Yesterday’s hero, yesterday’s news.

Veteran’s Day Story in the recycle bin, San Francisco Zoo.

As I left the Zoo at San Francisco yesterday, after a rich and fulfilling Veterans’ Day/Armistice Day with my Californian family, I noticed there was a recycling bin for old maps and programmes. Looking closer, I saw a folded copy of USA Today in there too, with the headline for the story you can read on this link.

http://tinyurl.com/cxhj42n

I had not heard of Jeffery Davis, but his story, his war and his postwar suffering, his suicide and the traumatic postmortem suffering his family have endured were all too familiar as I read the article this morning.

I have just completed a memoir about my own father, his war, his experience of PTS/D after he left the Navy, and how it affected all of us. There was my mother and my grandmother too, both survivors of the Liverpool blitz and the V-weapon terror in London later in the war.

All of the adults in my family were traumatised by war, and it rubs off. The article on Jeffery Davis reinforces this in my mind – that in my own loneliness, anger and alienation, I was not actually alone. It was just that nobody knew what the hell was wrong with us.

I now have some understanding of why vets turn to the bottle, to gambling, to high risk activities and to each other; and often, tragically, to taking their own lives. Anyone who wants a closed examination of this should read Karl Marlantes book, “What It Is Like To Go To War”.

When the memoir comes out in June next year (The Lost Pilot, Penguin, NZ), I hope that at least one other person might find elements of their story in there, as I have just now in the story of Jeffery Davis. My Dad did not shoot himself near a war memorial: he drank and gambled himself to an early grave, at fifty.

Veteran’s children – like the adult children of alcoholics – are truly a family, and we need to reach out to each other and bring our stories into the light.

My father, CPO William Thomas Holman, HMS Illustrious, 1944-45, TF57, Pacific.

Jack Gilbert: Trying To Have Something Left Over.

Jack Gilbert, American Poetry Review, January/February 2009

BART line to a Jack Gilbert reading.

The guy who told me I was on
the right line. The woman who asked
me what I was reading. She was another
aspiring writer, all her stories 30 years
old. The amputee begging in her motorised
wheelchair. The guy beside me, dreads
and tatts, tinny Rap wrecking his
ears, asleep. The hordes of transfixed
smart phone users. Poetry on and
off the page: the Pittsburgh steel of
the wheels and the tracks, rolling me
close to a man without memory, stark
in the hope that his poems will awake him.
The heart as he always knew is a pilgrim.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Yesterday I went to see one of my favourite American poets in his rest home in Berkeley: Jack Gilbert. Jack has Alzheimer’s and now cannot walk (he’s 87). Jay, one of his carers, a lovely African American woman was so thrilled I’d come, all the way from New Zealand (you know how enthusiastic Americans can be, in a way that sometimes overwhelms Kiwis, but is actually very healthy).

She took a photo of us both then wheeled us into a private room, where I talked with Jack as he dozed and read him three of his poems. The first one upset him a bit – he tried to talk and shook his head – so I took a break. I knew he could hear something of what I was saying. I held his hand, stroked him, prayed in Māori, and after while read a poem I’d written for him – The Birds of Pittsburgh.

I think he liked that. Then I read him one of his, “Trying To Have Something Left Over” where he whispers “Pittsburgh” (his home town) into the ears of a baby he’s looking after for a mother he’s visiting, as his own marriage breaks down. I whispered “Pittsburgh” close to him; he opened his eyes and at the last line, I knew he could hear me. He looked far away ahead, as if seeing a sail in the distance.

“So that all his life her son would feel gladness/unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined/city of steel of America. Each time almost/remembering something maybe important that got lost”.

They were about to have a Mind Body class in that room, for the other residents as well. The therapist (a sweet guy) and his assistant came in to set up, wheeling two or three others in. He asked me about Jack and said I was reading him poetry. He knew Jack was a poet, said he needed to read some of his work. I told him he should, Jack was a great man. “We are in the presence of greatness”, I volunteered.

“I like to think of all these guys like that”, he replied, in a kind of rebuke to my singling Jack out. I knew it was time to go, so I told Jack I would come back and squeezed his poor white hand one more time. As I left I said to the therapist that by making mention of Jack’s unique value, I wasn’t implying his other residents were not great human beings.

“That’s OK,”, he said, “I just have to keep my focus in here”. I made my farewell with Jay who hugged me fiercely and said my coming was meant to be. “He’s my father,” I said. “That’s right!” said Jay and hugged me again, as if I was her big older brother. I gave her a signed copy of that poem I had written for Jack and asked if she could put it in his room.

More delight: she’s going to do that, make copies, keep in touch with me by email on how Jack is. I was family now. I stumbled out of the care home and into the bright Berkeley morning. I walked down the street weeping, passing the postman, saying hello and wondering if he saw my tears. I’m sure he sees more than that around here.

I went to a café and wrote out a draft of a poem I’d been composing on the BART train coming in from Dublin, then sent it to myself from my phone. Jack was writing here in 1957 with Jack Spicer and others of the Berkeley Renaissance; he was part of Spicer’s Poetry as Magic Workshop in San Francisco State College back then.

The magic worked for him. He was as present then as I am now, but so much younger: a man afire, alert as a tiger, swift as a hummingbird to the nectar, restless and about to break through. Now he could be anywhere in his mute, seemingly endless days, located in the love of his relatives and the kindness of strangers.

Out on Sacramento Avenue – in my search for that nectar Jack Gilbert found in his life and stored for all time in his poetry – I pass hummingbirds iridescent as fire, whizzing like bullets from blossom to blossom:

“The heart in its plenty hammered
by rain and need, by the weight of what momentarily is”.

Jack Gilbert: from Steel Guitars.

Purple-throated Carib, Dominica. Photo: Charlesjsharp, Wikipedia Commons.

The scent of fame

One of my ambitions on arriving in Iowa City for the residency which ends today was to meet Marilynne Robinson and sit at her feet, so to speak. This desire manifests throughout literary relationships and politics, where those who feel not-so-great desire to spend time in the presence of greatness.

It is tiresome I’m sure to those famous writers so afflicted; once when Bob Dylan was asked what he thought of his fans, he replied, “Wasn’t it a fan shot John Lennon?” Yes, he knows about obsessives – and while some may find that remark unkind, he’s a realist. Informed by a Rolling Stone interviewer recently that his fans loved him, he said “They don’t love me, they don’t know me. They love the songs”. Or something like that.

Wanting to meet a writer because we like/love/obsess over their work is a risky business: what if the two, the writing and the writer, have nothing to do with each other? That is, the book is yours but they are not. Literature is very different from the oral transmission of story, where the storyteller is in the same space, possibly of the same tribe or family or subculture – so you do have a relationship with them.

The only prior and enduring relationship I have with Ms Robinson is with her words, her writings, and my own internal responses to the worlds she creates. The false sense of intimacy that creates – that I know her, and that I need to meet her – is actually against the very thing literature can do for me.

Writing freed from the writer frees me; it enlarges my subjectivity as a free person and allows me to travel in space and time. Just as Jesus did his work and left the disciples to it with the help of the Holy Spirit, so the writer does theirs and leaves us to ours.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to meet a writer and have them sign your book, but they are not in the bookshop or on the podium to be your friend. Readings are often part of sales and promotion, and not to be confused with family gatherings. Writers have their own circle of relationships outside of the job – like plumbers and the police. They are not here to make us feel less lonely in the universe.

I did get to see Marilynne Robinson – once passing in the street laden with book bags, coming from a class no doubt. Glancing at her in that moment, she caught my eye, two random strangers. I wrote a poem about it: The glance. That was my reward.

I also heard her speak at a reading in the Englert Theatre. I marvelled at the luxuriant mane of grey hair she kept sweeping back like the curtains of a temple from around her face. She read with a polyphonic sensitivity, sounding out the drama of the human voices in her new novel.

Then yesterday, just before the final IWP reading in Prairie Lights Bookshop, I saw her come in the door as I was standing at the front desk waiting to buy a copy of Osip Mandelstam’s Selected Poems. A middle aged woman grazing the shelves, touching the books as we all do.

There I was, flanked by greatness: one voice dead but speaking to me inwardly of the black earth of Mother Russia; the other passing me silently, breathing still, full of stories only her privacy can protect, that she might one day get fresh ones out onto the same page as Mandelstam. The book is my true friend – writers belong to themselves.

“Salutations, black earth. Courage. Keep the eye wide.
Be the dark speech of silence labouring.”

Osip Mandelstam. Black Earth. Voronezh. April 1935.

Translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin (1973)

Statue of Osip Mandelstam, Voronezh.

When translation contemplates Being.

Pandora at work, Iowa House Hotel, IWP, October 2012.

In his 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, the great Lithuanian poet of the Polish language, the expatriate Czeslaw Milosz had this to say about the politics of poetic exile, actuality and what he terms the poet’s true vocation, the contemplation of Being:

“Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search of reality is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation—which is to contemplate Being.”

Coming from a writer who survived the twentieth century’s twin totalitarianisms, this is a pronouncement worthy of some reflection. Milosz had seen what Hitler and Stalin had done to writers, and the choices they were confronted with under the Nazi heel and the Communist fist.

Many were cowed, co-opted and silenced, others spoke up and paid the price – yet he seems to be saying that something other than resistance or collaboration with worldly power is the real calling of the writer. What does he mean, to “contemplate Being?”

For someone so worldly wise, it sounds airy-fairy, but in fact, it is all we really have. Poets it seems to me, work best when they realise that they are their own experiments in humanity; from within and without, they are always processing the results of that internal encounter with the infinite self and the infinite universe, through language.

How could we not be moved by living in space and time, immeasurable and incomprehensible, yet crying out for our answers? For those who take this journey – the real dangers to power – there is no hiding place, as the self is mortal and flawed, while the world is transient and unstable, ephemeral.

Yet not only do poets attempt an answering call, a conversation within, from limits into the illimitable, they also attempt further adventures by translating each others’ works – so often described as a process that cannot succeed, because a poem in one language cannot truly be reproduced in another.

Watching Pandora, a Burmese poet translating my English poems, “As big as a father” and “The departed” two days ago, I had a chance to think about all this up close.

One poem is about an absent father, the other concerns grief for kamikaze pilots – both subjects well within Milosz’s scale of contemplation, however well or badly I may have brought them off. Looking at the Burmese script on Pandora’s laptop as we discussed a range of meanings for “big” and “skiff”, I had a weird sensation somewhere between delight and awe.

And not just because they were my poems, but because, I think, here was one experience of Being moving into another realm, as new poems were created based on the English originals. “As big as a father” will now belong to anyone in Myanmar who wants it, as will “The departed”.

Myanmar is a country as we all know with a famously harsh attitude to any dissent, let alone poets who want to think and BE outside the square. How can I expect any Burmese reader to identify with the grief of the families of kamikaze pilots – such men belonging to an order of being so radically dehumanised that it is hard to know where to start?

Yet grief is a universal experience that finds expression in every language, from the deepest wracking sob to the the most elevated elegy. “Sobbing” was a word Pandora and I discussed at length; it is the strongest English word for the bodily expression of grief, I think – and she has to find the Burmese for that.

She will, because her people know about sobbing, and they grieve as we do. The joy and the power of a good poem, of the few truly great poems, is that they give back to us some precious spaces to contemplate our own Being, away from exile, alienation and actuality.

In giving me this gift, Pandora has opened a kind of box which is the very opposite of that of her namesake – and of course, she has another name, which is untranslatable. She has opened my world into Burmese and so taken me, mysteriously, into hers.

Reading at Shambaugh House, 17 September, 2012. Photo credit: Greg A. Bal.

Meskwaki: The Red Earth People of Tama.

Dancers, 1830s.

Somewhere deep in the unconscious of most Westerners alive today is buried an image of “Indians” like the one above, the “Redskin” of generations of cowboy movies and Westerns that however nobly they portrayed the “savages”, such “hostiles” were always doomed tribes on the road extinction, barriers to progress.

I could instead have inserted this image of a modern Meskwaki, the writer Ray A. Young Bear signing his book for me in the Full House Cafe at their Casino near Tama, where one of his far-sighted ancestors bought land in 1856, and so halted the driving of his people from government reservation to reservation.

Images of literate Native Americans hard at work in their own communities preserving their languages and cultural traditions, are not yet so embedded – which is a pity. We still have a long way to go before we can ever erase the genocidal propaganda that Hollywood sold as entertainment in the pursuit of profit.

If that sounds harsh, how hard was it for Ray’s parents and grandparents from the 1930s right through until more liberal moviemakers started to peel the stereotype back, with Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves? Smoke Signals was even better, but the long-term damage had been done. It is still being done today.

Nobody is mentioning the “R” word in the current presidential campaign here much, but it is a pretty good guess that much of the hatred directed at the “socialist” and “Muslim” Barack Obama is race hatred only thinly disguised. The sight of a T-shirt back on Facebook – “Let’s put a White back in the White House” – says it all. At least he’s honest.

Ray and his Meskwaki people have seen it all, and suffered the consequences; his many books, unsparing in their depiction of real Indian lives have become American classics, while he struggles to give back what he sees as his dues, to the Tama community.

Ray is a native speaker of Meskwaki and has been long involved with the school at Tama that is working to pass that language on to the next generation. One of his children is a fluent speaker and his other kids are at least passive speakers – but it’s a hard slog in a world saturated by English-language media, especially those that target kids.

The school has older speakers teaching, most often elders without formal teacher training. It’s a familiar story to someone from New Zealand like me, who knows something of the history of Māori language revival, and the battle to keep te reo Māori alive.

Ray also prays Meskwaki language mentors start videotaping themselves at work, to post their lessons on YouTube, like Katie Grant, a young Sauk and Fox college student from Oklahoma. “As with most funds/grants received by Tribe,” he says, ” the tribal community as a whole is inadvertently excluded by administrators and others with belated interests in Meskwaki. This wall of linguistic imbalance denies opportunities to those who could share their speaking skills or family memoirs to aspiring students and even adults”.

As a bilingual writer and singer for forty years, Ray says the Meskwaki lexicon, like English, is expanding and teaching it in school via an outreach or immersion setting is just a start. “To an extent, the Tribe’s efforts are commendable”, he says, “but at-home parents and/or language mentors are facing a 50 year fight against linguistic atrophy – when all is said and done.”

Ray is a sweet guy: he’s used to Anglos and outsiders like me turning up to interview him and take away something from his world to benefit their careers. I wish I could give him more than my respect and a mihimihi, a greeting from us in New Zealand.

I have brought my copy of Black Eagle Child: the Facepaint Narratives – his recreation of the Meskwaki world that is a must read for anybody who cares about the future of Native American languages and cultures. He signs it kindly, drawing me an eagle feather. His most recent literary kudos has been to have a very moving poem for his grandmother published in the Julie Andrews’ collection, “Treasury for All Seasons’. Check it out.

I give him two of my own books, and rabbit on about one poem which laments language loss for people like him. He’s tolerant and when he leaves, I wonder about what lies ahead for him and his people. The shadow of the Romney-Obama face-off hangs over the casino somehow. What will the outcome mean for Meskwaki and all the other tribal groups trying hard to be themselves in a mostly uncaring State of the Union?

I have given him my pounamu pendant and he has given me beads – for once, there has been a fair trade between my pale face and his red skin. I have spoken a mihi to him in Māori, and he has written his Meskwaki words in my copy of his book:

“Ko tā te rangatira kai, he kōrero – conversation is the food of chiefs.”

“Ke te bi – e ka no ne ti i ya ni – thank you for talking to me.
Be no tti – e o ji wo ni – for being from far away”

No wonder there was thunder, lightning and torrents of rain in the early dawn as I set out on my journey to meet him, on the land where he belongs now, until the day he dies.

I write to think.

Writing is a form of thinking: I often don’t know what I think until I write it down – or, to put it another way, when I am writing I am thinking differently from when I am talking. The habit of literacy, the practice of writing sentences, writing prose and poetry shapes my thoughts as much as my thinking shapes what I write.

It isn’t so much a matter of where I get my ideas from, as where language takes my ideas. Ideas are inconceivable without language, but books to me are not so much about ideas as the medium of which they are made – language, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pauses, music, beginnings and endings, all these things.

Sometimes I re-read things I have written some time ago – especially longer and more complicated passages of non-fiction that involve argument and analysis of a growing number of ideas and positions – and I wonder how in the world I ever managed to come up with that. Writing, the act of writing, comes up with what we need when we do it.

In a very real sense, language precedes thinking, it is the mysterious system imparted to us from the beginning in a series of sounds our (hopefully) proud and doting parents and grandparents goo and gah over us, from that bloody and exhausting moment we emerge from our struggles to enter the world.

Of course, the last paragraph bears no relation to whatever the undifferentiated “I” was experiencing then and there as those sounds surrounded my bursting into the light. I was almost certainly bawling my own pre-verbal anger, rage and pain at the welcoming committee, who took this protest as a very encouraging sign of life.

The acquisition of language thereafter conferred upon me slowly over many years the gift I am exercising now, as I was initiated into the realm of literacy in the many schools I would enter on the road to adulthood. Whatever I thought of tracing rows of “o’s” and crossing “t’s” in my primary school years, the practice of writing has led me here.

This education was much more of course than just writing words: it was conferring on me the ability to shape my thoughts externally on paper and in the process, it changed my thinking about thinking, it changed my subjectivity. As I read more and more books and found certain of them appealed to me more than others, I developed as an individual in ways that are not possible to a person living in an entirely oral culture, dependent on the powers of memory to transmit knowledge: myth, religion, histories and ways of managing the material world.

The phenomenon of literacy changed the world of the medieval peasant in Western society from serf to citizen. The ability to read conferred by mass literacy – generated in the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages during the rise of Protestantism so that the individual could meet God in the Scriptures and not be chained to a Latin-chanting priesthood for God’s message – was the key to the later rise of secular education systems in the emerging nations of the nineteenth centuries, spawning the Industrial Revolution and its discontents.

From the seventeenth century onwards, Christian literacy was carried from the West to countries colonised by European powers; this happened partly as a result of Catholic evangelism and also religious revivals in England and the Continent. Reading and writing spread to many parts of the world where it was previously unknown.

This is not to justify or excuse the excesses and cruelties that went hand in hand with the conquest of those peoples in such territories, but it remains true that literacy changed their world and in the past 100 years has shown its continuing power, as they have “written back” and changed the story of the progress of empire.

The written word soon destabilises the spoken word of the chief and his priests. Once a tribe has books, their world expands and the intellectual universe changes. Increasingly for such colonised peoples, unless their languages are written down, their words begin to die as the colonising tongue takes over.

The agents of such translations are once again, the missionaries: with conversion as their aim, they work day and night to record the native tongue, creating orthographies and printing bibles for the mission schools. Every child that enters this new world is passing out of the pre-literate world of their ancestors – no matter how long the spoken language survives. Economic pressures in the societies created by colonial rulers transform power and prestige relationships.

The results of this are seen in many post-colonial realms today, where language revitalisation movements struggle to maintain indigenous languages almost extinguished by that of the historical coloniser. In other post-colonial realms (for example, India), a language such as English may remain embedded as the lingua franca amongst the diverse tongues of differing ethnic groups, and a link to the wider world for many of its citizens.

The common factor here is that literacy – both life giver and destroyer in this drama – changes not only the way we are, but the way we think. There is no way I could have said all this aloud, no way these thoughts could simply have emerged as speech. They are thinking as writing, writing as thinking.

You may not – you need not – agree with me, but shouting at the computer screen will have no effect whatsoever. You have to reply in writing, to which end a comments section is handily provided.

Ngahere School 1957, S2 to F2, I am in the second row up, second from left.

We Live In A Political World.

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Everybody gather round, that time of year, they’re on the stump.
Don’t want you but they want your vote.
Democracy: the killing joke.

Never be perfect but it’s all we got, so listen up.
Which rich shirt are you bound to pick?
Really? He’s such a prick.

Cost him a million just to open his mouth and fly down South.
Cost twice that when he flew North and gave that speech.
You know the one: last week’s.

I hear that one has a billion backers, dollars, man.
No money, no love.
It’s such a scam.

But I’m not cynical – no, not me – I hitch my star to integrity and sing.
They can’t bottle what they can’t sell.
You can easily tell.

I vote the way I always will, for hope you can’t find in a wishing well.
For the sweat that laid the railway tracks, the aching backs.
They’re out there, still.