Week 10: Supplement for NEAR

After last night, I realized that I wanted to post this for all of you--the question being, what we see in the faces here. The photograph is from a televised performance by Russian bard singer, Victor Berkovsky, in the year 1990. I asked you about their expressions. Alex suggested the word rapture. I thought that was a good start. They're listening to Berkovsky's version of a poem--presented here as a song--M. Svetlov's Grenada, from 1925, which was soon after the years of the Revolution and Civil War. What we're watching, of course, is from many years later--but the memory of the those events--and all the events in between--how they're felt and understood--how they're conveye--is what's important. Indelible, at least to me. I wanted to see if any of this carried over to each of you...

Here's the link:  Виктор Берковский Гренада - YouTube

Week 10: NEAR

Odilon Redon

My Papa's Waltz
Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
_____

Roethke reading the poem:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/my-papas-waltz-audio-only

Week 9: FIELD

Wang Meng, 1308-85, Scholar in a Pavilion under Trees, Cleveland Museum

Umberto Saba, The Goat

I talked to a goat.
She was alone in a pasture, and tethered.
Stuffed with grass, soaked
by the rain, she bleated.

That monotonous bleating was brother
to my sorrow. And I answered, first
in jest, then because sorrow is eternal,
has one voice and never changes.
I heard this voice in the wails
of a solitary goat.

In a goat with a Semitic face,
I heard all other pain lamenting,
all other lives.


(translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)
____

The reading I had in mind to accompany this is John Berger's essay, "Field," in his book About Looking. I'm wondering if you can hunt it up as a pdf online... I found one, but with distracting annotations. My own copy of the book--now where is it?
_____

And in a different tone,  another poem from Peter Everwine:

Back from the Field

Peter Everwine

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or a country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.

Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads,

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws,

old ones in beards, leapers

in silk leggings, the multiple

pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.

Week 8: ROUND

Albert York, oil on canvas, mounted on masonite, 28 x27cm., 1963

How It Is


This is how it is --

      One turns away
      and walks out into the evening.
      There is a white horse on the prairie, or a river
      that slips away among dark rocks.

     One speaks, or is about to speak,
     not that it matters.

     What matters is this --

It is evening.
I have been away a long time.
Something is singing in the grass.


                                              -- Peter Everwine

Week 6: REACH

Alfred Wallis, oil on cardboard, date unknown

O western wind, when wilt thou blow
  That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
  And I in my bed again!  

              --anonymous, 16th century