Vivian Eden || How to Write a Poem in the Midst of Chaos

 

Vivian Eden ||

How to Write a Poem in the Midst of Chaos

'Some pain is so great that tears are powerless,' according to Heinrich Böll. 'Dirge,' by Salman Masalha, conveys the feeling behind the quote beautifully.

Salman Masalha

DIRGE

Smoke pillars clothe the sky,
hills will hide behind the haze,
fear fills his mind, his pulse is high
and his heart is all ablaze.

Treading silent on the verge,
he envisions in his brain
as verses in his spirit surge:
a final dirge for distant days,

fleeting, long departed, cold,
of many nights and griefs unnamed.
He counts hundreds, thousandfold,
numerous souls erased.

Images of infants and elders dead,
smashed, fragmented, broken clay,
human leaves by ill winds sped,
Pride's captives blown away.

With all light in their eyes snuffed out,
little children consumed in flames,
extinguished in the ruined town
are ashes of dreams, the life of an age.

Pillars of smoke in hill and vale
rise as fires devour the remains.
Insatiable gluttony prevails,
yet begs for alms to keep its gains.

From there to here and back again,
from sea's edge to riverbank,
Death's display window is dressed
in gushing blood and pain.

Spring has passed and summer came.
This land weeps like the willow's plaint.
The grandees seeing Death in place
know neither modesty nor grace.


        DIRGE in Hebrew, here

***

When the cannons roar, do the Muses really fall silent? This poem employs some useful strategies for writing poetry in a time of tumult and horror.

1. Give the poem a pedigree

Repurposing fragments of canonical texts provides credibility by signaling, "I am not just making this stuff up. I am citing authoritative sources." Pillars of smoke, for example – seen twice in this poem – first appeared in Joel 3:3 in a context of divine punishment. God (in the JPS version) says: "And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke," exactly like the scenes we have been seeing on the battlefield, live or on television, depending on which channels we watch.

2. Pretend it isn't really you suffering there within the poem

The poem opens with a lone figure moving in a bleak landscape and we see his inner state – mind, body and emotions.He is identified as a poet and is reminiscent of the protagonist in the opening of world literature's greatest hellscape, Dante's "Inferno: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark" (in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1867 translation).

However, the person moving through "Dirge" is not identified as "I," but rather as "he," someone definitely distinct from the author of the poem, not the same person (wink, wink).

Dump William Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." This is not a time for the Romantics. Your most powerful emotions these days are probably not fit to print. By having someone else as the protagonist in your narrative and not using the first person, you are absolved from unrealistic expectations of tranquility (as well as from the luxury of postponement), making it possible to write urgently but ostensibly as an objective, uninvolved observer. Be an actor in the role of a good fake reporter, reporting real bad news.

3. In the real world the noise is unbearable now, so tune it down in the poem 

The poet-within-the-poem envisions yet another poem in addition to the one in which he stars – a dirge, a funeral hymn, but insofar as we know, the words remain surging and tumbling – sealed within him as though he has been dumbstruck by the cannons' roar. He is "silent," and so is the noise of war in the poem. We never hear the poet-within-the-poem speak or chant his funeral hymn aloud, nor do we hear anything else in the scene. The poet-without-the-poem depicts the horrendous things that the poet-within-the-poem witnesses, but he doesn't depict at all what he hears. No exploding, no thunder, no whispers, no groans.

"It is a silence only God can bear," wrote Haim Nachman Bialik in "The City of Slaughter," on the horrors of the 1903 Kishinev pogroms (as translated by Israel Efros, 1948). This is a staple of Hebrew literature that your peers in Israel were studying in high school while you were wandering lonely as a cloud with Wordsworth. In Bialik's devastated landscape, the horrified Shekinah – in Kabbala, something like the Holy Spirt, only female – "is dumb... Its tears in dimness and in silence shed." For flesh and blood human beings as well, the ruse of silence allows the most explicitly awful things to be understood while leaving them unsaid. Perhaps you too had a dear relative who when things got hairy would say through gritted teeth: "I'm not saying anything" – thereby expressing utter condemnation.

4. A poem is a special event, so be formal 

Nonetheless, the ear is very much engaged in this poem. The soundtrack is not in the action but rather in the form. By stanza 3, the reader of the Hebrew poem will be aware that every other line ends with the exact same rhyme throughout, while the first and third lines in each stanza rhyme with each other, though differently: ABAB CBCB, DBDB and so on. This demanding form is a feature of classical Arabic poetry dating back to pre-Islamic times, and subsequently has characterized poetry in Persian, Urdu and other languages of Moslem regions, including Hebrew secular and liturgical poetry of the Golden Age in Spain and thereafter.

This is a problem for translators. It is relatively easy to hang rhymes on verses' ends in Hebrew and Arabic, with their finite collections of repeated syllabic arrangements to indicate tense, gender, possession and number, but for want of those convenient nails, in this English version the alternate verses end in single syllables with the identical vowel sound (assonance – abab,cbcb etc.). Sometimes we got lucky and true rhymes emerged, e.g. sky/haze/high/blaze, but poetry translation is always an art of lowered expectations. Nevertheless, we must try.

Any classical form asserts consequence and decorum: This is serious, this is ceremonial. It establishes the power relation between the poet and the audience: "I, the poet, am an artist, I work hard and I am organizing these observations into a pattern for your benefit."

5. Make it strange

In the seventh stanza, "Dirge" swerves from visual reportage towards a judgmental conclusion. This change in direction pivots on what Bertolt Brecht called the alienation or estrangement effect, whereby something familiar is made to look unfamiliar in order to stimulate critical thinking. The cliché "From the river to the sea" is rearranged into very different words as a kind of mirror in which both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are reflected. Though certain people have given "both sides-ism" a bad name, in the final stanza the damning criticism of the "grandees" applies equally to Israeli and the Palestinian opinion leaders and decision-makers, and perhaps internationally as well.

  Haaretz