Through Mirrors

by Brett Rutherford

  I play you through mirrors,  

angled dreamt visions of you  

I catch in candlelight

    halfway across the crowd-cafe

  you are fun-house warped to me

  so close I can almost touch

  each peach-fuzz hair on your cheek.

    You are all there, from head  

long-haired, to slender foot,  

leaner than ever, as thin  

as depth of glass. If I

    touch this, will you yield

  to my phantom?    

I send a ghost-messenger

  to follow your double home.

    There you go. There, with you,

  she (whatever she you deign

  to possess this evening)

  leans on your shoulder.

    My mirror self will follow.

  When he returns

  I'll reap the grief  of his report.

  Your kind  can only be wooed that way.

    You do not see me looking,

  longing. You lurk in corridors

       of cold seduction,

  between the mercury and glass.

Love Song in Finland

by Brett Rutherford

after a poem by Goethe ("Finnische Lied"), 1810

How would it be if the dear one
came back exactly as he left me?
I'd kiss those lips so fast he'd stumble,
even if they gleam a wolf-blood red.


He would have to take back, too,
that cold formal handshake, heart-death
to me, that parted us. I'd press
those fingers even if they felt like snakes.


What is wind but words repeated,
tree to tree, from cliffs resounding,
losing meaning over ice floes?
Just so, the whispered promises
fade off when love is too long absent.


What would you have me renounce? Food?
I would shun all cakes and pastries;
I would refuse the monk's poor stew,
Starving to win the beloved!
Whom once I charmed in fulgent June,
let him come, Winter-tamed, to stay.

Charlotte Bronte, the Ego Triumphant

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Victorian reader was presented with a shocking manifestation of personality: a female lead character who was poor, homely in appearance, intelligent, and absolutely unwilling to bow to arbitrary authority. Where the heroines of Anne Brontë's novels bore their misery in silence, or kept their superior intellects to their private diaries, Charlotte's title character has a fully-formed ego in childhood and does not hesitate to assert her evaluations of the bad behavior around her, to her great cost in most cases. So pronounced is Brontë's individualism, in fact, that it could be called a softer mirror of the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the individualism of Thomas Paine, and a precursor of the Hegelian individualism that was taking shape on the continent in the mind of Max Stirner, author of The Ego and His Own, the first fully-developed statement of egoistic individualism.

You can read my paper on this topic here:

https://www.academia.edu/38398106/Charlotte_Bronte_-_The_Ego_Triumphant

The Partisan's Woman

by Brett Rutherford

1

There was a woman, wondrous fair,
and he loved her. She lived alone.
Her door was barred. Her lover last
had been a Partisan, and died
in the far-off mountains. No man
Had seen her face, or touched her since.

He came to her door at sunrise,
bleeding. He knocked until a voice,
behind thick wood called out "Who's there?"—
"One who loves you still and always.
I have killed a man, and I bleed." —

"What kind of man have you killed, now?"—
"Policeman," he stammered. "My love,
I killed an officer of law." —
"Was he a bad officer, then?" —
"Like a wolf to the innocent." —
The bolts shot free. Just one pale hand
extended a clean, white bandage.
"Go and take care that no one sees you."

2

There was a woman, wondrous fair,
And he loved her. One dusk, he knocked
until the soft voice called, "Who is it?" —
"One who loves you still and always.
I have freed ten men from prison.
Help we need to reach the border."
The bolts shot free. Both hands held out
a sack of bread and provisions.
She leaned forth and let him kiss her.
"Go and take care that no one sees you."

3

There was a woman, wondrous fair,
and he loved her. Midnight, he knocked
until she stirred and asked, "Who is it?" —
"I who love you still and always.
I have brought you the tyrant's head."
Down he hurled it on her threshold.
The bolts shot free. Into her arms
the woman took him, laughing loud.
Goblets had she, and wine a-plenty.
"Love me," she said. "Love me from now
until the day they come for us."

4

And the age of hard wars was long,
and the hunger consumed many.
The bees from the hive were absent,
and the dry nests fell from the trees.
Seas rose, storms fed the hurricanes.
Whirlwinds harrowed the empty fields.
Nights lay silent — crickets and frogs,
owls and nightingales on strike,
awaiting the high victory
of species, of each against each
and mankind against everything.

A hundred times the earth returned
to the place it thought it started.
There stood, in a leafless forest,
the partisan's woman's cottage,
a rotting skull upon its doorstep.

Nevermore did oak door open,
and nevermore were seen the man
or the woman wondrous and fair.

An Old Flame

by Brett Rutherford

On the eve of this dreaded holiday
I scanned the mailbox for pink fringes,
heart-shapes and scarlet arrows.

None, the gods be thanked.
I am well past pursuing, loth
to imagine myself the object
of any being's affection.

I glanced at internet beauty,
spectator sport. And look!
an urgent email
from someone who knew my name,
a mystery "old flame," he wrote me.
"How old?" I queried skeptically.
"You were my first," he teased back.

A date was made. The hour came,
and as expected, no one arrived.
I listened to Bach for an hour
then drifted off to sleep.

Sunrise on Valentine's Day
my eyes rolled open. Some
one was in the bed with me.
We turned to face each other.

It was a Trilobite.

{Revised May 2019].

By A Roman Road Forgotten

I started this translation many years ago and stopped after three stanzas, feeling not up to the complex challenges posed by this powerful poem of protest. This is Yevtushenko's equivalent to Shelley's "Ozymandias." The poem resonates not only with its time, but with the present. The poet was in Syria in 1966 and was taken to see a stretch of a Roman road. No one knew who built it or when.
We know a great deal more now. The road was called the Strata Diocletiana, and was built under the order of the Emperor Diocletian from 284 to 305 CE. So it is a late addition to the vast road system that ran all over the Empire, some of it maintained for more than 800 years. Talk about infrastructure! This stretch of Roman roads held the Syrian territory, which included Judea, together connecting Palmyra and Damascus all the way down to Arabia.
Yevtushenko wrote this in 1966. Brezhnev was in power. Every word he said and wrote was carefully watched by the state, ever since he wrote his famous poem about "Babi Yar" five years earlier. Things had to be said carefully, by indirection, or not at all. The sight of the ruined road of a forgotten Roman regime may have seemed a gateway into a poem that could say much, yet seem to be about a remote time and place, about "imperialists" the Soviet authorities could not object to his portraying as corrupt and evil.
The poem resonates now, too, since Syria is once again a battle ground over which sinister and arrogant empires and faux-empires are fighting. Fighters may be creeping along this 1700-year-old road at night. As as we have to deal with a wanna-be Emperor of our own, the poem is an urgent warning about hubris from these parts.
I have translated this fairly close to the original. But it is an adaptation, with such liberties as the moment induced. I have also added a few lines here and there to add factual details about the road's identity and Diocletian's name. Since it is known now, we had might as well name the Emperor and place the road in its historical moment, not Rome in its glory but Rome a hundred years from its end.

Enough said: here is the poem, in my first draft translation.


*** ***
BY A ROMAN ROAD FORGOTTEN

Translation by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from a Russian poem by Evgenii Yevtushenko

By a Roman road forgotten,
not far away from Damascus,
dead-faced mountains wear away
like masks of an ancient emperor.

Fat snakes that warm themselves
draw back their heads in coils,
bask their scales in the sunlight,
keeping their self-important secrets,
as if they had been with Cleopatra!

This was a road of damascene,
that rarest of steels for swords,
trade route for pearls and rubies,
rubbed clean by the bodies of slaves.

Legions marched in to invade,
profiles like Roman coins,
breast plates of bronze concealing
the venereal plagues of the armies.

Wheeled chariots once swayed
(before their wood was torn for cook-fire),
leaning beneath their drivers
like the crested coifs of empresses.

Laying the flagstones was the death
of slaves untold, each stone the back
of one fossilized workman,
an easy-ridden-over cenotaph.

Grown tired of his hot and Syrian exile
(too warm to even think in Latin),
the elegant patrician puts down
his lemon ice, to swab himself
in the finest Etruscan oil.

"Who cares if we crush this rabble
till nothing is left but skull and bones?
We Romans will not die like worms,
and the road will always save us."

Words not heard by the Arab mason,
dutifully pounding his hammer
to a slave-song obstinate,
a Syriac slave-song full of cunning.

"Thinking only about the flesh,
you have forgotten the gods.
Your death I hammer here,
and the road's death too."

Empire, decayed at the roots,
crept on, agape with gore;
veined, not like a tree,
but as a patchwork of blood.

Against resisters the Romans did
what they did best: the fire and tongs,
but torture victims sewn together
can only hold out so long.

The Romans took to sleeping naked,
their haughty togas put aside,
and so it was the Empire died,
and as well the ruined road I stand on.

They passed off their crimes to others
with the ease of the forger's art.
Some mile stones have only
the distant Emperor's name,
and some say nothing since
Diocletian had many worries,
least among them those awful Christians.
Who dies making the road is no one's
business. The road is not to blame.

But generations of wild grass
have had their way with it.
Only ghosts and goatherds walk
the dead Strata Diocletiana.
The road that engendered crime
Is now itself outlaw and criminal.

Let all the roads to executions,
and all the highways to tyrants' follies
come at the end to this ultimate payment:
forgotten, forever, in the highest weeds.

Damascus-Moscow 1967-68.

The Poet Who Starved

by Brett Rutherford

After Uhland

Such was his lot — each dismal day
was short and marked with sorrow,
and just as a poet ought, he withered
and quite forgotten, passed away.

He was an ill-starred baby
with only a muse hag for a nurse-maid,
and she it was who taught him
to sing whether supper came or no.

His mother, if one could call her that,
crisped early to her unmarked urn,
and so she marked his doom,
an anonymous and unread vessel
unfit for holding and keeping gold.

When all around passed pewter mugs,
flagons and cups and champagne flutes,
he was the one they scorned to cheer,
pouring the dregs on the cindered ground.

He knew the names of their vintages,
the lineage kings who had trod the valleys;
he could tell the rise and fall of empires,
but not one sip was for him!

Still, smiles came to him every Spring,
his dreams of blossoms woven,
but others hewed the trees to splinters,
boots muddying his purple stream.

When others orgied on holidays, game days
and feasts, and victory parades,
he raised his proud cup from afar —
his clear cold water; their groaning boards.

The others watched as he walked on by,
between his study and the library shelves,
thought him a being of scarcely flesh.
He must have inherited some money, of course.

"He's almost a ghost, an other-worldly man.
He doesn't live like us. Ambrosia and mead,
strange fruits and berries, a millet stew
must be the provender of his monkish days."

Dead! dead! they found him there
over the crumbs of the last saltine, the pot
of weak tea too many times infused
until it was but shaded water.

There was nothing in his house! Just papers!
Cupboards zig-zaggedy with spiderwebs,
refrigerator unplugged, a gasless stove,
plates in the sink too far gone for even mould.

At least it was easy to carry him, pine box
not much heavier than a pine box and a suit
of clothes. No hearse for him: a handcart
sufficed to roll him off to the graveyard.

His weak tread had scarcely marked the dust
when he walked of nights. Now may the earth
rest lightly on his shoulders. May someone find
those papers he left behind, and publish them.
May someone remember those words were his.

Sarah Helen Whitman Book Goes to Press

After six months of furious research, annotation, and editing, Break Every Bond: Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence has gone to press. Here is the full description of the book:
BREAK EVERY BOND: SARAH HELEN WHITMAN IN PROVIDENCE. Literary Essays and Selected Poems. Edited and Annotated by Brett Rutherford.

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe's posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.

This volume presents Whitman's literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford's biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman's time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded "literary widow," we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.

The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe's writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensable for students of Edgar Allan Poe.

The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in "Hours of Life," her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger's "Leonora." Whitman's allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

ISBN 0-978-0-922558-00-1. 302 pp., 6 x 9 inches, paperback. Published February 2019. $18.95.
AVAILABLE NOW:
ORDER FROM AMAZON NOW.

Across the Sublime Divide: Dryden and Handel

Back in 2006, I created a web page template for presenting short academic papers in an easy-to-read format. I took a paper that I had written about Handel's Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day and formatted it. It's been sitting on my website for a while, and to my surprise it's even been cited by a couple of scholars. Take a peek if it interests you, not just for its Introduction to Handel's work, but also for my web design. The idea was to have this as an empty template, and the user could paste in text from word and do just a minimum of formatting. The fonts will differ from user to user -- I call up my favorite fonts in descending order, and what you see depends on what you have, the lowest common denominator being the hated Times Roman.

The intro to the paper reads:

Handel’s 1739 musical setting of it, Ode for St. Cecilia’s
Day, signify the meeting of poetry and music in the realm of
the Sublime. Dryden’s poem takes music and its role in the
universe as its theme, and hence invites examination against
the eighteenth century’s radically evolving aesthetics of the
Sublime. Handel’s musical work, setting to music a text
about music itself, invites study to determine whether
musical practice in Handel’s time enacted the aesthetics of
contemporaneous poets and critics, insofar as they claimed to
understand the Beautiful and the Sublime in music.
This paper will attempt to illustrate the enormous gap
between the two arts by showing that eighteenth-century
British critical understanding of music was based on
abstract ideas largely unrelated to musical practice, an
understanding that failed to acknowledge music as an art
capable of sublime effect on its own. I will use Handel’s
work to demonstrate that composers achieve sublime
effects — with or without text — by employing harmonic,
dynamic and rhythmic techniques that constitute a kind of
rhetoric. This techne, closer to the Sublime of Longinus
than to that of Burke or Kant, allows music its
acknowledged power even when accompanied with lessthan-
inspired text. I will review some of the criticism
around Dryden’s poem that relates to its original 1687
musical setting, and then examine Handel’s work itself on a musicological basis.

View the Handel-Dryden Paper Here.

Books by Poet's Press Authors

You can find the ordering links to all the Poet's Press books on our main webpage.

Here are shortcuts to some of our long-time authors:

Emilie Glen

• Emilie Glen Vol 1
• Emilie Glen Vol 2
• Emilie Glen Vol 3
• Emilie Glen Vol 4

Emily Greco

• Things to Do When Dead

Annette Hayn

• Chamber Music
• Enemy on the Way to School
• One Armed Flyer
• Journeys Around One Point

Heinrich Heine

• Heine: Germany

Barbara A. Holland

• Crises of Rejuvenation
• Autumn Numbers
• Holland Collected Poems
• In the Shadows

The Exhumation of Goethe

by Brett Rutherford

East Germany, 1970

By all means do this at night, while Weimar
sleeps, while even those whose job it is to watch
the watchers, sleep. In merciful dark,
the third-shift silence when the local electric plant
shuts down for the Good of the State,

take a cart — no, not a car,
a hand-drawn cart —
dampen its wheels so your journeys to,

and from, and back
to the foggy graveyard are soundless.

Do not awaken the burghers!
Here are the keys to the wrought-iron gates —
mind you don't rattle them.
The crypt has been purposefully left unlocked.
You need but draw the door.
The cart will just squeeze through
(Engineer Heinrich has measured everything!)

Open the sarcophagus as quietly as possible.
Watch the fingers! Don't leave a mark
on the hand-carved cover.
Be sure it's Goethe, the one with a "G."
We don't want his crypt-mate Schiller
(too many anti-People tendencies).

Lift up the whole thing gently.
The bones will want to fly apart.
Only the shroud, and some mummified meat
keep him in the semblance of skeleton.
Just scoop the whole thing up
like a pancake, then into the cart.

Here's a bag for the skull. Don't muss
those ash-gray laurel leaves.
We plan to coat them in polymer
after we study that Aryan skull
whose brain conceived Faust,
Egmont, and sorrowful Werther.

We're going to wire the bones together,
strip off that nasty flesh,
maybe bleach him a little,
make a respectable ghost of Goethe.

Who knows, if he looks good enough,
in a newly-lined sarcophagus,
we could put him on display.
Come to Kulturstadt!
See Goethe's body!
Even better than Lenin!
(Can we say that?)

It will be a world attraction.

We'll pipe in lieder and opera.
Tour guides will be dressed as Gretchen.
Maybe a fun-house
with Mephistopheles,
a sausage-fest at Brander's Inn.

Ah! the cart is here! The bones,
yes, the bones. Unfortunate, the odor.
We can work on that.
The colors, mein Gott,
(excuse the expression)
they will not please —

over there, Klaus,

     if you're going to be sick —

It's such a little skeleton —
was he really so short?

The books said he towered

over his contemporaries.

So much for the books!
And the shroud — that color —
not at all what we imagined.
Perhaps the opera house
could make a new one.

Watch those ribs —

so many little bones
in the fingers.

Things are just not . . .

holding together.

I can't do this.

The project is canceled.

Poets are just too — flimsy.

Put this mess back
where it came from.
Next time let's exhume a general,
Bismarck, the Kaiser,
someone with a sword and epaulets.
Armor would be even better.
The People want giants!

*** ***

Selected from my collection, Things Seen in Graveyards. 
 Photo from Wikimedia Commons, contributed by Charlie1965nrw.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922558884/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_KOmvCb0YWWTEQ
Buy a copy while you and I are still above ground!

The Warning

I think the animals will come and live among us,
their habitats ruined, their forests burned, their seas
afloat with the litter-tide of our abominations.
It comes in small ways, foretold in dreams:
       the snake I saw
amid the lettuce leaves: how does one eat
around its coiled length without disturbing it?
Is it a venomous one? — Will it take an egg
if I poise it at one end of the salad bowl,
and, swallowing it, slide off and ignore me?

Why, when I open my wardrobe door
do two fawns stagger-stumble from it,
their deer-horse voices calling, “Hide us!”?

Why do I awaken, just half the bed my own,
the other half fur-snuggle full of breathing:
a great gray wolf, red-eyed and drooling?
“No need to worry,” his bass voice assures me,
tongue lapping my hand ‘twixt double dog fangs.
“As long as I’m here, the others will spare you.”

“Others?” I ask. I sit up in bed and find
amid my clutter of chairs and Chinese, Egyptian
tchotchkes, blocking the view of Renaissance
boy, the enigma-smiling Bronzino print,
a diorama of wild animals on the move: bear cubs,
an eagle and a fox in tug-of-war fight
over a leftover steak from the refrigerator,

dark-mask raccoon faces, opossums peeping
from under the uplifted carpet’s corner,
a raven (not stuffed, a living raven!) a-perch
my bust of Hermes. My foot, in search of slipper,
startles a whippoorwill that hoots at me.
A badger rejoins its den beneath my floorboards.

I am not their food and they are not mine,
but somehow, they will have to be provided for.
They are here for the duration, as the water rises,
the tornadoes whirl, the fracked earth shivers.
It is hard to look into their eyes without shame.

Goethe's Career Advice for Poets

Comfort for poets from the greatest German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from his "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship":

"Now, fate has exalted the poet above all this, as if he were a god. He views the conflicting tumult of the passions; sees families and kingdoms raging in aimless commotion; sees those inexplicable enigmas of misunderstanding,which frequently a single monosyllable would suffice to explain, occasioning convulsions unutterably baleful. He has a fellow-feeling of the mournful and the joyful in the fate of all human beings. When the man of the world is devoting his days to wasting melancholy, for some deep disappointment, or, in the ebullience of joy, is going out to meet his happy destiny, the lightly moved and all-conceiving spirit of the poet steps forth, like the sun from night to day, and with soft transitions tunes his harp to joy or woe.
"From his heart, its native soil, springs up the lovely flower of wisdom; and if others, while waking, dream, and are pained with fantastic delusions from their every sense, he passes the dream of life like one awake ; and the strangest of incidents is to him a part both of the past and of the future. And thus the poet is at once a teacher, a prophet, a friend of gods and men. "

What?! Thou wouldst have him descend from his height to some paltry occupation? He who is fashioned like the bird to hover round the world, to nestle on the lofty summits, to feed on buds and fruits, exchanging gayly one bough for another, he ought also to work at the plough like an ox? Like a dog to train himself to the harness and draught? Or perhaps, tied up in a chain, to guard a farmyard by his barking?"

To Goethe's words I add: Be the poet. No one else can.