[816] I'm Explaining a Few Things

Guest poem submitted by Amulya Gopalakrishnan, <amulya_g@>:

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel?         Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

	-- Pablo Neruda

Translated by Nathaniel Tarn.

Here's one for all those who decry politically engaged literature as being
aesthetically compromised: Pablo Neruda. For some of the most wonderful
poems that combine Art and heart. He wrote some of the most burning,
gorgeous lines but what powers his poetry is always his politics. Unlike
Nabokov's idea that 'the sole purpose of art is aesthetic bliss', he
fiercely believes that poems can make new worlds. He described the first of
his poetry readings at a trade union meeting as 'the most important fact of
my literary career'.

This particular poem combines generosity, fight, painfulness... and
lyricism, even as it shows up the absurdity of 'poppy-petalled metaphysics'.
There's an aggressive overabundance - the spilling over of the merchandise,
building up to the rush of violent visual images, (black friars spattering
blessings) and then, the unexpected, bludgeoning moments of tenderness (the
house of geraniums, the children's blood).

Neruda's surreal, sure, but it isn't swimmy, soft-focus surrealism. His
images cohere emotionally, with the energy of his anger, all the way up to
the terrible finality of 'come out and see the blood on the streets'. The
poem burns clean.

Amulya.

From: Nicholas Grundy <nick.grundy@>


Hello,

Just thought I should leap to poor old V.V.N.'s defence in Amulya's
comments on "I'm Explaining a Few Things".  I think the comment Amulya's
referring to with "the sole purpose of art is aesthetic bliss" is from the
afterword to Lolita, where Nabokov says "For me a work of fiction exists
only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss,
that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of
being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."
(If this isn't what Amulya was referring to then I apologise!).

When you look at the full quotation, I think Nabokov's rather closer to
Neruda in wanting to "make new worlds" than might at first be evident. In
fact, he also said of his work that "What I would welcome at the close of a
book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and
stopping somewhere there suspended afar like a picture in a picture."
Granted, the kind of world he's looking to create is different (reflective,
self-conscious, deliberately enigmatic) from Neruda's, but I think the
intent is the same.  In fact, given that the basic definition of art he
worked from was "beauty plus pity", he's actually (happily!) very close to
"I'm Explaining a Few Things", which - as Amulya says - combines "violent
visual images" with "bludgeoning moments of tenderness": beauty with pity,
or (not to coin a phrase) Art with heart...

Thanks,
Nick.

From: ReggieG814@

I know not when this poem was written, but it is a timely comparison to the  
situation going on in Iraq: "Come and see the blood in the  streets!"