by considerations of merit. It asks for a poetry submission without focus on byline or academic background. It also states, clearly, "preference" will be "given to those of progressive literary tendencies". 

At no point does it ask about financial disability or previous travel (which would be appropriate questions if the intent of the scholarship was to reward untraveled Americans citizens without means to go abroad).

The application process is free and simple. All that is required is:

  1. Two copies of the completed application. You may also, but need not, submit a 2 to 3 page curriculum vitae (again, two copies).

  2. A sample of your poetry, consisting of either up to 40 typed pages (two copies) or two copies of a printed volume of your poetry and two copies of no more than 20 additional typed pages.

I don’t understand how a traveling scholarship intended to benefit underprivileged American poets doesn’t require any of the following: 1) a listing of their prior travels outside the country 2) a statement of their economic need 3) any evidence tha…

I don’t understand how a traveling scholarship intended to benefit underprivileged American poets doesn’t require any of the following: 1) a listing of their prior travels outside the country 2) a statement of their economic need 3) any evidence that they are better qualified to represent “Americans” than the sheer luck of being born here.

When I downloaded the application, I discovered that it asked for a birth certificate and that the primary information culled on that one sheet of paper had to do with where a citizen was born. As stated in your FAQ: 

"Any poet of American birth who is able and willing to spend one year outside the continent of North America. There is no age requirement, and there is no requirement that applicants be enrolled in a university or other education program. While many recent winners have been published poets, there is no requirement that applicants have previously published their work."

Past recipients of this fellowship include several of my favorite poets--writers whose work I cherish deeply. But past recipients reflect a very narrow view of “American”.

I believe that Amy Lowell would not be on the side of human beings who currently agitate to diminish the value and rights of naturalized US citizens and immigrants.

I believe that Amy Lowell would be disgusted by the Birther conspiracy around President Obama and its resonance in our popular culture. If I am wrong in these beliefs, Amy Lowell's poetic excellence would not be enough to enable me to overlook a definition of "American citizen" that excludes naturalized citizens.

At first, I considered suggesting a more appropriate title for this fellowship. Maybe it’s the title that feels jarring. For example, "The Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship for Native-Born Americans"--but that's the rub, isn't it? See, those who are actually native to America are not centered in this Fellowship. (I could be wrong, but it seems that fewer than 5% of awardees have a tribal affiliation.)

This Scholarship is not about First Peoples--it's about the people who replaced them. It's about the stories we tell about the country we can only honor through progress, restitution, and acknowledgement. Amy Lowell's efforts to portray the lives of First Americans in her posthumously-published Ballades for Sale reveals the way in which primitivist stereotypes can underlie even the most progressive intentions.

As a naturalized US citizen whose parents risked their lives (and me) to flee Ceausescu's dictatorship, I cannot accept the sort of nativism which makes that citizenship somehow inferior to that of those who did nothing to gain citizenship. Being born in the USA is enough of a privilege without institutionalizing this privilege in a poetry scholarship intended to preserve the legacy of a powerful female poet whose struggled to be accepted in a country that rejected her sexuality.

I don't believe that any law or wrong is immutable.

I don’t believe that any foundation cannot change. I don’t believe a will or a trust housed in a law firm cannot evolve or develop under changing social conditions.

I don't believe that we are hostage to bad ideas from the past unless we deliberately choose to replicate and extend those ideas into the future.

I understand--and was reminded when protesting President's Bush's war in Iraq with a son incubating in my womb--that standing for the GOOD in one's country, as opposed to the bad, may render one "un-American" in the mouths of those whose institutions depend on historic preservation. If we spent as much money caring as we do bombing, this world would be so different. So very, very different.

What I believe conspires with what I understand in hope.

I hope more for the legacy of the "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad". I hope more for how this “America” extends itself into the world. And I hope more--so much more--for this country.

Yours in poetry and hope,

Alina Stefanescu, minor writer

P. S. If this fellowship is modified to include all US citizens, I promise that I will not apply for it at any point in time. I want to be clear about my intentions—though I discovered this fellowship when looking for assistance, my hope is that fellow “second-class citizens'“ do not discover this and experience the nativist rejection (which already leaves deep scars in most naturalized citizens). I don’t want this for myself—I want it for what it means to be “American” at a time when that meaning is associated with anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, xenophobia, and committed disregard for human rights. I want it, also, for Amy Lowell’s legacy, which I know can be revised to include what we know now rather that to perpetuate ad-infinitum the cruelties and inequalities of the past.