Letter to a young poet (C.K. Williams)

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, C.K. Williams, gives his advice for a poet starting out.

I’ll begin by promising that there’ll be times in your life as a poet when the problems that are a part of trying to live that life will make the whole undertaking seem a terrible mistake, and you’ll find yourself thinking there must be something else to do that might better reward your labor.  And indeed some poets do release themselves from poetry; they become novelists, or teachers, or accountants, (happy accountants!) and this can happen to poets who are still surprisingly young.

I should also say though that I don’t think the decision to abandon poetry has to do with how much talent one believes one has or doesn’t have, or how much dedication, or confidence; it’s rather more a spiritual crisis, a loss of faith in the conviction that poetry has a value beyond the doing of it.  Surely the pleasures of that doing are undeniable; the making of something from nothing is a delight unlike anything else.

So the conviction that poetry has significance beyond its practice becomes absolutely essential, yet it isn’t at all self-evident.  Finally, at some point we have to ask what it is that draws us to poetry in the first place? It seems to me that the essential function of poetry is to unify.

Human beings experience ourselves as assemblages, almost collages, of the passional, the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual. We are at once philosophers, aestheticians, social and political theorists; we are lovers and haters, children and parents, we lie, we tell the truth, we make myths and stories; there is violence in us, but there is also the unlikely charity which illuminates our spiritual history.  And what’s more, we are both participants and observers of all these portions of ourselves, these selves.   Poetry’s real greatness is that it is the most effective means we have of bringing together these apparently disparate parts of ourselves.  Because to be real poetry must be true, and  because it must deal unconditionally with the reality of a single person’s existence, by its definition it entails a bringing together of selves within the self.  Poetry makes us more whole than we thought we could be.

And for a poem to do this, in some strange way it doesn’t matter what it is about, what its subject is.  Poems can be self-consciously dedicated to the moral adventures of our lives; they can delve into that complex swarm of emotions and thoughts out of which our ethical sensibilities and obligations arise, and this will give them a certain admirable weight, like the poems of Dante, or Milton, or Baudelaire, but whether poems do this or not doesn’t determine their ultimate merit.  All poems exist in the tension between the immateriality of consciousness and language and the brute physical facts of reality, and so all poems, or all poems that are not empty drums banged to garner the applause of others, poets or critics, resolve this tension in ways that make them speak both to and out of the self.  A poem can seem to be about nothing at all – a clever conceit about lost love in a sonnet by Ronsard, a meditation on a moment of sensual delight in an ode of Keats – and yet, if a poem is authentic, if it is true, it will still evoke this essential unity in us, and will help us understand that we are not the poor fragmented things we can seem to be, and that our social organizations aren’t merely groupings of other fractured beings.  Because poetry demonstrates that the plural is merely a convention for the human spirit. The truth is that we are born and live and die one by one, and poetry, because it speaks at once to the poet and the reader, links the experience of one single soul to another and by doing so it exalts both.  That, finally, is what poetry is about, it is what allows us to be able to sit in a room by ourselves and do battle with language and form and with the pain of being able to do so little about human pain, and still feel we are doing what we know is the right thing.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams has published numerous books of poetry, including Wait: Poems (2010); Collected Poems (2006); The Singing (2003), Repair (1999), The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987); Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). He has also published five works of translation.

Among his many awards and honours are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He has served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Currently Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris

C.K. Williams has travelled to the UK to give the Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture “On Being Old.” He will also read a selection of his poetry at the lectures which will take place on:

• Wednesday 25 May at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Newcastle University
• Thursday 26 May at Senate House University College London
• Thursday 13 October at the Kenneth Allott Lecture  at Liverpool University

In C.K. Williams’ Letter To A Younger Poet, he emphasises the need to keep faith in poetry. If you had a time machine and could send a letter back to yourself when you first started writing poetry, what would you say? Do you have questions you would like to ask your future self?

Source is here

Starting with the bitters, ending with the sweet.

Try them!

I started with the bitters today.

The gnarly, near unpalatable, dreaded green of the bitter gourd or the ‘ucche’.

It’s an acquired taste, the bitters. I always wondered why Bengali meals began with it.

Living in Delhi’s heart of Bengali-land, Chitaranjan Park for over three months now, I have had my fill of butter chicken, paneer and butter laden ‘aloo parathas’. Of course, I did get around to sampling the fare from the localities’ several ‘Bengali’ restaurants and take-aways. To every aficionado who would zealously advocate this fare, I would say, it ain’t the real thing; especially the non-vegetarian, which is well, much like Delhi-Chinese, the Delhified version of authentic Bengali grub.

Which made me venture into the kitchen myself. For a taste of home. Home, which is my inheritance, the comforting salve which I carry with me wherever I go, the memory of my grandmother and mother, garrulously toiling away over the kadhai, never running out of complaints, “When my child, will you ever learn?”

I of course, never learnt. I could never learn how to measure when it came to cooking. Things continue to be flung in at random. This of course makes the Man Friday, the guest-house keeper here jump out of his skin to see the amount of chillies I flung into the pan every time. Perhaps in fear of indigestion, curiosity or general well-being that I not burn down the house, he stands in vigil, as I cook amidst the fumes.

“This is burning,” he says. No, it is not, let it cook. “Are you sure about this?” he adds suspiciously and I tell him ever so gently, you really don’t have to eat this you know. Which works; well, for the time being.

So after the fish and the meat over past weekends, I came upon the bitters today.

They can be overcome, the bitters, with tempering.

“Why does Bengali food have to be sweet?” I’m asked ever so often. Most people not accustomed to the taste, cringe a little to spot the sweet taste in the dishes, sweet – something often reserved only for the last course, dessert.  

It’s all in the balance.

Sour, pungent or bitter, everything can be overcome, tempered, countered with its opposite taste. It is an inheritance, the kitchen’s chemistry of a handful spices, blending, searing, raging, bursting with their personalities, waging their own humble battle in the pan, plunged into scorching oil.

How much to extract of every flavor, how and exactly when… just like life, so in the kitchen. And it is toil. It takes patience. Time. And a little faith.

There are no masters, nor wretches who cannot go right, or wrong all the time. It is all a matter of acquired taste.

Today I broke them, the bitters. Gently seared it out of them, with the melting of starch in potatoes and acrid egg-plant. Sprinkled with swift rushes of pungent and sweet, it blended into the ever, ever so humble ‘sukto’.

Temperance, or moderation, to achieve which there are neither masters nor wretches who can inch towards it without the trying or the effort.

Life’s lessons need not always be in fancy places, high-profile meetings or boardrooms.

They begin, like you and me, in our own humble roots.

The place we must never forget, to keep forever close to heart.

Bien fait

I have said everything.

I have written down everything

You’d like to have ever known.

About anything. Or everything.

I have written it on butter paper.

Strung it across a shell of twigs

Set it alight

And let it afloat

Into the night sky.

How you read it now

Is to your devices.

And to none

Of mine. 

(Penned May 6, 2011)

Chittoh jetha bhoy shunno

...uccho jetha sheer. Gyan jetha mukto, jetha griher prachir...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore. 

A minute for the basics

Stoicism (Greek Στοά) was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.^[1]

Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved.^[2]

Basic tenets

“	Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.	”
—Epictetus[5]

The Stoics provided a unified account of the world, consisting of formal logic, non-dualistic physics and naturalistic ethics. Of these, they emphasized ethics as the main focus of human knowledge, though their logical theories were to be of more interest for many later philosophers.

Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos). A primary aspect of Stoicism involves improving the individual’s ethical and moral well-being: "Virtuewill which is in agreement with Nature."^[6] This principle also applies to the realm of interpersonal relationships; "to be free from anger, envy, and jealousy,"^[7] and to accept even slaves as "equals of other men, because all alike are sons of God."^[8] 

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regards to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes."^[6] A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy,"^[7] thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole."

Stoicism became the foremost popular philosophy among the educated elite in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire,^[9] to the point where, in the words of Gilbert Murray "nearly all the successors of Alexander^[10] [...] professed themselves Stoics."

The Categories

The Stoics held that all being (ὄντα) -- though not all things (τινά) -- are corporeal. They accepted the distinction between concrete bodies and abstract ones, but rejected Aristotle's teaching that purely incorporeal being exists. Thus, they accepted Anaxagoras' idea (as did Aristotle) that if an object is hot, it is because some part of a universal heat body had entered the object. But, unlike Aristotle, they extended the idea to cover all accidents. Thus if an object is red, it would be because some part of a universal red body had entered the object.

They held that there were four Categories.

• substance (ὑποκείμενον)
  • The primary matter, formless substance, (ousia) which makes up things.
• quality (ποιόν)
  • The way in which matter is organized to form an individual object. In Stoic physics, a physical ingredient (pneuma: air or breath) which informs the matter.
• somehow disposed (πως ἔχον)
  • Particular characteristics, not present within the object, such as size, shape, action, and posture.
• somehow disposed in relation to something (πρός τί πως ἔχον)
  • Characteristics which are related to other phenomena, such as the position of an object within time and space relative to other objects.

Epistemology

The Stoics believed in the certainty that knowledge can be attained through the use of reason. Truth can be distinguished from fallacy; even if, in practice, only an approximation can be made. According to the Stoics, the senses are constantly receiving sensations: pulsations which pass from objects through the senses to the mind, where they leave behind an impression in the imagination (phantasia). (An impression arising from the mind was called a phantasma.)^[15]

The mind has the ability to judge (sunkatathesis)—approve or reject—an impression, enabling it to distinguish a true representation of reality from one which is false. Some impressions can be assented to immediately, but others can only achieve varying degrees of hesitant approval which can be labeled belief or opinion (doxa). It is only through the use of reason that we can achieve clear comprehension and conviction (katalepsis). Certain and true knowledge (episteme), achievable by the Stoic sage, can be attained only by verifying the conviction with the expertise of one's peers and the collective judgment of humankind.

Make for yourself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to you, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell yourself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to you in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 11.

 ...

Source and more on this topic is here 

Home Improvement

Beaded curtains.

Glimmery. Shiny. Bright.

A little wild. Untethered.

They jangle.

They catch the light.

They tug at you.

Declawed crabs.

They tangle you up.

They make a lot of noise.

They never stick.

They’re not really curtains.

They’re not

What they’re meant to be.

Quite a nuisance

Such things are. 

(Penned April 8, 2011)  

Only babble

It is happening again.

Every time I break a snooze regime that never existed, I suffer this very same wakefulness.

It’s not easy being an insomniac. Not even for a sorry-excuse-for-a-partly-reformed-one either.

It was many years ago when I heard a little story. Well actually, it was quite an elaborate, well etched story. It was like almost a moving picture, in words. (More of a bane of the mind sort of a matter to see things narrated come alive in that manner. Sorry. Diversion.) It was not exactly an easy story to hear. I had to keep a straight face. I could not reflect the inside on the outside. It wasn’t advisable. It was quite a dilemma. Almost a moral one.  This chortling of self-expression. However, it was accomplished. And just as gently that a golden bronze maple leaf drifts off the tree in autumn, something snapped ever so imperceptibly. It was almost an epiphany. A gentle one in passing.  Something that does not ruffle things but simply flows by. Much like the maple leaf. 

Many people keep maple leaves, ok leaves inside books till they dry. As a child I was told, “Look at the dried veins of the leaf. There’s really nothing to them. But they keep together. And they will. Till the time you want to keep them.” It made me wonder then, why would a dried leaf be more fascinating than a living one? And that of course, would qualify for a rhetoric question as I learnt much later.

Am I trying to get to a point? Well after all, that’s what readers are interested in.

Maybe.

But mostly, I am writing this since as is obvious, I’m still waking.

And maybe because it might just be something to read.

Now. Or at a later point in time. 

Theories of the Soul (Karen An-hwei Lee)

Kant says, transcendental

    idealism. In Aquinas,

we exist apart from bodies

    but only on Thursdays

when his famous ox

    flies by the window

wiser at Cologne

    where Albertus Magnus,

his real name, appoints

    Aquinas to magister studentium,

master of students. Aquinas

    is petrified but says yes.

He feels his soul

    sailing out of his head

floating near the roof

    where a blue ox wings by.

On Wednesday, two bodies

    are one soul

waking at sunrise

    thanks to the pineal gland

of Descartes, who thinks

    this node in the brain

is a tiny sugar cone

    or salted peanut,

the seat of the soul

    while Aristotle points

to the chopping

    ax as a teleology

as if the ax were a living,

    breathing person

which it isn’t.

    Heraclitus, air and fire

while Aquinas objects, no

    not an ax but ox.

If you’re a bird or soul

    I am only one mile

from the sea. If you

    are a soul in two bodies

life is more complex

    and we must labor

twice the field of sorrow

    after sleep, bath, and a glass

as Aquinas whispers, the things

    we love tell us who we are.

 

 

Source: Is here 

In the quiet

It is fashionable

this derision

we entertain.

Rising tides

need no invitation.

Those seven bones

can only extend

so much.

So learn

the impervious.

The ways of the whirled

bobbing planes

the physics of inertia

the harmonics

of everything

to find

to rest

to cut through

to the centre

of everything.

(Penned April 7, 2011) 

Basho

"In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to  drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another, At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly."

Excerpt, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, Matsuo Basho