February 16, 2024 • 41 mins
I talk with poet Diane Mehta (Tiny Extravaganzas) about Ciaran Carson's poem "John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822." (Painting at the poem link; larger image here.) We talk about Constable and the view of the painting; death; music in Carson's poetry and others; Hamlet; why we're not fans of the last two lines. Afterward, Diane reads her fabulous poem "Extended Melodies." Then it's onto the game "The Undiscovered Country Puzzles the Will." Episode brought to you by The Poet's Atlas.
Additional reading:
- Howard Nemerov's "Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry"
- Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
- Review of Crystal Bridges in The New York Times
- The Labor Action Tracker from Cornell's School of International Labor Relations and the University of Illinois' School of Labor and Employment Relations
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast.
(00:07):
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
On each episode, I invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like to talk about for
any reason.
We'll talk about what excites us, what delights us, maybe what frustrates us, and we'll follow
the poem and the conversation wherever they turn.
Afterward, our guest will share a poem of hers and then we'll have a little bit of
silliness end the game.
I'm delighted to have as my guest today, Diane Mehta.
(00:28):
Diane was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay in New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now
makes her home in New York City.
She's the author of two poetry collections, Tiny Extravaganza, out just last year from
Aerosmith Press, and Forest with Castanets from Four Way Books.
Her essay collection, Happy or Far, comes out next year, 2025, and new and recent work
(00:48):
is in the New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Canyon Review, American Poetry Review,
and A Public Space.
Her writing has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural
Foundation, and fellowships at Civitale Ranieri and Yato.
She was an editor at A Public Space, PEN America, and Guernica.
Her latest project is a poetry cycle connected to the Divine Comedy, as is the writer of the
(01:13):
poem she's brought in.
He's also connected to the Divine Comedy.
And she's also collaborating with musicians to invent a new way of working through sound
together and working on a long-term project with the New Chamber Ballet.
Diane, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, my pleasure.
So you've brought in Kieran Carson's ekphrastic poem, John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822.
(01:37):
Carson was an Irish poet born in Belfast, born in 1948, passed away in 2019.
I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about his poems and your relationship with
them.
You know, it's funny, I've become more of a fan in the last few years, and part of that
was accidental because I started thinking about the Inferno as I got into this Dante
project and then someone wanted me to talk about the Inferno.
(02:00):
I thought, really, I don't want to talk about the Inferno.
I want to talk about the Purgatorio.
And they kept insisting and insisting.
And then they suggested this translation when I said yes.
And I thought, no, I don't like his translation.
They said, why don't you like his translation?
And then it became this whole investigation of what he was doing, which is really about
music and about being Irish.
(02:21):
And of course, it's actually a very straightforward translation, even though it's kind of wacky.
And everything about Dante being translated is useful.
So I ended up liking it and it got me closer to his work.
And I started going back into older work where he had these longer, very dense city poems,
long lines.
And then he sort of moved away as he got into the early 2000s.
(02:43):
And maybe some of those are the poems I saw, the translations.
And then this particular book, Still Life, from which the poem John Constable's Study
of Clouds, 1822, is taken, this poem I've chosen, is in this perfect book that really
entranced me.
So there's something about this book that's an entirely whole book.
And it's coherent in the way that many books aren't and that perhaps his other books aren't.
(03:07):
Oh, that's really lovely.
I don't know his poems very well.
So I'm very glad that you've brought him in.
Before I ask you to read it, I did want to give just a little bit of brief context about
the Constable painting, which I'll link to in the show notes.
This is from the National Gallery of Victoria, which has the painting.
Clouds is one of around 50 extant paintings of the sky, which Constable made in Hampstead
(03:29):
between 1821 and 1822.
And it's been speculated that he produced more than 100 such studies at the time.
Constable made his intense examination, which he called Skying, to precisely record different
weather and atmospheric conditions in preparation for his grand landscapes.
Apparently saw clouds as essential to getting landscape right, which will end up being resonant
(03:52):
with the Carson poem.
So whenever you're ready, go ahead and read it.
John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822.
The sound of water escaping from mill dams, et cetera, willows, old rotten planks, slimy
(04:12):
posts and brickwork.
I love such things, said Constable.
Also trees and wind and clouds reflected in the water as shown by his limpid watermows
at Salisbury.
His father owned watermills and windmills.
He understood weather from childhood.
(04:35):
Of hail squalls in spring he had this to say.
The clouds accumulate in very large masses, and from their loftiness seem to move but
slowly.
Immediately, on these large clouds appear numerous opaque patches, which are only small
(04:57):
clouds passing rapidly before them.
Those floating much nearer the earth may perhaps fall in with a stronger current of wind, which
drives them with greater rapidity from light to shade through the lanes of the clouds.
Hence they are called by windmillers and sailors messengers, and always portend bad weather.
(05:27):
Therefore Constable learned the craft of chiaroscuro.
Ten years ago it was your going through what had to be gone through.
First the little blip, then the bigger blip.
We'd scan the clouds for whatever augury they bore.
Clouds that bloom and dim from marble sheen to darks of silver at the edges, in the throes
(05:55):
of being and becoming, shown what showed on the screen we wondered what do we know of
our bodies, the internal country undiscovered until now and then not understood.
Now it has befallen me to go through what will be.
(06:17):
We gaze into the clouds and listen to the sound of water in the waterworks.
I open a book to see what Constable recorded one day on Hampstead Heath, 31st September
10 to 11 o'clock morning, looking eastward, a gentle wind to the east.
(06:38):
The moving cumulus caught on the fly between hand and eye study as in an act of learning.
Let's say a happenstance of Constable and cloud, the final picture, uninterpretable,
quasi shapely cauliflower plump with just a hint of dark top right to prove the chiaroscuro.
(07:05):
I love the patience that you read that with.
I feel like it captures something about there are certain kinds of echoes of sound in the
poem, but we'll get there.
I'm curious just what the main reason you chose this poem is.
There are a few reasons and I didn't know them all when I chose them.
The very first reason is that it was much shorter than the other poems and I didn't
want to take too much of your time because many of these poems are three or four pages
(07:28):
like his early poems.
Some go on for a very long time and it's hard to follow.
These are all about paintings.
I thought study of clouds, even if people are listening and they can't see the painting
right away, they know what a study of clouds looks like.
It's a painting that allows for a lot of imagination and possibility because clouds can be anything
(07:49):
and we always imagine forms in clouds.
He's a guy who's kind of interested in forms and frameworks and then as the poem moves,
he has these matching sounds as he's very good at, but these lines are much looser.
Instead of getting too talky, he kind of sticks to the main idea and he's got this very technical,
(08:09):
factual, research-driven approach to all the poems in this book, but really to this one
in the sense of he's focused on messenger and study and this list of fact over fact
over fact as a way of trying to understand what's happening and what is life.
This big question at the end is just very dreamy, what is, what will be since there's
(08:33):
no idea, but I like the way he had the clouds in the background and other clouds moving
in front of that so you get a dimension which he's very good at and that reflects the chiaroscuro.
It's a poem that allows for a lot of things and that's very technical and very detailed
and may not be necessarily the best poem in this book and I really don't like the last
(08:53):
two lines, but I didn't mind that they kind of made it fail a little bit.
This book is not really about failures but about endings and so in his way, he has failed
a little bit, he has failed to produce what he wanted to in the last four years of his
life or so and then he got his diagnosis as he says on the next page in the next poem,
(09:14):
he did not write anything publishable for four years until he got his diagnosis and
then he produced this book and he was happy and he went back to his long lines, except
they were looser because he was more mature.
Well I really, we'll talk about the last two lines in just a moment because there's something
I like about them but I also don't feel that they fit the poem exactly.
(09:36):
What I love about the poem is the kind of sleight of hand in a way that for the first
half of the poem, so much of it is quoting Constable and it reads like a fairly straightforward
acrostic poem and then the idea therefore Constable learned the craft of chiaroscuro
moves us into this thing that has been so impossible for him to understand.
(09:58):
It was going through what had to be gone through, the little blip, the bigger blip and it's
as if he's trying to use Constable as a way of understanding something that is otherwise
not understandable to him and so all these things from the first half of the poem suddenly
resonate light to shade, very large masses, there are all kinds of phrases that kind of
(10:20):
echo, but tell me what you dislike and I'll reread the last two lines, quasi shapely,
cauliflower plump with just a hint of dark top right to prove the chiaroscuro.
So what do you dislike about those lines?
Okay, I'll tell you first what I like about that line.
I like the monosyllabic with just a hint of dark top right.
So he's very good at meter and he's very good at timing so he got that right and he
(10:44):
did that well.
I guess the word quasi, this sort of Latinate scientific lifeless verb feels strange right
in the beginning and quasi shapely, it's a strange spondee that kind of grabs you in
the beginning of the last line of the poem that should be a summing up and this is a
(11:04):
kind of big question and in that a question is a kind of summing up that it makes sense
but this digresses from that and goes in an opposite direction so there's a lot of big
fat syllables I guess, the cauliflower plump, the quasi shapely, there's so much, it's a
mouthful to say those syllables, quasi shapely, cauliflower plump, even cauliflower plump,
(11:27):
you think that that sound would have been unhappy to him, he would have been, that sound
would have been not welcome in his vocabulary, in his diction because he matches things,
he connects things, he's got a lot of tk tk tk, but he's got a beat going and he's got
a rhythm and a music and this moves away from the music and the way he phrases things in
(11:51):
the way that I understand and it really just sort of stops me, I kind of get stalled, like
in the beginning I think it's about eight lines down earlier when he says of hail squalls
in spring, it has a thickness there too, you have syllables piled up, that doesn't stop
you, he has some assonance, he's moving around the vowels a little bit, hail squalls in spring
(12:13):
and so he could have done something like that here, so I just don't understand why he would
have, of all the forms he wants to see in these clouds or might see, why he ended up
putting a cauliflower in our minds.
I was wondering about that because part of it is that the sound is, it's enjoyable outside
the context of the poem, all the P's and it's sort of strangeness of the image, but it's
(12:36):
so different from the music of the rest of the poem and not in a way that feels like
it's built up to, so I love the kind of echoes we get, his father owned water mills and windmills,
he understood weather from childhood, but we'd scan the clouds for whatever augury they
bore, clouds that bloom and dim from marble sheen to darks of silver at the edges in the
(12:57):
throes of being and becoming, and there's a straightforwardness to the language and
a simplicity to the language and quasi-shapely cauliflower plump feels just like it's from
a different poem.
The only connection I can make is that, and I don't know the nature of the illness he's
referring to.
I think it was lung cancer.
(13:19):
Lung cancer, okay.
Then my reading makes no sense because I've seen the brain compared to a cauliflower.
That's the only kind of connection I can make.
It would, I might be wrong, that was just my quick search.
I know it was cancer because he talks about chemo in the beginning, but I thought it was
lung cancer.
But it's a nice image, it doesn't really matter, you can read what you want into it
because there's something wrong, right?
(13:39):
There's something very wrong.
Cancer is this bulbous, tumorous thing in your body.
It ends in the right place movement-wise in that we get, or I feel, the final picture
uninterpretable.
The thing is, I don't like the poem any less for it.
Everything he's doing is fantastic.
(13:59):
Plenty of poems go off the road a little bit somewhere.
Everything that builds up to that I really, really love.
Well, those lines that you just quoted are some of the, really, they're just marvelous.
The augury, just again, the word augury, so much turns on that word augury in these clouds.
You're thinking about these clouds and you have all this information and then suddenly
it's an augury and then that brings back something Homeric, that brings back myth and legend
(14:23):
and he's pulling himself into the past and connecting himself.
There is something to the kind of Homeric simile in here too, so that maybe accidentally
connects.
The Homeric simile that I was thinking about connected, the augury brings him back to the
Homeric idea of similes and from looking at it I kept thinking, well, the clouds of constable
(14:46):
are like the clouds of cancerous cells that appear on an x-ray screen.
We read what we want into it, but there is this grand simile behind it, something big
and grand is happening, the end of life, and you have something very specific and research-driven
just like these clouds and then he brings in this weird simile and wraps it in.
(15:06):
So he's not unfamiliar with everything that's out there before him.
So the comparisons and the metaphors and the way he moves seemed resonant to me.
And the poem is, I think, set up to, so we make those kinds of connections because it's
almost exactly halfway through that it turns from the constable painting to the illness
(15:27):
and the ailment.
What's so fascinating is the way in which it touches on the illness only a little bit.
It creates the emotional depth with things like the internal country undiscovered until
now and then not understood, but then almost immediately turns back to constable.
And psychologically it's just this fascinating way of trying to talk about something that
(15:51):
feels impossible to talk about, the depth of the terror of death and illness and that
constable provides him a way of trying to understand it, but ultimately is not a complete
way of understanding it.
That's a beautiful way of thinking about it.
If you think about the clouds, you think about death and you think about sky or snow or clouds,
it somehow makes it seem a little better.
(16:12):
I remember once being at the very top of a mountain overlooking many valleys of other
mountains in Aspen and I thought, oh, here I feel so close to the sky and somehow this
idea of death felt a little more comforting versus down in the city or wherever we are
in our homes, in our beds thinking about the other people.
(16:33):
Here you're removed from people in the clouds, I don't take you somewhere else.
That's a lovely idea and that turn right in the middle is kind of, it sort of fascinates
me like with his earlier work, he has these associative leaps that keep the poem going
and going and going and even in some of his prose too and they're punctuated rhythmically
and over time, durationally with music so that's how he does it and I saw that he did
(16:57):
this turn here.
I mean you have sound in the beginning of the poem, sound at the end of the poem, you
have the word chiaroscuro in the middle and then somewhere else right at the end and then
he turns from the craft of chiaroscuro to 10 years ago which is associated, like there's
really not much of a link there but if you look at it you think, oh, is he punning here
because there's a rhyme, chiaroscuro 10 years ago and I thought he wouldn't have not recognized
(17:22):
that and he might have thought maybe that's fun but it's just sort of like that link that
you pointed out I noticed as well.
It's funny, it makes me think of and I don't think it's intended to evoke this but a way
of thinking of it is I've had a therapist tell me that one way of thinking about mood
is that it is like the clouds, the blue sky is always there and the clouds kind of pass
(17:43):
and you always end up being able to see the blue sky again and so there's this interesting
sense of scale that it was you're going through what had to be gone through, that there has
to be some kind of acceptance that it's going to happen.
First the little blip and then the bigger blip and blip is such a great word choice
because the blip as a word it's pointing to something so small and yet here the scale
(18:05):
of what it's changing in their lives is so grand.
He's turning on that like a beat again like something you would do as a fiddler or something
as a flutist, you get a note.
Yeah.
By the way I think we should have the same therapist because I have that same metaphor
going.
I feel like therapists have a limited backpack of metaphors and sayings.
(18:33):
On a previous episode I was talking with my friend Will Callahan and I think I mentioned
the Wild Geese Mary Oliver poem that ends in what will you do with your one wild and
wild, I've already forgotten the word life and Will said, you know I was in the hospital
once and that quote was everywhere.
(18:53):
I feel like it's unfortunately for Mary Oliver it feels like it's become co-opted as a kind
of mental health statement the same way with the clouds.
I wanted to just briefly reference I love the phrase internal country undiscovered sent
me back to the the Hamlet Salo Cui which if people were trying to place it.
It took me a minute to place it because of the inversion that it's not undiscovered country
(19:16):
but the country undiscovered.
Who would fartals bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something
after death the undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns puzzles the
will.
Hearing that echo helps it for me land that sense of heaviness that death is on the mind
(19:37):
and there's that fear that comes with this kind of serious illness.
It's very moving and I like the way you tied it to Hamlet.
I actually didn't even notice.
I was just focused on the map implicit right there.
Where you said internal country undiscovered.
I thought oh he's going back to his map metaphor because everything in his early work seems
to be about a map.
He's a city poet.
He's a walking poet and he often looks at things from an aerial view and this is the
(20:00):
other direction.
So he's looking at things from below up to the sky instead of looking from a hilltop
down on Belfast and recognizing all the things that frame this painting.
The pub and the this and the that and the bomb here and the this there.
So he connects to literature in a really deep way.
(20:22):
He connects to everything that came before.
He connects to music and in terms of not knowing what's out there and the fear of death I was
looking through his prose book which is this prose book about Irish music which is sort
of a memoir but it's fun.
It's called Last Night's Fun.
He's got so many quotes in here that kind of counteract and contradict some of the things
(20:46):
he says and his fears.
For example there was a line just in the middle of the book, a better time elsewhere is mere
illusion.
So I thought he's okay with this after all.
And then you know in terms of the the syntax I found something else and he was talking
about music and there are dialects of moods, decors, atmospheres and ambiances.
(21:10):
And he's doing that here too.
He does that in his early poems.
I think he moved away from it in some of the middle poems because they're very thin small
poems and he seems utterly lost like without a map.
But the dialects are in here, literally dialects.
The mood changes when you get the blip as you notice.
That blip is kind of like a turning point.
And then he's wondering and then he's not so sure but he's also okay and then he turns
(21:33):
everything into a cauliflower.
Not terrible mood.
He's walking around Belfast around the waterworks with his wife and they're having their own
private conversation and they're making the most of their time.
He's making the most of his time.
He's like I'm gonna make this really coherent book and each one will be a painting and if
you think about it like he's putting himself in this painting.
(21:54):
He's putting himself in these clouds.
And the thing that I always think about death is well this person died too.
I mean that's a ridiculous way to think but it's also not a terrible way to think.
I think well John the Constable is also dead.
Shakespeare is also dead.
All these other people before me are dead.
I also have to die.
So if you connect yourself to other artists and other times somehow it doesn't seem as
bad.
(22:15):
Well it's interesting thinking about the kind of painting.
The Constable painting is the kind of painting that's very easy to project yourself into
because it's painted as that view.
It's totally apart from landscape otherwise.
It is simply this vision of the clouds that for most viewers could be anywhere.
For him it's very much studying the sky over Hampstead day after day and doing study after
(22:39):
study but it is the sort of painting that you can look at and you can be in its landscape
because it's so simple and all we see are the clouds.
It's true and you know the future he has to live through.
You can be in the clouds, you can choose to be in the clouds.
I like actually associating landscape with a place that people can go once they die.
(23:00):
I have one friend who I associate with the snow in Colorado and her ashes there.
For a long time I thought my mother's I couldn't figure out where my mother went after she
died so I thought well she might as well be on the moon.
So I would look at the moon I think.
She could be on the moon.
That's where she is.
So it's sort of a nice concrete way to imagine people.
(23:21):
You know when I go swimming at the YMCA for a long time and I don't swim as much lately
but I'll go underwater and I'll see nothing but blue and my mind will empty.
Sort of like these skies and these clouds and then I think well my friend can be here
so I will meet her underwater and you can choose to go there.
So if you and I look up at the clouds maybe we will see Karen Carson more often now.
(23:46):
That's really lovely.
I love that.
One last thing I want to note about the poem before we turn to your poem is that so much
of the poem is turned over to Constable's language and it works incredibly well.
Like it seems like that's always a risk and yet I feel that it's similar to Carson's
(24:07):
language while being distinct especially this long quote.
The clouds accumulate in very large masses and from their loftiness seem to move but
slowly.
Immediately on these large clouds appear numerous opaque patches which are only small clouds
passing rapidly before them.
I think the lineation is helping in part with the kind of music he's interested in and it
(24:29):
goes on for several more lines which seems pretty amazing to me.
That's a thing to have in a poem include.
And the lines sort of flow.
They're mellifluous the way he can be mellifluous and then he has stops or stopping points here
and there before and after.
But you know that's a huge chunk of the beginning of the poem.
(24:50):
And they're in these unraveling unrolling unspooling lines.
But you have these choices of words that he might choose himself.
Opaque patches you know there's a music to that.
Well let's turn to your poem now Extended Melodies which is from Tiny Extravaganza.
Extended Melodies.
(25:11):
I worked all day but nothing took not even thought would take a look not still.
Nostling that was me mattered much too long less too long less and multiple multiple free.
(25:39):
I kept it up and orchestrated some ensembles.
Cello birds song violin auto tuned it added symbols and got the curve and score of personality
(26:03):
wrong my pitch to live harmonically clatterings and shatterings.
Soundings universal escape my ears pursuing joy enjoying trouble.
(26:25):
Thank you.
I have to ask immediately about the singing and also the echo of tuneless and then repeated
tuneless and same with multiple because that's not on the page and so I'm very curious it's
also in your bio about for you the relationship between music and this poem and particularly
the way that you are intoning it.
Did I repeat tuneless and multiple?
You did you did you said tuneless and then you sang tuneless and then multiple and then
(26:49):
you you hit multiple in a higher pitch.
Oh yes I did so sometimes I'm trying to get the word tuneless to be tuneless and sometimes
I'm trying to get it to be in tune and I can't decide so that was part of my indecision so
that was partly accidental but maybe it works.
I thought it's I thought it was useful to start singing on tuneless because I don't
particularly have a good voice but I can keep practicing and and use it in some weird way.
(27:13):
So what was your question again?
Well you're very interested in sound I'm curious to hear about the way you approach performing
the poem and particular in your bio writing about working with musicians to invent a new
way of working through sound together because I'm assuming there's a relationship between
this poem and that project.
Yes this poem is very deeply connected to that project so part of what I realized I
(27:37):
was doing which I didn't know until a musician told me is using a musical lexicon increasingly
and through this entire book and I wasn't I wasn't doing this before but I can continually
use a musical lexicon to talk about things that are not necessarily about music and I
think that was because I met a whole bunch of musicians while I was in Italy at this
(28:01):
artist residency and I started listening to what they were listening I started asking
a lot of questions probably a lot of dumb questions.
I didn't understand how contemporary classical work for example I might hear long spaces
of sound of silence as sound and I think that that's a very unclassical musical structure
(28:21):
I don't understand it I think that there is no melody and in fact I'm completely wrong
so it could be that someone is stretching out a melody so much that you can't really
hear my ears can't hear the melody so I realized that their ears were listening in a completely
different way than my ears and so every time I go to our artist residency now I recite
the poems differently one because the musicians have helped me one in particular has helped
(28:45):
me and she said slow down slow down and I already was relatively slow compared to how
most poets read and you have a lilt at the end of the line so I've always been careful
but I went much slower and I learned to use a different register of my voice which I didn't
know I had I just assumed I have a terrible voice and one musician said no you don't you
(29:06):
just are used to talking in your high nasally register and I have that too I just don't
use it so I started practicing and then I realized that the poems could sound better
and then I started thinking you know I want to do a collaboration because this one woman
asked me to do a collaboration and I thought oh she's really she's kind of legendary and
I was terrified and I thought no thank you and she wanted me to improvise so we're going
(29:32):
to do it and she's been teaching me but meanwhile since she lives in Amsterdam I started improvising
with a couple musicians in New York and I made it clear I had asked someone at the Brooklyn
I live in Brooklyn so I asked someone at the who runs the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
do you have a few musicians who'd be willing to work with me and you can let them know
that I don't want them to set my poems to music I mean how marvelous that would be that's
(29:54):
so nice and easy and fun but no I wanted to do the hard work of improving and to figure
out something new because I'm in trance and I know that my poems are musical but I don't
know what I'm doing so a couple guys agreed to work with me and I'm working with one man
in particular who we sit and talk for a long time and we just have a good vibe going and
(30:15):
then he kind of plays and I kind of talk and I try to go through poems which mostly don't
work so it's sort of an experiment in failure because it's mostly me learning how to improvise
as a musician improvises and of course the musician already knows how to improvise this
poem is about trying to write and have it not work so it's sort of a good poem in terms
(30:36):
of its theme to put into music and it works well because it's short and it's not as dense
as some of my other poems when using it in an improvisation and so most of these improvisations
work a little I've been able to improvise some and not be completely terrified we do
it in my living room and my goal is to perform because that is scary and difficult but why
(31:00):
am I doing this if not to get out of my comfortable skin.
I love hearing about that and it bringing you know what you mentioned about the poem
that sort of feeling of starting with this idea of failure because I like that there's
this simplicity of the poem that I don't know if it's intentional but I worked all day made
me think of Obad by Philip Larkin I work all day and come home half drunk at night my memory
(31:24):
is not helping me today but there's a simplicity to it and the abstraction of it and the rhymes
start fairly simple took look free me and then I love the rhyme ensembles and symbols
personality and harmonically it just it takes off and it has that that feeling of like trying
to work through something and then it just kind of it rises there's a Howard Nimeroff
(31:46):
poem because you asked about the line between prose and poetry it's a very short poem and
it's the last line that I'm thinking of here that I'm reminded of even though they they're
not the same line but they embody I think similar idea because you asked about the line
between prose and poetry sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle that while you watched
(32:09):
turned to pieces of snow writing a gradient invisible from silver a slant to random white
and slow there came a moment that you couldn't tell and then they clearly flew instead of
fell and it's that line the the move that feels like the move from the first few lines
and extended melodies to to where all of a sudden it takes off now thank you thank you
(32:33):
so much thank you and by the way I was reading Larkin Walls in Italy I love Larkin I love
his his his sad poems of old men dying and and so it could be that I that poem was in
my my head and I stole a lifted part of line I have no idea but that yeah it took a while
to write and it was maddening I would not stop I would not stop working on it but you
(32:55):
know it was it was made me mad well all the frustration paid off you got it there so are
are you ready to turn to the silliness oh definitely yes all right well the ad the ad
is a doozy before we get to the game we have an ad as always strap in folks it's a long
(33:16):
one it seems like the world is always expanding and what's been left behind for many of us
is basic geography that's why there is now the poet's atlas combining the names of world
capitals with the names of poets the poet's atlas will help you remember capitals of every
country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe do the poet's countries of origin line up with their
(33:38):
capitals of course not this is about geography not biography take for example the capital
of Belgium Brussels Edson or Cambodia Phnom Penh Warren or India many people think it's
Mumbai but it's actually New Delhi more Schwartz same with Canada for us provincial Americans
it's not Toronto it's auto one Felipe Herrera the list goes on and on Columbia Bogota mgun
(34:05):
the Democratic Republic of Congo why that's Philip Larkin Shassa Zimbabwe Harari at Mullen
Norway Oslo Symborska poets you've been amazing your friends for years with poems you've
memorized imagine that same skill with world capitals Mauritius Port Louis Simpson Iceland
Reykja Victor Hugo Brazil that's Brazil via Plath Morocco you might think the capital
(34:31):
is Tangier Ard Manley Hopkins but it's actually Rabat Frost the capital of the Netherlands
why that's AUSSIP Mandel Stamster damn okay I'm being told by the publisher of the poet's
atlas that I can't list every country in the world so let me remind you to buy the poet's
atlas edited by William Maxwell terrific I had a little too much I loved it my favorite
(34:56):
is Rabat Frost and Mandel Stammer yeah I had my friend did not laugh at the one I cut out
which was Washington DCD right pretty well good news you're still here for the recording
onto the game today we're playing a game I'm calling fittingly the undiscovered country
(35:16):
puzzles the will Diane you've lived all over the world in places as wild and distant as
New Jersey but in the theme how well can you name the home countries of poets I'm going
to give you a name and I'll ask you to tell me what country they're from basically born
in in a couple of cases and I want to emphasize first I made a long list of names first and
(35:38):
then tried to guess and I did horribly so I will this down to a much more gettable list
there aren't really that many tricky ones so there's no shame at least from my perspective
Diane meta are you ready to play the undiscovered country puzzles the will I am I'm going to
fail I can't wait well we'll see number one was well now I can't say her name was Lava
(36:00):
Zemborzka Poland Poland it is one for one number two Federico Garcia Lorca pain it is
Spain this I first whatever reason had it in my head that he was from South America
and then I paused for a second right I was thinking no I remember yeah yeah that was
(36:22):
like that's that's that one long that makes me remember oh yeah that's right number three
Mark Strand you like this is a trick question England he is for Canada and the reason I
know that is I actually on a previous episode had a Canadian comedian actually on the on
(36:43):
the show and the ad was something to do with the game of trying to name three Canadian
poets and of course everybody names Margaret Atwood but they could never get to the third
which I discovered was Mark Strand so Canadian comedian should go in that atlas it should
it should although I haven't enough difficulty getting out also man build standard stamp
(37:08):
stamp sturdy him number four Charles Simic country of birth so I'm looking for here
Slovenia very close geographically it's Serbia when I guess that I guessed first Slovenia
and then I guess Slovakia and then and then fine I'm just waiting number number five
(37:30):
Mandelstam Sturdam himself offset Mandelstam Russia Poland I okay I yeah we have the North
Pole with number one the South Pole with number five finally number six and you can answer
this anyway you want you Diane Mata I'm not trying to put you on the spot you can invent
something that's wholly fictional if you like I'm gonna say Bombay because you you know
(37:53):
why because I was looking at pictures the other day and I'm I saw something and I immediately
felt right back in Bombay like when you're a kid you have certain memories I was born
in Germany but it was only there six months nobody remembers that there's something about
having all my cousins around and and and being in a certain place first that makes a difference
(38:15):
even if my connection to it is so so far-reachingly in the background now it's such it's always
such a loaded question I mean I am from as prosaic of places anywhere Arkansas and when
people ask me that here where I'm from and I say Arkansas I can see a kind of cloud go
over their face and it's just like it used to be oh do you know Bill Clinton and now
(38:38):
it's just like this guy has to be stupid where where in Arkansas I've been to Arkansas so
isn't that crazy that is I would come into the Ozarks one little fancy art sea town in
the Ozarks so did you go to Crystal Bridges the art museum no so one of the Walton heirs
I think Alice Walton had an enormous private collection of art and decided to open a museum
(39:05):
which it's really incredible the range of what they have she had she had her met her
incredible collection and added a number of paintings as well and the one thing I'll praise
Walmart for and I don't know if this is still the case but the when they opened for 10 years
everyone could get in free because Walmart was basically footing the bill and helping
(39:25):
fund but it's it's in northwest Arkansas and when it opened I remember there was this review
of it in the in the New York Times that was huffy about the fact that it was in Arkansas
you know why should we have to get to northwest Arkansas for this right anyway oh I'm sorry
I didn't answer your question I was born in Pine Bluff and then grew up outside Little
Rock and went to school in Little Rock so I see I so I did actually go to junior high
(39:50):
with Chelsea Clinton which is my I see close and got to fame this is a story no one will
care about so we was in she was in a Christmas Carol she was the ghost of Christmas past
and it was during election season he had just won when we finally performed and we come
out for for our curtain call and it it's like this he was this magnet he's sort of sitting
(40:12):
right in the center of the crowd and everyone is turned toward him and trying to talk to
him and we're up there taking our bows and our cheap options and everything so your Secret
Service people around the whole time oh it was great yeah there was a Secret Service
person behind the scenes with us and he so there was an eight-year-old boy who got bussed
over to play Tiny Tim and half the time he was putting women's hats on the Secret Service
(40:37):
agent backstage it was it was strange apparently when she went to Stanford this is all the
Chelsea Clinton news you want the Secret Service guys were all dressed like they lived in Southern
California but you could see the earpieces they're like these big muscular guys in t-shirts
and shorts and dark glasses and they think they don't stand out exactly exactly they're
(41:00):
the people in the classes not taking notes well thank you so so very much for being here
is there anything you would like to say or plug before we sign off no I just want to
say thank you again from Randall Stansford him that's pretty good I spent a lot of time
going through poet names and in world capitals so everybody thanks for listening have a great
(41:20):
day go read some poems pets and dogs and support striking workers wherever you find them which
a quick note about that if you're curious where people are striking near you I'm adding
in the show notes from now on the labor action tracker which is kept by Cornell School of
International Labor Relations so many thanks to them for maintaining that site bye
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast.
(00:07):
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
On each episode, I invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like to talk about for
any reason.
We'll talk about what excites us, what delights us, maybe what frustrates us, and we'll follow
the poem and the conversation wherever they turn.
Afterward, our guest will share a poem of hers and then we'll have a little bit of
silliness end the game.
I'm delighted to have as my guest today, Diane Mehta.
(00:28):
Diane was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay in New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now
makes her home in New York City.
She's the author of two poetry collections, Tiny Extravaganza, out just last year from
Aerosmith Press, and Forest with Castanets from Four Way Books.
Her essay collection, Happy or Far, comes out next year, 2025, and new and recent work
(00:48):
is in the New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Canyon Review, American Poetry Review,
and A Public Space.
Her writing has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural
Foundation, and fellowships at Civitale Ranieri and Yato.
She was an editor at A Public Space, PEN America, and Guernica.
Her latest project is a poetry cycle connected to the Divine Comedy, as is the writer of the
(01:13):
poem she's brought in.
He's also connected to the Divine Comedy.
And she's also collaborating with musicians to invent a new way of working through sound
together and working on a long-term project with the New Chamber Ballet.
Diane, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, my pleasure.
So you've brought in Kieran Carson's ekphrastic poem, John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822.
(01:37):
Carson was an Irish poet born in Belfast, born in 1948, passed away in 2019.
I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about his poems and your relationship with
them.
You know, it's funny, I've become more of a fan in the last few years, and part of that
was accidental because I started thinking about the Inferno as I got into this Dante
project and then someone wanted me to talk about the Inferno.
(02:00):
I thought, really, I don't want to talk about the Inferno.
I want to talk about the Purgatorio.
And they kept insisting and insisting.
And then they suggested this translation when I said yes.
And I thought, no, I don't like his translation.
They said, why don't you like his translation?
And then it became this whole investigation of what he was doing, which is really about
music and about being Irish.
(02:21):
And of course, it's actually a very straightforward translation, even though it's kind of wacky.
And everything about Dante being translated is useful.
So I ended up liking it and it got me closer to his work.
And I started going back into older work where he had these longer, very dense city poems,
long lines.
And then he sort of moved away as he got into the early 2000s.
(02:43):
And maybe some of those are the poems I saw, the translations.
And then this particular book, Still Life, from which the poem John Constable's Study
of Clouds, 1822, is taken, this poem I've chosen, is in this perfect book that really
entranced me.
So there's something about this book that's an entirely whole book.
And it's coherent in the way that many books aren't and that perhaps his other books aren't.
(03:07):
Oh, that's really lovely.
I don't know his poems very well.
So I'm very glad that you've brought him in.
Before I ask you to read it, I did want to give just a little bit of brief context about
the Constable painting, which I'll link to in the show notes.
This is from the National Gallery of Victoria, which has the painting.
Clouds is one of around 50 extant paintings of the sky, which Constable made in Hampstead
(03:29):
between 1821 and 1822.
And it's been speculated that he produced more than 100 such studies at the time.
Constable made his intense examination, which he called Skying, to precisely record different
weather and atmospheric conditions in preparation for his grand landscapes.
Apparently saw clouds as essential to getting landscape right, which will end up being resonant
(03:52):
with the Carson poem.
So whenever you're ready, go ahead and read it.
John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822.
The sound of water escaping from mill dams, et cetera, willows, old rotten planks, slimy
(04:12):
posts and brickwork.
I love such things, said Constable.
Also trees and wind and clouds reflected in the water as shown by his limpid watermows
at Salisbury.
His father owned watermills and windmills.
He understood weather from childhood.
(04:35):
Of hail squalls in spring he had this to say.
The clouds accumulate in very large masses, and from their loftiness seem to move but
slowly.
Immediately, on these large clouds appear numerous opaque patches, which are only small
(04:57):
clouds passing rapidly before them.
Those floating much nearer the earth may perhaps fall in with a stronger current of wind, which
drives them with greater rapidity from light to shade through the lanes of the clouds.
Hence they are called by windmillers and sailors messengers, and always portend bad weather.
(05:27):
Therefore Constable learned the craft of chiaroscuro.
Ten years ago it was your going through what had to be gone through.
First the little blip, then the bigger blip.
We'd scan the clouds for whatever augury they bore.
Clouds that bloom and dim from marble sheen to darks of silver at the edges, in the throes
(05:55):
of being and becoming, shown what showed on the screen we wondered what do we know of
our bodies, the internal country undiscovered until now and then not understood.
Now it has befallen me to go through what will be.
(06:17):
We gaze into the clouds and listen to the sound of water in the waterworks.
I open a book to see what Constable recorded one day on Hampstead Heath, 31st September
10 to 11 o'clock morning, looking eastward, a gentle wind to the east.
(06:38):
The moving cumulus caught on the fly between hand and eye study as in an act of learning.
Let's say a happenstance of Constable and cloud, the final picture, uninterpretable,
quasi shapely cauliflower plump with just a hint of dark top right to prove the chiaroscuro.
(07:05):
I love the patience that you read that with.
I feel like it captures something about there are certain kinds of echoes of sound in the
poem, but we'll get there.
I'm curious just what the main reason you chose this poem is.
There are a few reasons and I didn't know them all when I chose them.
The very first reason is that it was much shorter than the other poems and I didn't
want to take too much of your time because many of these poems are three or four pages
(07:28):
like his early poems.
Some go on for a very long time and it's hard to follow.
These are all about paintings.
I thought study of clouds, even if people are listening and they can't see the painting
right away, they know what a study of clouds looks like.
It's a painting that allows for a lot of imagination and possibility because clouds can be anything
(07:49):
and we always imagine forms in clouds.
He's a guy who's kind of interested in forms and frameworks and then as the poem moves,
he has these matching sounds as he's very good at, but these lines are much looser.
Instead of getting too talky, he kind of sticks to the main idea and he's got this very technical,
(08:09):
factual, research-driven approach to all the poems in this book, but really to this one
in the sense of he's focused on messenger and study and this list of fact over fact
over fact as a way of trying to understand what's happening and what is life.
This big question at the end is just very dreamy, what is, what will be since there's
(08:33):
no idea, but I like the way he had the clouds in the background and other clouds moving
in front of that so you get a dimension which he's very good at and that reflects the chiaroscuro.
It's a poem that allows for a lot of things and that's very technical and very detailed
and may not be necessarily the best poem in this book and I really don't like the last
(08:53):
two lines, but I didn't mind that they kind of made it fail a little bit.
This book is not really about failures but about endings and so in his way, he has failed
a little bit, he has failed to produce what he wanted to in the last four years of his
life or so and then he got his diagnosis as he says on the next page in the next poem,
(09:14):
he did not write anything publishable for four years until he got his diagnosis and
then he produced this book and he was happy and he went back to his long lines, except
they were looser because he was more mature.
Well I really, we'll talk about the last two lines in just a moment because there's something
I like about them but I also don't feel that they fit the poem exactly.
(09:36):
What I love about the poem is the kind of sleight of hand in a way that for the first
half of the poem, so much of it is quoting Constable and it reads like a fairly straightforward
acrostic poem and then the idea therefore Constable learned the craft of chiaroscuro
moves us into this thing that has been so impossible for him to understand.
(09:58):
It was going through what had to be gone through, the little blip, the bigger blip and it's
as if he's trying to use Constable as a way of understanding something that is otherwise
not understandable to him and so all these things from the first half of the poem suddenly
resonate light to shade, very large masses, there are all kinds of phrases that kind of
(10:20):
echo, but tell me what you dislike and I'll reread the last two lines, quasi shapely,
cauliflower plump with just a hint of dark top right to prove the chiaroscuro.
So what do you dislike about those lines?
Okay, I'll tell you first what I like about that line.
I like the monosyllabic with just a hint of dark top right.
So he's very good at meter and he's very good at timing so he got that right and he
(10:44):
did that well.
I guess the word quasi, this sort of Latinate scientific lifeless verb feels strange right
in the beginning and quasi shapely, it's a strange spondee that kind of grabs you in
the beginning of the last line of the poem that should be a summing up and this is a
(11:04):
kind of big question and in that a question is a kind of summing up that it makes sense
but this digresses from that and goes in an opposite direction so there's a lot of big
fat syllables I guess, the cauliflower plump, the quasi shapely, there's so much, it's a
mouthful to say those syllables, quasi shapely, cauliflower plump, even cauliflower plump,
(11:27):
you think that that sound would have been unhappy to him, he would have been, that sound
would have been not welcome in his vocabulary, in his diction because he matches things,
he connects things, he's got a lot of tk tk tk, but he's got a beat going and he's got
a rhythm and a music and this moves away from the music and the way he phrases things in
(11:51):
the way that I understand and it really just sort of stops me, I kind of get stalled, like
in the beginning I think it's about eight lines down earlier when he says of hail squalls
in spring, it has a thickness there too, you have syllables piled up, that doesn't stop
you, he has some assonance, he's moving around the vowels a little bit, hail squalls in spring
(12:13):
and so he could have done something like that here, so I just don't understand why he would
have, of all the forms he wants to see in these clouds or might see, why he ended up
putting a cauliflower in our minds.
I was wondering about that because part of it is that the sound is, it's enjoyable outside
the context of the poem, all the P's and it's sort of strangeness of the image, but it's
(12:36):
so different from the music of the rest of the poem and not in a way that feels like
it's built up to, so I love the kind of echoes we get, his father owned water mills and windmills,
he understood weather from childhood, but we'd scan the clouds for whatever augury they
bore, clouds that bloom and dim from marble sheen to darks of silver at the edges in the
(12:57):
throes of being and becoming, and there's a straightforwardness to the language and
a simplicity to the language and quasi-shapely cauliflower plump feels just like it's from
a different poem.
The only connection I can make is that, and I don't know the nature of the illness he's
referring to.
I think it was lung cancer.
(13:19):
Lung cancer, okay.
Then my reading makes no sense because I've seen the brain compared to a cauliflower.
That's the only kind of connection I can make.
It would, I might be wrong, that was just my quick search.
I know it was cancer because he talks about chemo in the beginning, but I thought it was
lung cancer.
But it's a nice image, it doesn't really matter, you can read what you want into it
because there's something wrong, right?
(13:39):
There's something very wrong.
Cancer is this bulbous, tumorous thing in your body.
It ends in the right place movement-wise in that we get, or I feel, the final picture
uninterpretable.
The thing is, I don't like the poem any less for it.
Everything he's doing is fantastic.
(13:59):
Plenty of poems go off the road a little bit somewhere.
Everything that builds up to that I really, really love.
Well, those lines that you just quoted are some of the, really, they're just marvelous.
The augury, just again, the word augury, so much turns on that word augury in these clouds.
You're thinking about these clouds and you have all this information and then suddenly
it's an augury and then that brings back something Homeric, that brings back myth and legend
(14:23):
and he's pulling himself into the past and connecting himself.
There is something to the kind of Homeric simile in here too, so that maybe accidentally
connects.
The Homeric simile that I was thinking about connected, the augury brings him back to the
Homeric idea of similes and from looking at it I kept thinking, well, the clouds of constable
(14:46):
are like the clouds of cancerous cells that appear on an x-ray screen.
We read what we want into it, but there is this grand simile behind it, something big
and grand is happening, the end of life, and you have something very specific and research-driven
just like these clouds and then he brings in this weird simile and wraps it in.
(15:06):
So he's not unfamiliar with everything that's out there before him.
So the comparisons and the metaphors and the way he moves seemed resonant to me.
And the poem is, I think, set up to, so we make those kinds of connections because it's
almost exactly halfway through that it turns from the constable painting to the illness
(15:27):
and the ailment.
What's so fascinating is the way in which it touches on the illness only a little bit.
It creates the emotional depth with things like the internal country undiscovered until
now and then not understood, but then almost immediately turns back to constable.
And psychologically it's just this fascinating way of trying to talk about something that
(15:51):
feels impossible to talk about, the depth of the terror of death and illness and that
constable provides him a way of trying to understand it, but ultimately is not a complete
way of understanding it.
That's a beautiful way of thinking about it.
If you think about the clouds, you think about death and you think about sky or snow or clouds,
it somehow makes it seem a little better.
(16:12):
I remember once being at the very top of a mountain overlooking many valleys of other
mountains in Aspen and I thought, oh, here I feel so close to the sky and somehow this
idea of death felt a little more comforting versus down in the city or wherever we are
in our homes, in our beds thinking about the other people.
(16:33):
Here you're removed from people in the clouds, I don't take you somewhere else.
That's a lovely idea and that turn right in the middle is kind of, it sort of fascinates
me like with his earlier work, he has these associative leaps that keep the poem going
and going and going and even in some of his prose too and they're punctuated rhythmically
and over time, durationally with music so that's how he does it and I saw that he did
(16:57):
this turn here.
I mean you have sound in the beginning of the poem, sound at the end of the poem, you
have the word chiaroscuro in the middle and then somewhere else right at the end and then
he turns from the craft of chiaroscuro to 10 years ago which is associated, like there's
really not much of a link there but if you look at it you think, oh, is he punning here
because there's a rhyme, chiaroscuro 10 years ago and I thought he wouldn't have not recognized
(17:22):
that and he might have thought maybe that's fun but it's just sort of like that link that
you pointed out I noticed as well.
It's funny, it makes me think of and I don't think it's intended to evoke this but a way
of thinking of it is I've had a therapist tell me that one way of thinking about mood
is that it is like the clouds, the blue sky is always there and the clouds kind of pass
(17:43):
and you always end up being able to see the blue sky again and so there's this interesting
sense of scale that it was you're going through what had to be gone through, that there has
to be some kind of acceptance that it's going to happen.
First the little blip and then the bigger blip and blip is such a great word choice
because the blip as a word it's pointing to something so small and yet here the scale
(18:05):
of what it's changing in their lives is so grand.
He's turning on that like a beat again like something you would do as a fiddler or something
as a flutist, you get a note.
Yeah.
By the way I think we should have the same therapist because I have that same metaphor
going.
I feel like therapists have a limited backpack of metaphors and sayings.
(18:33):
On a previous episode I was talking with my friend Will Callahan and I think I mentioned
the Wild Geese Mary Oliver poem that ends in what will you do with your one wild and
wild, I've already forgotten the word life and Will said, you know I was in the hospital
once and that quote was everywhere.
(18:53):
I feel like it's unfortunately for Mary Oliver it feels like it's become co-opted as a kind
of mental health statement the same way with the clouds.
I wanted to just briefly reference I love the phrase internal country undiscovered sent
me back to the the Hamlet Salo Cui which if people were trying to place it.
It took me a minute to place it because of the inversion that it's not undiscovered country
(19:16):
but the country undiscovered.
Who would fartals bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something
after death the undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns puzzles the
will.
Hearing that echo helps it for me land that sense of heaviness that death is on the mind
(19:37):
and there's that fear that comes with this kind of serious illness.
It's very moving and I like the way you tied it to Hamlet.
I actually didn't even notice.
I was just focused on the map implicit right there.
Where you said internal country undiscovered.
I thought oh he's going back to his map metaphor because everything in his early work seems
to be about a map.
He's a city poet.
He's a walking poet and he often looks at things from an aerial view and this is the
(20:00):
other direction.
So he's looking at things from below up to the sky instead of looking from a hilltop
down on Belfast and recognizing all the things that frame this painting.
The pub and the this and the that and the bomb here and the this there.
So he connects to literature in a really deep way.
(20:22):
He connects to everything that came before.
He connects to music and in terms of not knowing what's out there and the fear of death I was
looking through his prose book which is this prose book about Irish music which is sort
of a memoir but it's fun.
It's called Last Night's Fun.
He's got so many quotes in here that kind of counteract and contradict some of the things
(20:46):
he says and his fears.
For example there was a line just in the middle of the book, a better time elsewhere is mere
illusion.
So I thought he's okay with this after all.
And then you know in terms of the the syntax I found something else and he was talking
about music and there are dialects of moods, decors, atmospheres and ambiances.
(21:10):
And he's doing that here too.
He does that in his early poems.
I think he moved away from it in some of the middle poems because they're very thin small
poems and he seems utterly lost like without a map.
But the dialects are in here, literally dialects.
The mood changes when you get the blip as you notice.
That blip is kind of like a turning point.
And then he's wondering and then he's not so sure but he's also okay and then he turns
(21:33):
everything into a cauliflower.
Not terrible mood.
He's walking around Belfast around the waterworks with his wife and they're having their own
private conversation and they're making the most of their time.
He's making the most of his time.
He's like I'm gonna make this really coherent book and each one will be a painting and if
you think about it like he's putting himself in this painting.
(21:54):
He's putting himself in these clouds.
And the thing that I always think about death is well this person died too.
I mean that's a ridiculous way to think but it's also not a terrible way to think.
I think well John the Constable is also dead.
Shakespeare is also dead.
All these other people before me are dead.
I also have to die.
So if you connect yourself to other artists and other times somehow it doesn't seem as
bad.
(22:15):
Well it's interesting thinking about the kind of painting.
The Constable painting is the kind of painting that's very easy to project yourself into
because it's painted as that view.
It's totally apart from landscape otherwise.
It is simply this vision of the clouds that for most viewers could be anywhere.
For him it's very much studying the sky over Hampstead day after day and doing study after
(22:39):
study but it is the sort of painting that you can look at and you can be in its landscape
because it's so simple and all we see are the clouds.
It's true and you know the future he has to live through.
You can be in the clouds, you can choose to be in the clouds.
I like actually associating landscape with a place that people can go once they die.
(23:00):
I have one friend who I associate with the snow in Colorado and her ashes there.
For a long time I thought my mother's I couldn't figure out where my mother went after she
died so I thought well she might as well be on the moon.
So I would look at the moon I think.
She could be on the moon.
That's where she is.
So it's sort of a nice concrete way to imagine people.
(23:21):
You know when I go swimming at the YMCA for a long time and I don't swim as much lately
but I'll go underwater and I'll see nothing but blue and my mind will empty.
Sort of like these skies and these clouds and then I think well my friend can be here
so I will meet her underwater and you can choose to go there.
So if you and I look up at the clouds maybe we will see Karen Carson more often now.
(23:46):
That's really lovely.
I love that.
One last thing I want to note about the poem before we turn to your poem is that so much
of the poem is turned over to Constable's language and it works incredibly well.
Like it seems like that's always a risk and yet I feel that it's similar to Carson's
(24:07):
language while being distinct especially this long quote.
The clouds accumulate in very large masses and from their loftiness seem to move but
slowly.
Immediately on these large clouds appear numerous opaque patches which are only small clouds
passing rapidly before them.
I think the lineation is helping in part with the kind of music he's interested in and it
(24:29):
goes on for several more lines which seems pretty amazing to me.
That's a thing to have in a poem include.
And the lines sort of flow.
They're mellifluous the way he can be mellifluous and then he has stops or stopping points here
and there before and after.
But you know that's a huge chunk of the beginning of the poem.
(24:50):
And they're in these unraveling unrolling unspooling lines.
But you have these choices of words that he might choose himself.
Opaque patches you know there's a music to that.
Well let's turn to your poem now Extended Melodies which is from Tiny Extravaganza.
Extended Melodies.
(25:11):
I worked all day but nothing took not even thought would take a look not still.
Nostling that was me mattered much too long less too long less and multiple multiple free.
(25:39):
I kept it up and orchestrated some ensembles.
Cello birds song violin auto tuned it added symbols and got the curve and score of personality
(26:03):
wrong my pitch to live harmonically clatterings and shatterings.
Soundings universal escape my ears pursuing joy enjoying trouble.
(26:25):
Thank you.
I have to ask immediately about the singing and also the echo of tuneless and then repeated
tuneless and same with multiple because that's not on the page and so I'm very curious it's
also in your bio about for you the relationship between music and this poem and particularly
the way that you are intoning it.
Did I repeat tuneless and multiple?
You did you did you said tuneless and then you sang tuneless and then multiple and then
(26:49):
you you hit multiple in a higher pitch.
Oh yes I did so sometimes I'm trying to get the word tuneless to be tuneless and sometimes
I'm trying to get it to be in tune and I can't decide so that was part of my indecision so
that was partly accidental but maybe it works.
I thought it's I thought it was useful to start singing on tuneless because I don't
particularly have a good voice but I can keep practicing and and use it in some weird way.
(27:13):
So what was your question again?
Well you're very interested in sound I'm curious to hear about the way you approach performing
the poem and particular in your bio writing about working with musicians to invent a new
way of working through sound together because I'm assuming there's a relationship between
this poem and that project.
Yes this poem is very deeply connected to that project so part of what I realized I
(27:37):
was doing which I didn't know until a musician told me is using a musical lexicon increasingly
and through this entire book and I wasn't I wasn't doing this before but I can continually
use a musical lexicon to talk about things that are not necessarily about music and I
think that was because I met a whole bunch of musicians while I was in Italy at this
(28:01):
artist residency and I started listening to what they were listening I started asking
a lot of questions probably a lot of dumb questions.
I didn't understand how contemporary classical work for example I might hear long spaces
of sound of silence as sound and I think that that's a very unclassical musical structure
(28:21):
I don't understand it I think that there is no melody and in fact I'm completely wrong
so it could be that someone is stretching out a melody so much that you can't really
hear my ears can't hear the melody so I realized that their ears were listening in a completely
different way than my ears and so every time I go to our artist residency now I recite
the poems differently one because the musicians have helped me one in particular has helped
(28:45):
me and she said slow down slow down and I already was relatively slow compared to how
most poets read and you have a lilt at the end of the line so I've always been careful
but I went much slower and I learned to use a different register of my voice which I didn't
know I had I just assumed I have a terrible voice and one musician said no you don't you
(29:06):
just are used to talking in your high nasally register and I have that too I just don't
use it so I started practicing and then I realized that the poems could sound better
and then I started thinking you know I want to do a collaboration because this one woman
asked me to do a collaboration and I thought oh she's really she's kind of legendary and
I was terrified and I thought no thank you and she wanted me to improvise so we're going
(29:32):
to do it and she's been teaching me but meanwhile since she lives in Amsterdam I started improvising
with a couple musicians in New York and I made it clear I had asked someone at the Brooklyn
I live in Brooklyn so I asked someone at the who runs the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
do you have a few musicians who'd be willing to work with me and you can let them know
that I don't want them to set my poems to music I mean how marvelous that would be that's
(29:54):
so nice and easy and fun but no I wanted to do the hard work of improving and to figure
out something new because I'm in trance and I know that my poems are musical but I don't
know what I'm doing so a couple guys agreed to work with me and I'm working with one man
in particular who we sit and talk for a long time and we just have a good vibe going and
(30:15):
then he kind of plays and I kind of talk and I try to go through poems which mostly don't
work so it's sort of an experiment in failure because it's mostly me learning how to improvise
as a musician improvises and of course the musician already knows how to improvise this
poem is about trying to write and have it not work so it's sort of a good poem in terms
(30:36):
of its theme to put into music and it works well because it's short and it's not as dense
as some of my other poems when using it in an improvisation and so most of these improvisations
work a little I've been able to improvise some and not be completely terrified we do
it in my living room and my goal is to perform because that is scary and difficult but why
(31:00):
am I doing this if not to get out of my comfortable skin.
I love hearing about that and it bringing you know what you mentioned about the poem
that sort of feeling of starting with this idea of failure because I like that there's
this simplicity of the poem that I don't know if it's intentional but I worked all day made
me think of Obad by Philip Larkin I work all day and come home half drunk at night my memory
(31:24):
is not helping me today but there's a simplicity to it and the abstraction of it and the rhymes
start fairly simple took look free me and then I love the rhyme ensembles and symbols
personality and harmonically it just it takes off and it has that that feeling of like trying
to work through something and then it just kind of it rises there's a Howard Nimeroff
(31:46):
poem because you asked about the line between prose and poetry it's a very short poem and
it's the last line that I'm thinking of here that I'm reminded of even though they they're
not the same line but they embody I think similar idea because you asked about the line
between prose and poetry sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle that while you watched
(32:09):
turned to pieces of snow writing a gradient invisible from silver a slant to random white
and slow there came a moment that you couldn't tell and then they clearly flew instead of
fell and it's that line the the move that feels like the move from the first few lines
and extended melodies to to where all of a sudden it takes off now thank you thank you
(32:33):
so much thank you and by the way I was reading Larkin Walls in Italy I love Larkin I love
his his his sad poems of old men dying and and so it could be that I that poem was in
my my head and I stole a lifted part of line I have no idea but that yeah it took a while
to write and it was maddening I would not stop I would not stop working on it but you
(32:55):
know it was it was made me mad well all the frustration paid off you got it there so are
are you ready to turn to the silliness oh definitely yes all right well the ad the ad
is a doozy before we get to the game we have an ad as always strap in folks it's a long
(33:16):
one it seems like the world is always expanding and what's been left behind for many of us
is basic geography that's why there is now the poet's atlas combining the names of world
capitals with the names of poets the poet's atlas will help you remember capitals of every
country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe do the poet's countries of origin line up with their
(33:38):
capitals of course not this is about geography not biography take for example the capital
of Belgium Brussels Edson or Cambodia Phnom Penh Warren or India many people think it's
Mumbai but it's actually New Delhi more Schwartz same with Canada for us provincial Americans
it's not Toronto it's auto one Felipe Herrera the list goes on and on Columbia Bogota mgun
(34:05):
the Democratic Republic of Congo why that's Philip Larkin Shassa Zimbabwe Harari at Mullen
Norway Oslo Symborska poets you've been amazing your friends for years with poems you've
memorized imagine that same skill with world capitals Mauritius Port Louis Simpson Iceland
Reykja Victor Hugo Brazil that's Brazil via Plath Morocco you might think the capital
(34:31):
is Tangier Ard Manley Hopkins but it's actually Rabat Frost the capital of the Netherlands
why that's AUSSIP Mandel Stamster damn okay I'm being told by the publisher of the poet's
atlas that I can't list every country in the world so let me remind you to buy the poet's
atlas edited by William Maxwell terrific I had a little too much I loved it my favorite
(34:56):
is Rabat Frost and Mandel Stammer yeah I had my friend did not laugh at the one I cut out
which was Washington DCD right pretty well good news you're still here for the recording
onto the game today we're playing a game I'm calling fittingly the undiscovered country
(35:16):
puzzles the will Diane you've lived all over the world in places as wild and distant as
New Jersey but in the theme how well can you name the home countries of poets I'm going
to give you a name and I'll ask you to tell me what country they're from basically born
in in a couple of cases and I want to emphasize first I made a long list of names first and
(35:38):
then tried to guess and I did horribly so I will this down to a much more gettable list
there aren't really that many tricky ones so there's no shame at least from my perspective
Diane meta are you ready to play the undiscovered country puzzles the will I am I'm going to
fail I can't wait well we'll see number one was well now I can't say her name was Lava
(36:00):
Zemborzka Poland Poland it is one for one number two Federico Garcia Lorca pain it is
Spain this I first whatever reason had it in my head that he was from South America
and then I paused for a second right I was thinking no I remember yeah yeah that was
(36:22):
like that's that's that one long that makes me remember oh yeah that's right number three
Mark Strand you like this is a trick question England he is for Canada and the reason I
know that is I actually on a previous episode had a Canadian comedian actually on the on
(36:43):
the show and the ad was something to do with the game of trying to name three Canadian
poets and of course everybody names Margaret Atwood but they could never get to the third
which I discovered was Mark Strand so Canadian comedian should go in that atlas it should
it should although I haven't enough difficulty getting out also man build standard stamp
(37:08):
stamp sturdy him number four Charles Simic country of birth so I'm looking for here
Slovenia very close geographically it's Serbia when I guess that I guessed first Slovenia
and then I guess Slovakia and then and then fine I'm just waiting number number five
(37:30):
Mandelstam Sturdam himself offset Mandelstam Russia Poland I okay I yeah we have the North
Pole with number one the South Pole with number five finally number six and you can answer
this anyway you want you Diane Mata I'm not trying to put you on the spot you can invent
something that's wholly fictional if you like I'm gonna say Bombay because you you know
(37:53):
why because I was looking at pictures the other day and I'm I saw something and I immediately
felt right back in Bombay like when you're a kid you have certain memories I was born
in Germany but it was only there six months nobody remembers that there's something about
having all my cousins around and and and being in a certain place first that makes a difference
(38:15):
even if my connection to it is so so far-reachingly in the background now it's such it's always
such a loaded question I mean I am from as prosaic of places anywhere Arkansas and when
people ask me that here where I'm from and I say Arkansas I can see a kind of cloud go
over their face and it's just like it used to be oh do you know Bill Clinton and now
(38:38):
it's just like this guy has to be stupid where where in Arkansas I've been to Arkansas so
isn't that crazy that is I would come into the Ozarks one little fancy art sea town in
the Ozarks so did you go to Crystal Bridges the art museum no so one of the Walton heirs
I think Alice Walton had an enormous private collection of art and decided to open a museum
(39:05):
which it's really incredible the range of what they have she had she had her met her
incredible collection and added a number of paintings as well and the one thing I'll praise
Walmart for and I don't know if this is still the case but the when they opened for 10 years
everyone could get in free because Walmart was basically footing the bill and helping
(39:25):
fund but it's it's in northwest Arkansas and when it opened I remember there was this review
of it in the in the New York Times that was huffy about the fact that it was in Arkansas
you know why should we have to get to northwest Arkansas for this right anyway oh I'm sorry
I didn't answer your question I was born in Pine Bluff and then grew up outside Little
Rock and went to school in Little Rock so I see I so I did actually go to junior high
(39:50):
with Chelsea Clinton which is my I see close and got to fame this is a story no one will
care about so we was in she was in a Christmas Carol she was the ghost of Christmas past
and it was during election season he had just won when we finally performed and we come
out for for our curtain call and it it's like this he was this magnet he's sort of sitting
(40:12):
right in the center of the crowd and everyone is turned toward him and trying to talk to
him and we're up there taking our bows and our cheap options and everything so your Secret
Service people around the whole time oh it was great yeah there was a Secret Service
person behind the scenes with us and he so there was an eight-year-old boy who got bussed
over to play Tiny Tim and half the time he was putting women's hats on the Secret Service
(40:37):
agent backstage it was it was strange apparently when she went to Stanford this is all the
Chelsea Clinton news you want the Secret Service guys were all dressed like they lived in Southern
California but you could see the earpieces they're like these big muscular guys in t-shirts
and shorts and dark glasses and they think they don't stand out exactly exactly they're
(41:00):
the people in the classes not taking notes well thank you so so very much for being here
is there anything you would like to say or plug before we sign off no I just want to
say thank you again from Randall Stansford him that's pretty good I spent a lot of time
going through poet names and in world capitals so everybody thanks for listening have a great
(41:20):
day go read some poems pets and dogs and support striking workers wherever you find them which
a quick note about that if you're curious where people are striking near you I'm adding
in the show notes from now on the labor action tracker which is kept by Cornell School of
International Labor Relations so many thanks to them for maintaining that site bye
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