Anger Part II

This post goes with the poem, "Names We Sing in Sleep & Anger" by Amoud Jamoul Johnson. I could not add comments to the poem without everything mashing together as if it was part of the poet's work. I had chose the poem because the poet wrote so eloquently about anger and how it stays in one's life and molds it.

I am living in a country at war with itself and with a few people with the same problem. I don't understand it, but I can attest to the extent that it does change, mold and moves you to do things you would probably not do otherwise. There is a family who are unable to do otherwise or so it looks from where I am.

As a youth, I came from school to see my friends no longer living but victims of violence and many at the hands of people who swore they loved them. So much for love. I was lucky in that I never questioned that it was a god that made all that heartache and violence possible. I saw it as people doing it to themselves as I see it now.

As for the dead reminding the living, the Korean War started 60 years ago and nothing has changed those who jump up and down threating a new one anymore than the war of my youth when I came home from college 40 years ago. The coming storms then have come and gone. The Viet Nam War did not teach anyone anything and those I knew in my youth played the same roles in the same play over and over again. My father never did learn his role in the tragedy that was played out in our family. My mother never did learn what her actions did to her children. And on it goes. I am just trying to learn mine. Destruction does dance slapdash and unashamed everywhere and still the human race survives.

Amoud Jamaul Johnson

Names We Sing in Sleep and Anger
By Amoud Jamaul Johnson

Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned
from war with stories slumped over their shoulders;
their fingers firm at the knot, the netting thick
and tangled with the names of the dead.

None could explain how the flood of life all around
them escaped like water from between cupped hands,
how the bodies of men they loved began to crust
like earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash
and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived.

When I came home from collage poud, my educated
mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy
and I saw the names of my friends, the young men
I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behind

Lil'Rose, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Juneburg, Aghoster
names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood
in memoriam, I couldn't understand how a god
could make one life possible and strip the world
clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks
the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.

Mark Strand

Lines for Winter

By Mark Strand
For Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself-
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonighte as it gets cold
tell yourslf
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
And you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your links
that you love what you are.

This might be an odd poem for Spring, but I am in Korea and in Daejeon to be exact surrounded by mountains. Sometimes, it is warm but like today it was cold, foggy and the gray seem ready to fall from the sky. When Spring came this year, it was so cold that I layered everything I had in an effort to keep warm and walked to the university where I work in an effort to keep warm. My winter jacket warm in Northern California is almost useless here.

I have two classes that I teach, one in the morning and another in the evening. I walk to both of them and back to my small apartment and I hear the same tune of my steps on the pavement, the cars and trucks rushing past often running the red traffic lights if they are working and I running to the other side of the street. My knees play a game of pain and hurt as they move against the cold, the damp of rain that falls and the college students who crowd around the bus stops getting off the buses or waiting to get on one.

I look up at the mountains today, covered with new trees for the Korean war of Mid Twentieth Century burnt down all of the old trees and families along with other people planted all of the different trees now growing everywhere. The trees are topped with fog. Music plays from the speakers from the university radio station and messages that I cannot understand play constantly. My backpack of ESL books shift on my back. I plod on the pavement but there are no stars tonight because it is not winter and the light of the day stays longer.

In the final flowing of cold that I feel when I am on the homestretch of road, along the golf course, past the Samsung Insurance Company, buses roaring past, creates a feeling of satisfaction. I know I love where I am and who I am. Some people shout hello and I shout back greetings from Samsung as I walk past and head to my apartment. Soon, it will be summer and the monsoon will begin.

Cesare Pavese

Passion for Solitude

By Cesare Pavese
Translated by Geoffrey Brock

I'm eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room's already dark, the sky's starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I'm eating, watching the sky-who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch,
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I am eating alone.
I lookat the sky, know that lights already are shining
amoung rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulf of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything's still,
in it's place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness - I know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn't matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noise to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn't enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, along,
my body is calm, it feels it's in charge.


Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo in Italy. He is not generally known in the United States which is a shame since he was profoundly influenced by American Literature. He had a rather short life and died in 1950. It was in his last years that he achieved success in his literary life after many years laboring in obsecurity and fighting fascism and censorship.


Many scholors attributed his losing his father to brain cancer and a emotionally unavailable mother to his tendency towards depression. Certainly he was attached to northern Italy especially Turin all of his life. He attended the University of Turin where he pursued his love of American literature because he felt it offered a viable alternative to European cultural alienation and disintegration. It is through HermanMelville, according to Leslie Fiedler in an essay in the Kenyon Review that Pavese has an "impulse as an artist towards a dimension he liked to call 'mythic' a dimension he found in Melville but not in Flaubert...and it is through [Melville]that (Pavese) finds in our books an identity of word and thing...not the aristocratic symbolism of the French...." Pavese took his degree with a thesis on the poet, Walt Whitman.

After graduating from the university, Pavase wrote and produced his own poems, stories and novels, translating and editing English literature. As fascism grew in Italy, Pavese attended anti-fascism groups although he remained on the margins of these groups. Things changed when he fell in love with Tina Pizzardo who was a secret member of the Italian Communist Party and convinced Pavese to receive letters for her at his address from jailed anti-fascist dissident Altiero Spinelli. Pavese was arrested and sentenced to 3 years. Pavase was devastated to learn that after serving his prison term and returning to Turin, Pizzardo had not waited for him.

In the meantime, his poetry was being censored by fascist censors. After his release, Pavese did not publish his work for three years although he wrote privately and published two novels in 1941 and 1942. During 1938 to 1941, he translated and helped Einaudi Publishing Company bring out such tittles as Charles Dicken's "David Copperfield" and Herman Melville's "Beneto Cereno". Pavese also encouraged Einaudi to publish Freud, Jung, Durkheim and other important authors and scholars, some for the first time in Italy.

Finally, with the demise of Fascism, Pavase's work grew in popularity. Many people saw him as a writer who was right about fascism all along. He was awarded the Stega Prize for "ire romanze" in June of the last year of his life. It was during this time he had an unhappy love affair with the American actor, Constance Dowling. He wrote in his diary that he was devastated by the failure of this relationship and took his life at the age of 41 years with an overdose of pills.

Just a final few notes about this poet, I was fascinated with Cesare Pavese's poetry and his ability to put into words the different subjects he wrote about such as solitude and about women in "A Season". Sometimes when reading poetry, I learn to trust the poet and his ability to handle his material in a way that brings me along in his vision. I certainly learned to trust Pavese's talents as a poet. I just wish I lived somewhere that I can read his novels in translation.

I keep thinking of my house in California and how it is full of books and all of those wonderful second-hand book stores and Barnes and Noble. I can't mine those veins of literary gold here in Korea, but it has created in me an appreciation of the availability of books in English. Pavese worked very hard in his short life to bring American and English writers into Italian life. He fought fascism although he did it for love and paid for it with a prison term and censorship.

I can't imagine someone ending his life over a failed romantic relationship especially when his writing career was beginning to take off. I guess I am too much of a pragmatist for that, but I can appreciate the wonderful art Pavese brought into this world including his own words. Maybe someday someone will write the real story of this wonderful poet and writer's life. I don't think it was written in the small descriptions that I read.

Update

This is a short update on what is happening in my life. Certainly poetry is a major part of it, I just not been able to get to a computer with Internet access as much as I would like. I have been writing in my notebooks and journals. I have also been reading.

I now have a new apartment that is across the street from the university where I teach. It is a very nice place. I am slowly fixing it the way I would like. I also have a new laptop that is in English and Internet access there. It is quiet and very comfortable. I have a lot of help in getting situated.

I will be leaving Seoul soon for Daejeon where I live and work. There are flowers and blossoms everywhere and it is warming up. It has been so darn cold here. I did not bring enough cold weather clothing. Everyone is saying that it has not been so cold for over 100 years. Well that does not help me.