Sheila Packa Poetry Blog: A blog about poetry: figurative language, spirit, intertextual explorations, patterns, punctuation, forms, great writers, quotes, and journey notes. For updates, follow me on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/sheilapacka.com
I'm so excited about the music that composer Wendy Durrwachter has created for the title poem from my book, Surface Displacements. She has preview concert in Grand Marais on October 21, and a premier at the Weber Music Hall this winter in 2024. To learn more about the composer, go to https://www.wendydurrwachter.com/
A playlist of Tomas Tranströmer: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/the-blue-house-playlist-by-patty-crane/
I'm so pleased that the library at UMD created an archive for Duluth's poet laureates. Each individual poet laureate contributed time and talents to promote poetry and expand the reading audience. Now artifacts, video, and writings have been archived.
This image is a placemat for my "Read It and Feast" project. I published the work of several Lake Superior poets on 4 unique placements. Altogether 1500 placemats were printed and given out at the fundraiser for the Food Bank, "Empty Bowl," and also used at the Duluth Grill restaurant. A set of laminated placemats are now at the archive!
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Read about the archival project here:
https://www.perfectduluthday.com/2023/10/04/poet-laureate-collection-unveiled-at-umd/
Writing about Landscape
How does landscape impact the creation of poems or stories? Zora Neale Hurston described aspects of the self in geological terms, saying our memories come from the weight, fire, and pressure of the landscape where we came up.
This fall, the Twin Ports Perceptions project will invite six award-winning Twin Ports authors (three from each side of the bridge) to participate in two moderated panel discussions to talk about how they portray Duluth and Superior in their work, how they grapple with issues of regional identity, and the challenges and joys of writing about where they live. You’re invited to join the discussion and add your perspective to these conversations. How would you characterize the “personalities” of the Twin Ports?
The next discussion will take place at Duluth Public Library (520 West Superior Street, Duluth) on Tuesday, October 10 at 6 p.m. and will include authors Linda LeGarde Grover, Jayson Iwen, and Sheila Packa. Both discussions will be moderated by retired librarian/author/historian Teddie Meronek.
You’re encouraged to familiarize yourself with the work of the participating authors ahead of the event by picking up a free booklet containing writing samples from each author. Booklets can be picked upat Superior Public Library in early September and will be available while supplies last. A downloadable version of the booklet is also available on the library’s website here. Copies of the authors’ books can be checked out from your public library or purchased locally at Zenith Bookstore, the Bookstore at Fitger’s, and Barnes & Noble.
Two cities. Two nights. Two discussions. Endless possibilities. We hope you’ll join the conversation.
This program is funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisconsin Humanities strengthens our democracy through educational and cultural programs that build connections and understanding among people of all backgrounds and beliefs throughout the state. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funding was also provided by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Recently, I read an interesting review of Peter Sacks, the literary critic turned poet turned visual artist. "An Artist's Archeology of the Mind" by Joshua Rothman documents Sacks' intensely private and solitary art practice, and the time he spends with each canvas to paint, layer textiles, lay in text, cover, burn, and reveal the complexities of history, landscape, and the mind.
Rothman mentioned a book of literary criticism that Peter Sacks wrote, examining the form of elegy. Rothman quoted the poet T.S. Eliot, and from Eliot's essay about poets:
The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together….
The review is great, and I believe that what Eliot says is true. The individual poet's attention turns to disparate things: images, phrases, sounds that finally coalesce into a poem. Eliot's essay always uses he/his pronouns to indicate poets, a convention considered appropriate in his era, but it is clearly sexist. However, Eliot was a master of his craft, and for that, his thoughts are worthy of consideration. Further along in the essay, T.S. Eliot writes:
…the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.
The particular medium, the genre of poetry, is built from a disparate collection of things, chosen by the poet. The poem begins to take on its own life. T.S. Eliot further says:
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
The purpose of a poem is not to express feelings, in other words. Poets are not different from other people; they aren't more sensitive than others nor have better refinement of feelings.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere…
This thought has been echoed by several poets. Lorine Niedecker's poem, "The Poet's Work" goes like this: "I learned/ to sit at desk/ and condense// No layoff/ from this/ condensery." This is true in my experience writing poems: one writes and revises, takes out words, takes out lines, and searches for a metaphor and a pattern, a set of images, a pattern of rhythm and sound that makes the poem into an instrument that the reader experiences. The best poems connect to the body and breath. They have a physiological element. T.S. Eliot ends his essay with this thought:
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
As with any creative work, discovery is part of the making. A good poet is willing to suspend previous ideas or plans for the poem, is willing to ignore convention, to put aside personal feelings, and is first and foremost, attunes the attention to emerging opportunities or elements that arise within the making of a poem.
Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.A writer's voice, therefore, traces this self-making. The Swedish-Finnish poet Edith Södergran (1892-1923) wrote in a notebook: "I do not write poems, I create myself; my poems are the way to my self." Each book of poems that I have made had a select group of influences, and I called it the 'constellation' from which the book emerged. This I might consider as part of the cosmology. For Solnit, it's clear that her work for the Sierra Club and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have been significant.
In my study of Finnish, I have learned that the Finnish word for translation is related to the word "to carry." Yet, it is nearly impossible to carry all the meanings of any one word into a new language. There are cultural associations and literary references that a reader in another context, not in the original language or landscape, will not get.
Between languages, between literary translations, is a gap, an electric space. This gap contains silence, things unable to be said, misunderstandings, and longings. In the carrying, meanings have been dropped by one side or the other. In this between space, as a poet, I sense the ambiguities of meanings and linger with the possibilities. In my book Surface Displacements, I have a sequence of poems that have titles in Finnish although the body of each poem is in English. The titles reflected my day-to-day experience while I was staying in Finland and memories of the Finnish language and family in Minnesota.
Translation is much more than transcription. Intuition is necessary. Priorities are made. Mira Rosenthal said translating poetry is a "process of discovery, which may sound strange, given that the original has already laid it all out for me. But the translation still has to discover it’s own form." This highlights the way that translation is similar to creating one's own poem. Another translator, flash fiction writer Lydia Davis says, "you are a ventriloquist as well as a chameleon." Book reviewer Elizabeth Bryeron describes the act of translation as entering the "fruitful darkness" in her review of the novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrara. The phrase fruitful darkness rings true. The image of the word translate in the photograph here is next to the "Shift" key. There are several changes, or to use a more accurate word, shifts that one must make.
Trans-creations
When I was in Helsinki, I met a woman who did translation for a company, or as she clarified, she did not so much do translations but trans-creations. This term might be a better word for the business of translating poetry. Often translators must re-invent the meaning using different images or metaphors than the original writer, and this of course, creates controversy at times. Let's just say that if one really needs to experience the original in full, one must know the original language and live in the landscape. Failing that, reading several translations of the same work might get you closer to the source.
The Book Club for Poets has had a fascinating sequence of books this year. In February, we read Emily Dickinson.
In March, the book selection was Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. This novel in poems, based on ancient Greek myth of Geryon, the red winged monster. Carson used a complete poem by Emily Dickinson (no. 1748) "The reticent volcano keeps/ His never slumbering plan--/ Confided are his projects pink/ To no precarious man.// .... Carson's translation of the ancient myth gives us a contemporary tale. Geryon negotiates a complicated family life, develops a passion for photography, and when he becomes a young man, takes a gay lover named Herakles). After Herakles leaves him, they meet again while at a conference in Buenos Aires.
In April, the book selection is A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman by Olga Livshin (Poets & Traitors Press, c2019). In this book, Livshin creates a conversation between her translated poems of Akmatova and Gandelsman and her own poetry. This creates a unique experience for the reader. New versions of the literary greats' poems are presented. I enjoyed reading the echos and response in the narrative poems by Livshin about her contemporary experience of being a Russian-Jewish immigrant in the United States.
In May, the book selection is How to Communicate by David Lee Clark (Norton Press, 2022). Clark is a deaf/blind person, and his poems reflect the intense experience of touch. ASL uses a different grammar structure than English or American English. Interpreters of ASL translate on the fly, and often use analogy and repetition to reinforce the meaning of the original communication. Interpreters for deaf/blind people receive and give translation by physical touch with the deaf/blind. As you can imagine, this makes for some very interesting poems.
I recommend that you read more about translation and more interviews with translators. It's fascinating:
Review by Elizabeth Bryeron: "In This Fruitful Darkness: Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera": https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/signs-preceding-the-end-of-the-world-yuri-herrera/
Lydia Davis' essay: https://lithub.com/lydia-davis-on-how-translation-opens-a-writers-mind/
Interview with Mira Rosenthal, translator of poetry: https://www.catranslation.org/journal-post/poet-to-poet-an-interview-with-mira-rosenthal/
Interview with translator Samantha Schnee: https://bookblast.com/blog/interview-samantha-schnee-translator-of-the-week/
I am honored to be a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Awards in poetry. All four poet finalists gathered for a poetry book talk. You can watch it here:
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