Yes, finally the evil government is out of my soup, and I can think striaght enough to run at the mouth again. Also tis is what I tell friends, no poets and such fuzzy brained folk for 'wife', or that potential household would be an anarchy, even though sometimes I think the institution of marriage is a social ploy to contain glorious 'madness' from taking over the world!

I am looking at the Isle picture again, and thinking of Pablo Neruda's Isla Negra ~ now that is a house only a poet can fashion, with all kinds of kooky stuff (bottles, ship mastheads, anchors, wheels, photographs of sad-eyed Madonnas etc etc) crammed into crooks and crannies. I live too damned inland for a fish. However thank goodness, this locality has a lake and few creeks where I can frequently take water.

I also appear to have recovered from the Herzogain craked-up state of last Sunday, and the insides seem to be swimming with other kinds of zany energy. But thanks for your 'pills' in the 'recovery' process.

As for ability to communicate, vs. say talk, I think this is an age-old problem which can be only solved by silence ( but I have some more ink to spill before I shut up here), and going from there. Have you noticed that we, here I am claiming to speak for 'modern' man, seem to be afraid, even more than the 'ancients' of silence? I sometimes hike into a stand of woods here, and even there I am covered with this hovering blanket of city noise.

Perhaps this is another reason that 'art' in the present day has degenerated (the apologists can maintain the illusion that it is merely different) to noisy rubbish. In that rag, Time Mag, this week, was bestowing the mantle of masterpiece on 'Halo', a video game. Perhaps this era's Rembrandts and Michelangelos will end up making short lived video games, for doesn't 'God' now live in the machines?

You said "Friendship is giving", and I say "but we have been schooled, overtly or covertly, only to buy and sell, here in 'otel California!" Also if my description of marriage is charmingly lofty, it is because I think it is dead serious, lofty business, not meant for everyone.

He reads about Ozymandias in a book, and thinks back to his school days. Those committee tailored textbooks of English to teach the native sonofabitch His Master’s Voice. Lord Maculay! Sahib, you just wanted some nice good brown skinned clerks, and now we are back there again. This time, however, under American nicknames, and with fake American accents, helping dumb Yankees to figure out how to turn on their latest and greatest seventy inch TVs (money spent on which, if spent on an as large canvas might have helped their thinning souls much better. But no let’s not blame them. They are only doing their patriotic duty, and helping Chinese et al., half the world away to be able to afford, and aspire to, Mercedes Benzes!) because they are too lazy to read the fucking manual, and figure out how to work the remote.

So he read many of those Romantic, transcendental, what-have-you English poets (generally not too many American poets. No Whitman, too much large hearted, large scale ache for transcendence, including sexual, not only hetero either, in his poetry. Oh yes, Frost with his Birches and Road Not Taken was there as well) in the last twenty pages of his high school textbook. And then he went to exams to answer questions about the significance, moral of the story etc (Oh! How the natives loved stories with morals! Their greatest epics were gargantuan morality plays) that Lord Byron or whoever wrote Ozzie (in America, Ozzie would turn up as some kind of punk-rock musician, no operator, who ate a live rat on TV. Ah! How is human kinkiness elevated to public spectacle!), or what Wordsworth was feeling when he saw daffodils? Again this required some fifteen odd years, and some fifteen thousand odd miles to be put behind, before he could really see daffodils in spring, and feel what perhaps Bill Wordsworth felt long time ago. Lovely! Very lovely indeed!

He also remembers all those recitation competitions the high school used to have, where one is supposed to go up to a stage, recite a poem, and win a prize for oneself, as well to whatever ‘house’ (i.e., clans into which the whole school populace was partitioned into) one belonged to. His clan was named after that tryst-with-destiny guy, Nehru. Did he, perhaps, just finish balling Edwina when he wrote that great speech for a brand new spanking nation, soon to be a republic even, created out of anarchy by colonists, and all set to sail back into anarchy. But then did the ancient philosophers over there hold that everything was Maya, and this was Kali Yuga of human existence, the dark ages waiting for some meta-mega plague to wipe it all out? The only poem he remembered for this whole dog show was one of Blake’s Songs. That theatrical operator, who later went on to study computer science at India’s finest, instead of Shakespeare, won the prize by belting it out an old man’s accent, some version of a Hindu old man. No well meaning Brit could have infused so much sentimentality into such a recitation. He almost made the whole damn panel of judges weep!

Then there was the whole terror of Hindi, administered by the “gora” (i.e. fair skinned. How racist even the “dark” races are, or have become! O! Masters, you taught us well; color is indeed power!) Northern fascists to the bumbling “niggers” down below. Teach them the damn language by beating the shit out of them. Fear is a quicker teacher than love. And if the idiot doesn’t get the hint that if he wants to be spared a caning every so often, he has to come by the house, twice or thrice every week for private tuition and coaching, give him more humiliation (ex: making him kneel down in biting sand, in the school courtyard under the hot tropical sun for an hour or so) till he gets the message that this is a plain extortion scheme, and he better cough up the dough to learn a language, which is not his own. No soft love there. Spare the rod; spoil the child, was after all the prevailing mantra.

So what did he learn in the process, apart from an ability to understand sentimental and zany dialogue (Are o Samba! Kithne admi the? Mocambo kush huaa!) or hum songs sung by courtesans etc (Inhi logon ne!, Yahoo! Koi mujhe jungalee kahen!) from Bollywood blockbusters? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. And after being away from speaking it, or hear it spoken, for some years, it all seeped away from his mental aquifer. Good riddance perhaps? So these days when people, thinking they are of his kind, which indeed they partly are, encounter him and strike up a conversation in Hindi, he can only, most comfortably, reply in His Master’s Voice, i.e., Ingles senor. Me no speak, Hindi.

Yet, some random bits stayed because transcendence sticks to the guts with as much persistence as shit does. Premchand’s Panchlight. Harivansh Rai Bacchan’s Madhushala (a warning sign that he might become a mild alcoholic in the latter years?), and Kabir’s dohas (oh stern Kabir, mad Kabir, what is man, that evolved ape, to do when he can’t do what he is supposed to do right this moment, caught swinging between past and future?). The rest of the drivel drained away.

So later he would have to discover for himself the whole other treasure house of literature created by those wandering minstrel holy fools in ten or fifteen languages that lived as long as Hindi did. He would have to discover Urdu and the massive beauty of ghazal. Muslims, those smelly strangers with multiple wives, usually shrouded in burkhas, and statueless god, and occasionally caricatures in films of his youth, had lived where he grew up, and had left behind numerous beautiful sings for him to follow to paradise.

Last evening was spent in the company of poets, before and after one of those almost uniquely American spectacles: a poetry reading. While such experiences in the past year have been more frequent that what is, perhaps, required by the human organism – for really gossip, even when done by ‘professional’ poets, is, or soon gets to be, numbingly dull. How many conversations revolve around the yet to be ‘professional’ poets, i.e., M.F.A students sucking up to the full-time pros, or the full-time pros reminiscing about literary conferences from a distant time, taking about who got which grant, award, or fellowship (as Tom Disch in ‘The House of Indolence”, a book of essays on poetry, more trenchantly calls it, ‘institutional welfare’), or in unguarded moments, which range into sexual proclivities, expeditions and so forth of the muse-anointed-few.

While this begs the question: why do I go, which I won’t attempt to answer, après self-analysis, last evening proved to be somewhat superior than the others, because one of the poets involved (Robert Bly) was gracious enough to climb down for Mount Olympia (or which ever mountain pro-poets sit in conversation with the muses), and make conversation with the hangers on, like yours truly.

So I got my few words edgeways about my discoveries of some fantastic poets, notably Tomas Transtromer, via his (in Transtromer's case good) translations, which like his own poetry are pretty uneven; a few of Kabir and Meera Bai are, really, terribly bad, and those of Ghalib merely insufficient.

But then I may be prejudiced, having a reasonable access to (and understanding of) these poems in original. And maybe because my critical awareness was heightened after reading, recently, Dan Gioia’s ‘demolition’ job of Bly’s work:

"By propagating this sort of minimalist translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, but also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale y Machado, not only sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best. But as if that weren’t bad enough, Bly consistently held up these diminished versions as models of poetic excellence worthy of emulation. In promoting his new poetics (based on his specially chosen foreign models), he set standards so low that he helped create a school of mediocrities largely ignorant of the premodern poetry in English and familiar with foreign poetry only through oversimplified translations."

And some of the above points are valid, and very well made by Gioia.

Bly also told us that Transtromer had recently suffered from a stroke, which took away his mental functions for using words (I thought of Beethoven going deaf in his latter years), and for forming sentences. What a fate for a poet!

Subsequently we also gossiped about his methods of translating Ghalib, with help from his PhD-cop-Indian son-in-law, and other personal matters regarding how he wrote, lived, what his children did etc. This was followed by the reading, which was compared to a few other affairs I had subjected myself to, fairly enjoyable, if not because of the poetry read then for the literary asides and anecdotes told, especially by Heather McHugh (the other poet on the bill of fare). These ones were especially witty (I don’t recall to whom these quotes were attributed to):

Dear Sir, the distance between the covers of your book is too great. I shall waste no time reading your wonderful book. The writing in this book is both original and ugly; where it copies from others’ work, it is original, and where it does not, it is ugly.

Following this Robert Bly took to stage, and read from some of his recent work, most of which he claims to have written in the ghazal form. If he did use this form, they didn’t sound like ghazals to me, and even if they were ghazals, they lacked the intensity the best of ghazals (here I am thinking of Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Urdu) possess when viewing the world. But then, perhaps, if one is as famous as Bly is, stuff like this can be passed off as the real ghazal. However to end, (and stop playing the amateur cirtic), on a nice note: Mr. Bly also gave me two of his books gratis, and also asked me to write to him in his Minneapolis ‘hermitage’.