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Overview
Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.
Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation
And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.
Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.
—from "Gulf Music"
An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).
On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate.
Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466878402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/19/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 146 KB |
About the Author
Robert Pinsky is the author of several books of poetry, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel, and, most recently, At the Foundling Hospital. His bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante sets a modern standard. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.
Read an Excerpt
Gulf Music
By Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2007 Robert PinskyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7840-2
CHAPTER 1
Poem of Disconnected Parts
At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as "Profesor."
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market "Smileys."
The first year at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim Dost
Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups.
"The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not
Worship our ancestors: we consult them."
Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving
Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.
Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2006
Still nothing finished among the descendants.
I support the War, says the comic, it's just the Troops
I'm against: can't stand those Young People.
Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.
Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.
After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror
Said she just couldn't vote to convict a pastor.
Who do you write for? I write for dead people:
For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.
"The Ancestors say the problem with your Knees
Began in your Feet. It could move up your Back."
But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper
And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.
Old Aegyptius said, Whoever has called this Assembly,
For whatever reason — that is a good in itself.
O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth.
There are many fake Sangomos. This one is real.
Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear
Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.
No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:
Otherwise he would not have written those poems.
I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.
Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.
Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes,
In Afghanistan. In Guantánamo he was isolated.
Our enemies "disassemble" says the President.
Not that anyone at all couldn't mis-speak.
The profesores created nicknames for torture devices:
The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby.
Not that those who behead the helpless in the name
Of God or tradition don't also write poetry.
Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes.
Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.
What could your children boast about you? What
Will your father say, down among the shades?
The Sangomo told Marvin, "You are crushed by some
Weight. Only your own Ancestors can help you."
Gulf Music
Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la,
Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bella, wella-wah.
The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated
Galveston, Texas. Some 8,000 people died.
The Pearl City almost obliterated. Still the worst natural
Calamity in American history, Woh mallah-walla.
Eight years later Morris Eisenberg sailing from Lübeck
Entered the States through the still-wounded port of Galveston.
1908, eeloo hotesy, hotesy-ahnoo, hotesy ahnoo mi-Mizraim.
Or you could say "Morris" was his name. A Moshe.
Ippa Fano wanna bella woh. The New Orleans musician called
Professor Longhair was named Henry Roeland Byrd.
Not heroic not nostalgic not learnëd. Made-up names:
Hum a few bars and we'll homme-la-la. Woh ohma-dallah.
Longhair or Henry and his wife Alice joined the Civil Defense
Special Forces 714. Alice was a Colonel, he a Lieutenant.
Here they are in uniforms and caps, pistols in holsters.
Hotesy anno, Ippa Fano trah ma dollah, tra la la.
Morris took the name "Eisenberg" after the rich man from
His shtetl who in 1908 owned a town in Arkansas.
Most of this is made up, but the immigration papers did
Require him to renounce all loyalty to Czar Nicholas.
As he signed to that, he must have thought to himself
The Yiddish equivalent of No Problem, Mah la belle.
Hotesy hotesy-ahno. Wella-mallah widda dallah,
Mah fanna-well. A townful of people named Eisenberg.
The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious.
The man was correct when he said it's not even past.
Look up at the waters from the causeway where you stand:
Lime causeway made of grunts and halfway-forgettings
On a foundation of crushed oyster shells. Roadbed
Paved with abandonments, shored up by haunts.
Becky was a teenager married to an older man. After she
Met Morris, in 1910 or so, she swapped Eisenbergs.
They rode out of Arkansas on his motorcycle, well-ah-way.
Wed-away. "Mizraim" is Egypt, I remember that much.
The storm bulldozed Galveston with a great rake of debris.
In the September heat the smell of the dead was unbearable.
Hotesy hotesy ahnoo. "Professor" the New Orleans title
For any piano player. He had a Caribbean left hand,
A boogie-woogie right. Civil Defense Special Forces 714
Organized for disasters, mainly hurricanes. Floods.
New Orleans style borrowing this and that, ah wail-ah-way la-la,
They probably got "714" from Joe Friday's badge number
On Dragnet. Jack Webb chose the number in memory
Of Babe Ruth's 714 home runs, the old record.
As living memory of the great hurricanes of the thirties
And the fifties dissolved, Civil Defense Forces 714
Also dissolved, washed away for well or ill — yet nothing
Ever entirely abandoned though generations forget, and ah
Well the partial forgetting embellishes everything all the more:
Alla-mallah, mi-Mizraim, try my tra-la, hotesy-totesy.
Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.
Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation
And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.
Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.
Keyboard
A disembodied piano. The headphones allow
The one who touches the keys a solitude
Inside his music; shout and he may not turn:
Image of the soul that thinks to turn from the world.
Serpent-scaled Apollo skins the naive musician
Alive: then Marsyas was sensitive enough
To feel the whole world in a touch. In Africa
The raiders with machetes to cut off hands
Might make the victim choose, "long sleeve or short."
Shahid Ali says it happened to Kashmiri weavers,
To kill the art. There are only so many stories.
The Loss. The Chosen. And even before The Journey,
The Turning: the fruit from any tree, the door
To any chamber, but this one — and the greedy soul,
Blade of the lathe. The Red Army smashed pianos,
But once they caught an SS man who could play.
They sat him at the piano and pulled their fingers
Across their throats to explain that they would kill him
When he stopped playing, and so for sixteen hours
They drank and raped while the Nazi fingered the keys.
The great Song of the World. When he collapsed
Sobbing at the instrument they stroked his head
And blew his brains out. Cold-blooded Orpheus turns
Again to his keyboard to improvise a plaint:
Her little cries of pleasure, blah-blah, the place
Behind her ear, lilacs in rain, a sus-chord,
A phrase like a moonlit moth in tentative flight,
O lost Eurydice, blah-blah. His archaic head
Kept singing after the body was torn away:
Body, old long companion, supporter — the mist
Of oranges, la-la-la, the smell of almonds,
The taste of olives, her woolen skirt. The great old
Poet said, What should we wear for the reading — necktie?
Or better no necktie, turtle-neck? The head
Afloat turns toward Apollo to sing and Apollo,
The cool-eyed rainbow lizard, plies the keys.
The Thicket
The winter they abandoned Long Point Village —
A dozen two-room houses of pine frames clad
With cedar faded to silver and, not much whiter
Or larger, the one-room church — they hauled it all
Down to the docks on sledges, and at high tide
Boats towed the houses as hulks across the harbor
To set them on the streets of Provincetown.
Today they're identified by blue tile plaques.
Forgotten the fruitless village, in broken wholes
Transported by a mad Yankee frugality
Sweating resolve that pickled the sea-black timbers.
The loathsome part of American Zen for me
Is in the Parable of the Raft: a traveler
Hacks it from driftwood tugged from the very current
That wedged it into the mud, and lashes it
With bitter roots he strips between his teeth.
And after the raft has carried him across
The torrent in his path, the teacher says,
The traveler doesn't lift the raft on his back
And lug it with him on his journey: oh no,
He leaves it there behind him, doesn't he?
There must be something spoiled in the translation —
Surely those old original warriors
And ruling-class officials and Shinto saints
Knew a forgetting heavier than that:
The timbers plunged in oblivion, hardened by salt;
Black, obdurate throne-shaped clump of ancient cane-spikes
At the raspberry thicket's heart; the immigrant
Vow not to carry humiliations of the old
Country to the new, but still infusing the segmented
Ingested berry encasing the seed, the scribble
Of red allegiances raked along your wrist;
Under it all, the dead thorns sharper than the green.
The Forgetting
The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory:
The undergrowth of things unknown to you young, that I have forgotten.
Memory of so much crap, jumbled with so much that seems to matter.
Lieutenant Calley. Captain Easy. Mayling Soong. Sibby Sisti.
And all the forgettings that preceded my own: Baghdad, Egypt, Greece,
The Plains, centuries of lootings of antiquities. Obscure atrocities.
Imagine! — a big tent filled with mostly kids, yelling for poetry. In fact
It happened, I was there in New Jersey at the famous poetry show.
I used to wonder, what if the Baseball Hall of Fame overflowed
With too many thousands of greats all in time unremembered?
Hardly anybody can name all eight of their great-grandparents.
Can you? Will your children's grandchildren remember your name?
You'll see, you little young jerks: your favorite music and your political
Furors, too, will need to get sorted in dusty electronic corridors.
In 1972, Chou En-lai was asked the lasting effects of the French
Revolution: "Too soon to tell." Remember? — or was it Mao Tse-tung?
Poetry made of air strains to reach back to Begats and suspiring
Forward into air, grunting to beget the hungry or overfed Future.
Ezra Pound praises the Emperor who appointed a committee of scholars
To pick the best 450 Noh plays and destroy all the rest, the fascist.
The stand-up master Steven Wright says he thinks he suffers from
Both amnesia and déjà vu: "I feel like I have forgotten this before."
Who remembers the arguments when jurors gave Pound the only prize
For poetry awarded by the United States Government? Until then.
I was in the big tent when the guy read his poem about how the Jews
Were warned to get out of the Twin Towers before the planes hit.
The crowd was applauding and screaming, they were happy — it isn't
That they were anti-Semitic, or anything. They just weren't listening. Or
No, they were listening, but that certain way. In it comes, you hear it, and
That selfsame second you swallow it or expel it: an ecstasy of forgetting.
Louie Louie
I have heard of Black Irish but I never
Heard of White Catholic or White Jew.
I have heard of "Is Poetry Popular?" but I
Never heard of Lawrence Welk Drove
Sid Caesar Off Television.
I have heard of Kwanzaa but I have
Never heard of Bert Williams.
I have never heard of Will
Rogers or Roger Williams
Or Buck Rogers or Pearl Buck
Or Frank Buck or Frank
Merriwell At Yale.
I have heard of Yale but I never
Heard of George W. Bush.
I have heard of Harvard but I
Never heard of Numerus Clausus
Which sounds to me like
Some kind of Pig Latin.
I have heard of the Pig Boy.
I have never heard of the Beastie
Boys or the Scottsboro Boys but I
Have heard singing Boys, what
They were called I forget.
I have never heard America
Singing but I have heard of I
Hear America Singing, I think
It must have been a book
We had in school, I forget.
If the Dead Came Back
What if the dead came back not only
In the shape of your skull your mouth your hands
The voice inside your mouth the voice inside
Your skull the words in your ears the work in your hands,
What if they came back not only in surnames
Nicknames, names of dead settlement shtetl pueblo
Not only in cities fabled or condemned also countless dead
Peoples languages pantheons stupidities arts,
As we too in turn come back not only occulted
In legends like the conquerors' guilty whisperings about
Little People or Old Ones and not only in Indian angles
Of the cowboy's eyes and cheeks the Dakota molecules
Of his body and acquired antibodies, and in the lymphatic
Marshes where your little reed boat floats inches
Above the mud of oblivion O foundling in legends
The dead who know the future require a blood offering
Or your one hand accuses the other both lacking any
Sacrifice for the engendering appetites of the dead.
The Anniversary
We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched
The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us
But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
We inscribed with meanings — who keep so few,
More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than "First of May" or "Fourth of July."
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes
Tell the interrogator their commanding officer's name
Is Colonel Donald Duck — he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it's nearly
Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.
We can imagine them kidding about it a little.
"No man is great if he thinks he is" — Will Rogers:
A kidder, a skeptic. A Cherokee, a survivor
Of expropriation. A roper, a card. Remembered
A while yet. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve
When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten? — Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,
The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
At a Sports Bar the night before, the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed
The name of God with his box cutter in his hand.
O Americans — as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together
A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?
We inscribed God's name onto the dollar bill
In 1958, and who remembers why, among
Forgotten glyphs and meanings, the Deistic
Mystical and Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye afloat above the uncapped Pyramid,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle's head
From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
The Western face of the pyramid is dark.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty —
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror
And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those old symbols. The wilds of thought
Of Katharine Lee Bates: Till selfish gain
No longer stain the banner of the free. O
Beautiful for patriot dream that sees
Beyond the years, and Ray Charles singing it,
Alabaster cities, amber waves, purple majesties.
Thine every flaw. Thy liberty in law. O beautiful.
The Raelettes in sequins and high heels for a live
Performance — or in the studio to burn the record
In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave with
What purpose as the harbor Statue herself, O
Beautiful for liberating strife: the broken
Shackles visible at her feet, her Elvis lips —
Liberty: not Abundance and not Beatitude —
Her enigmatic scowl, her spikey crown.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky. Copyright © 2007 Robert Pinsky. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
I,
Poem of Disconnected Parts,
Gulf Music,
Keyboard,
The Thicket,
The Forgetting,
Louie Louie,
If the Dead Came Back,
The Anniversary,
Newspaper,
Eurydice and Stalin,
Akhmatova's "Summer Garden",
II,
Thing,
First Things to Hand,
1. First Things to Hand,
2. Book,
3. Glass,
4. Jar of Pens,
5. Photograph,
6. Other Hand,
7. Door,
Pliers,
Banknote,
III,
Rhyme,
In Defense of Allusion,
Veni, Creator Spiritus,
The Dig,
Inman Square Incantation,
The Great Nauset Buddha,
Stupid Meditation on Peace,
El Burro Es un Animal,
Immature Song,
On a Line of Hart Crane's,
Work Song,
The Material,
XYZ,
Poem with Lines in Any Order,
The Wave,
Antique,
From the Last Canto of Paradise,
Note,
Also by Robert Pinsky,
Copyright,