Commenti / Comments

Herschel Shohan, May 4, 2007

Dear Paola:

As I’ve said, I very much like your poems. They are gnomic, intimate, available to the touch, inviting. Poems like yours have much in common with the riddle. Poetry is a riddling mode.

Yours asks “What am I?” and encourages, by their immediacy, their appeal to touch and sight and hearing an answer. Almost any answer will do for a start, but then one feels the need to look, venture further into your verse. The inquiry into your poems includes the idea that you, the poet, having created them, don’t always know what they are, what they want of us. And that’s fine.

Of course, not knowing Italian, I’m missing your rhymes or slant rhymes that direct attention to your thought—the sensuous movement of your poetry through the mouth and throat; all that direct appeal is absent in translations. Still, there are things to comment on.

Take “Visiting,” for example. It seems to crystallize around the memory of a friend. And perhaps an imaginary visit. The narrator seems to be remembering rather than confronting the actual presence of this friend, a woman, probably. She is luminous (to the memory, I think), quiescent, perhaps even deceased or on the point, being in a final illness, of dying. The tone is one of great tenderness with a complete acceptance of the friend as she is, concluding with a direct address to the one ‘visited’ and a promise. “The thin veil” of the other’s “absence” can be taken aside, put aside for the friend directly to be revisited. The promise never to forget the friend or the impression of her physical presence, her personality, is augmented by a true insight. . . that the changefulness of the memory of close friends engenders fear in the narrator-that memories fade “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” rings true in this case.

One assumes that the visitee had seemed afraid of being forgotten, perhaps even expressed a wish about it.

There’s more I could say, about “the luminous corner,” for example, and the reference to erratic breathing. But that’s enough for now. I can’t comment on the rhythm or the language for obvious reasons but the quickness of your lines and the poem’s brevity suggests the gnomic or riddling character I referred to above and also to the transiency, the fleeting character of life itself as you perceive it.

Herschel

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Herschel Shohan, May 4, 2007

Hello, Paula:

I see “the luminous corner” in “Visiting” as the special place in memory that you encounter or where you have put the special friend you are addressing. Luminosity suggests her (I believe it to be a woman) elevation almost as if a nimbus or halo surrounded her to something like immortality: she seems clearly either to have died or to have been removed in some way far from your present life or sight.

The smooth skin contributes to “luminous” and the sense of removal in time, of a special isolation and idolization. “You smile and you don't smile” leaves a dream-like impression of ambiguity: she is both dead and alive, attentive to you, yet remote, distant, her eyes fixed on an unknown or unknowable secret.

I now understand “erratic breathing” to be synonymous with life itself, your life on an everyday plane with its “erratic” events, rhythms, occurrences. “Your own has quieted away,/perhaps forever,” fixes the notion of the addressee having died and that you revisit her in memory.

So to the question, “What am I?” that the gnomic, riddling poem asks, the answer here is “An epitaph, a monody on behalf of a lovely and departed friend.” But like many such epitaphs it also points to the contrast and the mystery of life and death, the remoteness and mystery of those departed and the immediacy of conscious life. The separation between them, the darkness of the beyond is sometimes almost unbearable, as in intense grief. “If only I could KNOW!” is what grief almost always asks.

The poem comes to no conclusion; nothing “happens.” Rather the poet is simply looking at this idolon (a word?) or icon as a worshipper contemplates the image of Mary or a saint. Something is transmitted between idol and idolater, though nothing seems to be “happening.”

But what is it that is communicated? Your poem doesn't say, but simply invites us to look through your eyes and to learn by seeing.

***

I'd like to just briefly consider the short “Dedicated.” Again sibylline, riddling, again brief, impressionistic. The question here is what or who is the narrator? The red maple, presumably. But then why? And why “omniscient”? It's an important question or rather the poem makes it important because of the loveliness of the poem itself and the moment it invokes, a moment of revelation, of “telling.”

The mood is intensified by “One day.” Yes, a true revelation will be at hand that will “tell” us the story of ourselves, omnisciently: everything will be revealed, everything will be known; the graveyards will yield their dead and presumably their secrets.

Under this red maple we will know ourselves well and truly, at last. Nor will the red maple reveal itself to just anybody, or at any time: the truth will become known through the “narrator” of this poem in the role of priest or priestess—which is what you are, the priestess—poet-initiating the reader in the secrets of this red maple which, as one looks further, becomes deific, godlike, perhaps an image of god her/him/itself as in the burning bush.

This is another burning bush whose red fires will perhaps burn away our excesses, our accidental, everyday qualities to induce in us a quiet, unfolding, “transparent” beauty like this tree.

**

The more I think about these two lyrics, Paola, the more I think your major theme is the opposition between “everydayness” and life-in-death, the mystery of the darkness we emerge from and then fall back into.

Both these poems were a real journey, a real “unfolding.”

Yours,

Herschel