The Letters Turn To Water Like The Sea
Jan. 1st, 2009 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustYou’ve heard a fair deal about my Mom and I in these pages, and one of this year’s myriad resolutions is that from now on, whenever she says something I deem particularly intrusive, offensive or just plain weird I’m going to simply laugh out loud, then politely decline to discuss the subject any further. (Other rules: Never raise a subject. Never volunteer an opinion. Never expect interest in stuff I do for myself. Accept that I made a kid and she now likes that kid far more, with all his problems, than she ever seems to have liked me; that and the simple act of exercising next to each other, which she continues to solicit with bewildering frequency, will just have to do, in terms of interaction.)
Today, however, she saw me leafing through the copy of The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (ed. Meaghan Strimas with an introduction by Rosemary Sullivan, who also wrote The Shadow-Maker, MacEwen’s only biography). “What’s interesting to me now is how few of her poems speak to me at all,” she said, appropos of not much. “They’re so head-driven. I’m not surprised most people have forgotten her.”
“She remains one of my biggest influences,” I said, not looking up.
“Well, sure; your obsessions are so alike. All that mythology, the Egypt thing…”
I shrugged, and sat there thinking: Okay. So I guess I’ll be in good company when I’m completely forgotten too, as is obviously going to happen…
(The main difference between MacEwen and I, of course, being that at one point in her life, she was extremely popular.;) But then again, she did also drink herself to death.)
So that was painful. But it reminded me that I’d wanted to talk about MacEwen here, mainly because I’m never sure how many people outside of Canada know her, or any other Canadian poet—Hell, I’m not even sure how many people inside of Canada know about her anymore, or ever did. Mom went to high school with her, actually, which is one of many funny things about the conversation recorded above; they used to court bad reps together by dramatically turning their backs on the building and lighting up in unison, because the rule was “no smoking within sight of the school”. Ooh, rebellious!
She told that anecdote fairly often, when I was growing up. I stupidly assumed that meant she respected MacEwen, which she maybe did, but that respect obviously doesn’t extend to her poetry. Which is a pity.
Dark-haired, light-eyed, tiny, with a receding chin and an almost ridiculously ordinary Scots-Canadjun face, MacEwen was a genuine autodidact with frightening self-discipline. Her chief loves were language and mythology; in 1959, complaining that school was not teaching her the things she needed to know, she walked into a Toronto synagogue and asked to join a childrens’ Hebrew class, so that she could read the Bible in its original tongue. She self-published her first two books of poetry in 1961, and got a contract the following year. Hebrew gave way to Arabic, learned from a lover/tutor (most of her linguistic excursions either began with or seemed to necessitate romance—“Does the muse have to come to you every time bearing a new alphabet?” her friend, Margaret Atwood, once asked), which aided with her personal studies in Egyptology; eventually, she became so fluent she was able to write her own poems in hieroglyphics. She wrote a novel about Akhenaten, then moved on to Greek, translating Euripedes’ Trojan Women, opening a coffee-house called the Trojan Horse with a musician named Nikos Tsingos. But everything fell apart by the end—she died in poverty, alone, drinking constantly, yet still managing to somehow both write a whole book of poems about T.E. Lawrence, and having already won the Governor General’s Award.
The first book of hers I ever read—which I still own, since it’s out of print, even though it’s a horribly tattered remnant of itself—was The Armies of the Moon (1972); I followed it with The Shadow-Maker (1969). Though I consider both the core of her best work, I’m interested to note that Strimas chooses to mash them together in what I consider a pretty haphazard way, selecting fewer poems from either than she does from MacEwen’s interesting but inferior first three books, or her post-mortem final collection Afterworlds. (Then again, The T.E. Lawrence Poems gets fairly cursory coverage too, so maybe it’s just me.)
For me, reading MacEwen was like looking at a Timur d’Vatz painting (thus the i[k]on)—infected with the gilt-burnished colors of an ancient fantasy empire, some other world, a place which never existed, but looked as though it should. A truly interior landscape. She could be solemn, sexual, surprisingly funny. Wry. Heartbreaking. She was inherently dramatic in a way that few Canadians I’d ever encountered dared to be, which only made sense: When she was only 25, she decried her own country as “so quaint, so Naïve, so hopeless.” To an obtuse interviewer who asked whether she had “a mythic imagination”, she replied: “Of course. What other kind is there?” And that’s what they seem like to me, these poems: Fragments of a personal myth-epic, a story told in nonlinear sequences between areas of occlusion, complicated and self-inversive as all good myths should be—creation, destruction, the sacred marriage, the eternal struggle between flesh and spirit, looped back and forth through history, reducing everyone else’s mythology to mere reflection or echo of her own. Like she kept on seizing control of the universe and remaking it in her own image, consistently reshaping it to fit whatever she was interested in that week, even while she was freezing in an Annex basement, budgeting for paper and vodka rather than heat.
Of course, having said all this, whatever I choose to post can never be as good as my build up. And yet.;)
Let’s start with the big punch:
THE SHADOW-MAKER
I have come to possess your darkness, only this.
My legs surround your black, wrestle it
As the flames of day wrestle night
And everywhere you paint the necessary shadows
On my flesh and darken the fibres of my nerves;
Without these shadows I would be
In air one wave of ruinous light
And night with many mouths would close
Around my infinite and sterile curve.
Shadow-maker create me everywhere
Dark spaces (your face is my chosen abyss),
For I said I have come to possess your darkness,
Only this.
More below, if you’re interested. If not, thanks for letting me run on.
DARK PINES UNDER WATER
This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green.
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream
But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
A LETTER TO CHAROS
Lord of the midnight river, tell me
will my silver hands like fish
slip away from my lover’s flesh
and will it surely come to this—
the final tunnel and the liquid kiss
did I throw my life away like so
much money thrown at the feet of singers
did I throw my life at the feet of singers
like a coing tossed into a midnight fountain
into whose future am I moving
my thighs, all silver with his seed
are sleek for swimming.
I seek the aqueducts of death ahead
THE SIGN
What you have finally made me do
is trace with my foot
in the frightened dirt
the sacred fish, the Christian
calling-card, the sign
of the society, that all may know
I am one to go down
to the sacred feasts
beneath the aqueducts of Rome.
You think that this is my surrender to
some quieter form of love
and that this thin and spineless fish
swims only in rock or dust.
But what I am learning
is the lust of God,
the seas which boil in the bones,
and when next time I get to you
the teeth of my kiss
will trace in your flesh
the holy symbol of the catacombs.
And finally:
THE REAL NAME OF THE SEA
Everything would have been different
had I known in before. I would have had no fear
of tunnels, thunder, wind and water, also time,
which brought me always to the brink of being
and taught me how to love, to die.
(Sheer lightning found me cowering
hot and cold upon the floor; there were
some kinds of light I couldn’t bear.
Even the candles lit for all the birthnights
of my life
were the blaze of boats in an ocean funeral.)
I insisted that my terrifying cosmos
was no so different from your own;
I promised you that it contained
all that you had ever seen or done
(for I had seen all things converge to one),
I asked you to hold the gold shell
of the burning sea to your ear
and hear the drowning children
call for their Viking fathers
and worldbreakers breaking
on the awful shores of love forever.
Everything would have been different
had I known it before. Thalassa—
(whisper with me) Thalassa,
these last of the world’s children
beg pardon at your shores.
Today, however, she saw me leafing through the copy of The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (ed. Meaghan Strimas with an introduction by Rosemary Sullivan, who also wrote The Shadow-Maker, MacEwen’s only biography). “What’s interesting to me now is how few of her poems speak to me at all,” she said, appropos of not much. “They’re so head-driven. I’m not surprised most people have forgotten her.”
“She remains one of my biggest influences,” I said, not looking up.
“Well, sure; your obsessions are so alike. All that mythology, the Egypt thing…”
I shrugged, and sat there thinking: Okay. So I guess I’ll be in good company when I’m completely forgotten too, as is obviously going to happen…
(The main difference between MacEwen and I, of course, being that at one point in her life, she was extremely popular.;) But then again, she did also drink herself to death.)
So that was painful. But it reminded me that I’d wanted to talk about MacEwen here, mainly because I’m never sure how many people outside of Canada know her, or any other Canadian poet—Hell, I’m not even sure how many people inside of Canada know about her anymore, or ever did. Mom went to high school with her, actually, which is one of many funny things about the conversation recorded above; they used to court bad reps together by dramatically turning their backs on the building and lighting up in unison, because the rule was “no smoking within sight of the school”. Ooh, rebellious!
She told that anecdote fairly often, when I was growing up. I stupidly assumed that meant she respected MacEwen, which she maybe did, but that respect obviously doesn’t extend to her poetry. Which is a pity.
Dark-haired, light-eyed, tiny, with a receding chin and an almost ridiculously ordinary Scots-Canadjun face, MacEwen was a genuine autodidact with frightening self-discipline. Her chief loves were language and mythology; in 1959, complaining that school was not teaching her the things she needed to know, she walked into a Toronto synagogue and asked to join a childrens’ Hebrew class, so that she could read the Bible in its original tongue. She self-published her first two books of poetry in 1961, and got a contract the following year. Hebrew gave way to Arabic, learned from a lover/tutor (most of her linguistic excursions either began with or seemed to necessitate romance—“Does the muse have to come to you every time bearing a new alphabet?” her friend, Margaret Atwood, once asked), which aided with her personal studies in Egyptology; eventually, she became so fluent she was able to write her own poems in hieroglyphics. She wrote a novel about Akhenaten, then moved on to Greek, translating Euripedes’ Trojan Women, opening a coffee-house called the Trojan Horse with a musician named Nikos Tsingos. But everything fell apart by the end—she died in poverty, alone, drinking constantly, yet still managing to somehow both write a whole book of poems about T.E. Lawrence, and having already won the Governor General’s Award.
The first book of hers I ever read—which I still own, since it’s out of print, even though it’s a horribly tattered remnant of itself—was The Armies of the Moon (1972); I followed it with The Shadow-Maker (1969). Though I consider both the core of her best work, I’m interested to note that Strimas chooses to mash them together in what I consider a pretty haphazard way, selecting fewer poems from either than she does from MacEwen’s interesting but inferior first three books, or her post-mortem final collection Afterworlds. (Then again, The T.E. Lawrence Poems gets fairly cursory coverage too, so maybe it’s just me.)
For me, reading MacEwen was like looking at a Timur d’Vatz painting (thus the i[k]on)—infected with the gilt-burnished colors of an ancient fantasy empire, some other world, a place which never existed, but looked as though it should. A truly interior landscape. She could be solemn, sexual, surprisingly funny. Wry. Heartbreaking. She was inherently dramatic in a way that few Canadians I’d ever encountered dared to be, which only made sense: When she was only 25, she decried her own country as “so quaint, so Naïve, so hopeless.” To an obtuse interviewer who asked whether she had “a mythic imagination”, she replied: “Of course. What other kind is there?” And that’s what they seem like to me, these poems: Fragments of a personal myth-epic, a story told in nonlinear sequences between areas of occlusion, complicated and self-inversive as all good myths should be—creation, destruction, the sacred marriage, the eternal struggle between flesh and spirit, looped back and forth through history, reducing everyone else’s mythology to mere reflection or echo of her own. Like she kept on seizing control of the universe and remaking it in her own image, consistently reshaping it to fit whatever she was interested in that week, even while she was freezing in an Annex basement, budgeting for paper and vodka rather than heat.
Of course, having said all this, whatever I choose to post can never be as good as my build up. And yet.;)
Let’s start with the big punch:
THE SHADOW-MAKER
I have come to possess your darkness, only this.
My legs surround your black, wrestle it
As the flames of day wrestle night
And everywhere you paint the necessary shadows
On my flesh and darken the fibres of my nerves;
Without these shadows I would be
In air one wave of ruinous light
And night with many mouths would close
Around my infinite and sterile curve.
Shadow-maker create me everywhere
Dark spaces (your face is my chosen abyss),
For I said I have come to possess your darkness,
Only this.
More below, if you’re interested. If not, thanks for letting me run on.
DARK PINES UNDER WATER
This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green.
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream
But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
A LETTER TO CHAROS
Lord of the midnight river, tell me
will my silver hands like fish
slip away from my lover’s flesh
and will it surely come to this—
the final tunnel and the liquid kiss
did I throw my life away like so
much money thrown at the feet of singers
did I throw my life at the feet of singers
like a coing tossed into a midnight fountain
into whose future am I moving
my thighs, all silver with his seed
are sleek for swimming.
I seek the aqueducts of death ahead
THE SIGN
What you have finally made me do
is trace with my foot
in the frightened dirt
the sacred fish, the Christian
calling-card, the sign
of the society, that all may know
I am one to go down
to the sacred feasts
beneath the aqueducts of Rome.
You think that this is my surrender to
some quieter form of love
and that this thin and spineless fish
swims only in rock or dust.
But what I am learning
is the lust of God,
the seas which boil in the bones,
and when next time I get to you
the teeth of my kiss
will trace in your flesh
the holy symbol of the catacombs.
And finally:
THE REAL NAME OF THE SEA
Everything would have been different
had I known in before. I would have had no fear
of tunnels, thunder, wind and water, also time,
which brought me always to the brink of being
and taught me how to love, to die.
(Sheer lightning found me cowering
hot and cold upon the floor; there were
some kinds of light I couldn’t bear.
Even the candles lit for all the birthnights
of my life
were the blaze of boats in an ocean funeral.)
I insisted that my terrifying cosmos
was no so different from your own;
I promised you that it contained
all that you had ever seen or done
(for I had seen all things converge to one),
I asked you to hold the gold shell
of the burning sea to your ear
and hear the drowning children
call for their Viking fathers
and worldbreakers breaking
on the awful shores of love forever.
Everything would have been different
had I known it before. Thalassa—
(whisper with me) Thalassa,
these last of the world’s children
beg pardon at your shores.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:27 am (UTC)I had never heard of Gwendolyn MacEwen; I want all her poetry now.
Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 03:34 pm (UTC)I'm really sorry not to have commented or tried to get in touch with you re your accident, BTW. So glad you're A) not dead and B) reasonably up, if not about.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 09:36 pm (UTC)Well, I've long since given up being surprised at what the average person has forgotten/never learned in the first place.
What do they teach them in the schools?/damn kids, get off of my lawn!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 08:25 pm (UTC)