https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Poetry-Soup-Ep.-15-copy.MP3.mp3 Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup. I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. There’s been a short break, but Poetry Soup is back, with “Witchgrass,” by the late Louise Gluck. Louise Gluck was born on April 22, 1943 in New York City. She wrote 12 books of poetry, including The Wild Iris, which I will be reading from today. Though she never finished a degree, Gluck attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, and went on to later teach poetry at Stanford and English at Yale. She won many awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. From 2003 to 2004, she was also the U.S. poet laureate. She died on October 13, 2023. Louise Gluck’s personal experiences are prominent in her poetry. She often wrote about trauma and sadness. Some of her poetry was also influenced by Greek mythology, such as in her chapbook, October. Her poems are haunting, even in The Wild Iris, when Gluck combines her themes of tragedy with seemingly innocent flowers, which is exactly what she does in “Witchgrass.” Something comes into the world unwelcome calling disorder, disorder— If you hate me so much don’t bother to give me a name: do you need one more slur in your language, another way to blame one tribe for everything— as we both know, if you worship one god, you only need One enemy— I’m not the enemy. Only a ruse to ignore what you see happening right here in this bed, a little paradigm of failure. One of your precious flowers dies here almost every day and you can’t rest until you attack the cause, meaning whatever is left, whatever happens to be sturdier than your personal passion— It was not meant to last forever in the real world. But why admit that, when you can go on doing what you always do, mourning and laying blame, always the two together. I don’t need your praise to survive. I was here first, before you were here, before you ever planted a garden. And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon are left, and the sea, and the wide field. I will constitute the field. Louise Gluck centers her poem on a plant called witchgrass. It’s a sort of weed, unwanted in gardens and often pulled out. Gluck connects this unwantedness to her own life, as well as to the lives of others. Rather than backing down from the slurs and names she refers to in stanza two, she proudly declares, “I was here first.” Rather than agreeing that witchgrass is unneeded and forgetting about it, rather than getting rid of it and writing about something different, something more exciting, Gluck gives this plain weed a personality and significance. She shows how important the smallest things can be, how everything can play a role. By identifying with a plant – and a despised, insignificant one at that – Gluck composes an original and deep poem. In the first three stanzas, Gluck ends with dashes, signifying pauses in her speech. As she keeps going, however, she gets rid of these, showing that she is becoming more confident in what she is saying. But even the witchgrass has grown violent from the ages of violence that have been committed towards it. It has grown over the flowers, an act it cannot control, but one that it doesn’t excuse – it is stronger, or “sturdier,” after all. In a way, the witchgrass has embraced the concept of “survival of the fittest.” For plants and animals, this is a law of nature – the bigger organisms survive more than the smaller. But, humans having stepped in, the situation becomes a question of either preference or prejudice, leaving us to ponder whether what is acceptable in nature is acceptable for human beings – and why it is or isn’t. Told from the point of view of the plant itself, Gluck ends the poem with the line, “I will constitute the field.” She means that witchgrass, despite being hated by humans, has the right to and can be a part of the field that they love. However, this is where survival of the fittest comes in again – because witchgrass could also reclaim the field when the weaker flowers that rely on human care have died. In “Witchgrass,” Louise Gluck shows us the perspective of an ordinary weed and leaves us to think about the meaning behind it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Poetry Soup, and I’ll see you soon with the next one!
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Poetry Soup – Ep. 13: “There Was Earth Inside Them” by Paul Celan
Poetry Soup – Ep. 13: “There Was Earth Inside Them” by Paul Celan Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Today, I’ll be reading the poem, “There was Earth Inside Them,” by Paul Celan. Paul Celan was born on November 23, 1920, in what was formerly Cernăuți, Kingdom of Romania, and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine, into a Jewish family. Despite being born in Romania, Celan mainly spoke German. His father was adamant about Celan’s education in Hebrew and about Judaism in general. Around the time Celan graduated from preparatory school, he began writing poetry. Celan went to France in order to study medicine, but he went back home a year later to study language and literature. During World War II, while Celan was away from home, his parents were sent to a concentration camp, where they both died. This is the reason why so much of Celan’s poetry is about the Holocaust. In 1952, Celan married Gisèle Lestrange, who was a French graphic artist. Paul Celan drowned himself on April 20, 1970. Much of his work was later translated by Michael Hamburger, who translated the poem I will be reading today. There Was Earth Inside Them, and they dug. They dug and they dug, so their day went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. They dug and heard nothing more; they did not grow wise, invented no song, thought up for themselves no language. They dug. There came a stillness, and there came a storm, and all the oceans came. I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too, and that singing out there says: They dig. O one, o none, o no one, o you: Where did the way lead when it led nowhere? O you dig and I dig and I dig towards you, and on our finger the ring awakes. “They Had Earth Inside Them” is one of my favorite poems, and Paul Celan one of my favorite poets – all of his poetry has beautiful rhythm and metaphor. This poem is an extended metaphor, filled with beautiful language that paints images in the minds of the readers – such as a ring “awakening,” or shining on a finger. The poem is about trying to find meaning in existence. In the poem, a group of people referred to simply as “they,” dig to discover this meaning. As “they” dig, time passes by, and they invent no “song” or “language.” In this way, the first part of the poem seems to show the search for meaning as negative. The lines, “And they did not praise God,/ who, so they heard, wanted all this,/ who, so they heard, knew all this,” suggest that religion is a sort of search for meaning as well, God being a stand-in for the meaning of life. After the line, “there came a stillness and there came a storm,” everything changes. This line is the turn of the poem. All of a sudden, Celan breaks the parallelism, making it so not only “they” are digging, but also “I,” “you,” and, of course, the “worm,” a symbol of death, showing that life is short and that we are all trapped in the search for meaning. In the end of the poem, the ring “awakens” on a finger, almost as if it has been shined by the digging and scraping of the hands in the dirt. This line disperses all the negativity at the end of the poem – the ring symbolizes the little things that we live for, it symbolizes finding the “earth inside of them,” or the meaning that is in them, perched on their finger. The image of the poem does remain mixed, however – the ring shines, but it could also be covered in dirt from the repeated digging. Celan managed to create this beautiful poem in just four stanzas – the power of a short poem. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Poetry Soup, and I’ll see you soon with the next one!
Poetry Soup Ep. 12 – “An Ox Looks at Man” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Poetry Soup – Ep. 12: “An Ox Looks at Man” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Today I’ll be talking about the poem, “An Ox Looks at Man,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, which inspired my own poem. Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born on October 31, 1902 in Itabira, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He went to a school of pharmacy, but did not enjoy it. Rather than a pharmacist, de Andrade was a civil servant. As well as writing poetry, de Andrade became director of history for the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service of Brazil and, later, during World War II, started editing the official newspaper of the Brazilian Communist Party, Tribuna Popular, for a short while. The famous poet Mark Strand (who is one of my favorite poets!), translated a lot of de Andrade’s poetry, and his first English language translator was Elizabeth Bishop, whose villanelle, “One Art,” is featured in Poetry Soup. De Andrade wrote poems on many subjects, but every one of his poems exudes the same gracefulness and beauty. They are more delicate even than shrubs and they run and run from one side to the other, always forgetting something. Surely they lack I don’t know what basic ingredient, though they present themselves as noble or serious, at times. Oh, terribly serious, even tragic. Poor things, one would say that they hear neither the song of the air nor the secrets of hay; likewise they seem not to see what is visible and common to each of us, in space. And they are sad, and in the wake of sadness they come to cruelty. All their expression lives in their eyes–and loses itself to a simple lowering of lids, to a shadow. And since there is little of the mountain about them – nothing in the hair or in the terribly fragile limbs but coldness and secrecy — it is impossible for them to settle themselves into forms that are calm, lasting and necessary. They have, perhaps, a kind of melancholy grace (one minute) and with this they allow themselves to forget the problems and translucent inner emptiness that make them so poor and so lacking when it comes to uttering silly and painful sounds: desire, love, jealousy (what do we know?) – sounds that scatter and fall in the field like troubled stones and burn the herbs and the water, and after this it is hard to keep chewing away at our truth. Rather than writing a poem from the point of view of a human being, Carlos Drummond de Andrade instead writes his from the point of view of an ox looking at humans (referred to as “man” in the title of the poem). The ox seems to feel pity for the humans because they feel so much (“desire, love, jealousy”), and therefore suffer so much. Though the ox can somehow name these feelings, it does not truly know them – “(what do we know?)” The ox thinks humans are fragile and pathetic, that they are lacking in something because they are not strong, because they don’t always get along, because they have feelings that are depressing. But the ox does not know of bravery or friendship, other traits among humans. It only sees sadness, because it cannot really imagine happiness. It has never been happy, trapped in the same daily routine. And so it sees humans as a way of showing itself that its life is not so bad. This is the result of a life without true meaning. The ox does not only comment on itself, however, as de Andrade’s main point is to critique humans. Man to man, there are things we do not see – no matter what things we do, we still think of ourselves as the superior race. But we can counter these feelings in the way de Andrade does – through the eyes of a different animal, such as an ox. The ox says, for example, that “little of the mountain is about them,” showing that humans are somewhat abstracted from their environment. While other animals live in peace with nature, we sometimes even destroy it. This poem shows us that because humanity is so complex, looking at it almost disturbs the ox’s calm demeanor. The ox is not used to this level of intricacy. I wrote my own poem based on “An Ox Looks at Man,” from the point of view of a horse. It goes like this: What the Horse Saw They lack hooves, and they have straw falling from their heads. They have cast a spell to make it soft, like my mane, but not as elegant. I gallop gracefully, and they crouch down, panting, calling me. The beauty of my ballet is countered only by the humor of their jig, which they dance so insistently. They stand there only to make me laugh. I respond to no name. Not the name of the horse, not the name of the animal. They tried to give me a name, and they called me by it, but it was all a part of their play, where they doubled over, running off their grassy stage after me. They made my escape more pleasurable than I thought it would be. Now I have only bushes to talk to, and they make bad companions. They think my eyes are small, that because I do not recognize red, I do not recognize them. My laughs stay secret and joyous, like my leap from the stable to the world. The flies stayed inside, and I became free. They called my name. I respond to no name. Maybe if they named me for my beauty, if they named me for my laughter. If they named me for my feelings or for my color, I might yield. But they gave me someone else’s name. I know the horse they called Onyx, a blank canvas, but black,
