VALUABLE NAIL

Recently, Stuart Friebert, a poet friend who had been introduced to me through Pinyon Publishing, sent me copies of poetry translation collections in the Field Translation Series published by Oberlin College. He thought I might enjoy reading them and would be inspired to learn another language so I could translate the language of poetry from other countries. Of course, I'm too old for the latter adventure, but I enjoy reading some of Friebert's translations of German poets and am often surprised by a package of books published in the Field Translation Series that he sends to me.

The most recent surprise package contained a copy of Valuable Nail, Selected Poems by the German poet, Gunter Eich, translated by Stuart Friebert, David Walker, and David Young. Friebert's interest in Gunter Eich was piqued when he traveled to Europe on an H.H. Powers Grant to meet with a number of West German poets. He became so intrigued by the poet that he made second and third visits to study Eich's ideas about the "minimum," or, as translator David Young writes: "the claim staked to shreds and remnants, to the things we begin to notice and prize when our dignity and comfort are stripped away ...especially in [the] tendency to find mysterious signs and tokens in the natural world..." Thus, the title of the book, Valuable Nail, becomes plausible to readers when it appears as a commonplace object in the poem "Inventory" and denotes the symbol for Eich's life and thought.

In the introduction to Valuable Nail, David Young explains Eich's "glancing technique" where subjects brush past quickly as readers grasp issues that are at the edge of the vision and two or three words make up a small image that accounts for what Young calls "...a great chunk of terrible history..." Readers may dismiss many of the poems as trivial, but the simplicity of the imagery is comparable to the simplicity of more accessible (and not so dense) poets like our Robert Frost or Robert Francis, New Englanders who know how to create arresting visions using lyrical brevity. Readers recognize this simplicity in Eich's poem, "Days with Jays:"  

"The jay does not throw me

its blue feather.

The acorns of his shrieks

grind in the early dawn.

A bitter flour, food

for the whole day.

All day, behind red leaves,

with a hard break

he hacks the night

out of branches, seeds, nuts,

a cloth that he pulls over me.

His flight is like a heartbeat.

But where does he sleep

and what is his sleep like?

The feather lies by my shoe

unseen in the darkness."

Gunter Eich was a soldier and prisoner of war during World War II. Following the war, he found that the German language had been distorted by propaganda and lies, and he felt the need to revive his native tongue through poetry. Images of the war appear in a poem entitled "Too Late For Modesty," in which he achieves the "glancing technique" for which he became famous: 

"We took the house

and covered the windows,

had enough supplies in the cellar,

coal and oil,

hid death in ampules

between the folds in our skin.

Through the crack in the door we see the world:

a rooster with its head cut off,

running through the yard.

It's crushed our hopes.

We hang our bedsheets on the balconies

and surrender."

The poem that resonated the strongest with me was one entitled "Insight," a graceful and simplistic example of Eich's effort to renew the German language. It is also a cogent representation of Eich's interest in Chinese poetry: 

"...As I opened the kitchen cupboard

I found the truth

hidden

in labeled canisters.

The rice grains

are resting up from the centuries.

Beyond the window

the wind continues on its way."  

In such concise lines, we see how small images give the reader a glimpse of this "chunk of history" to which Young alluded in the introduction to Valuable Nail.

Although Stuart Friebert won't succeed in luring me into the world of translating poetry, he has certainly inspired my interest in the genre and the poets featured in the Field Translation Series, and I appreciate the introduction to these translations published by Oberlin College where Friebert taught German for years. He also founded and directed Oberlin's Creative Writing Program and co-founded Field Magazine, the Field Translation Series, and Oberlin College Press. Pinyon Publishing recently published a collection of poems by Friebert entitled Floating Heart.

I might add that Friebert is a faithful correspondent, and I enjoy his humor and audacity. This week, I opened a package from him and found a card imprinted with a bright yellow cactus that his sister had photographed—lovely artistry that tells me Friebert is a member of a gifted family—generous with "glad surprises." *

*a phase attributed to Thomas Aquinas

BIKERS AND PEACHES

Jasper GA bike show

Due to a mix-up in reservations, a trip we had scheduled for the Mississippi Gulf coast for the 4^th of July cancelled out, and we improvised for the holiday by meandering over to north Georgia.  We landed in Jasper, Georgia again and made plans to search for more peaches from the orchards near Ellijay.

After checking into the Woodbridge Inn the evening of the 5^th, we walked to downtown Jasper, drawn by the vroom of motorcycles and a band playing on Main Street. Turns out that a Downtown Bike Show, sponsored by the American Legion, was in progress, and an array of vintage bikes were lined up in the center of the street—beautiful, gleaming bikes whose riders were also vintage, probably between the ages of 50-70 and sporting the "costume" of that era, complete with Willie Nelson headband. Of particular interest to me was a WWII, olive-green bike that Harley Davidson had built for military use during the "Great War." It had been restored and was at the head of the line of more contemporary Harleys being judged in the competition for the best looking bike. 

The music for this event, also vintage 60's and 70's, was billed as "jazz," but my ears registered "rock," and when the MC announced that the next event would be a contest for the loudest bike, we quickly exited the scene. People attending the festival amazed me—no one applauded the music (except us), and we were among the few attenders who went over to the bikes and examined them as if we were veteran bikers looking for a new ride.  No one danced in the street; no one tippled beer from Styrofoam cups—the celebration in this culture contrasted sharply with the Cajun celebrations and fais do do events that take place in our second home, "The Berry," aka New Iberia, Louisiana. The following morning, Main Street was pristine—no trace remained of a July 4^th week-end celebration featuring bikers and jivey music.

The next day I went over to the Pickens County Library, an imposing building for a town of 3,600, that boasted an impressive sculpture of a boy reading to animals created by the Atlanta sculptor, William Sunderland, whose "Peace on Earth" sculpt won the People's Choice Award and is showcased in the Carter Center Garden in Atlanta. Sunderland studied under Pasquael Martin in Pietrasanta, Italy and has won many accolades for his creation in Carrara marble of sea lions nuzzling each other entitled "First Love."

I spent an hour reading about the agri-tourism business of north Georgia, a subject that fascinates me every time we hunt for peach orchards and farm stores that sell the luscious fruit. According to an article in Georgia Magazine written by Jackie Kennedy, 52% of students enrolled in the University of Georgia College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences are female, and their perspective is needed because women in Georgia are interested in farming and farm services – they want to till the land and promote the industry.

North Georgia is big on agri-tourism—from orchards to vineyards—and there's a growing interest in farm fresh foods, U-pick berry farms and apple orchards. Farmers take seriously the stats about the world population growing to nine billion by 2050 and know that a variety of perspectives, including an emphasis on farm fresh food, will be needed to feed the burgeoning population.

Peach orchard near Ellijay, GA

We found a plethora of peaches at the R&A Orchards and Farm Outlet again, but this time, the sweetest variety were of South Carolina origin. We had fresh peaches and goat cheese for dinner one evening while sitting in ladder-back rockers on the deck overlooking Woodridge Inn's garden, and I can feel plans for another trip to north Georgia already forming in my mind…

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan 

FROM THE FRONT PORCH

It's the time of the pause between books I've been writing—a time when I'm reviewing the work of ants, spiders, birds, plants, and the lime green trees in the wood beyond my front porch. I can't call it the time of idleness because I have a condition that is known as "racing mind," and contemplative or centering prayer is difficult for me unless I have some sort of mantra buzzing in my brain.

I console myself that the transcendentalist Thoreau observed, read, listened to the sounds of nature, built a cabin, planted a garden, and wrote about all of this during his two years of communing with nature in the Concord woods. As far as I know, he didn't assume a lotus position and just ponder or practice nothingness.

Right now, the crows overhead are jeering at me, as they do every time I come out on the porch. I've read that they recognize faces and voices, and we keep up a lively conversation above the sound of construction work going on near my driveway. One of them waddled over to my steps the other day and cocked his yellow eye at me when I recited the first poem I learned at age four while my mother read aloud from A Child's Garden of Verse: "A birdie with a yellow bill/hopped upon my window sill..." The crow quickly exited the yard at the sound of rhyming verse since he's more accustomed to readings of my free verse, and he flew away when I continued to recite the rhyme in a sing-song voice.

Moments later, my nose picked up the scent of a skunk, a creature more equipped for nocturnal visits, and I shuddered, remembering the family that colonized the insulation underneath our cottage two years ago—and ripped it into pieces for a nesting place to raise babies. Three skunk catchers later and $1,000 poorer, we rid ourselves of the offending visitors. I hope the scent this morning doesn't indicate there's a scouting expedition nearby.

We've had rain in sporadic bursts for weeks, and the snails are out. A large one was encamped by the French doors leading into our living room, and I was rude enough to interrupt his slumber, brushing him into the yard. When I was a child, a neighbor bully was fond of sprinkling salt on snail bodies when they emerged from their shells and would watch them turn into "butter," as he called it. It was a gruesome sight, and I've never bothered to find out why this chemical reaction occurred as it was a clear violation of nature.

Tiny bright orange toadstools have appeared in the bed of fern, varicolored hosta, a sickly lemon balm plant, and a stunted rosebush by the steps, the latter two preferring more sunlight than they're getting under the shade of the white oaks. The toadstools look like the fairy footstools my mother painted in her renderings of fantastical creatures that she imagined populated the piney woods near Franklinton, Louisiana. I expected a gnome with a pointed hat to appear on the spot as she always painted a gnome standing alongside huge mushrooms, a palette in hand and a large green frog perched in the foreground, observing the magical creature at work.

Those who want to read expert observations on the natural world should get a copy of The Unseen Forest: A Year's Watch of Nature by David Haskell, or read his blog entitled "Ramble." He has received national awards for his wonderful writings about a square meter of space in the woods where he spent a year observing nature at work. 

I'm not a trained naturalist, but I do like my observation post on the front porch here at Sewanee and find that it's a great way to reclaim my writing urges on a day that could have been a time for just being a good for nothing southerner doing some serious porch sitting.

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan