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Book Notes: on Mahagony and Sun of Consciousness by Édouard Glissant, Yours Presently, Selected Letters of John Wieners & Allegria, poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti

In 1946 at age 18, Édouard Glissant sailed to Paris from Martinique to continue his studies at the Sorbonne. He earned his graduate degree in ethnology and returned to the Caribbean in 1953. Like his friends and fellow Martinicans Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Glissant carried Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy back to Martinique, influenced by Sartre’s portrayal of the individual as endowed with the freedom to confer meaning on – and restore the wholeness of — the world. The figure of the poet as demiurge, totalizing existence through utterance, led Césaire and others to launch the Negritude movement, an assertion of black identity and anti-colonialism through the French language. When Césaire ran as a communist candidate for the French parliament in the 1945 election, Glissant helped organise his campaign (though he was too young then to vote). These events are depicted in Glissant’s first and prize-winning novel, La Lézarde (The Ripening, 1958). He soon co-founded with other writers Le Front Antillo-Guyanais (The Antillean-Guyanese Front), advocating for French West Indies independence. His activism led to his arrest in 1961 and a four-year detention in France.

By the time he returned to Martinique in 1965, his thinking about art and politics had dramatically evolved. Dissatisfied with the tenets of Negritude, he began to argue for “Tout-Monde,” a post-Sartrean relational poetics of constant transaction between the world’s diverse elements – making clear that identity is always formed via relations. His work would feature hybridity; he would destabilize standard French and narrative address, and dispense with the heroics of self-formulation. He sought “a poetics of language-in-itself. It sanctions the moment when language, as if satisfied with its perfection, ceases to take for its object the recounting of its connection with particular surroundings, to concentrate solely upon its fervor to exceed its limits and reveal thoroughly the elements composing it.”

Two texts central to Glissant’s oeuvre have recently been translated for anglophones – Mahagony, his fifth novel published by Gallimard in 1987, and Sun of Consciousness (1956), a long essay-in-parts that Gallimard ultimately published in 1997. Mahagony is spoken by multiple narrators from different periods of Martinican history, but its organizing narrator is the present-day Mathieu: “I began to dream about how someday I could create an account that would stand in contrast to the expanse of all that crazed time (that maelstrom) in which I had been included. Not to emphasize the opposite but to shed light on the formless original and thus nullify myself, or, to tell the truth, make myself unnecessary. Light, laying time and time’s agony open, ought to free me from my character. Even in this abstract form, I didn’t intend to be the messenger.” Mathieu does indeed appear to dissolve into other speakers and other sounds. In the process, the island’s story emerges on their terms.

When Glissant attended his French-run grade school, students were not permitted to speak their own language, Creole, during class. Mahagony doesn’t blend the rhythms of French and Creole as much as it reconfigures them, redesigning syntax for a spoken sound that soon begins to register as strangely familiar. This is language that reflects the tension between belonging-yet-not-belonging to France and French culture. Betsy Wing’s remarkable renditions are stunning for their attunement to Glissant’s idiosyncratic expression. For Sun of Consciousness, Nathanaël also captures the unique forms of Glissant’s prose and lyricism. As he notes, this is an early work that also includes lines of poetry from the late 1940s. Glissant’s assertions about poetry and language anticipate today’s most urgent and penetrating verse, such that Sun of Consciousness makes for a most timely text for study:

“To be born to the world is an exhausting splendor. And for whomever wishes to guard the testimony of this birth, there is a time of chaotic opening, of anarchic presentiment of history, of furious masticating of words, of vertiginous seizure of clarities which, though born to oneself, one is tossed to the handsome forefront of the world … prose, chaos, measure, knowledge and poetry being signs of my experience, seen from inside. Outside, it is the French truth opposing mine; by this revealed alliance of an opposite to its other, in which it is known that all truth is its dialectical consummation.”

[Mahagony, published by the University of Nebraska Press on January 1, 2021, 186 pages, $19.95 paperback; Sun of Consciousness, published by Nightboat Books on February 25, 2020, 96 pages, $14.95 paperback]

 

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Upon the death of John Wieners in 2002, Robert Glück wrote a tribute for James White Review, saying, “John Wieners was without defenses; his imagination did not protect him from the world and he described that openness (in conversation with Robert Duncan) as a condition of personal danger. He transmuted that vulnerability into a sweet and heartbroken poetry whose fragmentations can be comic but are painful at heart, like those in the world.” Wieners’ tremulous exuberance is apparent throughout Yours Presently, a generous selection of his letters, edited and helpfully glossed by Michael Seth Stewart. Eileen Myles contributes a preface; she describes Wieners as “a changeable man, an adoring man, a calculating, generous, vengeful, and loving man” and finds that the letters “hold the same breath and cadence and the sheer alchemical weight of the poems.”

Stewart’s introductions to the book’s nine chapters sketch the main events as reflected in the letters, beginning with the 21-year old’s arrival at Black Mountain College in 1955 where he discovered “a living that counted” while studying with Charles Olson. He writes excitedly to a college friend, Robert Greene, about Olson’s enthusiastic response to his poems — and closes several paragraphs later by saying, “I think this era, is the hardest I have been through, as I am now totally alone, for the first time, and very nervous about the possibility of a life alone, old, drunk, etc. And yet what else can I think of when this thing is being smashed, a thing that was always warm inside of me, and now it’s as if I am paid back for all the warmth. You know that old cliche, you have been too happy … Right now, there is nothing but John Wieners and white paper, and it is killing me …” As the letters proceed, the dreaded possibilities become actualities: forced electroshock and insulin therapy, institutionalization, poverty, addiction, despair.

By 1962 he was back in his hometown, Milton, Massachusetts, and then lived in Boston where he advocated for gay rights and political justice with and for his friends. In July 1964, he writes to Denise Levertov, “I can’t really say much more than this: the blue flowers on the dresser, the red comforter on the bed. It is all I have, and the wind rustling through the trees outside. It is more than enough, and to have the pen in my hand is more than joy; it is thrilling moments just these — that direct one’s whole life. And make him see what things are to be avoided and what fostered to preserve these things or moments to be a permanent part of one’s life: Working ‘alone.’ I do try to be a comfort and song in the night for others — but this cannot be done … It is only ourselves that reveal the rapture.”

Stewart based his 2014 CUNY graduate dissertation on these letters. He has also produced a volume of Wieners/Olson letters (2012), and edited Wieners’ journals for Stars Seen in Person (City Lights, 2015). Wieners didn’t write criticism, and during his life he seemed to live at the outskirts of the various poetry schools that claimed him — Black Mountain, San Francisco, New York. In lieu of a biography, the journals and letters are the best sources for a sense of how and why the poems emerged, and where they circulated — and Stewart’s notes running throughout the text illuminate Wieners’ relationships and the topics he addressed. Like the poems, the letters are intimate. In 1965, he writes to Ed Sanders, to whom he owes ten dollars: “The Orgasm Oil is alright with me, tho I think we should be careful in revealing its contents, as FDA will come down on it.” Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Charles Olson, Michael McClure, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard, Donald Allen, Anne Waldman — Wieners corresponded with all of them, honoring those relationships with his affection, openness and candor. To Kyger in 1970: “Sharp as time becomes, no acid accusation will separate what has now proved constant existence in a genuine exchange of terms, letters, promise and fulfillments. Necessities of economy prohibit our position from being near to one another, yet these attempts at communication result in relighting the old honors of recognizing a common cause that travel only enriches.”

[Published by the University of New Mexico Press on December 1, 2020, 333 pages, $75.00 hardcover]

 

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Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) wrote his first poems while serving in the Italian army during World War I. In June, 1916, he was posted at the town of Mariano del Friuli, about 55 miles northeast of Venice. One of the most treacherous series of battles on the Italo-Austrian front occurred in that region through 1917. In Mariano he wrote “The Buried Harbor”:

 

The poet goes there

and then returns to the light with his songs

and scatters them

 

Of this poetry

I retain

that nothing

of bottomless secret

 

“The Buried Harbor” refers to the legend of a vanished ancient waterfront in Alexandria, the city of his birth in 1888. His latest translator, Geoffrey Brock, says that “for Ungaretti, it represented ‘what remains secret and indecipherable within us.'” A different translation of the last two lines reads, “the merest nothing / of an inexhaustible secret” — hardly a rococo rendition, yet one that permits us to appreciate the even simpler gracefulness of Brock’s version, as well as how the modifier “bottomless” works so felicitously with the image of a secret harbor.

“The Buried Harbor” is included in Allegria, Brock’s translation of the 1931 edition of L’Allegria, Ungaretti’s first collection of 1919, originally titled Allegria di naufragi or Happiness of Shipwrecks, perhaps an echo of a line by Leopardi (“E il naufragar m’è dolce in quest mare”). The son of Italian parents in multi-lingual Alexandria, Ungaretti attended French schools and encountered the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Apollinaire. In 1912 at age 23, he departed for Paris. If a poet’s first book represents a rebirth into language and the announcement of an arrival, then Allegria di naufragi introduces Ungaretti as a newly christened European and still spiritually loyal to the “bottomless” mystery of his and our origins.

 

ITALY

 

I am a poet

a unanimous cry

I am a clot of dreams

 

I am the fruit

of countless conflicting grafts

grown in a hothouse

 

But your people are borne

by the same land

that bears me

Italy

 

And in this your solder’s

uniform

I rest

as in my father’s

cradle.

 

The allocation of equal weight to mystery (often self-reflexive as in “I am a clot of dreams”)) and communal attachment is one aspect of “conflicting grafts.” The poem is a spine of pauses, each line exquisitely placed. Ungaretti’s un-paraphrasable and highly nuanced poems create a unique challenge for the translator, namely neither to smudge or adorn his forthrightness nor to tamper with his rhythms and acute enjambments. Brock’s performance is nothing less than masterful.

The joy of the shipwreck is the happiness of not-arriving — or more specifically, of embracing the actual with one’s limited means. In “Why,” written in 1916 at the site of carnage, he begins, “My dark scattered heart / needs some relief,” and later, at the end of the poem,

 

I carry it

as it sinks into dirt

and bursts and thunders

like a shell

on the plain

but without leaving me

even the trail of its flight in the air

 

My poor heart

struck dumb

with not knowing.

 

Most poets fill their poems with objects and scenes, attempting to close a gap between unknowingness and the world. Ungaretti had no such impulse. His poems embody the suspension and transfer of energy between the concrete and the unsayable. Brock’s Allegria returns us to a poet of clarity and strangeness who both comforts and stiffens our spines when he says, “all you need for courage / is one mirage.”

[Published by Archipelago Books on October 6, 2020, 198 pages, $18.00 paperback]

Contributor
Ron Slate

Ron Slate is the host and editor of On The Seawall.

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