After Storm Katie: a poem

  for Tracy, after twenty years of Cambridge

Getting out. Good for physical and mental health.

And the coal tit ratcheting up so local and yet we know

that refrain from Swabia. Shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Humans validate their omnivorous desire for presence

in the global and the local, the near and far. Polyamorous 

for place. So I am walking the route as if it’s my route 

mapped onto my psyche — out towards Madingley. But 

the gigantic West Cambridge University Estate is becoming

and Seven Pillars arch over the incomplete buildings:

seven yellow cranes facing away from south-westerlies

dying off with sunset. The entire south has been ‘battered’

into a weird submissiveness, and semantics and intonation

and subtext and double-meanings ramp up the translation.

The ground is being trained, the domestic brutalised by

the forces of God which have bizarrely become our forces.

We control the weather by inverted default. We are pantheistic

and pandemic and universal. All at once. I think this, marvelling

the Seven Pillars have stayed upright, their long arms reaching

towards tomorrow’s sunrise as the planet skews a little more,

and those concrete counterweights heavy as security. Into the sun,

then buffering it through the back of my head, the roads hiss

as all come out to play and unbroken daffodils look to their roots.

  John Kinsella

Now that April's (almost) there...

By Tracy

This northern spring marks twenty years since John & I first came to Cambridge together  (we'd been two years married at that point).

Photo by Tim Kinsella

In the grounds of Churchill College

Today, back here after Germany, we met the same beautiful spring weather as twenty years ago (though it's due to turn not-so-lovely from tomorrow).

Churchill daffodils, 2016

Daffodils are out everywhere, and in town the Easter crowds have been enjoying the sunshine.

Here's a section from a poem John wrote in Cambridge back in the early days here, in 1996, and published in Fenland Pastorals (Prest Root Press, 1998)... The poem is called "Triptych: Poems from Churchill College, Cambridge".

3. Seed Cases 

                        for Tracy

Dark clouds thicken overhead

but there's not enough moisture

in the air to prevent the cracking

of seed cases: that crackling

like fire in undergrowth,

or water exploding on hot metal.

A partial collusion of the elements—

only the fifth element missing,

as if the eponymous has no part

in the moment. You hear the seed cases

opening and searching your memory

for a name, a species, find nothing.

But it's a familiar sound—it brings back

Dryandra Forest in the South-West

of Australia. Even the hemisphere

is different. The brain struggles

with location. It's the moment

of aloneness that's captured you,

when nameless plants execute

their cycles. People are absent.

A robin glows nearby. You know

its name and it knows yours. It is wary

and you remain still. The seed falls
and covers friable earth like snow.

And here's one from my early Cambridge days, again an extract from a longer sequence called "Noli Me Tangere", written at Easter in 1996 and published in The Willing Eye (Fremantle Press & Bloodaxe, 1999 & 2000). (Back then I was still working my way out of the Christian faith in which I had grown up; I now have no belief in formal religion. Doubt was showing in the fuller version of this poem...) Note that the fickle Cambridge weather is in there already! The seasons no longer offering stable metaphors were a reference to the fact that climate change was already very noticeable, back when we had no Google yet and email was brand new to us.


5
Faith blows hot & cold
as Cambridge in spring
where late snow dissipates
before reaching any surface
where nothing penetrates

where those who drank in
yesterday's sun
are caught out now, ill-dressed
for this fickleness,

for this world whose seasons
no longer offer
stable metaphors for
spiritual states.

But then you were never
afraid of change
God of transitions
God of this Easter

constant & steadfast only
in your refusal
to be pinned there.


One of the things John likes about Churchill College is that its chapel is ecumenical (in fact his play "Ecumenical" was performed in that chapel in 2012, directed by Tim Cribb).

And here's a pic of the two of us in the early Cambridge days, in the same flats where we are now and have spent much time over those 20 years. (John used to get a lot more sun in those days, before skin cancers took their toll!)

Photo by Bettina Keil

World’s End

            after Jakob van Hoddis’s expressionist poem

The sharp-headed citizen grasps at his flying headdress.

A hell of a racket is busting out from here to there.

The roofs are too steep for the tilers split asunder.

Watching the news we are rudely confronted by rising seas.

The storm is upon us, demented waves pole-vault

Beaches and thrust inland to take out the dams.

Most of us have runny noses, which goes with the gestalt.

Coal-bearing rails cascade down from railway bridges.

            John Kinsella

Note: Jakob van Hoddis (Hans Davidsohn) was born in 1887 to a German-Jewish family in Berlin and was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. He published one book of poetry during his lifetime, Weltende, in 1918, though his poetry was collected in 1958. He was resident for some years 'in care' (he suffered from schizophrenia) in Tübingen. There are public steps named after him in Tübingen (that were earlier named after a Nazi doctor, but finally renamed in 1992), and also a plaque on a residential building to mark where he lived. It is not far from where we are staying. The 'expressionist' poem 'Weltende' of which I offer a version (above — I have taken great liberties, but it seems such a prescient poem that I think it works as a commentary on human environmental impact), was published in 1911, and had significant influence on innovative German-language poetry of the time. Hoddis was unable to escape Germany with the rest of his family to Tel Aviv in 1933 due to the British authorities refusing him an entry certificate on the grounds of his mental health condition. The German Wikipedia entry carries far more information on him than the English version.

Temporariness (2): Photography

            by John Kinsella

I drag and drop my terms from a previous investigation of presence into this ‘new’ one, or into this present one. The multiplicities of polysituatedness, the echoes, murmurs and stains of temporariness. Here for a relatively short time, but not briefly, as I have been before, I am present ‘in company’. My company is more than my own, and as I age, I age with someone else. Tracy and I share much of origins in common. Ancestry, locality, the same television programmes as children, and decades together. We etch-o-sketch each other’s spatial and temporal presences. We overlap. And here, in Tübingen, we overlap in our temporariness. Both of us record our presence and observations of the town and environs in our own way — directly, indirectly — but we are also observed by others alone and together. We do not know what these observations, maybe recordings, mean, but they are there. We are background to the State’s (attempted, at least) observations of all who pass through, and we are in dozens of photographs taken by visitors and residents. The old town is a town that is photographed. The machine is used to capture, but each face or back-of-the-head caught by the machine escapes the function of the machine. Mostly, photographers won’t notice the detail till later. And even then, they might well look around the ‘distractions’, the incidentals in the photos, to see what they want to see. One might be photoshopped out of existence, out of the time marked at the bottom of the image. I have Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project on my lap, opened to the section on photography. I am recollecting and tracing because I want to show a poem is not a photograph. Not for me. Is it really for any poet? It might be referred to as such by a critic, as an insult, or maybe as an act of détournement by the poet, or as a commentary on how a photo sees and is seen as opposed to a poem. A sequence of poems: Photographs on... or Snapshots of... Already the title ironises or at least ‘sets up’ the way we frame the poems that follow. All that is seen in the moment. But then, the still photograph in the next frame. Or run together through a slideshow, a different kind of movement, a disrupting film. Benjamin: ‘Symptom, it would seem, of a profound displacement: painting must submit to being measured by the standard of photography: ‘We will be in agreement with public in admiring... the fine artist who... has appeared this year with a painting capable of holding its own, in point of delicacy, with daguerrian prints.’ This assessment of Meissonnier from Auguste Galimard's Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1850, p. 95, cited in Benjamin, p. 685). This is followed by ‘Photography in verse’ — synonym for description in verse. Edouard Fournier, Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris (Paris, 1864, pp. 14-15, in Benjamin, p. 685). And, of course, one must reference the referencing of this by saying The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann; Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1999, p. 685). Whose reference system is this? I track my journey and you can follow, too. Scrutiny, gate-keeping, appropriate behaviour. See me as others might see me. See us as others would see us. But let’s go back a few pages, altering the sequence (dipping in?), and read: ‘One of the — often unspoken — objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine. This the sentiment of Delacroix in particular’ (op. cit. p. 678). Why do I go here? Well, the strands of belonging and unbelonging take me to the photo Tracy is taking — I am there again, NOW — of me on the Neckar Island outside, across the river from the Hölderlin tower. Not outside, really, but almost opposite. At a slight angle, to avoid getting others in the shot — dogs and their walkers, people discussing their problems. We are in the alleyway of plane trees, 

JK photographed by Tracy Ryan; Hölderlin tower behind

the same trees Hölderlin  would have looked onto out across the river, in their youth. The island. I feel most connected to both my aloneness and my sharing of life-space on islands. It was absence of family on Cocos; with family on La Réunion; with family again here, on this small river-island. The ancient trees have been tagged with graffiti. Between the old town keeping an eye on, and the new town eyeing off? Both, really. Crocuses are out. There are no four seasons anymore, not even here, and the prompts to emergence are conflicted.

Tracy takes all the photos of our presences beyond Jam Tree Gully. She carries the camera. She embraced digital photography very early on not in praise of technology — she shares my doubts, objections and often refusals — but because this way she could get around the issue of animal products in the manufacture of film and developing of photographs. I think of this as she snaps my photo. As a child, I did all I could to avoid being photographed. There are quite a few childhood photographs of me, but fewer than there would have been. Seeing myself disturbed me as much as hearing myself on cassettes. Early cassette-players. All these devices to show we’ve been, to carry our timbres to others, to say we have trodden here as well, maybe (slightly) before. The markers of presence. The painting marks the presence of the painter more than the subject. Does the photo mark the presence of the photographer in the same way? Our temporariness here has stretched to breaking-point; we risk becoming familiar. That familiarity of the outsider who stays and stays and sees what is uncomfortable even when not looking. It’s easy to see the overt badness: the hatred of refugees by some, the violent moments on a back street, the racist graffiti, the brutal presence of the past under the utopias of early modern architecture. It’s also easy to see the good (I don’t use scare quotes): people living as people, welcoming refugees, the anti-racism, and a strong environmental consciousness. As I would arrange good and bad. As I would picture the qualities of each. But the liminal comes into focus over time, and one realises the Green emphasis is also mixed with capitalism, that the head of the Greens in the state is proud of his Mercedes and wants the state to be used as a dumping-ground for radioactive waste. The blurring. The state party system adapts to the emphasis of place, and beneath all the good and bad is a commercial drive, a desire for goods. Telephones, cameras, computers. They might be used to undermine the capitalist enterprise, but they reinforce it more than they undermine. The violent ones, those from the circles of Dante’s Inferno, worship goods to remake the world in the image they ascribe to some other force but which is really a reflection of self-desire and often self-hatred. I think this while being photographed opposite (almost) ‘Hölderlin’s tower’ (it wasn’t his tower, it was the carpenter Zimmer’s and his family’s) and thinking of the industry that has grown around his supposed madness, his fall, his ‘lesser’ late poems which I think burst out of their formulaics to be masterpieces of subterfuge, mocking the very fame he had obsessed over when young. He was not insane. His tower glows. An edifice. Graffiti approaches along the walkway. It will be tagged.  

This end to Benjamin’s Photography section does something for me and maybe this text as well: ‘Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel can perhaps be considered a “critique of the snapshot”, insofar as in this piece the two aspects of shock — its technological function in the mechanism and its sterilizing function in the experience — both come into play.’ (Benjamin, p. 692) This notation to brutality (the consequences of a Sunday stroll?), to Cocteau’s critique of the bourgeoisie reinvented in the gallery of the book, or the accumulation of notes towards the book, does not accord with the moment of being photographed in front of Hölderlin’s tower. (There was no violence; however, behind the façade of any pleasant moment within the State is the knowledge that the pleasantness comes at a cost to the world somewhere else.) But it does accord with the ecology of presence around it, and of which we make ourselves part.  There is no beauty in ‘history’. The dialectic rejects it. I do not ‘watch the birdie’ when Tracy ‘snaps’ me. I am there, and she is in front of me, and I look at her obscured by the machine. But I see past the machine to Tracy. I know she is there, and that she will look at the picture later. I know it is part of a narrative she is making where a narrative is, but is also diffused and lost. That narrative isn’t fixed, and its purpose will change over time. I am happy to be part of it: a recording, of course, but also an act of temporariness against the hauntings of temporariness. Not to say we have been, but to say we are. Not to own presence, but acknowledge it. Tracy’s brother Sean, who died when he was eighteen, was a photographer and was going to study to be a ‘professional photographer’. I am told that as a child he liked the tricks of the camera, all it could do in terms of changing our perceptions of what actually was and is. The person standing on the palm of a hand, the warping of perspective. But there is no change to reality, just a play on the way we see. He was interested in temporariness, he died young, but marked his places in so many ways. Not damaging, but imprinting over so many other previous imprints, and in the imprint of presence continuous. In Tracy’s ‘snaps’ are her brother’s imprints. In a world where negatives are a fading memory, his negative develops the island without damaging the trees, a negative made positive in a place so far from where he lived and died. The ‘other side of the world’ (a place he never left), but here all the awareness of the indelible nature of ‘history’ and its images would have pressed on him also.

Rilke writing loving in a "female" voice

By Tracy

Rilke wrote more than one poem about loving from the imagined point of view of a woman.

Two of these poems bear the same title, "Die Liebende". One is from The Book of Images (between 1902-06) and one from New Poems: the Other Part (1918).

They are often translated as "(The) Woman in Love", but in these versions I have preferred, "The Woman Who Loves" as a more active idea -- "die Liebende" is the lover (not necessarily the one loved) but in the feminine, so it's hard to convey in one English word...

Both poems have an undercurrent of anxiety -- again -- I think, about loss of identity. These are not literal translations but ones which try to retain the crucial metaphors or images in each case. Both Rilke originals are rhyming -- in one I have used a kind of rhyme, in the other not. Sometimes I have made variations on a phrase that is single in the original, but whose double or triple meanings need expanding in English, to get the fuller sense.


Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images)

The Woman who Loves

Yes, I’m aching for you. I’m slipping,

getting out of hand – my own hands,

without a hope of contesting

what’s coming to me, as if from your side

earnest, unwavering, firm.

...in those days: Ah I was all one thing,

with nothing that cried out or betrayed me;

my silence was like that of a stone,

over which the stream trails its babble.

But now in these weeks of spring

something has slowly severed me

from the dark, unwitting year.

Something has given my poor warm life

into the hands of somebody

who doesn’t know what I was even yesterday.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(from New Poems: the Other Part)

The Woman who Loves

This is my window.

I’ve just woken so

gently I thought I’d float.

How far does my life go

and where does night start?

I might think that all this

around me was still part

of me; transparent as crystal’s

abyss, darkening, mute.

So huge does my heart seem

to me, I could take in even

the stars; it so happily lets him

loose, releases him again,

him I began maybe to love,

to hold onto, maybe.

Foreign as if never spoken of

my fate watches me.

What am I laid down

under such endlessness

fragrant as meadow and blown

to and fro like the grass,

at once calling out and afraid

of my call being heard,

set, like a sun, to decline or

sink into another.

[Translations by Tracy Ryan]