Osip Mandelstam, "The Poem"

Hi all –

I found the John Oliver episode on the West Bank to be incredible, necessary viewing:

There's so much we could talk about from this episode. How casually those settling illegally dismiss the lives of Palestinians, or how massive numbers of checkpoints lead to Palestinian women dying during childbirth. One thing I didn't realize was how much the Israeli government was subsidizing settling illegally. That "quality of life" means for some running over others without any sense of the pain caused.

Kelly Hayes' lastest newsletter, "Remembering Who We Are To Each Other," is also highly recommended. She spends time going over how a prosecutor vs. felon framing for the current election is rhetoric which can quickly get out of control. She notes that people who have helped make the earth unlivable will never be even conceived of in a criminal manner:

Think about the oil executives who knew decades ago that they were driving us toward a mass extinction event. These men are responsible for mass death on an incalculable scale. People are dying from heat stroke, fleeing from wildfires, and being drowned by floods as I type because of the conditions that these executives knowingly cultivated. They are mass murderers, but they are not “felons” because the system exists to facilitate their harms in order to generate profit.

I don't have much more to add. I should say that I've really enjoyed what I've seen of the Olympics and I'm looking forward to seeing political and societal change, which seems more possible now than it has for a while.

Osip Mandelstam, "The Poem"

Nowadays, I find myself drawn to poems about poetry while lesson planning. For a long while, I was repelled by how self-referential they were. They felt far too indulgent, as if a writer wanted to brag about the intricacy of their lives.

But lesson planning puts me in a mode where I have to think hard about what works. When you're in front of a classroom, or pointing to a textbook which you insist must be read, details matter. Students pick up on the smallest things and will tune out quickly if they find nothing of interest.

So poems about poetry make this question visible: How do I cultivate focus over just a few words? Everyone has a phrase they consider "theirs," something they consider meaningful, something they hold onto tightly. How do I encourage mining for meaning, looking beyond the usual? It's strange to think this might happen through discussion of a textbook or the news, but anything helps which prompts reflection on one's experience and the workings of the world.

Still. Focus over a few words could be best exemplified by phrases like "White meteorite," "infinity's orphan," "word / Painwaking particular earth." Mandelstam implicitly asks why the words which stay with us do that in the first place. It's like they come from a different realm, time, or type of experience entirely, yielding a power not unlike magic:

The Poem
Osip Mandelstam (translated by Christian Wiman)

White meteorite, infinity’s orphan, word
Painwaking particular earth...

Supplicants, tyrants, it doesn’t matter.
It is matter: unbudgeable, unjudgeable, itself.

Previously, we talked about Kay Ryan's "Poetry is a Kind of Money." Ryan spoke of the value of words coming from reserves of bullion. We have to go underneath the earth itself, we have to sweat, we have to exhaust ourselves to get what matters. "White meteorite" presents a completely different image for the same idea. What if we just allowed ourselves to be awed? Here's this shooting star, this intergalactic traveler, that we want to carry our wishes. It's white hot, hot with an otherworldly intensity. We're glimpsing another reality and we don't care if it acts like money. Possession and control are not priorities.

Mandelstam's imagery, to be sure, works back to Ryan's hypothesis. "[I]nfinity's orphan" also has cosmic, supernatural overtones, but reaches toward our level. What is it like to believe you are descended from an all-powerful being but have been abandoned? Renounced? "[O]rphan" is a crushing word in this context. The more you think about it, the more remote one's chances of survival seem. And yet those words, which might not make it past one hearer, could be treated like a "[w]hite meteorite" or reserves of gold. "[W]ord / Painwaking particular earth" brings us directly back to our experience. The right words evoke what we've been through and pain cannot be avoided.

That raises a question. We've known people who can only talk about their losses. Who need everyone to feel sorry for them. Do their words painwake "particular earth?" Are they natural poets of a sort?

I think it's safer to say they are petty tyrants of a sort. They want everyone to think about them. Their words can divorce from their own problems at times, because there are times they'll say anything. To be sure, Mandelstam ends with lines related to a much larger tyranny, where poetry and its truth can break the worst sort of oppression merely by being. "Supplicants, tyrants, it doesn't matter. / It is matter: unbudgeable, unjudgeable, itself." These particular words remind me of Hegelian dialectic: How can a thought about being, about "matter," destroy despots and tyrannical norms? Hegel thought history was the unfolding of an Idea, and that Idea in the end would yield freedom. It seems too corny to be true or useful, but when we reflect on the power of poetic truth, it makes perfect sense. Knowing the most essential part of your experience can find words is freedom.