Dancing on the Brink

WHAT struck me most about coming home to the north coast of California after a long, wet summer in Europe, was the sharp, aromatic odor of bay laurel, sweet poison oak and sun-burnt hay, flavored with the acrid, thirsty dust—the mellifluous odor of Indian summer making me nostalgic for the past, for memory hidden in the crenulated folds of hills. Buñuel said: You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Pieces of memory resurrect in the mirrored San Francisco Bay and Mt. Tamalpais, the fire-ravaged Oakland hills. They resurrect against a cerulean sky, steep, tawny hillsides cloaked in sizzling non-native oat grasses like sleeping lions, and thick green-black oaks roiling in their crotches—so sexual—it surprises me anew each time I return. It steals one’s breath away, reducing all semblance of speech to that of monosyllabic moaning of prespeech. They say our earliest memories are the strongest. I was conceived on Mt. Tamalpais, my mother watching Point Reyes disappear over my father’s right shoulder at sunset. The lost pieces of memory, a mended patchwork quilt over the bed of time.

A South African writer I know coined the word outgasm. I want to tell Breyten an outgasm of light dances on the bay; I’ve taken in some of his memory into my own. The parched savanna juxtaposed against the funereal odor of escapee calla lilies. “Arum lilies here?” exclaimed a Capetown realtor from the group we led on a hike past an abandoned ranch to view the mouth of the Golden Gate from Indian Cove. I mouth the unfamiliar word, arum; the sarcophagi of Egypt or the pelican daughters of Lear comes to mind. Alcatraz. Angel Island. We resurrect place names of the Coast Miwok, mouthing a dead language: Tamalpais—the land of the Tomales, O’onopais—the land of buckeyes, and Yulupa—the place of the shining Golden Gate. Explorer John C. Frémont’s epithet, Chrysopylae, a historical footnote. Sadly, all that survives of the Ohlone tribal stories of this landscape is: Dancing on the brink of the world. We gently retrace our steps along the seething faultline, the Farallones and the Point Reyes Peninsula draw our eyes to the curvature of the sea’s final horizon.



© 1997, revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

Poetry International article, Audacious tongues

AUDACIOUS TONGUES: THE HEART OF TRANSLATION

Poetry is what gets lost in translation
—Robert Frost
As you die/ you meet the light/ of before creation
—Bert Schierbeek

“Sometimes poetry is literally a matter of life and death,” said Martin Mooij, founder and shy godfather of Poetry International in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. A central focus of the 27-year-old literary organization is to liberate poets incarcerated by oppressive governments due to his or her literary work. The annual Poetry International Award “to distinguish an imprisoned poet, was established in 1979 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Poetry International,” said Mooij.

At the 1996 festival, exiled South African writer and political prisoner Breyten Breytenbach, who received the Poetry International Award in 1981, was also the recipient of this year’s translation Vertaalproject where world-class poets participating in the festival translate a selected poet during the annual two-week event. Breytenbach is the only poet to receive both honors.

 Like many of the poets chosen for the Poetry International Award, Breytenbach lives in exile, borderless, without a country, having only his mother tongue to sustain the roots of his art and culture. We began our translation workshop honoring those imprisoned poets—Breytenbach painting the name of the latest recipient of the 18th Poetry International Award, Iraqi poet, Adnam Abbas Salman al-Sayegh, on the Poetry Wall mural on the corner of Niewe Binnenweg and Gaffelstraat in Rotterdam. It is hoped he’ll be released from prison to collect his award.

Executive director Mooij explained, “The Poetry International Award began as a fluke. I'd published some Turkish children's books, and I mentioned the name of an imprisoned poet, Nevzat Çelik.” Mooij said he was merely wondering aloud what had happened to the Turkish poet. Surveying Kruisplein from the squat, modern post-war De Doelen building in Rotterdam, Mooij explained, “The editor promised to write to a government official, and in 1987. . . the poet was set free!”

Mooij continued, “We cooperate closely with PEN International, and the Index on Censorship.” Without the political pressure and media exposure wielded under the auspices of the Poetry International Award, the voices of world-class poets might not be with us today—

Bert Schierbeek Memorial

As you die
you meet the light
of before creation

—Bert Schierbeek

Where to begin, at the beginning with a commemorative book to Bert Schierbeek. In the beginning was light, at the crematorium, the poets of the world paid homage to the fallen hero. We, the tribe, were 500 poets strong, but down one poet, we were 499 poets, we were both deluded and undiluted by light. Bert would've liked that pun.

Charles McGeehan, and I stood with the Dutch poets, wild-maned Jan Wolkers, a painter, Willem van Toorn and Simon Vinkenoog. I was well-sandwitched between corpulent Belgian poet, Hugo Claus, and Martin Mooij, who founded Poetry International in 1970.

Festival director, Martin Mooij, had invited Herman Berlandt and I to Poetry International. Herman founded Mother Earth Journal,; Uniting the world Through Poetry, an offshoot of San Francisco's National Poetry Week festival, which he also founded. (No, not Emma Goldman's anarchist rag, but the poems themselves are anarchists, focusing on the current political and ecological global crisis we're in.)

A musician played Route 66 on the trombone, it was a Beat poet homage moment. A woman placed poems on his coffin. We paraded past Bert one last time, someone left roses, we left a copy of Mother Earth Journal with Bert's poems in it. Bert was very supportive of our journal. When the crematorium doors opened, the furnaces roared like lions. We sent Bert, liberated from life, into the flames, the furnaces roared with joy.

We sent Bert off with words that burned like the stars; his coffin was a fiery arc in search of a new art form. We blanketed it with flowers and poems to offer Bert safe passage in order to meet the light that was born before creation. 

As we wept, Remco Campert read a final poem to Bert:

BERT 

So fragile
his legs
in his trousers
his chest
in his shirt
his hands bruised
from the work
of death
yet suddenly
a glimpse of a wink
never say die
let somebody else
say it
not Schierbeek.

     —(tr. Linde Voûte)

So much as happened in the past 24 hours, I hardly know where to begin. I did not expect to step off the plane to attend a funeral in Amsterdam. Joke (Yoka) Gerritsen of Poetry International told us last night during dinner. Schierbeek, a co-founder of the COBRA movement, died on June 9, right before the festival began. I knew Bert was sick—our host, Charles McGeehan had told us, but we fully expected to see him again. Upright.

Charles McGeehan, is Bert's brother-in-law, and translator; Charles' ex-wife was the sister of Bert's second wife, Margrait, who was killed in a car crash. Charles met us at Station Central, and we drove to the funeral.

I've met so many interesting people –Maija (I don't know her last name), whose brother is a famous actor, and whose father was a famous painter, I liked her so much on sight, I was sure she was both an artist and actor, but she has a studio for photographers, she is a makeup artist. Her art is other people's faces. She lives in Amsterdam, we will visit later, she said.

The reception was at the De Bezige Bij (Busy Bee) publishers. Poet and prolific columnist who writes for a daily newspaper, de Volkskrant, Rutger Copeland said he kept looking at me all through the service, trying to place me. I'm flattered that he was trying to figure out who I was. He probably saw me at Poetry International during previous years. Rutger was one of the famous Dutch poets my friend, and translator, Vins van Neerven, had told me about. 

Dutch poet Judith Herzog, who is a bit of a recluse was there (on previous visits, Vins wanted me to meet her but she kept brushing me off), along with Remco Campert, and one of the grand old Dutch poets, Dutch-American poet and doctor, Leo Vroman, and Toon Telegen—so many faces from Poetry International, on such a sad occasion. At the death of a poet, and such a beloved one.

I met the wife of the vice president of De Bezige Bij publishers, she was interested in our Mother Earth poetry project at, and the children's work I do. I will send her my Dutch translations of This Body is to Ask, perhaps I'll get it republished after all. 

The Holland connections are strong. I've had more cultural stimulation in 24 hours than I've had in the past two years in California.

Sipho Sepala was very pleased to get our magazine. He wanted an entire collector's set, he kept saying, I will learn much from these. Thank you. Thank you while hugging me. And so from one poet to another, the tradition of samizdat is alive and well.

Last night, Leo Vroman and I talked about the nature of physics poetry and the need for accuracy. Leo is a biochemist and hematology researcher, as well as an artist. Hematologists know of him because of a discovery named after him, called the Vroman Effect, which has to do with the attraction of blood proteins, he explained.

Leo was my dinner partner. We shared drawings. Herman and I were suffering from severe jet lag, as were American poet Barbara Goldberg, a translator, and Israeli poet, Moshe Dor from Tel Aviv. We were all practically sleeping on our dinner plates, so I drew in my journal in order to keep awake. Leo joined me.

We all went walking after dinner along the canals looking at the lights reflected thinking of Bert Schierbeek, thinking of how we let him go into the light, into the darkness and into the light. Welcome to Holland.

13 June 1996 Rotterdam, Poetry International
Quite a star-studded event.

See my article:
Poetry International AUDACIOUS TONGUES: THE HEART OF TRANSLATION

rev. from journal notes 11/2/2015

Letter to Valerio Magrelli, Via Condotti, Roma

Letter to  Valerio Magrelli 

Via Condotti, Roma

I write to you while watching the film, Kaos, by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Finally after months, I was able to track it down and inexplicably in the dialogue, I was compelled to write to you, how your poems shed light—even in an alien tongue. 

Was it because the playwright visited his dead mama where the ghosts still have stories to tell through the fingers of pots? That made me think of your poems. You, a contemporary, or was it because I had been missing Mary Bianchi, my grandmother's best friend?

How in the afternoons she would grate cheese into a large jar, offer us  spongecake and sherry, or raviolis, while they gossiped. Her large hands could kill a rabbit or a chicken quicker than the eye could see, that same hand that patted my cheek each afternoon, coming home from school. 

She walked like a queen. The exact curl of her hands, my grandmother would demonstrate thus. Thous she had lived in America most of her life, Mary always thought of Italy as home. We drank her her wine and ate her chickens and ravioli, and became part of her clan, my family, my mother, aunts and uncles. 

The poets talk about exile, death is always an exile. All writing is a translation, this I know. In the movie Kaos, in the epilogue, Colloquio con la madre, the character Luigi (also the the author) confesses to conversing with his dead mother. He tells of the story of going to Malta one last time because something always eluded him, that yearning, that unnamed memory always goading poets onward into exile. 

Or was it because of the cable that Martin Mooij had sent us in February was delayed, it was his last Poetry International. Would we come? And will you be there, and may I hear the words again in their own native tongue?

April (11-18?)

He had written a poem about archaeology that I loved. I've a letter from him somewhere. He must've told me to see the film.

Valerio Magrelli

Poetry International 1993/1994, v1

POETRY INTERNATIONAL 1993/1994 (1st draft)    Maureen Hurley

Holland's enormously successful Poetry International festival is the cultural highlight of Rotterdam—a futuristic concrete city known for its shipyards and little else. Razed to the ground by the Nazis in 1940, the city completely rebuilt itself from the rubble; some say it's culturally brain-dead. It's the largest industrial port in the world. In 1968, there wasn't much happening: no TV or radio stations, no publishing houses—in short, no culture. There still isn't much to see in Rotterdam today, and little to distinguish it from any other modern city if it hadn't been for a ship of fools who decided to declare verbal warfare on Rotterdam's lack of culture by hurling poems at it.

“WWII was long over, it was obvious something had to be done,” says Martin Mooij, the director of Poetry International. According to Mooij, the budding Rotterdam Arts Council invited him to become their director of literature. His job, to develop a literary community, was a bit like sending Don Quixote out with oars to joust with windmills. The 25-year-old organization has spawned other innovative projects and events besides the readings: a Dutch and Italian poetry exchange, translation workshops, a poetry archives and documentation center, putting pressure on repressive governments to release incarcerated poets, painting lines of poetry on garbage trucks. . .

Yes, painting lines of poetry on garbage trucks. . . It's an odd ark indeed when all 400 of Rotterdam's municipal garbage trucks flaunt lines of poetry: “Good morning beauty,” and “Always be clean so that the air will be clean.” Mooij explains, “One was the title of a book, and the other, a line from Rafael Oberti. Sometimes I just get crazy ideas for publicity. Rotterdam gets 30 to 40 new trucks a year. That's 30 to 40 more poets whose work gets read. At this point, I know everything about the cleaning service.”

Holland's second most important city, Rotterdam, has put the Netherlands on both the shipping and the poetry map. Amsterdam is the capitol of the Netherlands; both cities support one million inhabitants. (For those of you a bit shaky on geography, think Dutch: wooden shoes, Edam and Gouda cheese, tulips, windmills and canals: sorry, the story of the little boy Hans Brinker with his finger in the dyke is an American invention. I'll skip the historical legacies we owe to the Dutch: the pilgrim fathers, and New York nee  Nieuwe Amsterdam, Waal Straat, Haarlem. . .)

Since 1970, over 1000 poets from all over the world have boarded Rotterdam's gangplanks to participate in the annual ten-day festival held during the third and fourth weeks of June. For many poets from Holland and Flanders, the festival offers a unique opportunity to read with poets of international repute. Past luminaries include the European poets: Herbert Zbigniew of Poland, Vasko Popa of Yugoslavia, Miroslav Holub of Czechoslovakia, Lar Gustafsson of Sweden, Gunther Grass of Germany, Seamus Heaney of Ireland; The Russians: Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesenski, Yosef Trotsky; poets from the Americas: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz of Mexico, Pablo Neruda of Chile; from the Middle East: Yehuda Amichi of Israel; and Randra from Indonesia. (PI archives.)

Poetry International journal, CPITS networking

15 Tuesday. I am making more CPITS contacts (Poetry International Director Maartin Mooij invited me because I work with children.) Bert and Thea Schierbeek, Horacio Ferrar, Marjan Meijer (who is working on a kite project), and also Dimitri Prigov (I showed him a poem of his we published in Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost—he was so full of himself, I didn’t want to give him a copy). 

Roberto Juarroz and Bert took the CPITS flyers as did Marjan, so the news is getting out that way. Apparently those of us who teach children how to write poems are a rare breed. I gave Bert one of my Dutch chapbooks, he said he would introduce me to someone who also works in the schools tomorrow. I talked with my photographer friend Jan Bogaerts tonight and he said the Mongol poem was beautiful. I asked him how did he get a copy of that? And he said, a spy.

(PI archives.)