Poems of Hungary, Second Selection
A Note on the Poems
The Editor’s first set of selections, in the previous issue, emphasized social-political themes. This second set emphasizes art-making intention: hearing and seeing, perceptions shaped into poems, paintings. The earlier set made reference to Wallace Stevens, but this set looks more to the example of William Carlos Williams: the democracy of things seen, importance of feeling-tone of place, the three-tier line Williams developed in books of the forties and fifties – based on the coincidence and non-coincidence of intonational phrases with the step-down line.
Looking Away: On not-seeing, and on perception that occurs before cognition in the image of the University cat.
Uses of an Abandoned Church: On hearing, as a resolution to or dodging away from seeing.
To Susan Howe: An implicit criticism of a fine writer delivered to her directly, followed by a vulnerable admission.
There is a new translation of Dezsô Kosztolányi’s novel, Kornél Esti, full of references to districts, streets, shop names, means of transport in Budapest, and I found I could visualize every scene. To resonate with the aesthetic intention of this second set of poems, I will give a list of just those memories of the city that come immediately to mind after an absence of several years: let us celebrate the beauty of the word for “goodbye”, with its luscious v and l and its five lingering syllables; the yellow awning at the Hotel Normafa in the Buda Hills, which tints all faces on a summer day; the electricians who gladly took a glass of Vilmos for goodbye gift, and who then overcharged by 70,000 forints; the zöld küllô bird in Kerepesi Cemetery that has the colours of the Hungarian flag; the male scholars who wear their sport jackets over their shoulders, style found only here; the fare-police in the Metro who slap on Velcro armbands after boarding a train; the sounds of the organ playing Albinoni at St Matthias Church in the Vár, drilling down to the animal brain; the perfect pairing of coffee with Sauerkraut pogácsa; $100 stolen from an open purse on the #7 bus; the man sleeping with his head on a bed of dill at the Garai Market; teachers dressed as St. Nicholas (Mikulás) and as a devil, who came to our language class on 6 December to give us mock-presents to encourage us; the cimbalom-player in a cellar restaurant who, angling for tips, would play Gershwin songs when the Americans came down the stairs.
Looking Away
Greeks said: look
at some
thing you rip
the surface off it. We:
tear
huge swaths off Budapest!
In a new place
amazed
hunt for sense,
but some things simply
don’t fit,
as with sidewalk walking at
a Magyar veering left
when he veers
right, near collision,
that never happens
USA, so
is here backwards,
no, we’re in a
slightly
other universe.
The visual hunt to
make Pest
familiar won’t work
so long as they say
Pesht,
so frustration keeps
up the eagerness
of sheer seeing,
except: except
when in Keleti
station there
are legless beggars sliding
on their hands on
circles
of wood; or when in
the park or on the street
the long calf
emerges from a woman’s
skirt, ankled, booted,
resolute
the leg and above, the eye-
beams moving frankly
as if not
attached to the bare leg
walking out the
slit skirt.
Then we look away.
We say we skim-glance
and then
look elsewhere, to spare
embarrassment the beggar or
the woman,
but we do know how self-
serving that excuse,
we want to
revel in another’s pain
or touch another’s
perfect leg,
so vision’s cowardly
in reticence, cannot
go
everywhere. Vision’s not
helpless or complete but
submits
to that professor
behind the
eyes,
cognition.
Inordinately in March
Budapest’s
full of legless beggars
and women with legs,
occasions
for looking away
and for rich evocation
of visual
guilt. How easy
then to see five slant stripes
of tart red-purple neon
a quarter-mile away through
clear evening air, the
Paprika restaurant
lit for supper, or to see
spiky white fur below
the neck of
the University cat
as he looks up
startled
at a falling leaf.
Uses of an Abandoned Church
Tho I’m no Catholic
(remembering
Williams’ line as I
redivide his To Elsie
measure), I
admire you, my parish
church, though now you
have no name
of Saint, no plaque, and
the leaves pile up
unswept
before the locked door
facing Thököly út,
corner Cházár
András út, heart of Pest
across from where, cold night,
we saw, last
fall, the woman
in white short skirt
interpellating
traffic, married
Americans saying Do
you think?
and yes, it was a whore,
one does not see them
checking
out men’s eyes in La Jolla.
You rise away from her,
from us,
in purple brick reaching
100 feet before you narrow
to a steeple
with the nave-roof behind,
points and finials, stripes
and jags of
gray-stone trim, copper cone
turned green, at very top
a cross. Bi-
located,I see church roof, steeple from
my kitchen window, and behind
them Népstadion,
behind these the dawn with
flights from Ferihegy
stretching
con-trails over the band of pink.
What we
see’d
be nothing without the church,
nothing for the moon
to anchor to
or that woman to stand below,
unjudged. Tuesday nights
at 7,
or here 19, the church
sends out brief sounds
in bells,
not rung in tremendous
40-minute plunging
changes like
those English Colchester
evenings but still, a harsh
most
unmusical thin disturbance
on the air between steeple
and here,
whose meaning’s hardly
Catholic or Hungarian,
but has their
traces, marking dinner
hour, marking dark,
sound as
sound, a reality from outside.
Rippl-Rónai
Wrote his initials with two Rs
one backfacing
one forward using same vertical
bar in the middle, connecting
outward-
pointing R-feet in a semicircle.
Said Here I soon
saw everything
in colour, and the intensive
blue of the sea deterred
me from
my former intentions, and
if you want fiery
colours, press
tube to canvas, no mixing
on the canvas; and paint
everything, whatever
its size without intermission or,
as painters say, at
a single
sitting. Could the poem
also keep every part
at equal stage,
so all finishes same time?
Could language yield
so pure
a colourist, do what
Rippl-Rónai did when
he returned
from years in Paris to
Kaposvár, create genre-
scenes not
narrative, where jolly reds
and greens are the story,
or where he knew
to paint a mirror’s surface blue
to a little from the top,
then grey?
His pastels and tapestries
are not the point,
but rather how
he knew in Portrait of
Mrs Pataki, 1892,
a starshape
fluteburst of thinnest
doodling pencil
lines
was her closed eyelash.
To Susan Howe
You show a lyric steeped in thought
about America, our history, silenced
women, original intensities, the lyric
of learning. Search of appearance
performed through ellipse and breaking off,
unexpected redundancies, footnotes, non-
punctuation, nouns laid in like stripes
of colour, the material word. Defenestration
of Prague’s your daring title, but
the material word’s not there,
making prodigy-prodigal search of what’s
material in Prague, it’s not a writing
of Prague by an arguing eye, though
you can claim a reading of America
across a violent Czech allusion.
Prague’s not there for you, won’t be
historical, discursive, every-
day, what Budapest is for me.
You have more ideas in fewer words!
Your music’s sparse; mine’s talky.
If only I could delete as much!