Commentary on "Variation on 'Song' by Guillevic"

This poem was written near the end of my stay in Lafayette, Indiana, where I lived while attending Purdue University. As part of my degree program, I took a French reading class, and, luckily, Prof. Allen Wood allowed me to fulfill requirements by translating contemporary French poetry. He thought I was crazy, as contemporary French poetry employs so many puns, double entendres, and idioms that only the very brave or foolhardy should attempt to translate it! More than one poem stumped us, particularly the work of Francis Ponge, the trouble beginning even with the title of the work I chose: Nioque de L'Avant Printemps. "Nioque" apparently is Ponge's idiosyncratic soundplay on words such as "knowledge" and "gnosis"—it took me a heck of a long time to figure that out! In another poem, by an author I cannot recall (it may have been Jules Supervielle), the phrase "le dos bas" is used to describe low-lifes in a crowded cinema. Prof. Wood, a more-than-native-speaker who regularly publishes in French, couldn't figure out the transliteration of that image at all! Nevertheless, this class not only brushed up my French, it taught me something of the art of of the translator—and French poet Guillevic (1907-1997) at least was an easier study than Ponge! Guillevic's poem "Song" was one of those rare works that speaks to me so thoroughly it begs to be used as a "template" for a new poem. It's almost as if the melos of the poem were actually a song melody to which new words can be fitted (I published similar variations in my first book, on poems by Sylvia Plath and Yannis Ritsos.) Guillevic was unabashedly a nature poet, as I am, although, despite once hearing another poet remark disparagingly that the last thing nature needs is irony, I am more interested in exploring the intersection between humans and nature using the kind of detail often reserved for the latter—not trash: cigarette packets, beer bottles, dead car batteries, struggling to define their existence among Indiana's brutal wasteland plants: chickory, phlox, goatsbeard. This intersection is something Ponge explored, which is why I wanted to translate him, and I can only hope I am one-tenth "on the side of things" as that master poet!

Commentary on "What can we do with the plains' beaten weight?"

This poem was inspired by the long and very difficult commute I had to my first teaching gig after graduating from Purdue University, at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. It was a two-hour trip across farm landscape so vast and dull it enters the imagination as myth. When James Wright and Robert Bly wanted to explore the possibilities of the "deep image," this mythic landscape (albeit it the plains of Ohio and the prairie of Minnesota) was as apt a backdrop as one could find. At the same time, I was reading another great poet of flat farmland, Russian Osip Mandelstam, and attempting to answer his desperate question (posed in one of his final poems) seemed a good way to gather my thoughts about the till plains I grew to love and hate. I remember how, after a poetry reading that featured this poem, an undergraduate told me how impressed he was at the image "Flycatchers, little puffed-out grenades, squat / On telephone lines, the cold space between them / Measured & measured." He said he liked the way I wrote as much about what is not there—the space—as what is, i.e. the flycatchers. Originally, I think I was more concerned with the violence in the grenade metaphor (echoing as it does the earlier image of blasting stumps.) But re-reading it, with this young man's clever comment in mind, I see the image does focus ideas about the wilderness of the Indiana landscape (its huge, mute space writ small between the bodies of the birds); its loneliness (why do birds only huddle together in the most bitter cold?!); and its awesome machine beauty that turned forest into farmland in a few decades and left the flycatchers only a wire for a perch. By the way, in order to make the journey to school on time, I pretty much had to speed the whole way there ("I reach Tipton going eighty"), but I never once got a speeding ticket—God bless those Indiana troopers! Another fact: I paid the lowest I've ever paid for gas on this Muncie road—75¢ a gallon (in 1999)—which is not a record this country should be proud of.