Brodsky was born on this date (May 24) in 1940. I’d only heard of his work, never read any, when one evening in 1999 or so, I heard a recording of him reading ‘A Song’ on NPR. In the twenty years since I heard that recording I can still remember its cadences. This video, with its accompanying Chopin, is close, but it’s not the same. He’d passed away two years before, but this poem enchanted me such that I went out the next day or the day after that and purchased the slim volume So Forth, published by his estate in 1996. I was reading a lot of poetry at the time.
In Moe’s books in Berkeley, someone saw me flipping through Robert Hunter’s Glass Lunch and asked if I’d read his translations of Rilke. Another poet who’s name I knew, but whose work I hadn’t read. Shortly thereafter I started consuming Rilke. The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus did my head in, as I would have put it at the time, though not in Hunter’s translations which I found online. The Norton Press dual language editions. Housman, Stein, Wilde, and Sharon Doubiago carried me through those years as well.
My memory is that I bought the Brodsky at Moe’s (RIP) as well, but the bookmark inside insists it was Booksmith on Haight Street. I can vaguely picture myself paying for it there, probably having already exhausted the two used bookstores across the street. I don’t know if Austen was still a going concern at that point. I’d worked a couple of stints there, but after Jeffrey died and Brian took it over, it didn’t last too long. That spot might already have become another shoe store by ‘99. I don’t recall the name of the other used bookshop on the street, but for all the paperbacks crammed into the place I rarely if ever found a book there I wanted to buy. And I was voracious.
I’ve not opened So Forth in several years, and find that it still has a blue plastic sticker marking A Song on page 5. The name Joseph at the top of the front cover is sun faded, but the spine is intact, and the glue binding intact. Flipping through it, though, there’s no page that isn’t a joy to read. These poems reward reading aloud. Not to say I and my poor understanding of my iPad’s voice memo function do them justice, but here’s one called Ab Ovo which I quite like…
Note: Copyright in this poem is held, I’m certain, by the estate of Mr. Brodsky. I will remove this recording upon request.
So Forth can be ordered via the links on the publisher’s web site here.
My family had all left Synanon by the close of 1977 and the snake incident didn’t occur until about a year later. (I should verify, but in my memory the Morantz attack, the People’s Temple mass suicide and the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone all ran together in the news. So perhaps by this definition, Synanon counts as a cult, or at least it did by that point. I have vague memories of an increased focus on self defense while I was still there, but that might be an amalgam of readings and memories and discussions that happened later.
Somewhere in between these two events, Father Tate, leading an English class, calls Stephen out for blasphemy in a sequence that evokes in the reader a sense of the secret mysteries of the church (chapter II). The teacher cites merely a fragment of a sentence, ‘”Without a possibility of ever approaching nearer.” That’s heresy.’ Stephen backs down, saying, ‘I meant ‘Without a possibility of ever reaching.’ The teacher accepts this, ‘O. That’s another story.’
Many are expressing hope that in the wake of her death, some collaboration might occur between the various groups in NI and that perhaps the political parties will see through their differences and get something done. Talks between the DUP (the party that’s also propping up Mrs May in Westminster) and Sinn Fein broke down almost two and a half years ago and the province has been without a government ever since. (Though it seems talks may yet happen. Link at the bottom.)
Where the Dark and the Light Mingle concludes with Richard Buckner’s Desire, in which our narrator is done with their last partner, having said too much and too drunkenly, ‘shot my insides out with grief and Mr. Kessler’ and just needs to hit the road. Fed up with life and death and lust and addiction, the road beckons.
Joe Jots 