Simultaneity in Verse: On Nathalie Handal

by Craig Epplin

“A simultaneity of inconsolable coexistences”: this is the way Charles Bernstein has described American culture. A plural America, ultimately the Americas. Plural because of its continent-spanning reach and plural, also, because its past is always present. The horizon is never just a thin gray line dividing ocean from sky. It’s also a jagged relief of trees and mountains and water towers. Even the purest of horizons waxes, wanes, and occasionally softens with the play of light. Our future, the future of Americans north and south and, really, of everyone else too, lies on that intermittent horizon.

That horizon is the future, founded on the past. And thus, a military raid captures and kills Osama bin Laden, and its codename is Operation Geronimo. A Native American leader, metonym of a history of resistance against imperial fantasies, resurfaces in an ill-conceived conflation of narratives.

And thus also, the Argentine 100-peso bill commemorates, on its flipside, the “Conquest of the Desert,” the military offensive against indigenous peoples that consolidated the nineteenth-century nation state. An extermination campaign as the official story.

What country in the Americas doesn’t have such a past? And which of these pasts doesn’t continually rear its head, unexpectedly, in the most varied contexts? This is why our co-existences are inconsolable.

*

And what is true of the Americas holds true for every place. Spain, for example. This simple insight lies at the heart of Nathalie Handal’s brilliant new volume of poetry, Poet in Andalucía. In it, her eye abolishes time, combing all pasts into the resonant folds of the present.

I feel close to death tonight.
I just saw the poets
of the Golden Ages and those of ‘27,
there was no time between them—

They speak to her and through her, these poets, across history: Luis de Góngora and Garcilaso de la Vega, bookends of the Spanish Golden Age; Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca, standard bearers of modern Spanish verse. They tell her to drink and sing and also that “illusion creates history,” perhaps because it is the illusion of leaving the past behind that allows us to name it as such. The conversation she imagines runs contrary to illusion, then, just as it restages another conversation, one that happened in Seville in 1927 when a group of poets gathered there in celebration of the 300th anniversary of Góngora’s death. Alberti and Lorca were among the group, henceforth canonized as the Generation of 27. They brought Góngora into their present, just as Handal brings them into our own.

And she brings one of them, in particular, to the fore: Lorca. Her Poet in Andalucía is a recreation, in reverse, of his posthumously published Poet en New York. Her own introductory remarks sketch out the way we might read her geographic negative.

Lorca left as part of his legacy a longing for homeland. My own longing stretches across four continents, due to a life made exilic by the political turmoil in the Middle East. His poems are about discovering a lost self. The poems in this collection confront that same loss, and resonate with that same yearning for a sustaining place. Poet in New York is about social injustice and somber love, and the quality of otherness such forces produce.Poet in Andalucía explores the persistent tragedy of otherness but it also acknowledges a refusal to remain in that stark darkness, and it searches for the possibility of human coexistence.

Longing for a place: this is why both titles situate their poets geographically. Loss of self: this is why both collections alternate so visibly among subject positions. Otherness and its reverberations: this is why both poets fixate so much on things and the symbolic forces they channel (and on words as things, especially in Handal’s poems).

There are certainly other points of contact between the two, but I’ll just name one: both poets understand the “simultaneity of inconsolable coexistences” that makes up human (and indeed, nonhuman) history.

For example, in Poet in New York we read lines like these:

It isn’t foreign to the dance
this columbarium that yellows the eyes.
From the sphinx to the vault there is a tense thread
that pierces the heart of all poor children.
The primitive drive dances with the mechanical drive,
ignorant in their frenzy of original light.

From the pharaohs to the titans of Wall Street “there is a tense thread”: history doesn’t repeat itself, as in a spiral, but is rather stitched in a complex of threads, some of which are more tightly spun than others. And those threads are not static. They dance, present and past holding hands. If I had to imagine Lorca’s vision spread out in space it would take the form of a sparsely woven cloth flapping in the wind, some parts of it stained with blood, others reflecting light.

Lorca’s mode is frequently that of an accusal. When he reveals the ties that bind present and past, he also seeks to uncover the violence of that binding. And thus the poem titled “Office and Denunciation” begins with these lines:

Under the multiplications
there is a drop of duck’s blood.
Under the divisions
there is a drop of sailor’s blood.
Under the sums, a river of tender blood;

He mentions the death of a human, but he’s really concerned with the animals, as we see later on in that same poem:

Every day in New York they slaughter
four million ducks,
five million pigs,
two thousand doves for the pleasure of the dying,
a million cows,
a million lambs,
and two million roosters
that leave the sky in splinters.

The pain of violent animal death underlies the balance-sheet arithmetic of slaughterhouse administration. This subterranean truth is brought to light in these verses.

*

Cruelty buttresses civilization; the past inheres in the present. Both formulations repeat the modernist trope, running from Marx to Freud to Debord, of a truth, an awful and awesome truth, that is concealed from our everyday perception, whether through a fetish or through the sound and fury of the spectacle. In Poet in Andalucía, the question is refracted through the lens of language itself. And thus the collection’s title keeps the Spanish “Andalucía” instead of the Anglophone “Andalusia.” The title bears the trace of its own past, its peripatetic origins. And thus too the first poem in the collection is titled “Ojalá,” left in Spanish, a Spanish word that comes to us from the Arabic “Insha’allah”: God-willing, or in lay terms, let’s hope. In the almost eight centuries of Arab occupation of at least part of the Iberian peninsula, thousands of words filtered into the local languages. Handal captures something of this history in the Qit’as presented here, each of which bears the title of a Spanish word of Arabic origin, each of them explicated below the short poem. The truth of the Spanish language is the truth of its hybridity. It, like all languages, is a mestizo tongue.

That affirmation has its own history, and it is a history of repression. If Arab-occupied Iberia was a motley pot of Jewish, Arabic, and Latinate cultures (among others), post-“Reconquest” Spain was marked by its intolerance. This was the Spain of the Inquisition, the Spain that expelled its Jewish population in 1492, and a little over a century later the Moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity) as well. A version of this purity-fixated Spain resurfaced under the government of Francisco Franco (1939-75), when manifestations of linguistic and cultural diversity were persecuted. Handal is sensitive to this past when she writes, for example, in a poem significantly titled “La Guerra” (“War”),

You said:
After the bomb,
I held a comrade’s arm,
listened to Radio Cadena Española,
and looked at the moon.
The bodies weren’t moving.
I went closer—
we must remember
what we looked like once,
a country cut in half.

And that metaphor of splitting, of one half running up against another, divided by a tenuous border, recurs in her collection. For instance the Qit’a titled “Acitara” (“Wall”):

Can the sky recover after a bombing,
can a house break into two cities,
and secrets hold the wall
between two bodies?
Tell me, what are borders?

The violent past of a nation divided (the idea of the “two Spains” is a constant trope in the country’s essayistic tradition), here acquires poetic weight.

And yet, as she herself marks out in the prologue, the collection seeks a path beyond division and alienation: toward the possibility of coexistence, to use her word (and Bernstein’s). And thus the book’s eighth section is titled “Convivencia” (“Coexistence”). How can we live together? Through the intimacy of touch, the section seems to suggest, given the number of sensual, bodily scenes. Perhaps this is a recognition of our shared embodied nature, and the capacity of our bodies to feel pain, weight, touch, and arousal. Recognition of this simple truth lies at the origin of life in common. The politics of that shared life is also an erotics.

That question, how can we live together, runs throughout Nathalie Handal’s Poet in Andalucía. I see in it a very American (in the broad sense of the Americas) problem, but this is certainly short-sighted. It owes, I assume, to the simple fact that I live in the Americas, two continents or one where our languages are marked by the violence of conquest and the struggle for coexistence. But this is the story of all humans, at least I think so. And this is why Poet in Andalucía—about Spain, about the Middle East, about shared destinies and hopes—touches me deeply: it reminds us of what’s inconsolable, of what’s multiple, of what’s irreducible, and what’s simultaneous.

20 hours ago  /  0 notes

Forebodings

These ravens gathering on the breach
in the battered blue light of dusk
are a sudden unkindness

The path heading up the house
strays off into a vague straggle
like a thought that has gone too far

That sliver peering through the clouds
looks like a bell that can no longer ring
in an abandoned church steeple

I don’t mind the mindless fog
but my room at the top of the stairs
tilts like a broken boat at sea

All night I feel the homesick waves
and I hear ravens scavenging in my sleep

The Beginning of Poetry

Railroad tracks split the campus in half
and at night you’d lie on your narrow cot
and listen to the lonely whistle
of a train crossing the prairie in the dark.

What the Last Evening Will Be Like

You’re sitting at a small bay window
in an empty café by the sea.
It’s nightfall, and the owner is locking up,
though you’re still hunched over the radiator,
which is slowly losing warmth.

Now you’re walking down to the shore
to watch the last blues fading on the waves.
You’ve lived in small houses, tight spaces—
the walls around you kept closing in—
but the sea and the sky were also yours.

No one else is around to drink with you
from the watery fog, shadowy depts.
You’re alone with the whirling cosmos.
Goodbye, love, far away, in a warm place.
Night is endless here, silence infinite.

1 day ago  /  2 notes

Anything but Standard

It was the two of us, wasn’t it, on those steamy nights
circling the low-slung museum across the street
and lingering by the pond behind the chapel.

It’s how the southern clouds passed slowly
overhead, season after season, year after year,

as you followed a low intricate scent
across the stately lit lawn,
and studied the squirrels in the live oaks,
and waded into the brown reflecting pool
with the broken obelisk.

You were a descendent of water dogs
and anything but standard
when you materialized out of the sticky heat
with your dripping black forehead
and delinquent grin, a growl unmuzzled.

It was your Russian face that steadied me
as I sat on a battered wooden bench,
lost in a night that wouldn’t end,
and you lay down— calm, poised, watchful—
and stirred beside me on the simmering grass.

Let’s get up and go.
Trot ahead of me, old friend,
And shake off the watery darkness.

1 day ago  /  1 note

EDWARD HIRSCH: Selections from Edward Hirsch’s new book The Living Fire, an exclusive video interview speaking about what matters most in poetry, and a reading of the daring poem “Milk.”

on THE LIVING FIRE

Edited by Flavia Rocha

“Poetry tries to take a stand against time. It speaks against our vanishing, it speaks on behalf of our living. It takes sides”, says Edward Hirsch, in a sentence that sides with the title of his new book, The Living Fire (Knopf, 2010), a collection of new and selected poems written between 1975 and now. In an intimate book like this – driven by experience, actual and intellectual— reading becomes a journey, a mystical one, a relationship. The poet is destined to communicate, a kind of compulsory honesty and generosity that leaves him vulnerable as much as it empowers him. He can’t but feel and articulate his feelings. Poetry takes his side, and language is what feeds the fire.

Edward Hirsch kindly gave Rattapallax permission to publish a selection of his new poems from The Living Fire. You will have the privilege to read, see and hear him talking about subjects that matter to him in poetry in an exclusive interview that accompanies this section, and will find a special video with his thoughts about one of the worlds’ most beloved poets, Pablo Neruda – with the delicate perception, easiness and eloquence that the author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry always charms us with.

FROM NIGHT TO LOVE

Rattapallax asked Edward Hirsch to talk about six concepts in poetry that the reader may find familiar while reading “The Living Fire”. These words certainly carry a history of meaning. Although in true poetry feeling and language come before any concept, poets seem to rethink them over and over again. They keep “flooding back” (to use a Hirsch’s expression), calling for more, new poems.

NIGHT

“I’ve always liked night as a setting for poems. It’s the mystic hour. So many of my poems try to move from the ordinary to the mystical, from the quotidian to the spiritual. Night is a good springboard for that, because the ordinary senses are suppressed, and other things are heightened. You don’t try to get eyesight, you try to get vision. So you move both outward and inward, in terms of deeper internal spaces by setting poems at night. There is a long history of mystical poetry, beginning with the notion of the dark night of the soul. Night is the embodiment of that moment of mystical contemplation.”

MEMORY

“It’s hard to address memory as a subject because it is so much woven in what poetry is and what we are. I was very struck in reading Proust when I was young, by the distinction that Proust makes between voluntary and involuntary memory. Voluntary memory is when you sit down, and you think back, and you willfully, consciously try to remember something that happened. That’s very useful, but it’s not magical. What Proust calls involuntary memory is magical (in his case, remember, he eats the petit madeleine and suddenly his entire childhood memory comes flooding back to him). There are moments in scraps of conversation, hearing a piece of music, smelling something, when the past is suddenly present to you, it’s suddenly there. Those are magical moments in life and in literature, those moments of involuntary memory, when the past comes flooding back to you so powerfully that it’s no longer past.”

ENCOUNTER

“The notion of encounter is driving my very idea of poetry. The word that is more important to me here is relationship. Martin Buber starts “I and Thou” talking about the relationship between oneself and others and God. Instead of “in the beginning was the word”, he says, “in the beginning was the relation.” The relation precedes the word, because it’s offered by the human. And I believe that my own poems, which are so much written out of loneliness, seek a reader, seek to find someone, seek the stranger, or the beloved, to use a Sufi term. This quest for the beloved, this quest for connection, is what drives my own poetry. So it’s not the notion of an encounter with another person in the presence, but that of creating a kind of poem, of text that will act as a surrogate for the relationship established between the poet and the reader. I seek poems of deep intimacy.”

CONFESSION

“This is a complicated term in poetry because it was hijacked by M. L. Rosenthal’s designation of the so-called “confessional poets”, the group of Robert Lowell, Susan Plath, Anne Sexton. Lowell and his progeny, if you will. None of those poets liked the term “confessional poetry.” The term is loaded. But the idea that Lowell was using, that he would give you the experience, create the fiction— if you will— of a real Robert Lowell using biographical effects, that is very useful in poetry. It’s important to remember that you’re not getting the real Robert Lowell, you’re getting a fictive construction, but the poem means to give you the feeling that you are. And there is an honorific sense of confession that goes back to Saint Agustine in which the autobiographical “I” is meant as a stand in for a certain kind of experience. I believe that it’s important to get down to what your own obsessions are in writing poetry and there is always going to be a place in poetry for the lyrical “I”. What is wrong with the idea of confessional poetry is the notion that it’s just meant to shock or to expose. I don’t think it’s useful or important to write shock poetry. The honorific sense of confession— to tell the truth, to express things as they really happened— that is very useful and important, and that has been a model for me.”

GOD

“My work is a bit God-haunted. I can’t say that I am gifted with belief. I am not a believer. But I’ve never been able to give up the idea of God, or the quest for God. I would say that a lot of my poetry is in some kind of spiritual quest for something beyond. Ever since the romantic poets, that something beyond is also something within. But I’ve always thought of something beyond ordinary consciousness, some kind of quest for the transcendental. It’s what Emerson calls “beyonding”. For me it’s a process. There is a moment in my poem “A Partial History of My Stupidity” in which I list through the poem all the mistakes I made: it begins with traffic: “Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge,/and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,/and got stuck in the car for hours.” and it ends with God: “I did not believe in God,/who eluded me.” It makes a claim that you don’t believe in God, it suggests that God exists but you just can’t find Him. Whatever you want to call God, whatever you want to name Him, or the force beyond or It itself, I always sought it, but I can’t say I ever found it.”

LOVE

“There is love with a small “l” and there is Love with a large “L”. The love poem seeks the beloved, but it’s always been haunted by figuration, by trying to find appropriate similes and comparisons for the beloved, and by the poet always stating his or her inadequacy in doing it. Strikingly in the history of poetry, the question of comparison or analogy is always both something that is original and that wears out. The early Shakespeare writes “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and the whole poem is based on the Petrarchan convention of comparing the beloved to a summer’s day, but in a late poem he says “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;”, meaning there’re been so many Petrarchan sonnets, the analogy is so worn out, that no longer means anything. He denies it in order to try to get something more real about the beloved. The figures of poetry always come into play in thinking about the love poem and the shadow of the beloved. I think there are two different kinds of love poems. In the majority of them, the beloved is absent; these are poems of longing and desire. But there are also a few love poems of attainment, to use the Sufi maxim “the beloved are I and one”. These are very moving poems in which desire is momentarily fulfilled. I’ve tried to write a few of these myself. When a love poem shadows a larger subject, greater than love— it is love with a capital “L”. The love poem here too is often shadowed by the mystical longing for some kind of God figure. This is the tradition of courtly love, the way Dante uses love in the “Divine Comedy”. Beatrice stands in for a larger figure. I’ve been aware of that allegorical possibility, that dream, that fantasy of using the beloved and the love poem as a kind of springboard towards something else.”

1 day ago  /  3 notes

Nathalie Handal’s Poet in Andalucía is a meditation on the past and the present. It renders in poetry a region that seems to hold the pulse of our earth, and where all of our stories assemble. It is a meditation on what has changed and what insists on remaining the same, on the mysteries that trouble and intrigue us, and on a poet who continues to call us to question what makes us human. –FLAVIA ROCHA

Federico García Lorca lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca’s sojourn in America, and myself a poet in New York of Middle Eastern as well as Mediterranean roots, I went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucía. I recreated Lorca’s journey in reverse. Andalucía has always been the place where racial, ethnic, and religious forces converge and contend, where Islamic, Judaic and Christian traditions remain a mirror of a past that is terrible and beautiful. Poet in Andalucía is a meditation on the past and the present. It renders in poetry a region that seems to hold the pulse of our earth, and where all of our stories assemble. It is a meditation on what has changed and what insists on remaining the same, on the mysteries that trouble and intrigue us, and on a poet who continues to call us to question what makes us human. Poet in New York is about social injustice and somber love, and the quality of otherness such forces produce. Poet in Andalucía explores the persistent tragedy of otherness but it also acknowledges a refusal to remain in that stark darkness, and it searches for the possibility of human coexistence. — NATHALIE HANDAL

1 day ago  /  0 notes

Rattapallax Magazine APP from Rattapallax on Vimeo.

A short documentary & commercial to present the new Rattapallax magazine APP. For the past 10 years, Rattapallax magazine has been on the forefront of introducing readers with compelling literature, poetry, films and ideas from around the world. Timeout magazine has called the literary journal “the visceral, multimedia hit of poetry.” Rattapallax (issue 21), edited by Flávia Rocha, is now launching its first FREE APP issue for iPad — the natural path to a magazine that has been always committed to literature in various forms, medias and languages.

Please download the app at:
itunes.apple.com/us/app/rattapallax21/id623482251?mt=8

More info on the issue at rattapallax.com

Video shot on Panasonic GH3 with Leica 25 mm. Edited on Final Cut X.
Filmed in Portland, Brooklyn & Helsinki.

Produced, Edited & Directed by Ram Devineni.
Featuring: Flávia Rocha, Haale Gafori, Natalia Fedorova & Jason Porath.
Music by Matt Kilmer & Colter Harper.

1 month ago  /  0 notes