HAPPY BIRTHDAY ULULATIONS

one year ago today:

Thursday, December 19, 2002

      ( 2:20 PM ) Nada

 

The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong. One idea (please don’t steal it, but if you can think of any practical ways to implement it please let me know) is to do a series — I’m not sure of what — could be poems, or fashion items, or paintings — of urban wildlife: pigeons, squirrels, sparrows. Imagine, a 50’s style shirtwaist dress whose full skirt is imprinted with a faux sumi-e of sparrows on winter branches! It almost makes my heart palpitate to think of it. Allison Cobb (or was it Jen Coleman?) commented to me, on hearing my idea, “why not rats?” I suppose there would have to be rats, too. For irony as well as diversity.

Our lives these days our over-designed (determined) but under-decorated. Kazari! Embellishment! My whole being rails against minimalism, austerity, pruning. Or simply the unconsideredness of public spaces which could have been extraordinary experiences in form and pattern. I always think this on the F train, with its 1970s Denny’s orange/tan/woodgrain scheme. Why the lack of visual imagination? What a contrast to the tiles in the 6 train stations. 86th Street it particularly stunning. I find myself transfixed before those exquisite combinations of pale chartreuse, brick-chestnut, and grayed purple. And I suppose I feel the same way, though I often have to suppress it out of practicality/expediency, about those quotidian pigeons. Mina Loy understood pigeons better than any poet who has ever lived. I recently taught her poem, “Property of Pigeons” in an introductory college writing course in a fly-by-night college in Bensonhurst. I found that my undergrads (Russian, Chinese, African-American, Jamaican, Italian-American) were all able to enter this rather difficult poem with its weblike language — maybe because its subject is so familiar to us:

_Property of Pigeons_

Pigeons doze,

or rouse

their striped crescendos

of grey rainbow

a living frieze on the shallow

sill of a factory window

Pigeons arise,

alight

on vertical bases

of civic brick

whitened with avalanches

of their innocent excrements

as if an angel had been sick;

all that is shown to us

of bird-economies,

financeless,

inobvious as the disposal

of their corpses.

Pigeons make irritant, alluring

music;

quilled solfeggios

of shrill wings winnowing

their rejoicing, cooing

fanaticism for wooing.

Their dolce voices

dotage.

Too and fro, frowardly they live

banishing each other’s

gorgeous halters

in the feathery drive

of preliminaries

to their marriages.

Pigeons disappear,

their claws, a coral landing-gear,

dive for the altar-stair

to their privacies —

a slice of concrete

fallen on a cornice

leading into darkness;

the slit adjacence of houses

where the caressive dusts,

the residue of furnaces

upholster the gossamer

festoons of intestate spiders

for nuptial furniture

Pigeons through some conjurous procedure

appear to reappear

upon the altar-stair

at startling instants

in the immature

torsos of their giant infants;

timid and unflown

stark of plume

naive in nativity

to peer into a vast transparency.

Google gave me a little present when I tried to find this poem online in the hopes of not having to type it in myself. Although I couldn’t find the poem, I found a mention of it on the University of Princeton site in a paper on the _Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol_translated by Peter Cole. It’s not clear to me who wrote the paper, but I learned that Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a Hebrew medieval poet. I couldn’t actually find the Loy citation, but I did find a section on ORNAMENT that dovetails (pun intended) beautifully with today’s message. Here’s the link: http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s6933.html Go down to the section headed “EMBRACING EVASION: THE EXOTIC” to find exactly what I would have loved to have said if I were a scholar. I’m not supposed to quote it here, but please, please, go have a look! It’s not that I’m too lazy to paraphrase, but I haven’t eaten lunch yet and the passage is so well-written.

As to sparrows, I cannot rave enough about a volume entitled, _Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi_ (trans. Lucien Stryk. Takahashi was a dadaist poet before he became a zen poet. Zen, he says in an interview in the back of the book, saved his life. In recent years he has been writing fewer poems and more books on zen, but he says, “When I was writing poems, almost daily, what fascinated me was the possiblity of anything, everything being made poetry. Though I was hardly conscious of having an aesthetic program. All I wanted, truthfully, was for the poems to express the world’s vibrancy.” I really really wish more poets these days felt the same way. Everyone’s either got a program or they’re being told to get with one.

I’ve got a program too, and it has to do with the notion of ornament that I don’t have time to flesh out today. I have to have lunch. But before I do I will leave you with one of Takahashi’s sparrow poems:

_Flight of the Sparrow_

Sparrow dives from roof to ground,

a long journey — a rocket soars

to the moon, umpteen globes collapse.

Slow motion: twenty feet down, ten billion

years. Lightheaded, sparrow does not think,

philosophize, yet all’s beneath his wings.

What’s Zen? “Thought,” say masters.

“makes a fool.” How free the brainless

sparrow. Chirrup — before the first “chi,”

a billion years. He winks, another. Head left,

mankind’s done. Right, man’s born again.

So easy, there’s no end to time.

One gulp, swallow the universe. Flutter

on limb or roof — war, peace, care banished.

Nothing remains — not a speck.

“Time’s laid out in the eavestrough,”

sparrow sings,

pecks now and then.

Love,

nada

write to me at nada@jps.net

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