MIGRARÉ

I looked for my CD of “In A Persian Market” by William Ketelbey this morning so I could play it while I wrote about Darrell Bourque’s newest book of poetry, migraré,  because the volume is a beautiful collection of ghazals evoking memories of my sojourn in Persia during the 1970’s. However, I did not find the CD and had to rely on the music playing in my mind as I re-read the arresting couplets that accompany Bill Gingles’s abstract art.

Bourque uses this ancient form of poetry familiar to readers of Rumi and Hafez, two poets with whom I became fascinated while living in Persia, and in this collection, he addresses the subject of immigration — migraré or “I will move”( in Spanish), referring to mass movements of people either for survival, or for life-threatening reasons, or as messengers called to divine purposes.

Bourque “moves into” the ghazals through the medium of ekphrasis wherein a poet creates a poem by looking at images and builds around “tensions, composition, line, color, and the theater created in expressionistic artworks,” according to Bourque. 

Bourque derives his poems from his experience involving the Immigration Team from Narrative 4, a story exchange program designed to foster empathy and break down barriers among students worldwide, equipping them to improve their communities and the world. Storytellers from around the world met in Arnaudville, Louisiana, where Bourque encountered carriers of the ghazal. He seems to be continually inspired by experiences that explore the histories of people deeply affected by separation and immigration; e.g., his own ancestry dating back to the 19th century when Acadians were expelled from France and Acadie. In a passionate “Foreword,” he writes that humans “must be vigilant and not separate themselves from each other in destructive and debilitating ways…”

Readers enter the sphere of Bourque’s ghazals with poems like “Division Stream,” which I felt was among the finest in this collection and featured his great-grandmother. Lines like 

…When great imperceptibles come to live with you

and you cannot travel far enough to get away, you swim daily in your division stream… 

Taken as a whole, the ghazal impresses readers with Bourque’s philosophical gifts translated (maybe migrated) into poetic form. 

She arrived one day with a small satchel and all her belongings and no husband.

What took him from her she couldn’t even begin to know. Death’s a division stream… 

However, ever the master of sensuality, he describes his great-grandmother’s separations as: 

turn[ing] to clabbers and soft cheeses spread on biscuits in the morning,

with mayhaw jellies and blackberries she picked while praying into the division stream… 

Bourque really “gets with it,” in contemporary language, as he launches into “Sun Choir” (Christ the King Bellevue Choir): 

I sit in one of the back rows with my wife, near Henry Amos. We couldn’t be higher.

There are no names on pews here. I hum. My wife sings out. It, too, is her sun choir. 

I once sat next to both of them at a celebration honoring his wife’s glass work in a triptych of this church and felt the dynamism of the sun choir, so this ghazal resonated with me, and I well understood his line: 

She sings trouble over trouble every Sunday…

The poem reminded me of Rumi’s 

The sunbeam fell upon the wall;

the wall received a borrowed splendor.

Why set your heart on a piece of turf…

When I lived in the sun-baked desert of Khuzestan Province in Persia, I longed to see water: bayou, river, even the aqua blue waters of the Persian Gulf and painted a wall in the dining room of our home a deep blue. I was taken back to that time of blueness when I read Bourque’s “Second Self,” his description of Vermeer’s blue as a way of “finding ways to second self… one self seeking another self…” My own immersion in a blue wall in Ahwaz, Iran led to a self seeking another self in that mysterious mideastern environment to which I had migrated. Expatriates to any country will identify with this ghazal.

Space forces me into brevity, but I hasten to say that migraré is Bourque’s finest gift of poetry, a meditative, mystical work that will “move” readers into the divine afflatus sans forced migration, arriving through phrasings of the same tone as the mystical Persian poets. It’s a beautiful entry into contemplative practice. As I told Darrell after reading migraré “Move over, Rumi.”

As readers can see, the review is not a definitive, scholarly treatment of a beautiful book from Louisiana’s most masterful poet, but it is an appreciative salute to Louisiana’s best ambassador for the mission of celebrating difference. 

Darrell Bourque is professor emeritus in English (University of Louisiana, Lafayette) and former Poet Laureate of Louisiana. He received the 2014 Louisiana Book Festival Writer Award and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 2019 Humanist of the Year Award, as well as the Dr. James Oliver-Monsignor Sigur Award by the Louisiana Council on Human Relations for his Social Justice work for minorities and the marginalized.

THE OLD COASTLINE

Nobel prize winner, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, has said that in order to have understanding of and peace in the world, we must read each other’s literature. I’d add that the emissaries of that mission are translators: think of Coleman Barks translating the Persian poet Mowlavi (Rumi); Jane Kenyon translating the work of the Russian poet, Akhmatova, Stuart Friebert translating the German poet, Karl Krolow…Think also of the independent press, Pinyon Publishing in Colorado, which often publishes international poetry translations, such as its recent release: a volume of selected poetry by M. Vasalis (1909-1998), a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in treating children and whose work has been translated by Fred Lessing and David Young.

In the introduction to this volume, translators Lessing and Young emphasize that the poet Vasalis had little interest in promoting her work but that her poems “come out of her life, her experience of the natural world, her professional practice, and her family relations, arising from the press of occasion and necessity rather than from an ambition to originality or greatness…” That description alone impressed me because I admire the qualities of humility and modesty that inhere in a writer’s life mission.

Vasalis’s immediacy and simplicity in “Spring,” a poem describing the spring season readers in the northern hemisphere are presently experiencing, resonated with me early in the volume and is perhaps the most whimsical one in The Old Coastline: “The light gusts across the land in spurts,/waking the hard, brief glitter/of the blue, wind-ruffled ditches and canals;/the grass lights up, dims down, goes dark./Two newborn lambs next to a grizzled sheep/stand white, printing youth’s picture against grass./I had forgotten how this was, and that/the spring is not a quiet blossoming,/dreaming softly but a violent growing,/a pure and passionate beginning,/jumping up out of a deep sleep,/and dancing away without a thought.” Although Vasalis has been likened to the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson in this selection the translators included from her first book, Parks and Deserts (1940). 

A reading of selections from her third book, Vistas and Visages, published posthumously in 1954, reveals more serious poetic treatments as Vasalis probes the deeper subjects of suffering and loss arising from Vasalis’s own tragic loss of a child who lived only a year and a half. The imagery in “Star” carries this message of loss in a departure from any formalism and pivots on the figure of her lost child, then concludes in a pastoral scene featuring a cow, a powerful entry into the natural world. “Tonight I saw a star for the first time./He stood alone, he did not quiver./Instantly, he pierced me through./I saw a star, he stood alone, belief/made out of light: so young and from a time/before there was such a thing as grief./The meadows lie unspoken in the light./The cows, so often painted,/restrain, with a young wet eye,/any account of their warm mystery.” That one verse , so much akin to Japanese haiku, underlines the beautiful simplicity of Vasalis’s oeuvre.

In the same volume, Vistas and Visages, Vasalis reveals her love and appreciation of children and her journey as a psychiatrist dealing with youth. “Children Coming Home” evokes strong emotions in those of us who parented young offspring and welcomed them as they returned home from an all-day absence. Her description of them as “big flowers” coming out of the gathering dark, “the chilly evening air/that lightly drapes their cheeks and hair/they are so warm!” is neither Elizabeth Bishop nor Emily Dickinson but simply a mother experiencing intimacy with her young in an intense immediacy. Further, she writes: “Clasped/in the strong clamp of their soft arms/I glimpse the love, shadowless and full./ [not yet exposed to Jungian psychology about shadows that will beset them later] that lives at the bottom of their penetrating eyes,/It is not mixed with pity, which comes later,/and has its reasons — and its boundaries.” It is Vasalis who has the penetrating eyes and appears watchful about the boundaries of innocent children.

In The Old Coastline (2002), readers will enjoy some of Vasalis’s poems about older relationships; i.e., a poignant characterization of her grandmother, a cherished member of the poet’s family constellation in “Old Age”: “Grandmother/snow-white-lace on/her calm sweet, white-satin head/carried when she was in Holland, at home,/the smallest muff in the whole world:/inside a tiny bottle, no bigger/than an ampule./ There was just room/for her hands. Plus one child's hand,/oh, what a delicious nest of fur and/the very softest satin lining/…Her eyes were a constantly changing blue;/you could look into them as long as you liked:/as if you were seeing, through two small openings,/the calm sea on a summer day.” That intimate tribute is both exacting and graceful, two recurring components of the selections chosen by Vasalis’s translators.

Vasalis also gives readers a glimpse of her own ideas about mortality, one with which most of us in our eighties can identify: “I practice like a young bird on the edge/of the nest I must soon forsake/in little faltering flights/and open my beak.”

This translated work by Vasalis is a powerful addition to the canon of international expression and vision.Translator Fred Lessing, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist, and retired professor of philosophy, retained his native Dutch language after moving to America at age 12. His fellow translator, David Young, is a poet (Field of Light and Shadow, 2010) an editor of Field magazine, Oberlin College Press, and a translator who enjoys collaborative work with his long-time friend, Fred Lessing.

Thank you Gary and Susan for contributing to the mission of sharing international literature through expert translations! The Old Coastline is another occasion for celebration. 

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

TRAVELING EAST

Yesterday, I stood under a blue tent in 80-degree temps at the side of a gravestone in Evergreen Cemetery delivering a homily for Marilyn Blackwell, aka Toni, Victoria Sullivan’s cousin and a good friend of mine. Toni died a few months ago in Lakeland, Florida, and we had traveled from Sewanee, Tennessee to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where I performed a burial ceremony to inter Toni’s ashes.

Toni lived most of her life in Babson Park, a small town in central Florida, but she was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and her two sisters still reside there; her brother, in Philadelphia. Toni left Gettysburg to attend Webber International College in Babson Park, Florida and never lived in the East again. After she retired from her job as an administrative assistant with Florida Power and Light, Toni took up one-stroke painting, and perfected this art within a few years. She painted almost until the last months of her life, and we have many of her floral pictures, trays, pitchers, and flower pots that she decorated with fruit, flowers, and landscape art, including a lovely Florida sunset. Toni loved beautiful things and claimed that her interest originated with Gacky Thomas, her paternal grandmother. Both liked clothes, jewelry, china, and flowers, and Toni had a closet filled with bracelets, necklaces, rings, and earrings —a regular jewelry store in a corner of a bedroom. She wore colorful, flowing clothes and possessed a style that was definitely flamboyant. But Toni was more than decorative art to Vickie and me. She was a beloved confidante and a woman with inclusive views about all people.

Toni had a high IQ and wasn’t showy with it, but if you ever played a word game with her, as we did during a family getaway for women of the family at the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and you considered yourself a fair wordsmith, you soon learned that she could out-best you in a heartbeat. She suffered deeply at the end of her life, and I think she knew there wasn’t a supernatural remedy for the cancer that ravaged her body, but she opened her arms to her son, Chad, to her brother Ed, and to her sisters, Bev and Chris, dubbing them 'her angels.' Suffering was there for Toni, but so were strength and light. I was privileged to honor her yesterday, and when I came to the last paragraph of my homily, saying that “no love we ever bestow on those we care about is lost; it goes with them to God’s home, and it stays with us,” a great wave of emotion overcame me. It was a Moment.

Tomorrow, I’ll deliver another homily at a wedding reception for Gettysburg-born Thomas Armstrong and his beautiful Turkish-born Seda, here in Gettysburg, and I plan to quote from Rumi, one of my favorite poets. In two weeks, Thomas and Seda will return to Turkey where they're both employed.

The following morning, we’ll move on to Potomac, Maryland for a visit with Janis Grogan, a close friend of 58 years who befriended me in Electra, Texas just before my first daughter, Stephanie, was born. Jan chronicled and published a book entitled All My Life With You: A Memoir about her life and travels abroad with her husband Gene, who was head of operations in the worldwide oil patch — she and Gene moved 19 times and lived on five continents. After Gene’s death, Border Press also published a book of Gene’s love poems to Jan entitled Upon the Walk We Make Each Day. A copy of this book can be found in the Louisiana State Library, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and purchased online at Amazon.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

THE SINGING INSIDE

One of the perks of my association with Pinyon Publishing is that I sometimes form a friendship with a fellow poet, via e-mail, and the poet and I make a spiritual connection through reading each other's work.  One of those incidents of serendipity has been through my recent correspondence with Michael Miller, a very fine poet who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Michael and I share a fondness for the New England poet Robert Francis, "a man who owned freedom and leisure," as I described him in a former poem – a poet who subsisted on a pittance for years before being recognized as an important New England poet.

I reviewed Michael Miller's newest book of poetry, Into This World, published by Pinyon Publishing, a few weeks ago, and before I traveled to Florida recently, Miller referred me to another of his works, The Singing Inside, a beautiful book of poetry set by hand in 14 pt. Perpetua, a font designed by Eric Gill.  The text was printed letterpress on a Heidelberg Original Cylinder press, and the cover was printed by hand on a 10x15 Chandler and Price platen press.  Artwork was printed from wood engravings by Frank C. Eckmair, and the book was designed and printed by Birch Brook Press.

I describe these exterior qualities because I seldom see such beautiful, hand-printed books of poetry.  The Singing Inside accurately defines the poetry inside – the singing inside of a man who pays tribute to his wife and their journey together as they mature in married love, passionately and honestly.  There are so many fine poems in the volume that I wouldn't strike out even one as unfit for the theme of married love, from its inception as a passionate love affair to the present decade of their aging.  Miller sings about the latter stage of married love: "Our house is singing as it sinks/A gradual decline with choruses/We can hear beyond the floorboards/Cracking, the old beams creaking,/The stone foundation shifting as if/It were looking for a place to escape./How we resist our body's aging!/Resentful of our brittle bones,/Our muscles slackening as if asleep,/Come, let's open all the windows/And sing to the warblers, the wrens."

I was also impressed by the cogent feelings expressed in two exquisite love poems reminiscent of the Persian poet Rumi, on facing pages, XIX and XX, the latter defining a love that has been plumbed and kept intact: "We have delved into the anatomy/Of each other's darkness,/Of each other's light,/Uncovering a grave,/Unveiling a hidden sun./We have explored without a caution,/Reconnoitering each other's heart,/Refusing to believe there is/Nothing left to discover."

Although Miller speaks of "maple leaves reddening and curling at their edges," he recognizes that mature love takes "decades of struggle/And ease to arrive at this/Three-foot wall built with/Smooth and rough stones/Where the countries of lichen grow,/And we sit upon it looking out/With the joined perfection of hands."

These poems are true and powerful – no frills, each word crafted with precision, each poem condensed into tight, concrete imagery and rendered in passionate phrasing.  I read this volume while vacationing in Weston, Florida, a city of wonderful light and felt a synchronicity of environment and the wonderful clarity and light in The Singing Inside.