richardwells's review
5.0
I gave this book five stars because it's been a wonderful chore reading something that I don't get it - not by a long shot. It is, in fact, incomprehensible. Not that I don't understand the words - they are in english, not that I don't understand whole sentences, and even find some of them beautiful and moving; I just don't understand what any of the poems is supposed to be about, except, perhaps, the futility of any poem being about any thing. I've tried. I went back into Mr. Salumun's past work, and found poems I understood. Found one poem, The Shepherd, to be quite beautiful; beautiful and scary. And I've discovered that Mr. Salumun has some highly prestigious fans, so they must understand what I don't. The back cover of the book contains the sentence: In The Blue Tower, language is remade with tenderness and abandon. I'm not sure I know what that means, either, but I took it as a sort of clue.
The collection has a cast of characters that repeat through the 55 poems, and the poems do seem to track a life, but... As an experiment I took the third line of the first ten poems and constructed a new poem - it seemed to make as much total sense as any of the other poems in the book. And then I thought I found the key in the 47th poem in the collection, and oddly enough, a poem in which I could suss out a disjointed sort of meaning. The key was this quote: "Art is a present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, such is its richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing." And so I stepped back from meaning, looked at a random poem as a construction, and found some sort of evocative sense, until I moved on to the next poem, and decided: these are not evocative, they're a jumble.
And there you have it, if the brilliance is only seen by a few is it brilliant? Yes, it is.
The collection has a cast of characters that repeat through the 55 poems, and the poems do seem to track a life, but... As an experiment I took the third line of the first ten poems and constructed a new poem - it seemed to make as much total sense as any of the other poems in the book. And then I thought I found the key in the 47th poem in the collection, and oddly enough, a poem in which I could suss out a disjointed sort of meaning. The key was this quote: "Art is a present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, such is its richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing." And so I stepped back from meaning, looked at a random poem as a construction, and found some sort of evocative sense, until I moved on to the next poem, and decided: these are not evocative, they're a jumble.
And there you have it, if the brilliance is only seen by a few is it brilliant? Yes, it is.
xterminal's review
5.0
Tomaž Šalamun, The Blue Tower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
There are a lot of people who—for lack of a more tactful way to put it—simply Just. Don't. Get it. where poetry is concerned. Unfortunately, judging by the other Vine rewviews extant as I write this, all too many of them requested The Blue Tower, the latest volume by Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, for review. The Blue Tower is a nice, quiet, unassuming title that doesn't tell you much. Would it have helped if someone had mentioned that his previous volume is titled There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair? It's a title that's much more expressive of Mr. Šalamun's brand of poetry. Sure, you can look at it seven ways to Sunday and try and figure out what the hand means and what the chair means and above all why the chair is arid, and you may even come up with something. But if you're one of those people who reads a poem and whose first thought is “what does this mean?”, sue the teacher(s) who taught you poetry. They screwed up. The only valid first question to ask after reading a poem is “how does it sound?”. And suddenly “arid chair” makes perfect sense.
And from the point of view of simply sounding good, The Blue Tower is a little marvel—all the more so because it's translated, which often takes gorgeous-sounding work and makes it pretty much unbearable to read. (I don't know how many awful translations of Apollinaire I've come across over the years; I am eternally grateful Michael Hamburger's were the first I read, or I'd have probably ended up hating Apollinaire.) Translator Michael Biggins seems to be doing his level best to keep his translation in the spirit of Šalamun's words, and the English plays and bounces and patters like rain.
“...Pythagoras is plunder. A cat licks
his ears all summer and winter. Pins directed
the bloodflow of saints. Stones erode
on the shoals. I shove Diran's head away from
the table. This clump is a tombolo. And that
pigeon on the plate. Mother of pearl. Gray head.”
(--”Honey and Holofernes”)
Image after image after image after image and if there is any tie between any of them, it's put there by baggage the reader brings to the table. (The poet, in this model of thinking, which was put forward by one of the surrealists—I think Prévert, but don't quote me on that—is nothing more than another reader, albeit of his own work.) This is far from original thinking, but the lack of any sort of essential meaning a teacher can point to and tell students to study means this stuff is likely to get as much coverage in universities as, say, René Char. (In other words, nil.) What is also means is that as long as you're willing to suspend your search for meaning and just hop along for the ride, it's absolutely blissful stuff, dada in one of its most beautiful incarnations since Picabia, and that when you do find those juxtapositions where two of Šalamun's images spark a third in your mind, the poetry becomes intensely, deeply personal, but on your level rather than the poet's. This is fantastic stuff indeed, and it saddens me that so few understand how to get at the true meat of it. **** ½
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
There are a lot of people who—for lack of a more tactful way to put it—simply Just. Don't. Get it. where poetry is concerned. Unfortunately, judging by the other Vine rewviews extant as I write this, all too many of them requested The Blue Tower, the latest volume by Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, for review. The Blue Tower is a nice, quiet, unassuming title that doesn't tell you much. Would it have helped if someone had mentioned that his previous volume is titled There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair? It's a title that's much more expressive of Mr. Šalamun's brand of poetry. Sure, you can look at it seven ways to Sunday and try and figure out what the hand means and what the chair means and above all why the chair is arid, and you may even come up with something. But if you're one of those people who reads a poem and whose first thought is “what does this mean?”, sue the teacher(s) who taught you poetry. They screwed up. The only valid first question to ask after reading a poem is “how does it sound?”. And suddenly “arid chair” makes perfect sense.
And from the point of view of simply sounding good, The Blue Tower is a little marvel—all the more so because it's translated, which often takes gorgeous-sounding work and makes it pretty much unbearable to read. (I don't know how many awful translations of Apollinaire I've come across over the years; I am eternally grateful Michael Hamburger's were the first I read, or I'd have probably ended up hating Apollinaire.) Translator Michael Biggins seems to be doing his level best to keep his translation in the spirit of Šalamun's words, and the English plays and bounces and patters like rain.
“...Pythagoras is plunder. A cat licks
his ears all summer and winter. Pins directed
the bloodflow of saints. Stones erode
on the shoals. I shove Diran's head away from
the table. This clump is a tombolo. And that
pigeon on the plate. Mother of pearl. Gray head.”
(--”Honey and Holofernes”)
Image after image after image after image and if there is any tie between any of them, it's put there by baggage the reader brings to the table. (The poet, in this model of thinking, which was put forward by one of the surrealists—I think Prévert, but don't quote me on that—is nothing more than another reader, albeit of his own work.) This is far from original thinking, but the lack of any sort of essential meaning a teacher can point to and tell students to study means this stuff is likely to get as much coverage in universities as, say, René Char. (In other words, nil.) What is also means is that as long as you're willing to suspend your search for meaning and just hop along for the ride, it's absolutely blissful stuff, dada in one of its most beautiful incarnations since Picabia, and that when you do find those juxtapositions where two of Šalamun's images spark a third in your mind, the poetry becomes intensely, deeply personal, but on your level rather than the poet's. This is fantastic stuff indeed, and it saddens me that so few understand how to get at the true meat of it. **** ½
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