Copia

Ikot Abasi

Ikot Abasi, also called Opobo, formerly Egwanga, port town, Akwa Ibom state, southern Nigeria. The town lies near the mouth of the Imo (Opobo) River. Situated at a break in the mangrove swamps and rain forest of the eastern Niger River delta, it served in the 19th century as a collecting point for slaves. In 1870 Jubo Jubogha, a former Igbo (Ibo) slave and ruler of the Anna Pepple house of Bonny (28 miles [45 km] west-southwest), came to Ikot Abasi and founded the kingdom of Opobo, which he named for Opobo the Great, a Pepple king (reigned 1792–1830). Also called Chief Jaja by Europeans, he destroyed the economic power of Bonny and made Opobo the leading power of the eastern Niger delta oil-palm trade until he was deported in 1887 by the British, who established a trading post at Opobo Town, 4 miles (6 km) southwest, on the west bank of the Imo River.
Modern Ikot Abasi serves as a trading centre for the yams, cassava (manioc), fish, palm produce, corn (maize), and taro produced by the Ibibio people of the area; it also is known for boatbuilding, although a sandbar partially blocks the entrance to its port from the Gulf of Guinea. The town is linked by highway to Aba and Port Harcourt. Pop. (2006) local government area, 132,023.

—Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

It was in Cross River state (Akwa Ibom was later carved from Cross River) when I was there, back in 1990, visiting my then girlfriend who was doing her post-University National Youth Service. We took a Toyota taxi van from The University of Port Harcourt, where I was living with my lecturer Dad. For a variety of reasons the trip lives lushly in my memory, not least because of the gorgeous tropical setting (We were in the rural part of Ikot Abasi). I was also aware of the area's rich history, centered on Opobo, where "King Jaja" went from captured Igbo slave to local leader, undertook an extended campaign of defiance against the British, was eventually captured through deceit and sent into exile.

In a few days there I read a lot and wrote a few poems, including one about Ikot Abasi itself. This week YB Poetry published my poem, Ikot Abasi Redux, written a couple of years ago as a sort of echo of that poem I wrote in 1990. That earlier poem, written when I was still a teenager, isn't really publishable in any proper journal, but I thought this a good time to post it in this informal setting as a sort of bookend to the "Redux." You can see the themes I carried into the more recent poem.

Ikot Abasi

(Thoughts from the World's Navel)

I. Fauna

In the wake of age-old night,

A downy, dewy new born baby

Ourang-outan hangs face downwards,

Legs in mother's knowing grip,

Wide-eyed at the brown, the chlorophyll.

Apprentice to the simple art of gestures,

It takes, in breath, the dizzy scene,

The trailing vines and sea-green herbs,

The brown dehiscent pods,

The endless symbiosis (breathe)

The roiling food chains (breathe again);

In mother's knowing grip,

It learns that which the eye can't see

In this plush romp of deity,

This nursery of being...

The primate urge that shaped our shrilling tongues to trope

Shows roots here like the ageless, sprawling tree in shallow soil.

II. Sylva

A tree is not a poem, but a poem might be tree:

A poem that is not a tree is grass or birophyte.

A poem, tree through hardened truth or old acuity

Is ringed by lesser stalks and shoots that struggle to the light.

Knowing truth in things unseen and rarely comprehensible,

A poem's tree by virtue of compression (heed the lesson)

Images, insisted Pound, are acorns—hard, inedible

The poet's business lies in rearing oaks to dine the mind on.

III. Antiquissima

Bah!

These centuries of prosody and rhetoric are latent here,

And have been since our times before imagining,

Flowing through the veins of leaves.

There are no hamadryads here,

No wooded tabernacles,

No slave moods in the elder's stool,

The hoe, the hollow ikolo.

Wisdom is never exercise

At the world's damp navel,

But an endless dance to soundless measure,

Answering to none at all

unless the simple seasons.

27 March 1990

at Ikot Abasi, Nigeria

Black night! Black night!

In the case where fear presses back
Through the air, where the torch has expired
On the orphan river,
In the forest, soulless and tired,
Under the anxious and faded trees,
In the wan woods, squalling trunks
Ululate without respite
Over the accursed tom-toms,
Black night! Black night!

—from "Nuit Noire" by Birago Diop, translated by Uche Ogbuji

This poem is excerpted from Birago Diop's short story "Sarzan", well known among literati with interest in African culture. I can only find it in French online right now, but I first encountered it in the collection Jazz and Palm Wine which my father loved and would sometimes read to the family. The excerpt above is from the very end, and I translated it form the French original:

Dans la case où la peur repasse

Dans l'air où la torche s'éteint,

Sur le fleuve orphelin

Dans la forêt sans âme et lasse

Sous les arbres inquiets et déteints,

Dans les bois obscurcis

Les trompes hurlent, hululent sans merci

Sur les tam-tams maudits,

Nuit noire ! Nuit noire !

I've watched the "Kony 2012" hype and the subsequent controversy with both amusement and bemusement, thought I've thought whatever comment I might have better kept to myself. I wasn't even paying much attention to the whole affair except for a few nuggets that would strike me, usually from when it was on the news my wife was watching in the other room. The first case was when I believe NBC said they would be sending a crew to Uganda to do some fact-checking on the story. That really annoyed me.

Here is a list just off head:

Major unrest in Burkina Faso last year
Ethno-religious strife in Nigeria's middle belt
Al-Quaeda-inspired terrorism in Nigeria's North
The Nigerian fuel subsidy removal unrest
An oil spill by Shell almost as bad as the Deepwater Horizon disaster (in terms of environmental impact rather than barrels of oil)
South Sudan's independence
Eradication of Rhinderpest
Famine in East Africa
The arrest of Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire following the mayhem he caused after elections
The election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia
One of the most engaging African Cup of Nations competitions in my own memory (OK I had to throw that last bit in there).

So many compelling stories coming out of sub-saharan Africa, and it took a viral Youtube video to get NBC to send a crew to the continent. Even if you were only interested in Uganda, the non-violent protests led by Besigye against Museveni alone were more newsworthy than "Kony 2012".

Now don't get me wrong. Joseph Kony and the LRA have been shocking and disgusting me for at least fifteen years, and of course I'd love to see him brought to justice, but the problem with Kony 2012 is that it perpetuates the approach of over-hype and lazy hyper-focus on one topic that has characterized so much popular Western attention on the continent. It's "Do they know it's Christmas time at all" all over again, and don't let me start on that unspeakable nonsense.

Anyway another snippet from the "Kony 2012" affair that struck me was the clip of the video's creator I half caught in which he was itching about some U.S. city street in the nude while muttering loudly. It instantly brought back a very powerful reminder of Birago Diop's short story, which Professor Willfried Feuser translated in his collection as "Sarzent the Madman." The "Sarzent" ("sergeant") of the story has returned from his military education in France loudly determined to "civilize" his home village. He becomes possessed by the spirits of his ancestors and goes around raving in poetry. I see the broader lesson of the story about the peril of insincerity couched in self-righteousness, especially when rooted in alien, Western values. That's certainly how the story struck me as a child, and in that wise I find the correspondence to this madness of Jason Russell extremely creepy. A friend of mine mentioned that it's as if the man was stricken by the Igbo deity Agwu Nsi.

Some of the ravings of Sarzan/Sarzent come from Diop's earlier poetry, including his lovely "Souffles" ("Breaths"):

Écoute plus souvent

les choses que les êtres.

La voix du feu s'entend,

entends la voix de l'eau

écoute dans le vent

le buisson en sanglots.

I found the above video with the poem's recitation. I translate it thusly:

Listen more often
To things than to beings.
The fire's voice is heard,
Hear the voice of the water
Listen in the wind
To the bush a-sobbing.

Out! Out! You must be prised right out...

Out! Out! You must be prised right out
Joyless desire and love's conceit!
You've cranked at my heart such a treat,
Nothing's left there for your grubby onslaught.
Now for my own good may I forget about,
Shrug off this tenant of my very suite.
Out! Out! You must be prised right out!
I took you in without sufficient thought.
Get out! Go find yourself another beat!
Don't even skirt my heart's remotest street!
Too long I've dwelled cowed by your harsh, grim clout.
Out! Out! You must be prised right out!

—Rondeau/Chanczon XI of Alain Chartier, translated by Uche Ogbuji

This morning a friend of mine posted the following on Facebook:

Untitled - by Alain Chartier
I turn you out of doors
tenant desire
you pay no rent
I turn you out of doors
all my best rooms are yours
the brain and the heart
depart
I turn you out of doors
switch off the lights
throw water on the fire
I turn you out of doors
stubborn desire

I have a lot of friends who post fine poetry, of their own, or from others. Most of the time I'd just click "like," possibly comment, and then move on with life. This one seemed set for the pattern at first, a neat little piece, clever device and all. But then I noticed the byline. "Alain Chartier."

I love medieval French poetry: Villon, Chartier, de Pizan, even d'Orléans, who's a decent enough poet, but probably would have been much less remarked if not for his nobility. Anyway, it immediately struck me that the "I turn you out of doors" poem is quite un-Chartier-like, and I certainly didn't recognize it despite having read a fair bit of Chartier in the original and in translation. So just like that began a delightful journey taken up in occasional steps throughout the day.

I found the poem posted on a variety of Weblogs by the occasional romantic. It had clearly gained currency at some point as a mini-meme. But nowhere could I find information about the Chartier original. I did find that the translation was by Edward Lucie-Smith, a new name to me despite the fact that he seems a very prolific and near contemporary author.

Just about every permutation of Google search I could think up with the above info turned up at the very best a cryptic bibliography entry in The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies:

I turn you out of doors. Alain Chartier. BoLoP tr. by Edward Lucie-Smith

My friend mentioned she had found it in her copy of "A well-loved book of love poetry from Oxford University Press edited by Jon Stallworthy," which was probably "BoLoP" so I'd hit a dead end.

I ended up searching online editions of Chartier for a variety of likely 15th century French translations of the words in the Lucie-Smith. I didn't have time to do it the old-fashioned way, thumbing through my volumes, but I suspected this was a rarely collected Chartier poem that I probably wouldn't find in my library, anyway. Guessing at "dehors" led me to a mention of:

XI. Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier,
Désir sans joye et pensée d'amours. . .

Rondel de dix vers : Grenoble, n° 874, fol. 60 ; ms. du
cardinal de Rohan, fol. 80 v°; Lyon, n° 1235. Publié dans
Lyon- Revue, 1886, p. 315.

In "Mélanges offerts à M. Émile Picot." Alas the full poem was not rendered, but it seemed a passable match for the Lucie-Smith. I found many more fragmentary references until I did find the full poem in a miscellany of "Ballades, Rondeaux et Chansons" appended to Chartier's celebrated "La belle dame sans mercy"

Here is the full, original poem:

Rondeau/Chanczon XI
Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier
Desir sans joye et pensee d'amours!
Tant aves fait en mon cuer de voz tours
Qu'il n'y a plus pour vous que fourragier.
Nonchaloir vueil desormais hebergier
Avec oubly pour moy donner secours.
Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier!
Je vous receu ung pou trop de legier.
Departez vous! Allez logier aillours!
N'aprochez plus de mon cuer les faulxbours!
Trop ay vescu soubz vostre dur dangier.
Dehors ! dehors ! Il vous fault deslogier!

(Sources: [1] . [2] . [3])

Well then! That's a rather different creature than the Lucie-Smith. I understand that Lucie-Smith was doing a bit of an Arthur Symons, the modernist gutting a languorous latin procession of poetry, seeking the supposed vortex. If a sonnet or canzone/chanson is like a sphere, you can see Lucie-Smith cutting a spiral out of it, looking for some sort of essence.

It does bring to mind the question of where translation gives way to adaptation or even original work. I generally label a poem adaptation when I feel I've made it too much my own, and I try to be explicit about such cases. I've done so for example in my treatment of “El Amor Ascendía Entre Nosotros,” by Miguel Hernandez, and even in my treatment of Villon's "L'Épitaph (Ballade des pendus)," where the only real liberty I took was with the refrain.

Upon finding the original Chartier poem I tried my hand at a translation, which is the lead quote of this post. I tried to preserve some of the metrical and rhetorical feel of the original, which in my opinion Lucie-Smith jettisoned, creating an entirely original work of his own. Again I think the Lucie-Smith is a neat poem, but I think its worth giving Chartier a chance to have his own, more direct say. As I wrote of the old master in a poem of mine published last year:

Doubting truth in unseen things
I seek the literal tree,
The prickly fruit, the leaves, the flowers
Some posit it to be.
Uproot the tree of vegetable love
And plant a swooning spray—
I'm well across the gospel of
Our prelate Chartier.
If love is nectar blossoming
But fades to autumn grief,
What heroes championing what gods
Are left to my belief?

—from "What belief" by Uche Ogbuji (Lucid Rhythms, 2011)

Poetry, Western Slope sty-lee

This world glistens like a summer lamp saying open, open
In the time it takes to speak, everything could disappear.

—from "Looking for Fossils" by Sandra Dorr (from Desert Water, The Lithic Press, 2009)

What is that spark when you meet a friend, which crackles with instant recognition? And what is that spark multiplied like a moonless night sky's field of fireworks? It might be something like what I experienced at the Western Colorado Writers' Forum's annual conference in Grand Junction this past weekend.

I was introduced to the group by Wendy Videlock, who appeared on TNB Poetry at my behest and who then suggested I lead a workshop on submissions to online journals at the conference. I gave that workshop Saturday to a sharp, attentive group who had just heard María Meléndez's advice about submitting to print journals.

Earlier that morning I had encountered what this conference was really about, at heart.

What better place to call home
than this high desert cloud mesa wrong turn
rippling of the continental plates
before they slap down
fanning towards the Coast?

—from "The Wright Stuff" by Art Goodtimes

I woke up on the crisp, autumn morning to ride with Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason and his sweet, effervescent lover Cally Conan-Davies up Monument Canyon into the sort of jaw-dropping landscape that Colorado offers up to casually. There at the visitor center of the National Monument, a group of poets learned from Park Ranger Liz of the eventful geological and human history of the place, as well as present climate, flora and fauna. Fingers bit by the chill, we nevertheless scribbled scraps of what she said and what figments the vista inspired in us.

We then gathered in a room at the center where David Mason recited selections of poetry which exhibited rootedness to land. He finished with Bristlecone Pine, his own poem written after visiting the oldest tree of that type in the Rocky Mountains; he started with:

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

—from "Bogland" by Seamus Heaney

I wrote a poem, "Parachuted," that seemed to emerge, great elk skeleton, from the dew-soaked sponge of my brain. I also remembered that beginning of "Bogland" throughout the day, and when one of the organizers urged us to write and share weathergrams to post on Grand junction trees, "Bogland" wove into my offering.

I've since worked that weathergram into a tanka.

We have no tarn to

Mottle the copperplate face

Of rough entrada.

We've no black peat, dry fossil

Colorado, we repeat.

—untitled, by Uche

There were several fossil-marked rocks at the home of Danny Rosen, professional astronomer, director of the Western Sky Planetarium, poet, and host to a group of us. The first night Danny treated us to jaw-dropping views of the moon, Jupiter and its moons, The Pleiades, The Andromeda galaxy and more through his large telescope. Friday evening I taught a couple of Igbo and Efik songs to Art Goodtimes, San Miguel County commissioner and Western Slope Poet Laureate and Rosemerry Trommer, runner, linguist, singer and proprietress of a large fruit orchard. Rosemerry sang me a few Yoruba songs in turn. From there we joined the chat and debate at Danny's legendary poet's bonfire with Jack Mueller, Wendy, David and Cally.

It wasn’t the moon
that swooned me, but
the edge of the moon,
cratered and rough,
the shadow line
where substance ends
and space begins.

—from "After Watching the Moon through a Telescope Big as I" by Rosemerry Trommer

Plenary sessions were held in a lovely converted church with high, NBC peacock stained glass windows. Highlights included a poetry reading in which I took part, and offerings of words from elders. Saturday night, before the headlining presentation of Leslie Marmon Silko we had a bit of history from Ute elder Clifford Duncan. Sunday morning the conference closed with a series of reminiscences by elderly representatives of various cultures in the local Grand Valley: Hispanic, African American, Basque, Italian, Japanese, etc., as well as from a gentleman telling the history of geology, miners and military installations in the region. I was very impressed at the amount of time, attention and respect given over to those who have known that land the longest, and to their stories.

Maybe that is why we go on talking,
always trying to show someone we're here,
and look--I have a past just like you do,
a stream of words that fills the empty night
and sweetens troubled dreams, or so we hope,
and tells us not to linger long on bridges
staring at all the water passing by.
I thought my whole ambition was to make
the past and present come together, dreamed
into a vivid shape that memory
could hold the way the land possesses rivers.
They in turn possess the land and carry it
in one clear stream of thought to drink from
or water gardens with.
I learned that I must first talk to myself,
retelling stories, muttering a few
remembered lines of verse, to make the earth
substantial and to bring the sunlight back.

—from "The Country I Remember" by David Mason

Stories were how my long weekend began, as well as how it ended. I arrived at Wendy's household, met and had supper with her charming family, after which Wendy and I discussed lives and poetics, our own, and of others, into the night. Then it was time to sleep, because in the morning Wendy was leading a workshop, "Totem Poems and the Subconscious Muse," which was my first writing workshop, an experience I approached warily because my remote impression of workshops had been rather dire. On the day I enjoyed Wendy's approach, and was very impressed at the quality of poems written by participants. I wrote a couple of poems which seem worthy of further attention, including a leopard poem, which I'm always grateful to receive.

Only bone, like the shadow, knows
that lasting metaphors are born
of architects and alchemists,
of those who love the arch
and beam, and of the fleshy need
to leave and have something remain.

—from "In Praise of Form" by Wendy Videlock, from Nevertheless, Able Muse Press, 2011

Sandra Dorr was too busy running the show for me to have much opportunity to hear her poetry, so Desert Water was my first read this week of the many volumes I'd bought at the conference. In the way she switches from the telescope of landscape to the microscope of intimate personal detail, Sandra is like so many of the remarkable poets I met that weekend. Something very special is welling from the ground in Colorado, and I'm excited to be a part of it. I spent about a half hour with Sandra walking to lunch one of the days, and she told me of how she had gotten involved in local literary initiatives, pointing out the many points of artistic interest in the small town of Grand Junction. I have no doubt that her tireless efforts, and that of her collaborators at the WCWF, will continue to bear fruit, and that I'll always be of a mind to witness the resulting magic in person.

Who's Gonna Take The Weight?

As for the second point, I say what our faith says, and the truth of the matter. At a certain time a motion begins which is not precipitated by another motion and this occurs in this very manner: that there has been eternally a first mover, although there was not eternally a first moved; but at a certain time the first moved began, and then motion began.

—Albert of Saxony, Questions on the Physics (Questiones et decisiones physicales insignum virorum). Uche Ogbuji's translation. Latin original as follows:

Quantum ad secundum, dico quod secundum fidem nostram et rei veritatem. Aliquando incepit motus quem non precessit aliquis motus et hoc per istum modum quod eternaliter fuit primum motor, licet no eternaliter fuerit primum mobile; sed aliquando inceperit, et tunc incepit motus.

For some reason I've been sparring with the notion of the Prime Mover a lot this year. In my poems and other writings I've taken on the idea playfully, angrily, and sometimes in sheer bafflement. The idea comes from the tortured efforts to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism, received by medieval scholars with such reverence once re-discovered in contact with the Islamic civilizations, with Christian dogma. I think this struggle still dominates modern science and philosophy, though no serious enquirer outside the Bible Belt, except maybe Peter Geach, would dare plead directly to Christian principles in such discussion, and not many would directly invoke Aristotle. Despite this coyness a great deal of thinking behind Western civilization is bogged down in two theoretic systems which seem to betray utter ignorance of the natural world.

Albert of Saxony was one of those medieval natural philosophers instrumental in marrying Aristotle with St. Augustine; I believe I ran into his quote at the library of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and I managed to dig it up again in God and reason in the Middle Ages by Edward Grant. As I've grown older I've become very sympathetic with Epicurianism, respectful of Sophism and hostile towards Socratism, the great enemy of both. Unfortunately Socratism won out in post-Classical times, with its insistence on impossible absolutes and false humility in style. I won't go so far as to claim that looking back more to Epicurus (who in turn looked back to Democritus, subject of savage attacks by Plato) would have prevented the religious distortions, cultural chauvanism and geopolitical distortion that characterize the West's material triumphs, but I do think Platonism served as a heavy, clumsy stick swung wildly about the world by Europe.

I must admit that it was not Plato and Aristotle who gave the Europeans that chilling formula "dico quod fidem nostram et rei veritatem", "according to faith and the truth of the matter," which so polluted Medieval natural philosophy with divinity studies. Ibn Rushd ("Averroës" in the West) had already compiled a herculean defence of Aristotle against some agents of Islamic dogma, having to cover much the same ground as Christians did centuries later. Since they were getting their Aristotle from the schools of Ibn Rushd, the Christian philosophers had to deal not only with the Greek, but also with the brilliant (though fundamentally flawed) elucidations of the Spanish Moor. In the end they pretty much just cut Ibn Rushd out with the neat scalpel of church dogma. Back to superstition square one. The dogma of six-day creation sixteen hundred years before the great flood could not withstand the empirical idea from the natural world that nothing suggests any beginning to the chain of causality. Things are in motion because things have always been in motion. The church needed to silence this heresy to make room for Yahweh and they did so with the garrotte rather than with fair debate.

The lasting effects of this strangulating threat occurred to me once again a few days ago when listening to Kool and the Gang's soaring, aching composition, "Who's Gonna Take the Weight." What lyrics there are to this song are eye opening:

People! The world today is in a very difficult situation,
And we all know it because we're the ones who created it;
We're gonna have to be the ones to clean it up;
We're gonna have to learn to live together

And love each other.
Because I believe one day someone or something
Is gonna wanna judge

Who's creating all this corruption and death and pollution,
All these difficult situations on earth.
And he's gonna wanna know:
Who's gonna take the weight?

So the world is screwed up, and we're the ones who have to sort it out, but why? Not because it's our world to sort out, but because it's a world belonging to some Daddy Abstract hanging out in the sky who's going to come along some day to judge what we've done. What's the point of so much soul if all were doing is renting it, anyway?

Under the Aristotelian shadow of Ptolemy both Islamic and Christian natural philosophers wound themselves into ridiculous contortions until Copernicus and Galileo. The primum mobile, the first or empyrean sphere was equated to utter goodness in gratification of Christian doctrine and was accounted by Sacro Bosco in his seminal De Sphaera the only sphere of "motus rationalis" (i.e. rational motion by which they meant the rotation any idiot can see by observing the sun) and then by complete hocus-pocus the idea came about that all other spheres were of "motus irrationalis sive sensualis" ("irrational or sensual motion"; take that, Aristotle!). So now suddenly the church had not only the keys to goodness, but also to reason. How convenient!

Sadly, I'll close with one of the more lurid illustrations I've seen of how all this nonsense addled even the most brilliant minds in the West. "Good-friday, 1613, Riding Westward"

by John Donne is a poem of his usual technical virtuosity, but is full of the sloppy, slavish sentiments that leave me so scornful.

LET man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

This is about the half-way point of the poem, and marks the heave of theme from a philosophical to a devotional bent. The church was all about facilitating such arcs, and The Dean of St. Pauls well illustrates how they got their wish for so long. I like to think the 21th century will mark another turning point in which we throw all that twaddle into the vaults of history, and actually look upon the universe with our own eyes. I personally have no truck with waiting out to determine Who's Gonna Take the Weight.

King David's Nkrumah Salute

The first leader of a newly independent Ghana
Faced many a challenge to visions of utopia;
The vision is based on science and agriculture;
Here come the vultures shitting like pigeons on a sculpture.
Nobody's perfect, yo! he's got faults you can list them...
Dr. Nkrumah's intentions were the best
Why it's all a mess cause we still needed lots of help from the West...
Kennedy and his foreign aid
During the cold war turning Ghana into economic slaves...
Military coup after coup it's appaling
Seventh time a charm: enter Jerry Rawlings...
There once lived a great man with a geat vision, great plan,
A great dreamer determined to realize what he'd seen for Africa
Things fell apart at the seams in Ghana...
We salute ya, we salute ya,
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah

—from "Nkrumah Salute" by King David

My cousin and sound producer extraordinaire released this clear-eyed tribute to the great man who spearheaded the African independence movements of the 50s, including that of Nigeria, whose independence came a few years after Ghana's. Nkrumah was the father among pan-African visionary leaders from Nyerere to Azikiwe who did succeed in the most visible successes of independence, but whose energy and charisma were not quite enough to counter the complex manipulations engineered by colonial powers within the field of influence of the globally influential cold war poles in Washington and Moscow.

What I like about this Nkrumah salute is that it doesn't shy away from calling out the disaster of Nkrumah's Volta river project, which also pioneered errors repeated across Africa where ambition for foreign exchange and rapid industrialization led governments into economic patterns that extended the hegemony of Western powers while decimating indigenous industries. These errors led to corruption, which led to erosion of the most important human resources and caused perilous internal strains. In Ghana the false gold was bauxite, which inspired the Volta river project. In Nigeria it was and still is petroleum. Such projects required strong central control, which bred autocracy, in which Nkrumah was also an unfortunate pioneer, and eventually this led to a wave of military coups across Africa, and made it easier for the CIA and KGB to conduct their proxy wears across the continent.

Despite all that we rightly salute Nkrumah. if these have been harsh lessons for Africans to learn, it has been essential that we learn them ourselves, and Nkrumah led the way to such self-determination. It is also for us to address the problems over time. We should be wary of quick fixes. Everyone salutes Mandela for his greatness, but I'm sure he paid careful attention to his African history, and learned the right lessons. Even Mandela had his elders, among whom Nkrumah was a leading light.

I've always personally enjoyed the fact that Nkrumah took his pan-Africanism even as far as matters of the heart, marrying an elagent Coptic Egyptian lady Fathia, whom he impressed as a fiery African nationalist in the spirit of Nasser. The marriage fell apart with the strains of Nkrumah's later years in power and Fathia returned to Cairo even before Nkrumah went into exile in Guinea, but after Fathia's death a few years ago she was flown according to her wishes to be buried beside her husband in Ghana.

ObPoeticReference:

We are the punch bag of fate
on whom the hands of destiny wearies
and the show of blows gradually lose
their viciousness on our patience
until they become caresses of admiration
and time that heals all wounds
comes with a balm and without tears,
soothes the bruises on our spirits.

—from "Ghana's Philosophy of Survival" by Kwesi Brew, richly discussed in "Poetry as Cultural Memory", by Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah. It's also well worth reading "Africa, 1966" on the same Weblog.

Chez Labbé, au-delà de la terre

Je vis, je meurs: je me brule et me noye,
J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure:
La vie m'est et trop molle et trop dure.
J'ay grans ennuis entremeslez de joye:
Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment n'endure:
Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure:
Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye.
Ainsi Amour inconstamment me meine:
Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.
Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine,
Et estre au haut de mon desiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.

—Sonnet VIII by Louise Labbé (I found an English guide to the poem.)

The first time I heard Morcheeba's Au-delà, featuring Manda, the french fan who became a lead singer for a brief spell, I was at a Morcheeba concert in Denver, just before the album Dive Deep came out. When she started singing the lyrics, I started jumping up and down yelling "C'est Louise Labbé!" I guess half-hoping Manda could hear me. Yeah, wifey thought I'd gone mad. She would have thought so even more if she'd realized, as I did quickly, that the lyrics that started with Labbé quickly went its own way.

Je vis, je meurs; je ris, je pleure.

Je vis de la mer; je vis de la terre.

Je le dis aux fleurs; au lac de vapeur.

Au ciel de toutes les couleurs,

Ton soleil réchauffe mon cœur.

Je vis, j'ai peur; je crie de douleurs.

En secret je m'enterre: je cherche la chaleur.

Je m'enfuis dans les airs; au delà de la terre.

Au ciel de toutes les couleurs,

Ton soleil réchauffe mon cœur.

—"Au-delà" by Morcheeba

I live, I die; I laugh, I cry.
I live of the sea; I live of the ground.
I say it to the flowers; to the lake of steam.
In the all-colored sky,
Your sun warms my heart.
I live, I die; I scream of pain.
I bury myself secretly: I am seeking heat.
I abscond into the air; beyond the earth.
In the all-colored sky,
Your sun warms my heart.

—translation by Uche Ogbuji

BTW the last time I mentioned Morcheeba on Copia I was anticipating the new album after Skye Edwards had rejoined them. "Blood Like Lemonade" came out last year and is I think worth the wait. If you've been sleeping, wake up and check it out.

Labbé's sonnet famously brings Petrarca's style of antithetical tropes into French. Just this morning Au-delà came up in my shuffled playlist and I remembered I'd resolved to translate it, to see if I could preserve some of its music, which has eluded translations I've seen so far. Here is an excerpt from my attempt:

All at a stroke I laugh and I lament,

And suffer many torments in my pleasures:

They live forever, my absconding treasures:

All at a stroke I wither and augment.

—from "Je vis, je meurs" a translation of Sonnet VIII by Uche Ogbuji

re: lament/augment, you can either accept it as rime riche, or consider the "g" borrowed into its following syllable, as it does sound in my pronounciation.

Ou sont les péans d'antan

The morning glory climbs above my head,
Pale flowers of white and purple, blue and red.
I am disquieted.
Down in the withered grasses something stirred;
I thought it was his footfall that I heard.
Then a grasshopper chirred.
I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,
I saw him coming on the southern road.
My heart lays down its load.

—"The morning glory climbs above my head" by Helen Waddell (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913)

Yesterday I was going through old notes from my writing while at The University of Nigeria at Nsukka, and I came across Waddell's translation, which I'd copied out by hand. In those days before Google and ready cut&paste, I used to do a lot of copying out poems I found and loved. This lovely poem, a translation of a translation from the Book of Odes, was originally published with the note "Written in the twelfth century before Christ, c. 1121," and demonstrates once again that extraordinary facility that's blessed Asian poetry through the ages of taking the broad sweep of Nature and tacking it lightly onto the human experience, such as compelled Ezra Pound to toil over Fenollosa's notes to produce Cathay. Of course that's what many European Classic poets tried to do in pastoral efforts, but generally ended up being so much more heavy-handed with political and academic statement than their Asian counterparts. That's what the European Romantic movement poets tried to do, but also without much subtlety or delicacy.

The modernist movement in Europe seems to have unfortunately banished this sort of expression entirely, and that is a major tragedy. Even among poets working to reinstate metrical verse to contemporary practice, there seems to be some inexplicable terror of abstract and natural themes. This is a shame, but I'll take what I can get, and yesterday I also came across "The Wind with its Smell of Flower," a wonderful translation from Mongolia's Poet Laureate G. Mend-Oyoo by Simon Wickham-Smith and Lyn Coffin.

I love this peaceful blue evening
It is absolutely a castle of the East
I love this cloud with its golden mane
It is absolutely a lantern of the East
I love this wind with its smell of flowers
It is absolutely the fragrance of the East

—from "The Wind with its Smell of Flower," translation from G. Mend-Oyoo by Simon Wickham-Smith and Lyn Coffin in Qarrtsiluni

If you read Mongolian, I'd guess you are very lucky to be able to read the original "ЭНЭ ЦЭЦЭГ ҮНЭРТСЭН САЛХИ." And while at Qarrtsiluni be sure to check out "The Man in the Yellow Coat/L’Homme au Pardessus Jaune" by my friend M.J. Fievre, a stunning story both in the original French/Creole and in the English translation made by the author. I'll repeat in public something I remarked to the author in private:

You say "While the omniscient P.O.V is admissible in Haiti, a country known for its oral tradition, it was frowned upon in American literature." I'm not much for American fiction but that startled me. If it's true, it probably helps explain why I'm not much for American fiction.

For me banning the omniscient narrator from story-telling is like banishing the color black from visual art. Or hey! maybe like banishing abstraction and nature from poetry. Shame on any MFA departments and workshop people involved in such heresy.

By the way, my title for this posting includes some poetic license. More accurate to my point would be something such as "Ou sont les idylles bucoliques d'antan," but that doesn't sound nearly as nice.

First in flight

Let’s imagine for a second that the robin
is not a contained entity moving at speed
through space, but that it is a living change,
unmaking and remaking itself over and over
by sheer unconscious will, and that
if we were to slow down the film enough
we would see a flying ball of chaos,
flicking particles like Othello counters,

—from 'Robin In Flight' by Paul Adrian, winner of The National Poetry Competition, UK

This might be the best poem I've ever read to have won a recent competition. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the winner has never published before. The more I deal with the poetry establishment the more I'm convinced it has a way of curbing fresh voices. I hope this honor encourages Mr. Adrian to persevere with his style. For me it's not far from being up there with the great bird poems (OK maybe not 'The Windhover' but does anything even approach Hopkins's iconic piece), including D.H. Lawrence's 'Humming Bird.'

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

—from 'Humming Bird' by D.H. Lawrence

Back to the UK National Poetry Competition, one of the runners up is quite good fun.

The records show that in Shanghai
at the end of the Yuan Dynasty,
the year 1364, a glassblower blew
a mermaid that came to life, and swam
away. And in Cologne, in 1531, a team
of glassblowers blew an orchestra,
instruments and all, and these played.
Then on Hokkaido, in 1846, a blind
monk blew his own Buddha to pray to,
and the next day he was able to see.

—from 'A History of Glassblowing' by Matthew Sweeney

Here's a neat project using Blake's illustrations and music to set The Songs of Innocence and Experience nicely into video.

It includes treatment of "The Blossom."

Pretty pretty robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Hears you sobbing sobbing
Pretty pretty robin
Near my bosom.

—from 'The Blossom' by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789

Labor, industry and negligence

Solvency or luxury
Or modesty of revenue—
Campaigners seem to want all three
But most that they can have is two.

—adapted from "The Madison Front" by Uche Ogbuji

The above stanza is the crux of my poem, "The Madison Front," which was posted in Verse Wisconsin this weekend as part of their "Poems About Wisconsin Protests" series. It takes a critical look at all sides of the politics and economics of the Madison protests. There's also audio of my reading it, which in some cases will automatically play when you load the site. I'll try to figure out how to record better quality audio next time.

The bottom line is that I think all sides tend to miss the most important point, though no one more than Scott Walker and his supporters. Gutting union rights won't solve their fiscal problems. The only things that will are increasing revenue or reducing the overall standards of living to a point neither left nor right would be likely to accept. This is a fundamental problem throughout the U.S. Most of the talk about "small government" by folks such as the Tea Party is either vague, or focuses on institutions that offend right-wing social sensibilities and are yet the most infinitesimal fraction of spending. No one who insists on maintaining current levels of defense spending while sniping at environmental and educational institutions is in the least bit serious about budgets.

At the same time the left has lost its backbone. Despite steeply declining overall tax rates over the past century, right wing campaigners have succeeded in turning "tax" into a word so dirty even progressives fear to use it. I personally think it's a good ting that tax rates have declined, but I think it's common sense that there reaches a point where you reach the nerve bundle of the tradeoff in my stanza above.

No one in the U.S. seems to be calling the true debate. Are we willing to accept being the greatest military power in the world by just a small margin rather than by two or three times, or are we willing to sacrifice our standards of living to levels that would place us wel at the bottom of OECD league tables? No one seems interested in the latter, and I can understand that. I enjoy having a high per-capita standard of living. I think the crux of the debate, then should be in the matter of defense spending versus taxation, but everyone seems terrified to press this point forthrightly.

It's hardly unusual for the U.S. to have arrived in this situation. It's just the way of power in the world. As Samuel Johnson says in a famous quote:

There is a general succession of events in which contraries are
produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with
success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and
negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.

—from section 21 of The Rambler by Samuel Johnson

And speaking of The Rambler, my search for the above image of Dr. Johnson (caught possibly in the eyes-open phase of winking and blinking) led me to a Weblog established by a gentleman inspired by the great Doctor's efforts. I've read a few of the entries and it's got a bit of The Copia about it. I'm always delighted to find a fellow journeyman.