{"id":217,"date":"2010-08-09T00:52:52","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T00:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nabourke.com\/?p=199"},"modified":"2010-08-09T00:52:52","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T00:52:52","slug":"gjertrud-schnackenbergs-coda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=217","title":{"rendered":"Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s ‘The Lamplit Answer’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BattistaI’ve been reading a wonderful book of poetry by the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg: The Lamplit Answer<\/em>. This collection was first published in 1982, and later included as part of the collection, Supernatural Love<\/em> . I discovered it when a friend advised that it included a series of poems on Simone Weil.<\/p>\n

It’s a slim volume, full of poems of vigour, wit, and easy intelligence. Easy in the sense that her poems do not strut: the poet’s intelligence, her interest in history and ideas, is worn easily, gracefully.<\/p>\n

The book includes a series of poems informed by historical figures: Chopin, Darwin, Weil, the Croatian naive art painter Ivan Generali?. There are also poems that imaginatively and perhaps critically engage with other stories: ‘Imaginary Prisons’ is a sustained meditation bringing together the narrative of Sleeping Beauty, and the imagined prisons of Battista Piranesi. <\/p>\n

Her poetry is muscular and musical; she places the words on the page just so. The lines are pressurised, releasing steam from the compression of image and idea, movement and moment. She employs the arts of the poet with sharp grace. The lines flow across the page, the words often seem perfectly-chosen in terms of meaning, intimation, sound and rhythm.<\/p>\n

My favourite poem so far is ‘Darwin in 1881’ – no surprise, as I’m a bit of a Darwin fan. In this elegant poem, Schnackenberg brings together with details of the late life of Darwin with Ovid’s Metamorphois<\/em> and Shakespeare’s Prospero. Darwin appears to have had a long-standing interest in both Ovid’s work and The Tempest<\/em>. <\/em>Both Prospero – the fictional seventeenth-century magician – and Darwin, the real scientist – travelled to the islands – magical places – where they had visions of the metamophosing of living creatures while looking backward into “the dark backward and abysm of time” (Tempest: Act 1: Scene 2). As Schnackenber observes, both created tempests with their books, and expressed a desire to throw their works overboard. Both withdrew from the public world- the world of politics – into the seclusion of their studies, their homes.<\/p>\n

‘Darwin in 1881’ is a long, eloquent poem, replete with the kind of images and the kind of seemingly seamless control of language’s meaning and texture that take my breath away with their sense of rightness, proportion and grace.<\/p>\n

\"DarwinDarwin in 1881<\/strong>
\nby Gretrud Schnackenberg<\/em><\/p>\n

Sleepless as Prospero back in his bedroom
\nIn Milan, with all his miracles
\nReduced to sailors’ tales,
\nHe sits up in the dark. The islands loom.
\nHis seasickness upwells,
\nSilence creeps by in memory as it crept
\nBy him on water, while the sailors slept,
\nFrom broken eggs and vacant tortoise shells.
\nHis voyage around the cape of middle age
\nComes, with a feat of sight, to a close,
\nThe same way Prospero’s
\nEnded before he left the stage
\nTo be led home across the blue-white sea,
\nWhen he had spoken of the clouds and globe,
\nBreaking his wand, and taking off his robe:
\nKnowledge increases unreality.<\/p>\n

He quickly dresses.
\nForm wavers like his shadow on the stair
\nAs he descends, in need of air
\nTo cure his dizziness,
\nDown past the shipsunk emptiness
\nOf grownup children’s rooms and hallways where
\nThe family portraits blindly stare,
\nAll haunted by each other’s likenesses.<\/p>\n

Outside, the orchard and a piece of moon
\nAre islands, he an island as he walks,
\nBrushing against weed stalks.
\nBy hook and plume
\nThe seeds gathering on his trouser legs
\nAre archipelagoes, like nests he sees
\nShadowed in branching, ramifying trees,
\nEach with unique expressions in its eggs.
\nDifferent islands conjure
\nDifferent beings; different beings call
\nFrom different isles. And after all
\nHis scrutiny of Nature
\nAll he can see
\nIs how it will grow small, fade, disappear,
\nA coastline fading from a traveler
\nAboard a survey ship. Slowly,
\nAs coasts depart,
\nNature had left behind a naturalist
\nBound for a place where species don’t exist,
\nWhere no emergence has a counterpart.<\/p>\n

He’s heard from friends
\nAbout the other night, the banquet hall
\nRinging with bravos\u2014like a curtain call,
\nHe thinks, when the performance ends,
\nFailing to summon from the wings
\nAn actor who had lost his taste for verse,
\nHaving beheld, in larger theaters,
\nMuch greater banquet-vanishings
\nWithout the quaint device and thunderclap
\nRequired in Act 3.
\nHe wrote, Let your indulgence set me free,
\nTo the Academy, and took a nap
\nBeneath a London Daily tent,
\nThen puttered on his hothouse walk
\nWatching his orchids beautifully stalk
\nTheir unreturning paths, where each descendant
\nIs the last\u2014
\nTheir inner staircases
\nHaunted by vanished insect faces
\nSo tiny, so intolerably vast.
\nAnd, while they gave his proxy the award,
\nHe dined in Downe and stayed up rather late
\nFor backgammon with his beloved mate
\nWho reads his books and is, quite frankly, bored.<\/p>\n

Now, done with beetle jaws and beaks of gulls
\nAnd bivalve hinges, now, utterly done,
\nOne miracle remains, and only one.
\nAn ocean swell of sickness rushes, pulls,
\nHe leans against the fence
\nAnd lights a cigarette and deeply draws,
\nDone with fixed laws,
\nDone with experiments
\nWithin his greenhouse heaven where
\nHis offspring, Frank, for half the afternoon
\nPlayed, like an awkward angel, his bassoon
\nInto the humid air
\nSo he could tell
\nIf sound would make a Venus’s-Flytrap close.
\nAnd, done for good with scientific prose,
\nThat raging hell
\nOf tortured grammars writhing on their stakes,<\/p>\n

He’d turned to his memoirs, chuckling to write
\nAbout his boyhood in an upright
\nHome: a boy preferring gartersnakes
\nTo schoolwork, a lazy, strutting liar
\nWho quite provoked her aggravated look,
\nShushed in the drawingroom behind her book,
\nHis bossy sister itching with desire
\nTo tattletale\u2014yes, that was good.
\nBut even then, much like the conjurer
\nGrown cranky with impatience to abjure
\nAll his gigantic works and livelihood
\nIn order to immerse
\nHimself in tales where he could be the man
\nIn Once upon a time there was a man,<\/p>\n

He’d quite by chance beheld the universe:
\nA disregarded game of chess
\nBetween two love-dazed heirs
\nWho fiddle with the tiny pairs
\nOf statues in their hands, while numberless
\nAbstract unseen
\nCombinings on the silent board remain
\nUnplayed forever when they leave the game
\nTo turn, themselves, into a king and queen.
\nNow, like the coming day,
\nInhaled smoke illuminates his nerves.
\nHe turns, taking the sandwalk as it curves
\nBack to the yard, the house, the entrance way
\nWhere, not to waken her,<\/p>\n

He softly shuts the door,
\nAnd leans against it for a spell before
\nHe climbs the stairs, holding the banister,
\nUp to their room: there
\nEmma sleeps, moored
\nIn illusion, blown past the storm he conjured
\nWith his book, into a harbor
\nWhere it all comes clear,
\nWhere island beings leap from shape to shape
\nAs to escape
\nTheir terrifying turns to disappear.
\nHe lies down on the quilt,
\nHe lies down like a fabulous-headed
\nFossil in a vanished riverbed,
\nIn ocean-drifts, in canyon floors, in silt,
\nIn lime, in deepening blue ice,
\nIn cliffs obscured as clouds gather and float;
\nHe lies down in his boots and overcoat,
\nAnd shuts his eyes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading a wonderful book of poetry by the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg: The Lamplit Answer. This collection was first published in 1982, and later included as part of the collection, Supernatural Love . I discovered it when a friend advised that it included a series of poems on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[193,167],"tags":[204,205,206,207,149,208,209,210,211,212],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LH1G-3v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}