Basement Poetry Podcast

There is a generous and perceptive reading and discussion of my poem "Kind" on Wayne Benson's Basement Poetry Podcast.

Click here to listen. If you go, stay to hear some of the other episodes. He is doing good work there.

"Kind" appears also in my book Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). It is available from Bottom Dog Press's website and from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, in paperback or digital formats. Please consider ordering a copy.

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My new book

James Owens's Family Portrait with Scythe is the sort of book I crave: a lambent poetry with sensuous detail, imagery that explores the microcosm and macrocosm of (and behind) human perception, a poetry that revels in a diction so beautifully arranged that to read it aloud induces something akin to a waking dream. The poems about family and the natural world refuse the reductive and often reach into the vatic. They luminesce. They are speculative yet confident, as in "Looking Back," a poem in which "the afterlife, if there is one, / will be like the window / when you are out here in the dark, / where you've come to investigate / a noise and have found / yourself so perplexed by stars / that you are strange now / under the vastness." Rich, sonically textured, beautifully wrought, these are poems I will read and re-read for years to come.

— William Wright, author of Tree Heresies and Night Field Anecdote



I’ve long been drawn to poets whose works—defined by precision, by transcendence—create moments of intense possibility in uncovering the exquisite nature of the ordinary. James Owens, author of An Hour Is the Doorway, Frost Lights a Thin Flame, and Mortalia, is one of them. His writing deftly mingles all lyrical and narrative threads into bursts of vision, beauty, clarity—wholly remarkable and singular. Owens is a poet who carries, in the words of Alan Tate, “the secret wisdom around the world” —placing his work firmly in the lineage of Virgil to Donne to Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Charles Wright, Kathryn Stripling Byer.

In Family Portrait with Scythe, his latest book, Owens writes of relationships and place—in striking blends of Appalachia, northern Indiana, Ontario, in a scattering of histories—with a fixated need for all truths hidden in the land —its deep veins of coal and death, its skies full of silent birds, its riverbanks always revealing something new. The voices in these poems are convincing, familiar, thoroughly bent to mission: “I walked on, heavy, and carried this only world” (from “Last Thoughts Cooling Like an Abandoned Cup”). Their stories, which do compel the poet, also stir the reader, as in the stunning “Imagine a Woman Behind Razor Wire”: “you must tell it speak it write it”. This collection will unsettle your ease, but that’s what it was meant to do.

—Sam Rasnake, author of Cinéma Vérité and Inside a Broken Clock, editor of Blue Fifth Review

Order from

Bottom Dog Press

Amazon

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So disappearing is the destiny of destinies.

Bring me the sunflower, let me plant it

in my field parched by the salt sea wind,

and let it show the blue reflecting sky

the yearning of its yellow face all day.

Dark things tend to brightness,

bodies fade out in a flood of colors,

colors in music. So disappearing is

the destiny of destinies.

Bring me the plant that leads the way

to where blond transparencies

rise, and life as essence turns to haze;

bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

Eugenio Montale

(translated by Jonathan Galassi)

(Erin's sunflower, Massey, Ont., Aug. 2019)

Paul Valéry: The Lost Wine

drawing by Jacques Emile Blanche, 1923

It is the eternal question that keeps all the cool kids up at night: should a translator of poetry be more interested in reproducing form or content? (Yes, even to ask the question, we have to pretend that we can separate the two, and that we know which aspects of a poem are "form" and which are "content.")

I think the useful answers are completely ad hoc; that is, we can only consider how a particular translator might best arrive at a version of a particular poem. A bit more abstractly, I figure it pays to think about how well known the source poem already is in the target language. If it isn't already well known --- the early versions of Duino Elegies, for example, or Middle Kazakh epics (if there are any) -- then it might be a good idea to give priority to the prose sense. On the other hand, if there already exist many versions of the source poem, then focus perhaps shifts to the translator's production of a crafted object, and aspects like rhyme and meter, those qualities we call "musical," gain in importance. It is, sure, all very subjective (I'm glad to say).

Paul Valéry's short lyric poems are very well known in English translation (and I think you should always read as many versions of any translated poem as you can find). To my thinking, this opens space for hewing more tightly to the shape of the poem -- though without straying too far from the sense, one hopes.

All of which goes to say that this morning spent trying to translate "Le Vin Perdu" has reminded me that all versions are only versions, provisional and compromised and cobbled together out of scraps. I've managed to approximate the rather difficult rhyme scheme and a lot of Valéry's syntactical oddity, but at the cost of metrical regularity and of the original's rich music (e.g., the leaden clunk of my closing rhyme!). But, after all, there is no final word, but only this attempt and then the next attempt ....



The Lost Wine

I, one certain day, on the Ocean,
(I forget under what starry sign)
Threw in, as if the void's oblation,
A dram of vintage, rich and fine.

Who ordained your loss, my potion?
Perhaps I obeyed someone divine?
Or was it my own heart's devotion,
Thinking of blood and pouring wine?

The purifying sea
Regained its usual clarity
After the briefest misting of rose ...

Lost that wine, the waves drunken! …
I saw – into the bitter air arose
Ciphers, from where they lay sunken …




Le Vin Perdu

J’ai, quelque jour, dans l’Océan,
(mais je ne sais plus sous quels cieux),
Jeté, comme offrande au néant,
Tout un peu de vin précieux…

Qui voulut ta perte, ô liqueur?
J’obéis peut-être au devin?
Peut-être au souci de mon coeur,
Songeant au sang, versant le vin?

Sa transparence accoutumée
Après une rose fumée
Reprit aussi pure la mer…

Perdu ce vin, ivres les ondes!…
J’ai vu bondir dans l’air amer
Les figures les plus profondes…

Rilke, two poems from French

Rilke, about 1880

Two poems translated at Belle Ombre

What Are Poets For?

wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?

                               But meanwhile too often I think it's
    Better to sleep than to be friendless as we are, alone,
Always waiting, and what to do or say in the meantime
    I don't know, and who wants poets at all in lean years?

-- “Bread and Wine,” Friedrich Hölderlin (trans. Michael Hamburger)

 Albert Hofstadter, in his marvelous translation of Martin Heidegger's 1946 essay “What Are Poets For?” renders Hölderlin's phrase “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” as “what are poets for in a destitute time?” and I think that is better than Hamburger's “lean years." For sure, it is closer to Heidegger's reading of the poem, which is what Hofstadter is after.

Halfway through the essay, Heidegger veers close to an answer. Anyone might have written what he writes here, but he has just spent twenty-five pages in meticulous argumentation to build the terms of what he will say (and this is followed by twenty-five more pages of equally careful work in explanation). That is, Heidegger earns it. 

From Hofstadter's translation in Poetry Language Thought: 

This day is the world's night, rearranged into merely technological day. This day is the shortest day. It threatens a single endless winter. Not only does protection now withhold itself from man, but the integralness of of the whole of what is remains now in darkness. The wholesome and sound withdraws. The world becomes without healing, unholy. Not only does the holy, as the track to the godhead, thereby remain concealed; even the track to the holy, the hale and whole, seems to be effaced. That is, unless there are still some mortals capable of seeing the threat of the unhealable, the unholy, as such. They would have to discern the danger that is assailing man. The danger consists in the threat that assaults man's nature in his relation to Being itself, and not in accidental perils. This danger is the danger. It conceals itself in the abyss that underlies all things. To see this danger and point it out, there must be mortals who reach sooner into the abyss. 

 But where there is danger, there grows also what saves.
 – Friedrich Hölderlin