The World's Literature in Europe discussion
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Poet Patrick Kanouse 29 Dec 2010 @ 5:00-6:00 PM and 30 Dec 2010 @ 9:00-10:00 AM, Eastern Standard Time, Indianopolis IN
This is Patrick Kanouse's poem from "The Furnace Review" of Summer 2010: Memory of Hyacinths
in memoriam Francis Crick, d. July 28, 2004
1
Gone to where your discovery cannot -
Never did - explain. That fine morning when,
In the mind, the entire structure emerged:
A billion years at once simple and clear,
Like how you can only really see
A leaf when a certain light shines over it.
Even then imperfect and brief, but whole.
2
Humid July dusk; sweat cripples my sight.
Blinking, I watched the comet explode,
Felt the withered, harrowed bone of doom.
No prayer for hope. Just the memory of hyacinths
Rising through the lattice of meteors
And the cracking of the sun on the sea.
3
The clack of the train as she leaps from the car
Into her beautiful moment, into her:
Gown billowing, hands to the sun,
White train the echo of her leap,
The prophecy of memory.
Lilies sway back from the train's rush,
As if accepting her unanswered will.
She gives herself to the idea of love.
4
The prayers we carry
In our hands do not quench
Our thirst in the noon's heat
The blessings we whisper
Do not quiet our desires.
We commit to each other
Not because we are strong
But because we are weak.
FalassarnaBy
Patrick Kanouse
– October 1, 2009, THE PENNSYLVANIA REVIEW
for Gina
In the cradle of your palms lift the sea
That shimmers with the sun over our heads,
Dropping from your fingers, tracing your wrists,
And whisper to me, again, how these waters
Sculpt time, birth beaches, conjure whole worlds.
Pinch your nose and sink beneath the ageless sea
Into electric calm, where only you and light,
Where only you and refracted light linger.
Rise up and swell the sky, harvest the sun.
Of the hours I have left, it is these sands,
These thick sands, the shimmering sun, your hands…
Tell me, beneath this sky, on this far beach,
Your lips wet with the salt sea to my ear
How those long ago hours harbor our universes.
"Falassarna", "Quanta Endure" and "Sonnet for Catullus" at http://pennreview.com/author/pkanouse/
Richard Feynman Orders Nigiri-Sushi by Patrick KanouseI think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
A conspiracy exists between me
And my itamae-san. I prefer that raw
Blue fish of the world, tuna, and the gray
And brown finality of the mackerel
Topped with thin rings of green onion.
Oh yes, and a cup of green tea.
I watch him as he prepares my order.
I always wonder, should I watch or read?
Watch as he slices the fish with a knife
Sharpened on one side only. Watch his fingers
Dip into the small bowl of water, then to the rice,
Which he sculpts with the first two fingers
Of each hand. He scrapes his index finger over
The wasabi, jams it into the underside
Of the fish, presses that over the rice.
No created or consumed energy. Just the efficient,
Orderly coincidence of hands, eyes, rice, and fish.
Do I bow or do I wave goodbye?
Like Xerxes attending his disaster
From a cliff, we ply the space between
Our eyes for definition and syntax.
As he, from his silver-footed throne,
Counted one-by-one the sinking
Of his grand fleet, knew his conquest
Would be but impressions
Of a throne on the shores
Of Greece.
So we ascend a stranger stair
Into an allusion of force and matter.
Vinegared rice, quarks, chopsticks,
And gluons. The anti-particles? Let's not begin,
For this is not a place for Pierre's admonishment,
"Wine should breathe!"
And what of the strings that cleave
Light, force, matter, gravity?
How much soy sauce? How much ginger?
Like an abecedarian, I try to tease
The implications of this dish before me:
Blue, long, with green edges.
Tuna and mackerel
Lined across the plate fleeing
Wasabi into ginger's tang.
Do I bow or do I wave goodbye?
How do we diagram such simplicity?
Enact the elementary with the ordinary?
Use a little soy sauce.
Ginger to cleanse the palate.
Oh yes, and another cup of tea.
Besides "Richard Feynman Orders Nigiri-Sushi" http://www.patrickkanouse.com/Poems.html includes "Death of Archimedes", "Vertumnus and Pomona", "What They Say", and "Where Waters Meets"
"Matala", from the collection Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair and Other Poems by Patrick KanouseLounging on the beach, death overlooks us.
Centuries of the dead, of the buried overlooking the sea.
We climb the cliff’s catacombs, pierce
Into the coffin-caves emptied and graffitied.
And all I can hear—not the waves, not the wind,
Not my heart—a rustling like distant leaves:
A requiem for these dead, forgotten, and removed,
These hollow eyes gasping down to the peopled beach.
Whipped by wind-frothed sand, interrogated by the waves
I touch your hand and stare into the sea of your eyes.
Hello! Patrick here, author of "Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair and Other Poems." I'll be around for the next hour or so, for Q&A on The World's Literature discussion group. If there's anything you want to ask or say, fire away! And thanks to Asmah for setting up this discussion!
HI, PATRICK, it's great of you to consent to an interview with TWL.
I read your most recent blog post about your thoughts on the season. Can you tell about it to people to get an idea about it?
****I read your most recent blog post about your thoughts on the season. Can you tell about it to people to get an idea of how the season falls on you?***I was contemplating the holiday season and its current place in our society...at least how it related to me. Christmas has shifted drastically from a religious holiday to a secular holiday. Generally, the secular nature of it (most prominently in the materialism of purchasing) tends to have a negative connotation. I don't disagree, but I think much of it is actually a replacement ritual for the loss of the religious. Instead of Midnight Masses (or Christmas Eve services in my childhood church), we've put in place other rituals--often highly specific to individuals, but not completely lacking in wider society (I think here of the popularity of "The Christmas Story" movie).
I find a lot of value in the rituals of the holiday, a sense of connectedness with the past. I think it is, essentially, a secular religious ritual.
Some people put rituals in their lives by reading stories or poems at characteristic times. Did you ever do so?
Some people put rituals in their lives by reading stories or poems at characteristic times. Did you ever do so? As it happens, I read Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales" every Christmas Eve. This is probably the most ritualistic reading I have, though every spring I'm pulling down "Leaves of Grass" and reading bits of it.
If anything, if I am traveling to someplace, I tend to read poems by poets of the area or poems about the area...at least when I can find them.
I recently listened to C.K. Williams talk about his new book based on Whitman's poetry such as "Leaves of Grass". Who are your favorite poets? Any favorite poems?
I recently listened to C.K. Williams talk about his new book of poems based on Whitman's poetry such as "Leaves of Grass". Who are your favorite poets or poems? I wonder if we listened to the same talk?
One always risks leaving out favorites in answers to these questions... I have long cherished Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Seferis, Seamus Heaney, and Eugenio Montale. Oh, and Auden. Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a recent favorite as well.
Poems... Yeats's Byzantium poems are among my favorites along with Keats's Odes. Seferis's poem 3 in "Mythistorema" (it begins "I woke with this marble head in my hands") has always been a touchstone for me. Heaney's "Digging" and "Blackberry Picking" similarly.
Oh...and I've spaced the Chinese poets and so many others. I have a hard time with favorites. Perhaps influences are the best way to describe it...
I'll have to look up where that lecture was. Anyway, I imagine that reading a lot of poetry is similar to reading a lot of novels. The immersion influences you to write your own stories and poems.
Anyway, I imagine that reading a lot poetry is similar to reading a lot of novels. The immersion influences you to write your own stories and poems. I very much think so. I think I have found Seferis and Heaney important to me in recent years because when I read them, I want to write poems. There are certainly poets whose influence is good...with others that are troublesome. Derek Walcott once commented that trying to write like Hart Crane was a project doomed. Crane, Thomas, and Hopkins are three poets that I can think of whose writing is so original and unique that they can really only serve as a useful charge to write with your own voice.
Seferis, Heaney, and Walcott are poets who cannot be imitated without sounding derivative, but some of their techniques are more usable by other writers without sounding like a 2nd-rate Heaney. Many of Thomas's techniques...trying to write like him always ends up sounding like 2nd-rate Thomas. At least, that's been the case with me.
Poets needn't be philosophers. Poetry is a craft in its own field. Though, poets might talk about things that are possible, what-if scenarios.
Poets needn't be philosophers. Poetry is a craft in its own field. Though, poets might talk about things that are possible, what-if scenarios.Agreed. The rationality of philosophy is often at odds with the non-rationality of poetry. Wallace Stevens may have been the most philosophical poet...in that much of his work seems to deal directly with philosophy. But even he saw them as separate if connected.
I regard philosophy as an attempt to *explain* something. Poetry is an attempt--at least in some senses--to *understand* something. And I think those two verbs are different enough to demarcate the two. I think we often understand something through emotion, beauty, and awe along with rationality, science, etc. I think philosophy has a difficult time dealing with Surrealism in poetry and art, but Surrealism certainly helps us understand more about our world and lives.
And you're right about the possible, what-if scenarios. Cavafy can imagine a world from a minor figure in the Roman court. Something inappropriate to philosophy...and this shouldn't be confused with a philosophical thought-experiment. The two serve very different purposes.
The field of aesthetics tries to explain beauty and sublimity in some way.
The field of aesthetics tries to explain beauty and sublimity in some way.It does but it does so from a philosophical or scientific standpoint and to explain how we understand something as beautiful. Roger Scruton's "Beauty" is a book that attempts to explain that...but it is not...and I don't think he would claim it to be...a work of art. Of course, what he's trying to do is different than a literary or art critic tries to do.
I think we can try to explain how beauty works (Gerard Manley Hopkins left an unfinished Socratic dialogue about beauty). But to understand it, I think we must face the thing that is beautiful directly and accept its *method*--be it a sunset, a poem, or a film.
Philosophy and science and history can inform poetry and serve as a place to step from or incorporate into poetry.
You wrote somewhere thatit all seems to be out there and too strongly to suggest that “unreal” situations are the point of art. I only wish to suggest that this is a part of art’s purpose. The mundane, the normal, the real are just as valuable for art and a source of inspiration
--which reiterates the point you're making about art being a basis to understand reality and having a basis in reality.
I think there are multiple ways we interact with the world and come to understand it...and I leave "understand" here purposively vague. Science, art, philosophy, religion, history all provides venues into that understanding, and with art in particular, you can mix and toss and all of them together. Poetry can use science as a basis to explore our relationship with technology. Cavafy uses history. Keats used beauty. I am a bit "old-fashioned" I think in believing that beauty is the key element in art and necessary for it to function. Again, I leave "beauty" as in the eye of the beholder, but it is somehow necessary.
Thank you for the questions and I look forward to continuing the conversation tomorrow morning!
Thank you, Patrick. Can you come back tomorrow to talk about your poems?
I will definitely be back tomorrow morning at 9:00 EST. I look forward to discussing more!
Poem "Conversing with the Stars" by Patrick Kanouse
I
He loved the stars. He loved spending hours
Through the night in his observatory
He built with his hands on top of his house:
A dome of two-by-fours and corrugated
Metal and a slit through which he peered
The telescope’s tube. Hours he spent. All year.
He told me once the universe could be
Confined to the realm of the lens, for but
The space between heart beats. If you waited
The universe would spin out of sight
Like a spinning top off the desk’s edge.
He said that that moment was still like wine.
II
He showed me on occasion stars, novas,
Nebulas, and planets, let me peek
At the sky that was his devotion.
In the center everything was crisp, clear,
Even the blackness punctuated by stars
No bigger than I can look up now and see,
Only more. Many, many more. He asked,
“Ever seen Saturn?”
“In pictures.”
“Look here.”
I stared into the eyepiece and gasped.
Vibrant as a picture, yet I knew
It was there, in the lens, tan and brown, circled
By ghostly rings dull from sci-fi books. He said,
“That’s the sun’s reflected light. It’s minutes
Old because it takes so long to go from the sun
To Saturn and back to here. Amazing.”
III
He loved sharing his stars. He loved, I think,
Saying, “Millions of light years,” as if distance
Could be measured in words and grave tones.
He told me once how he could just not
Fathom it all. How when he looked at
Andromeda or the Ring Nebula,
He was overwhelmed by the vastness
Of it all, by the emptiness full
Of lights, clouds, and stuff untouchable.
He said, “We’ll never know. Perhaps there are
People on some lonely planet whizzing
Around Andromeda unhindered
“By a vision limited to our sun.
Too far away to visit. What’s lost
Because of all that? What’s to know? To feel?”
Deep into the alcoholic’s hours,
He would watch the sky, thinking of vast places,
Odd things, and the birth and death of stars.
cont'd at
http://www.astropoetica.com/Winter05/...
Hello! Patrick here, author of "Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair and Other Poems." I'll be around for the next hour or so, for Q&A on The World's Literature discussion group. If there's anything you want to ask or say, fire away! And thanks to Asmah for setting up this discussion!
HI PATRICK! Welcome to this segment of Conversations of Authors and Readers.
Asmah, again, thanks for setting this up and I am delighted to be participating!
I've been reading some of your poetry and have posted some above on this topic as well as some links to other of your poems. Which is your favorite?
I've been reading some of your poetry and have posted some above on this topic as well as some links to other of your poems. Which is your favorite? This is like picking my favorite child...or in my case my favorite dog. :>
This is difficult, because I like them for so many different reasons. Probably my favorite of these is "Falassarna." This a sentimental poem for me, and so I have a fondness for it regardless of its "success" or not.
Can you tell us about "Falassarna"? It's posted above as well.
Here it is -- Falassarna
By
Patrick Kanouse
– October 1, 2009, THE PENNSYLVANIA REVIEW
for Gina
In the cradle of your palms lift the sea
That shimmers with the sun over our heads,
Dropping from your fingers, tracing your wrists,
And whisper to me, again, how these waters
Sculpt time, birth beaches, conjure whole worlds.
Pinch your nose and sink beneath the ageless sea
Into electric calm, where only you and light,
Where only you and refracted light linger.
Rise up and swell the sky, harvest the sun.
Of the hours I have left, it is these sands,
These thick sands, the shimmering sun, your hands…
Tell me, beneath this sky, on this far beach,
Your lips wet with the salt sea to my ear
How those long ago hours harbor our universes.
Can you tell us about "Falassarna"? It's posted above as well.Well, Falassarna is a very small, tiny town on the western edge of Crete. There is a stupendously beautiful beach there. When my wife, the Gina in the dedication, and I traveled to Greece several years ago, we had a very good friend living in Greece at the time. So he was able to take us to places that would have been difficult for the typical tourist to find. This is one of those places.
The waters were gorgeously clear. The beach was very unpopulated. The weather was spectacular. Simply an all-around lovely experience.
I have a term for these kinds of moments: cinema experience. And what I mean by that is that you are almost watching yourself in a scene that has all the components in it just right. The lighting, the weather, the sense of being. You "feel" alive and awake to the world. With my more recent readings in Buddhism, I think this may be akin to their sense of mindfulness.
So "Falassarna" is my attempt to capture this feeling and experience.
Can you tell us about "Falassarna"? It's posted above as well. Cont'dI was reading a lot of the Greek poets as well, and Elytis and Seferis have this surrealistic pose they often apply, particularly to the conjunction of the sea and history and memory. So I attempted to do so of that hear, without being directly imitative of them.
Serenity comes to mind and Wholesomeness. There's also nature in the poem.
...And something you've incorporated with human emotions/feeling--science. The idea of Completeness really comes through in the reading.
Serenity comes to mind and Wholesomeness. There's also nature in the poem.Serenity is a good word, I think. The setting was serene and remains one of the most vivid of my memories. And the sea was necessary for that serenity, I think. I've long loved the sea and ocean...probably a result of my landlocked childhood. So I tend to be quite joyful by the sea. Content.
And being there and feeling all of that, I knew that others had experienced something similar...if not on that exact beach. So I try to make it specifically singular at the same time trying to stretch out the individual experience into a more common experience that humankind has had across our time here.
Your poems overall aren't rooted in one time or place, going back into antiquity, describing the changes Nature has wrought on places and peoples' responses to these elemental events, mingling the past and present.
..And something you've incorporated with human emotions/feeling--science. The idea of Completeness really comes through in the reading. I'm glad you got that, for Completeness is, I think, critical to the poem. At that time, in that location..."it" was Complete. Anything added or subtracted would have messed up that sense. The trick, I think, is to bring that sense to such a specific location and time and extend it beyond that specificity. I think surrealism, metaphor, and other poetic techniques work help that. Sometimes they work in a poem and sometimes they don't.
This is one of those poems that I wrote that when I finally called it "finished," I said to myself, "I don't know if anyone else will like it, but I do." Sometimes by keeping a poem too close to the poet, it can be a boring poem to others.
Nature is Awesome either in a benign or a catastrophic way.
In "Falassarna" it also helps not to be aware of everyday distractions as well.
Nature is Awesome either in a benign or a catastrophic way.I completely agree. The catastrophic is more apparent, but the world around us is full of constant beauty, which is awesome. The late Irish poet John O'Donohue claimed that beauty was a requirement for human life once we evolved into societies. He doesn't claim that beauty is all around, but that we find beauty where we are. And nature provides a large portion of that. A single flower someplace can bring as much joy as a mountain landscape.
Catastrophic nature reminds us that we are but frail carbon/water bodies and that we are on a "living" planet that can easily bring our sense of structure to a standstill.
You have written many thoughtful-provoking poems with your own slant/perspective on something, a capability which makes any kind of writing to succeed.
In "Falassarna" it also helps not to be aware of everyday distractions as well.Ah, yes...our modern conveniences often get in our way. I do think this...at least for now or for someone of my age where I straddle both the "old" way and the portable computer age. I'm comfortable with books and ereaders, but computers will always be something slightly foreign to me. I think that will be less so for my 7-year old nephew.
But I don't think that being able to turn off modernity will be lessened. Those things are distractions and tools. To shed the cell phone, the TV, etc., and re-enter the natural world is necessary to connect with ourselves. Perhaps my nephew will find ways to incorporate it, but I will need to set it aside.
And beyond the modern conveniences not worrying about the mortgage or the knee-pain, etc., is important in that sense of connectedness with the larger world/universe.
I've enjoyed so many of your poems, and your illustrated collection of the Portrait of a Woman poems first came to my attention.
You have written many thoughtful-provoking poems with your own slant/perspective on something, a capability which makes any kind of writing to succeed. Thank you for thinking/seeing that. We are all individuals, so our slant/perspective is built into our movement through the world/life. But we are also connected to the larger world of humanity and nature, so we have common touch points, we have common and analogous experiences.
For me, a poem is successful that both communicates specificity and universality.
I've enjoyed so many of your poems, and your illustrated collection of the Portrait of a Woman poems first came to my attention.Well, I very much appreciate knowing you have enjoyed my poems. Writers may say they write for themselves, but they also write for others to read that writing.
That collection really started as an experiment, for I wanted to take some of the great photographs I had (some taken by me, others by my wife) we had of travels to Greece and Italy and combine them into a book that tied the inspiration for the poems with the sites.
I'm fortunate to work in a publishing company (educational books), so I had ready access to a compositor/designer who I could hire on the cheap to put it all together for me.
In "Quanta Endure" the point about the 'touch points' with others as necessary was said, But if my hand could reach yours, not so stark
Would the end, would the whimper seem.
So give to me your hands that we defy
The grip of physics, and live our lovely lie.
There's other lines in another poem, too, about the necessity of relating to others in physical ways as part of what humans do to feel secure in the Awesome, Beautiful world.
(INTERVIEW CONTINUES ON PAGE 2)
The World's Literature in Europe
Books mentioned in this topic
Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair and Other Poems (other topics)Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair and Other Poems (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Patrick Kanouse (other topics)Patrick Kanouse (other topics)
Some of his poems are: Quanta Endure, Sonnet for Catullus, Falassarna, Memory of Hyacinths, Portrait of a Woman Brushing Her Hair, The Aegean, Carnations in Venice, Santorini, Unde origo inde salus, Matala, Ruins Above the Sea, The Death of Archimedes, Richard Feynman Orders Nigiri-Sushi, What They Say, Where Waters Meet, Vertumnus and Pomona, Conversing with the Stars, The After Storm Drive, and Grandpa's Gone to Oregon.
Session One:
Reference Zone: America/Indianapolis
Reference Time: 17:00:00 29-Dec-2010 (Wednesday 5:00-6:00 PM)
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Session Two:
Reference Zone: America/Indianapolis
Reference Time: 09:00:00 30-Dec-2010 (9:00-10:00 AM Thursday)
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