Author: edrebmann

Teaching fills up available time so this blog sits abandoned while the school blog and Schoology fill with details of education. Someone, I suppose with some effort I could find out who, said once, “Work fills up available time.” Then there is the expectation of reflection on process, product, and result should one have a moment to look out across the field into the copse.

Lao-tzu wrote, “Work is done and then forgotten.” In such a world, work suits life, keeps it going, ensures that what is needed, gets done. Our world makes all of us strivers. It is exciting and wonderful in a way that makes all of creators. And yet living for what may be rather than now tosses away the past and erodes the present. What will our children and grandchildren look back to, past hopes for the future?

Foggy morning at Hoover Reservoir this past week.  I was driving by and stopped.  Five minutes later the fog had drifted off and the rains came.

Yesterday, I ran across Klappstühle a poem by Günther Grass. It reads,

While looking up the date of publication, I ran across a musical rendition by Ronald Perara who set Three Poems By Günther Grass to music in 1974. Klappstühle is the second on his Crossing the Meridian Album. You can hear it at Klappstühle and read about its setting with two other poems  at Three Poems of Günther Grass

The music does not touch me deeply, certainly, not as deeply as the poem. Folding chairs as a metaphor of the emigrant experience works quite well. The musical piece is pre-Glass classical. I find I recoil from it now, although then we struggled to understand what the composer was adding to the piece. But Perara is not Britten setting Owens poems to music sensitively. Would it be too harsh to say the music would not be to different were it reporing the grocery list? Yes, it is, but so it strikes me now. Our wilingness – my willingness – to struggle while listening to music changed with Einstein At The Beach.

William Stafford’s poetry came to my attention at a time when I was reading and translating Brecht, Hermlin and other DDR (East Germany) poets and novelists. The unassuming, but not simple, thoughts of poems to be read softly appealed to me as I read the 1983 edition of Smoke’s Way: Poems fom Limitd Editions 1968 -1981.

Here are three of them.

West of Here

The road goes down. It stops at the sea.
The sea goes on. It stops at the sky.
The sky goes on.

At the end of the road – picnickers,
rocks. We stand and look out:

Another sky where this one ends?
And another sea?
And a world, and a road?

And what about you?
And what about me?

At An Interval We Talk

An owl call – round, globed as the moon –
floats from the night though the open window
and brushes my face with the whole world
outside our home.

The woods flow back. The years I’ve had
have floated away. Without a sound
I turn my face and its hunger for the world,
here: today.

Smoke

Smoke’s way’s a good way – find,
or be rebuffed and gone:
a day and a day, the whole world home.

Smoke? Into the mountains I guess
a long time ago. Once here, yes,
everywhere. Say anything? No.

I saw Smoke, slow traveler, reluctant
but sure. Hesitant sometimes, yes,
because that’s the way things are.

Smoke never doubts though:
some new move will appear.
Wherever you are, there is another door.

In the late February sunlight this morning, I sat in the chill, drinking coffee, thinking of Siegfried Sassoon. We have just passed the 100th commemoration of the battle of Verdun. A century ago on July 1, 1916, the British Army walked into the machine guns at the Somme. In Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and the following two volumes of the trilogy, Sassoon lets us see the collapse of the old order and the impact of the trenches on men. There are other writers deeper, wiser, sadder – I have spent decades reading poetry, novels, primary and secondary sources. Still Sassoon gives us a picture of what the historians call, “a paradign shift” on an innocent man caught up in a Great War that killed millions as it drove a world into modernity.

In an ironically bitter poem, Sassoon wrote:

Does it matter? -losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter? -losing you sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

Sassoon like Owen, Thomas and the other battlefield poets earned his bitterness, his right to speak of the wounded and dead, the trenches and the home front and wrote beautifully and movingly of what was ugly and unthinkable. He often wrote of the beauties of nature noticed in between or during the battles. How long ago all this seems and how contemporary, too.

Immediately preceeding two deep, reflective eulogies – one for his mother Delia the other for his wife Andree, Kenneth Rexroth placed the poem, “It Rolls On” when he published The Phoenix and the Tortoise. (1944).

The opening line reminds me of a Basho haiku, (Falling ill on a journey, my mind runs round a withered field), the second line of Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole. The poem’s tone and sense of wearing travel and fatiguing restlessness contrasts so tightly with the warblers in their lives.

Time passes. Who else documents it as well as Rexroth? Read his work from the 1940s and 1950s as he looks backward with an awareness that informs a lifetime. Andree Rexroth  Delia Rexroth

IT ROLLS ON