Rain, all day. Soft, soothing, but maybe only from inside somewhere, looking out and listening. I’m devoting the morning to Chloe Garcia Roberts. I discovered her yesterday on Poetry Daily, when her poem-essay, Temporal Saturation, was the poem of the day. Yesterday I wondered if I should buy the book that this piece comes from, but today I know for sure. Yes!
It started when I noticed that Roberts had written an essay for Poetry Daily about the poem, Towards (A) Lyric Science. Here are some bits I’d like to remember today:
on teaching poetry like it was a high school shop class
Each week I bring a selection of poems to class which manifest some particular structural element we are learning. We read these poems aloud and observe their movements, and as we dissect them, we analyze their poetic systems, their energy sources, their gestures. We then reconstruct and rebuild approximations of their functions so as to better learn how to create our own poems from our own language and experiences.
Towards (A) Lyric Science
She envisions poetry as (a) technology. Describes the pleasure of reading “Goethe’s “Theory of Colours” as an example of writing that blurs and even perhaps erases the line between what they [her engineering students at MIT] are learning in my classroom and what they are learning outside of it.” And aims to combine the lyric and the analytic:
Temporal Saturation” was an attempt to build a poetic form that reflected that reality, between poetry and prose, in English but articulating an existence between languages and cultures, and a first foray into a place that lies between the poles of the lyric (the melodic, subjective, sentimental) and the scientific (systematic, objective, and exacting). In other words, in this piece I am writing towards the beckoning betweenness of a lyric science.
Towards (A) Lyric Science
I checked out her website — love the content and the design.
Read an excerpt from Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology.
Listened to the podcast, Voices in the River, and an episode with CG Roberts, Translating the Trees. She gives some background on Fire Eater:
So I had been working for many years on a translation project of a classical Chinese poet, Li Xiangyin, and in order to do that and give myself permission to even approach this canonical poet’s work in a language that I had learned, not grown up with, was I kept lists and notebooks of word choices and where those words came from and mapping them onto the English. And then I finished the product and I had all these notebooks and I went back to them and they were maps.
And I thought, could I use these maps to translate my own life, to articulate episodes or questions that I have about my own memories and my own experience?
And yes, they did. They did. A word would come to me, and then I would look it up, and I would look deeper and deeper and deeper into its root, and I would find, oh, it connects this meaning with this meaning, which then connects to a certain episode of my life.
So it’s 10 essays, poem essays. Writing the book felt like remembering it. It did not feel like creating it.
Translating the Trees
She describes it as a “divination with the dictionary.”
Wow. How wonderful to have found this writer and to dwell in the place she has created with her words and ideas! I can’t wait to get her book — I definitely can’t wait until my birthday next month!
Early on in the podcast, Roberts offers these words about being like a tree:
Each memory felt like a little root that I was extending and connection to that present moment [sitting inside her childhood home, creating memories, before it was torn down], not separate, not the past, not the future, not the present, but all together. This is like living like a tree. The tree is all of the moments of its growth at the same time.
Like a tree!? This reminds me of something I wrote last week in here, on 16 may about Lorine Niedecker and her line, stand among the birch, where among, at least to me, means to be a birch, to become one of them. I also wrote about noticing the split in a tree between two main branches and seeing a crotch and two legs and imagining a person, upside down, planted in the ground. And realizing that Katie Farris’s poem, “What Would Root” ends with the beginning of this image as the top of the narrator’s head comes off and is placed in the ground to drink/absorb water.
And now I’m thinking of the wonderful challenge (and, to Roberts, spiritual practice) of translating the feeling of being/becoming a tree into language.