"What the Ear Said"

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Oliver de la Paz

A scene from the play God's Ear by Jenny Schwartz

What the Ear Said

Nothing to hear in that hollow. Not boats,
not the cadence of boats and their oars.
Not wood and water and the ferry
to island in a storm, not rain. Not
the repetition of rain and the often loved
sound of trees. Or the sea.
Or the open mouth receiving. Not the lean
of the grief-struck against an oxcart or the low
of the dog caught in that rain. Again
the sound of the heart in the throat, and the too soon
lapse of breath. Again the beat of the foot
against the floor—the speech of the bed-creak
or the priest. Not to hear a cloak or some ghost.
Not moon. Not door. Not the entered shoes of a beautiful
stranger and her door, her moon.

Oliver de la Paz
from Furious Lullaby
Southern Illinois University Press

Copyright © 2007 by Oliver de la Paz


This is very strange when you and I know that this body’s organ, the ear, is meant, in strict scientific and biological terms, to receive auditory sensations. Or simply put, our ear is meant to hear sounds.

However, this poem by the Filipino poet Oliver de la Paz has turned things around, and he has made this organ speak.  That’s why there is “Nothing to hear in that hollow.” In the pause following, could this Ear be straining to do this, what it is meant to do? Well, no, the line, next, is saying the first of many “not”s: “Not boats,/ not ../Not ..Not/the repetition."   And many, many more.

The alliteration in “hear” and “hollow” offers a sensation of mere breath and no sound. The Ear cannot even hear the music in the “cadence of boats and their oars.”.

The Ear might not be able to hear all these, but the w alliteration and the rhythm in “Not wood and water and the ferry/ to island in a storm, not rain.” make our ears hear (in our head if we are reading that line silently) the rise and fall of the water lapping against the wooden ferry. And, there is a storm, as opposed to just rain. We hear the pitter-pattering rhythm in “the REpeTItion of RAIN”.

Again, the Ear cannot hear but it is aware there exist “sound of trees”, “the low/of the dog”, “sound of the heart in the throat”, “beat of the foot/against the floor—the speech of the bed-creak/or the priest.”.

Before the poem comes to its end, the poet repeats “Nothing to hear” in “Not to hear a cloak or some ghost”; as some kind of rounding off. The last two lines repeats “not” in succession, in a regular rising (penultimate line), then falling (last line), and, finally rising, rhythm: “Not MOON. Not DOOR. Not the ENtered SHOES of a BEAUtiful/ STRANger AND her DOOR, her MOON.”

“moon” and “door” in the penultimate line directly reflect, or mirror, “door” and “moon” in the last line. Like some reflection on the water, the symmetry of those images, together with the rise-fall-rise rhythm, is nearly perfect. 

The rhyming in the repetition of “moon” also reflects “soon” in “the sound of the heart in the throat, and the too soon/ lapse of breath.” This is so that we can link “entered shoes of a beautiful/stranger” to “Again the beat of the foot/against the floor”.  

The Ear itself is not mentioned in the poem, but we get the echo of it in repeats of "hear".  Also, we hear echoes - internal and other rhyming - in "boats" and "throat" and "cloak", "rain" and also "Again" and "against", "trees" and "seas", "oars" and "door", and of course "door" and "moon".  We see - and hear - a universe of symmetry acting out, connecting, inside this poem.

Something to ponder: why has la Paz personified the Ear? Is the Ear some kind of higher being, someone all-seeing, ubiquitous, perhaps?  What's more, the Ear did foresee the beautiful stranger's shoes beating against the floor.

"Thing Language"

Thing Language

by Jack Spicer

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

-----

Does anybody, nowadays, really listen to a poem, being read out in front of you, by someone you know, by a poet, who wants his poem to be listened to as much as to be read?

According to poet Jack Spicer - twice - in his poem here: No one listens to poetry. He likens a poem or, rather, poems, to “this ocean”. Like it, poems have their shortcomings, when compared with other media now available to us, like the TV, movies, videos, music, and many more of those 21st century mode of entertainment. Most of us would rather stick a pair of tiny earphones into our ears and lend them (as Shakepeare wrote "lend me your ears”) to the services of an iPod than to an actual poet, a live one.

Also, like this ocean, poetry has many, many guises. No matter, poetry, through the ages, is still surviving, still “Tougher than anything”. Still, “No one listens to poetry”, says the third line.

A dramatic pause there. Then, the subject from the first line is repeated, with emphasis, after that pause and ending at the end of the line, as a run-on to line four, which agrees that it – take it whichever you will, ocean or poetry – “does not mean to be listened to”.

Really? Not meant that?

Another dramatic pause, within the third of the line. The vast ocean is now strained of its “disguises”. We are given, now, “A drop” – at last, a poem! One poem, which is so loud, when read out, that it’s “a crash of water”.

Alas, it still “means/Nothing.”  The run-on here is strong, and the line it runs to end-stops just as powerfully, when it is the only word standing and with a full-stop into the bargain.  The new line, a word by itself, after this, is also solitary. “It” is another strong run-on.  

Those two one-liners are placed, strategically, in the middle of the poem.  The first has five lines before it, and the second also five lines, after it.  They are like mirrors: "Nothing" = "It"; "It" is "Nothing". Perfect symmetry. By the way, symmetry - and it cousin, parallelism - plays a major role in most good poetry.

To some poets, like Spicer, “It” – poetry – is their “bread and butter/Pepper and salt.” Big pause, again: it is “The death/ That young men hope for.”

Does the poet, or the poem, have a point or is he or it waxing “Aimlessly”, pounding the ocean’s (poetry’s) “shore”; merely “White and aimless signals.”

Is that why “No/One listens to poetry.” ?

Thing Language is from My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer , published this year by Wesleyan University Press.

Jack Spicer was born in 1925, in Hollywood, but lived only to 1965, in San Francisco.

"Purring" by Coleman Barks

Purring

by Coleman Barks

The internet says science is not sure
how cats purr, probably
a vibration of the whole larynx,
unlike what we do when we talk.

Less likely, a blood vessel
moving across the chest wall.

As a child I tried to make every cat I met
purr. That was one of the early miracles,
the stroking to perfection.

Here is something I have never heard:
a feline purrs in two conditions,
when deeply content and when
mortally wounded, to calm themselves,
readying for the death-opening.

The low frequency evidently helps
to strengthen bones and heal
damaged organs.

Say poetry is a human purr,
vessel mooring in the chest,
a closed-mouthed refuge, the feel
of a glide through dying.

One winter morning on a sunny chair,
inside this only body,
a far-off inboard motorboat
sings the empty room, urrrrrrrhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhhh
urrrrrrrhhhh

Coleman Barks is better known for translating Rumi’s poems without following the rhythm and rhyming of their original Persian. Instead he does something new, something unheard of, possibly deemed sacrilegious by die-hard Rumi fans: he turns them into modern free verse. Regardless of this, critics have to agree he still manages to capture the essence of Rumi’s verses.

In this piece, from a new collection of his own works, Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968–2008, published by University of Georgia, where he once taught poetry and creative writing, Barks attempts to explain to us how a cat purrs. 

Like most of us he depends on the Web for answers. Even scientists haven’t found out, assuming it’s the animal’s larynx that’s vibrating.  He underpins this using the r, p and b sounds in "purr, probably/a vibration of the whole larynx,".  When it comes down to how we humans sound he dismisses all those previous sounds: "unlike what we do when we talk."
 

Then, in the second stanza, he sums up what he thinks it is about purring, in two lines, scientifically indeed, even if he himself is not sure ("Less likely"), as “a blood vessel/moving across the chest wall.”

It appears Barks himself has been making empirical experiments to get some answers. In the third stanza you get a cutesy image of him as a little boy coming across cats and “stroking” them “to perfection”, to get the purr out of them; which is a miracle to a child.  Here, there are more "purr" alliterations in "miracles,/the stroking to perfection."

Whether the cat is happy or wounded, he still purrs. Apparently he does this to “ strengthen bones and heal/damaged organs”. Personally this writer has seen cats heal themselves by finding and ingesting certain plants, regurgitating the bolus later.

In stanza six Barks compares poetry to purring, but of a human kind. Here, he repeats "say", from the first stanza, where "The internet says", as we humans "say", not "purr", unless if it is poetry.  He gives us an image of a vessel moored in the chest. You “feel” it “glide through dying.”: poetic purring apparently heals.

In the last stanza we see what this “vessel” looks like: a motorboat. Its “purring” is so audible, humming (“sings”) in “the empty room” of “One winter morning on a sunny chair”. We have "this only body" because only cats have virtually nine.   There is such joy picked up in "inboard motorboat/sings the empty room".  This vessel doesn't merely "sings" in "the empty room".  The transitivity of the verb includes the empty room in the singing. It’s like some operatic aria, building up from a little sound, like “a blood vessel”, to an actual vessel (note the repeating of vessel as a rhyme), a motorboat.

The final lines realise this purring. Reading out loud the “urrrrrrrhhhh”s is like a chorus singing a prayer, or an incantation.

"Very Like A Whale"

"Very Like A Whale"

by Ogden Nash


One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whos cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof woof woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

---

The kind of rhymed poems I love the most are the kind that I read without realising the rhyme, where rhyme doesn't overpower the poem. I know it's a personal preference, but I find rhyming to be cloying too often, and something quite difficult to master (needless to say, as a reader I think very few people have mastered it). I read through "Very Like A Whale", laughed through many parts, loved it, and read it again -- only then noticing the rhyme. Enough. I was hooked.

I love how funny it is, how clever it is, how tongue-in-cheek yet not very subtle at all it is. No doubt Leon would be able to give you a much more comprehensive analysis of the poem's structure, its syntax and syllables, but I respond to art (in general) on an unsophisticated gut level. The title, of course, is a naughty paralleling of Byron's "wolf on the fold" -- there is nothing like a whale in this poem, just as there is nothing like a wolf in Byron's.

This is actually a very incisive poem, cloaking under humour a generous dose of snarkiness. How many of us have secretly groaned at the poems of the so-called greats? Leave be the work of the definitely-non-greats and the just-not-our-cups-of-teas. This cheeky poem is a very nicely-executed reminder to not get carried away with the canonized stuff, to look at poems for what they are worth, not for what their writers' names are worth.

This is a poem about poetry, and it is wonderful in its irreverence. Nash takes on Byron himself, and wins!

"Some Like Poetry"

Some –
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there’d be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like –
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one’s point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry –
but what sort of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving banister.


by Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I won’t say this is one of the most memorable Szymborska poem (not that I have read many), but there’s an interesting personal story why I picked this poem today. :)

Being not altogether a widely read person, I only remotely remember Wislawa Szymborska as some Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, until Gilbert Koh mentioned her name offhand to me in an e-mail, leading me to search online, finding a few of her poems here [link]. Liking what I read, I decided to purchase Miracle Fair: selected poems of Wislawa Szymborska during my recent trip to Singapore, for someone whom I felt might enjoy it as well.

After a pretty long week there, I finally boarded one of those long overnight bus home. As I began to gradually doze off, the bus inexplicably broke down. The bus driver told us, one part of the engine had overheated and the bus couldn’t go any further. A replacement would be despatched from the nearest town and should reach us in about two hours. It was 1am, right smack in the middle of some rather ulu (remote) place. Fortunately, the bus driver managed to stop at a petrol kiosk, where there was a rather dirty but still usable toilet.

Escaping the stuffy bus, I joined some of the passengers outside in the chilly night air. There were a couple of street lamps, so it wasn’t altogether that dark. I fish out the collection of poetry from my bag, sat by the kerb and started reading. It must have been a really amusing sight, a guy reading poetry in the dead of the night, under a street lamp, next to a broken down bus. in some near God-forsaken place.

The replacement bus never did came, at least not at the promised time; and was despatched only much later the next morning, finally coming to our rescue after an interminable eight hours later, at 9am. During that long night, a few makciks (ladies) were cooing and soothing their poor children who fidgeted and cried on the bus. As for myself, I was safely ensconced in poetry, lulled to a quietness of spirit amidst all the dire desperation, through the soft words of Szymborska’s poetry.

Why do I read poetry? To quote Szymborska: “… I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,/as to a saving banister.”


BTW, to my fellow Malaysians out there, Selamat Menyambut Hari Merdeka!

"Ars Poetica"

A poem should be palpable and mute
Like a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown —

A poem should be wordless
Like a flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind –

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and the two lights above the sea —

A poem should not mean
But be.


By Archibald MacLeish


I read this poem recently and it made me pause and wonder a little about what poetry is. Archibald MacLeish wrote this poem in 1926 as a kind of poetic creed of what he thinks poetry is. The title “Ars poetica” is Latin for the art of poetry, taken from a poetic treatise by the Roman poet Horace during 1A.D. describing the necessity of poetry to be brief and lasting.

Indeed, this poem appears very simple, yet seems to speak of something profound, as it strings abstract ideas and images together in a series of statements about poetry. The first part describes poetry as being “palpable”, something that can be strangely enough, physically touched and felt, just like the surface texture of a fruit in one’s hand, like the engravings of old medallions with one’s thumb; yet is paradoxically “mute” and “Dumb”. How can a poem be “mute” and “dumb” when one of chief pleasures of poetry is found in the aural delight of reading it?

It seems even more absurd when a poem is said to be “wordless”, and of all things, is compared to the flight of birds. The second part goes along in a similar vein, where the poem is described as being static in both time and space, even while the moon through its revolving motion around our earth “climbs” through the sky.

How does one make sense of all these seemingly paradoxical ideas? Well, take some time, the whole afternoon or day(s) if you need to, and linger a while with this poem, and slowly let the images and ideas sink in. Don’t rush, everything will come together gradually. *wink*

Share with me what you think...:)