Translated by Don Bartlett

From My Struggle: Book One, by Karl Ove Knausegaard

My Struggle: Book One is the first of six volumes in a meticulous self study published in Norway over the last three years. Read its story here in the Telegraph.

Knausgaard reflects on the trial of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik here

We offer his poem “Stella Polaris” in a translation by Little Star’s own James Stotts, with a small divertimento at the end.

That first time,
she came to me,
darkness incarnate,
and looked me in the eye
           to say—I’m not going
           anywhere.  Where would I?
           Now she’s a star.
           I withstood her light,
But could barely carry on
any longer…
But what moves
the heavenly bodies
            pulled me along, too,
            my soul idling, in neutral…
            The oxygen
            I’ve been stealing
for my black lungs—
an amplitude of the senses:
the lungs’ panting
to their rank ejaculation, I want you.
            It doesn’t matter who
            I sleep with, bile replaces
            their stirring dew.
            Dew you and I can hardly
expect to drink, now,
two mouths pressed into one
(less likely in this life—
than the next).
            The fur on his face
            helps keep out the cold.
            A hunt is happening
           somewhere in the clouds.
When heaven’s horn blows
and he hears the hounds,
the trembling ball of chase
races down his hole.
            He dare not speak
            a single word
           (all alone, and warm),
           But makes a silent prayer:
Shut up my throat,
let me lay with
anyone, anything at all,
but not love…

(Read the Russian original here.)

And now for the divertimento, “О чем вы птички?,” rather playfully rendered, again, by James Stotts:

whatcha singin’ ’bout birdies?  nothing,
just singing.
we open our mouths and it’s the sound
we make

like a dream or prayer, you take
what’s around
and it comes back out in
a random shape

(Read the Russian original here.)

Order Kulle’s book, Всё всерьёз, here.

Writers April Bernard, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., will join editor Ann Kjellberg to talk about Little Star and its special interest in the ways in which contemporary literature is in conversation with the literatures of the past and of the world.

As readers of Little Star know,

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and a translator of the Russian absurdist circle, the Oberiu poets of the 1930s. (Read a portion of his translation of the conversations of the Oberiuty here.)

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr, is a poet and a translator of the classical and modern Farsi. (Read her translations of classical and contemporary ghazals here.)

April Bernard is a critic and novelist, author most recently of Miss Fuller, a fictionalized account of the life and death of American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. (Read some here)

Periodically Speaking is sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and presided over by the library’s intrepid periodical and small press librarian, Karen Gisonny. What a wonderful job! All hail Periodical Room!

A Longer view: Reading across time and space
Little Star with April Bernard, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
New York Public Library, Periodicals Room
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
Tuesday, May 8th, 6:00 to 7:30pm

From Grasses of a Thousand Colors, a play by Wallace Shawn

Shawn reflects on sex in the Guardian, on the occasion of André Gregory’s London production of Grasses of a Thousand Colors as part of a retrospective of Shawn’s plays:
Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the meaningless and thereby turn it into the meaningful.
By all means read more here

And a review by John Lahr here

Margaret’s work paired a deep compassion and humanity with a capacious apprehension of existential solitude. She was a rare spirit and we will sorely miss her company and the wonderful work she had ahead of her. We hope in the coming days to post another morsel or two of The Destinationist.

To order “East of the 5, South of the 10” visit www.zyzzyva.org/subscribe/.  The story appears both in Zyzzyva #74 (Fall 2005) and the special issue “First Fiction in Print from Our First 25 Years” (#86/87). Click “Any Randomly Selected Back Issue” and make a note in the PayPal order or send an email editor@zyzzyva.org  specifying the issue you want.

Anne had talked privately with Miss Fuller only once, and that was during one of those summers when Miss Fuller had been living in Concord, at the Emerson home. In large groups, such as the lemonade parties Mrs. E hosted, Miss Fuller was expansive, full of opinions, and only fell silent when Mr. E spoke. She made sheep’s eyes at Mr. E—everyone saw it, including Mrs. E though she would never say so. Anne guessed that was one reason Mrs. E was so gracious. Helen commented on Miss Fuller’s diminished figure, and Henry reported that she was attempting a “vegetary” regimen, some combination of something called the Graham System and one pressed upon her by friends from London who followed Oriental dietary laws. Mrs. E had been making a great effort to satisfy her guest’s appetite, but everyone could see she was looking thin and wan, and Mrs. E felt blamed.

One afternoon Henry took his sister along with Miss Fuller for a river jaunt in his skiff. This time Miss Fuller seemed a school-girl gawky. When she snagged her pink sateen dress in an oar-lock, Henry’s face registered for his sister’s benefit a comedy of exaggerated eye-rolling dismay unnoticed by their guest, who never stopped talking for a moment about a lecture she had attended the night before, not even when a length of sateen ripped into a kind of fringe that trailed into the water. At last catching her breath and looking about, she finally noticed the draggling finery and laughed easily, which made Anne like her after all. Then she quoted something in German and simpered and squinted, so she had liked her less. Naturally the laughing and the German, like everything else about her, were too loud for Henry.

As Henry headed down river on his own, Anne walked Miss Fuller back to the Emersons.

“Please, do call me Margaret, as your brother does. And we have in common as well that we are both editors for Henry.”

“No, I could not say I am his editor. I am a copyist, at times. We make the joke that I am his private secretary. We are all most grateful—I’m sure Henry is—that you have taken his pieces for The Dial.”

“He has the soul of a poet, and I applaud his verses. But his essays, although rich and clear, are not, somehow, always coherent. I’ve only taken the one, you know. Sometimes his poet’s soul wanders.”

“Do you really think so.”

They arrived at the garden gate. Anne flinched as the woman seemed about to embrace her; they settled for shaking hands.

***

[1850] Henry returned from his visit to the shipwreck in a thunderstorm. A crate of specimens came off the cart with him.

As Sissy made tea in the nearly empty kitchen Anne told Henry about the Monarchs—one had already taken wing, three more were still in chrysalid state; one pouch had fallen, black and dead, to the bottom of the case. The kitchen table and nearly all the china had gone to the new house, so they set their tea-cups, without saucers, on the broad lip of the stove. The rain stopped and the sun came through the dripping window of the kitchen. Henry excused himself to go take tea with the Emersons. Lidian, Mrs. E, had sent a note asking him to come right away.

“He has gone to his Maker,” said Anne to her sister.

“I don’t enjoy your jokes about Mr. E,” Sissy said.

“You mean God?”

“It is not amusing.”

“I will call him Jove, then, is that better?”

Henry walked the short path to the Emersons’, and at the gate Lidian saw him coming and rushed to embrace him. She was sniffing; he backed away so as not to encourage any real tears. Mr. E was in his study, but he was no longer morose. He was talking and pacing, almost preaching, to Ellery Channing, who seemed to be taking notes. “Henry! Ellery told me you had stayed to scavenge.”

“I was collecting specimens, yes.”

Henry then noticed James Freeman Clarke, standing over by the corner window, and they bowed slightly to one another. His reddish hair, backlit by the late afternoon sun, stood out in wisps from his pale head. Clarke looks like an old man, Henry thought. Years ago many of them had guessed he might marry Margaret; but Lidian had thought not, and she had been right.

Emerson said, “We are beginning—embarking—you know, Ellery is really the man in charge, on a book of memoirs of Margaret, selections of her own writings accompanied by recollections of those who knew her best—myself, Ellery, Clarke, Greeley—commemorating her genius.”

He paused, then announced: “ ‘Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.’ You must contribute as well. Collecting her best words. Commemorating her genius.”

Henry took tea and sandwiches and waited for the others to leave. James inquired after Henry’s studies and said that while he was staying in town he would like to accompany him on a botanising walk or a river jaunt. Henry looked at James’s sleek brown boots and gave his usual shuffling answer about it all depending on the weather. Mr. E ate greedily and needed help to push his chair back from the table—one could not help but notice the girth he had added recently. Standing up to his nearly six full feet, however, he seemed in fine proportion.

After tea he and Henry took one of their usual paths, through the orchard and then on up the hill for a good view. Mr. E talked without ceasing about Margaret, her peculiar genius, her radical habits of mind, her place in the history of thought and action. Suddenly he sat down hard on a mossy rock, interrupting his own monologue, and softly wailed—

“Oh, have I done wrong?”

“What? Tell me.”

Mr. E did not want to go on; or he did, but he couldn’t. He pouted out his lips like a child. Henry was patient, staring out at the heavy trees that clustered along the curving river in the distance. The crown of one of the trees was yellower than the others—a hickory?

“I—I advised—I refused. She wanted money, months ago—she begged me for a loan and I did not answer, and she wrote to Greeley for an advance from the Tribune, for the book on the revolution—and I was in New York with Greeley at the time. He was short of ready money in any case, and I advised him not to make the sacrifice.”

Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New-York Daily Tribune, was Margaret’s employer and champion. She had written dozens and dozens of dispatches from Europe for him, all these years. He had published Woman in the Nineteenth Century and had promised to publish her book on the Italian revolution. Greeley and his wife and children were Margaret’s dear friends. This was incredible.

“Not to send her money he planned to pay her anyway?” Henry said.

“Not even a portion of it. I feared—we all feared—she would never come home. Such rumors we had been hearing, you know them yourself, from the Springs and that portrait painter—Ricks? Hicks?—and Hawthorne’s friend, the one who knows the Brownings. . . .”

“I did not believe the rumors,” said Henry stiffly. “If they did not have a marriage in a Protestant church that does not mean they were not married.”

“But marriage itself has been doubted, amongst people who knew—”

“Everyone would have doubted the marriage if it were in the Roman church as well. She explained all that, you told me yourself. They were married in late autumn of 1847, but the records were lost in the subsequent confusion of the war. These speculations are ridiculous and mean-spirited.”

“I confess I was at first shocked that she had married at all.” Two tiny green grass-hoppers leapt up from the grass and clung to Mr. E’s trouser leg. He brushed them away and continued:

“The domestic life, as wife and mother, always seemed to me something Margaret was too—noble, I think, yes, too noble for. She had too pure an intellect and character to. . . but the rumors—”

“We need not listen to slander,” Henry said.

“The only way to counter slander was for her and her husband and baby to come home, so we could see them all.”

Henry walked on ahead, to an old apple-tree that had just recently broken in two. The place where the break had happened was pale and mealy, and the center was hollow where the tree had been rotting from within. He plucked a green apple no bigger than a quail’s egg and polished it in his hands as Mr. E caught up.

“Are you angry, Henry?”

“Did you even think about how they would live here? On what income? Would her brothers have taken them in?”

“Or Elizabeth Peabody, or I. Our hands would have been open, once she was home. We would have found a place for them in Concord, or with her mother. Elizabeth proposed she begin a new series of Conversations. And naturally her book on the revolution would have been published. ”

“Do you know if she asked anyone else for money?” asked Henry.

“Her brothers. I think they had already sent her what they could spare. And she did ask Elizabeth, too. I told her not to send money, either. I persuaded her that Margaret must come home.”

Henry said, “You took a lot upon yourself.”

“It was for her own good! I know it was! But—I saw her brother Richard yesterday in Boston. He had only just received a letter she wrote in May, from Livorno, as they were waiting to board. A letter from the dead! Poor thing, he’s been ill enough. In the letter she wrote that they had borrowed money for food and boat fare, and that they were nearly starved.”

“No.”

“And that the only tickets home they could afford were on a merchant ship. They could not even afford the packet boat, which would have been safer—so many merchant ships are lost, so dangerous with the baby—And on another boat, they would have arrived much earlier. Don’t you see? And avoided the storm!”

Mr. E groaned and rubbed his face.

If sin existed, this was a sin; but who could grant absolution? Henry only said, “You could not have known.”

On their silent walk back down the hill, Henry absent-mindedly handed the green apple to Mr. E. He as absently took a little bite, then quickly spat it out and tossed the bitter fruit into the grass.

Henry had a sudden memory of one summer, many years earlier, when Margaret had come for her usual stay at the Emersons’ home. He had been living there too, as he often did, working as a carpenter and general handy-man in the house and garden in exchange for the peace of his study-hours at a desk in the barn. He was short of money then, and the Emersons were kind to him. Margaret had joined them in July, to Henry’s mild annoyance—she took up all of Mr. E’s best conversation, and seemed as well to make Lidian nervous.

But what he now remembered was something else: her quick look of sympathy that day when Mr. E had folded some coins in a paper and shoved it at him through the breakfast cups. It was called a “loan” but was really a gift; she knew so; she also knew that Henry must have needed it, and that he hated to receive it in front of her. The next week, she had bought two poems of his for The Dial—poems he knew for a certainty she did not like, he could tell well enough—and paid him more than he supposed poems usually merited. He angrily questioned her “charity,” she as angrily insisted it was nothing of the kind, and if he thought it was charity, well, he could give it to a charitable cause. So he did; the ten dollars she had paid him he gave to the First Parish Church fund for the new steeple.

“Since then,” said Margaret, who liked to repeat her own wit, “I always think of you when I hear the bell. The Dial paid the toll.”

It was a hard thing to need money, to have to ask for it. It might also be a hard thing to give it; but Mr. E and Greeley and the others had not, in this case, done that particular hard thing.

The light was low and the shadows long when they arrived at the back door of the Emersons’ house. Henry did not go inside, and he took his old friend’s hand in his.

“It was right that she should come home,” said Henry. “It’s contrary for any American to live in Europe. She needed to come home.” He meant those words; he was not lying. But he held some other words back.

Mr. E rubbed again at his face, making the skin ruddy and disarranging his side- whiskers, and heavily climbed the back steps. Henry found that he was not able to tell him about the letter he had discovered on Fire Island. Emerson was a man with money to give or not to give. He and Margaret were mice who darted for crumbs.

From Miss Fuller’s letter, discovered posthumously by Henry:
“As I already explained, I had met Giovanni Angelo Ossoli in Rome in early April of 1847. He escorted me home when I lost my way after vespers in St. Peter’s, & took to calling on me at the rooms we had taken on the Corso. Later in Grenoble, I told Mish [her lover, poet Adam Mickiewicz] all about him—& then by letter Mish continued to urge me to take the step of marriage & said that he prayed I might experience the joy of motherhood at last. I was so grateful. I had lost my “beloved” but I had not lost the Poet himself; my beloved had become like my father, advising & urging me to do what would make me happy & fulfill my place in the world.

“It is no insult to the Poet to say that he like all men perforce under-estimated the cost to my physical self that becoming a mother would mean. No doubt he also imagined, as indeed I did, that having a husband would mean I would be protected & could continue in my work. But as I am now circumstanced, with a small child & a war-scarred husband to support, how am I to take ‘my place in the world’? This is a puzzle I am yet working out, one that I hope my friends in America will not refuse to help me solve. I hope that Mr E will not gloat that he was right, that solitude & chastity & barrenness were the requisite conditions for me to be the New Woman & raise my beacon of education & action aloft. Minerva & her chaste moon are all very well for school-girls to emulate. But what World worth its salt will deny women the creature necessities of love & motherhood as the price for participation in its decisions & its future? The Associationists, I believe, have many practical solutions to offer, with their plans for community nurseries & schools. . . .

“But there are times when I long only for this: That my husband & child would venture on an excursion for a few days & leave me to my solitude. Would I write a newspaper column? A chapter? No. A letter begging for money from an old friend who is feeling less friendly with every letter he receives? No! Would I mount a platform & urge the rights of slaves not to be slaves, the rights of a free Europe, the rights of women? Not I. I would sit with Goethe’s poems, & attempt a translation. I would take a walk, a long city walk in which I could day-dream amidst the throng, their dreams & mine twining into the thick rope that is humanity . . . I would stand on a dock & watch the boats, I would dream in color & music but not in words . . . & then I would return to my desk, make a pot of tea, & try to make the German words come alive in English before me. This I would do for several days until I felt like myself once again.”

Margaret Fuller was drowned off the coast of Fire Ireland, returning from Italy with her husband Giovanni Ossoli and their two-year-old son. The manuscript of her history of the Italian revolution was lost at sea.

Miss Fuller, a novel by April Bernard based on the last years of Margaret Fuller’s life and the lives of her friends, will be published imminently by Steerforth Press.

April Bernard’s story “The Fixed Idea” appeared in Little Star #2 (2011). Read some of it here.

“Ah, that’s what’s so paradoxical about it all, you see. I haven’t done anything, or at least, I hadn’t done anything—not then. I was completely innocent—and yet I felt guilty. I thought I was responsible for everything that happened, it was my fault that the slum where my parents still lived even after I’d rented a little room closer to the bank, that slum was teeming with children suffering from consumption, it was my fault that so many old people died in poverty in hostels dotted all over the city, and I even felt stabs of guilt every time I saw a beggar or some poor soul with pock-marks all over his face. Of course, I tried to help, using all the means at my disposal in order to reduce my guilt, and I tried all the channels open to a citizen who wants to do something to assist the underprivileged, but I have to say I found all of them inadequate, and in some cases criminally inadequate. The charities disgusted me with their onanistic self-satisfaction, it was as if they had to look at themselves in a mirror after every good deed to check whether they’d acquired a new little wrinkle round their mouths advertizing their kindness. The political parties spent far too much energy on peripheral questions, claimed they were transforming the whole of society, a transformation which would liberate the world from the injustices currently bearing down on my forehead, in the long run: but that was just a cynical way of referring to a permanent postponement, that’s what they really meant. Occasionally they took up some of the problems of the very poorest in their propaganda, and what really disgusted me most about the whole thing was the way the poverty of the world was used as advertizing material for a political party, that a self-evident thing like reducing the number of children with tuberculosis became a publicity stunt for a party whose behavior in other respects has to be regarded with suspicion and even contempt. No, for guilty people like us there was no organization, the distress of the world was being taken in hand by people who’d ceased to feel guilty, if they ever had felt guilty at all, because they lived under the illusion that they were doing such an awful lot to ease it. The biggest problem, it seemed to me, was that people were talking so much about ideas, that’s what took up so much of their energy; but I think ideas are something for the nursery. You need ideas, of course, but you should play with them; ideas are the pretty little toys grown-ups play with. It seemed to me, contests concerning ideas were taking place at the wrong level altogether: instead of sitting around tables where the fate of the world is supposed to be decided with the ideas they cherished so scrupulously and with such sadistic logic, they should have been gathering at tennis courts and playing tennis for their ideas, or in a big theater where they could act out scenes with them, or in big, green meadows where they could chase after them in the sunshine with butterfly nets. There’s nothing more dangerous than taking ideas seriously, and nothing more praiseworthy, in fact I’d go as far as to say it’s the only praiseworthy thing in this life, than taking ideas for the playthings they are in fact. […] What happened next? Well—I grew tired of not being able to do anything but feeling as if I could do everything; I was falling between two stools, and in that situation I made up my mind on one thing. I decided to acquire guilt, real guilt, guilt I could really accept on my own behalf, guilt I could describe as being my very own so that I was the one who should bear it and nobody else.  And so I pulled off a pretty bold feat of embezzlement, and with substantial funds in my pockets I’d left the country on the very first day of my holiday and was well on my way to a life to be lived in relative freedom from guilt; but it all turned out rather differently from what I’d expected.
[translated by Laurie Thompson]

Move over Musil, Walser, Joseph Roth: Stig Dagerman.  Dagerman wrote Island of the Doomed in one feverish summer, in 1946, in a remote island cabin belonging to August Strindberg. Seven castaways on a desert island play out a delirious morality play exhuming all the subterranean passions of the freshly obliterated European bourgeoisie. It concludes with a paradoxical, devastated, utterly disillusioned guide to life which is as sophisticated as any we have seen.

Dagerman is not as disciplined a writer as the great threesome, but his excesses are those of a spirit truly testing the limits of heart and page. The University of Minnesota just now brings out Island of the Doomed for the first time in the US; last fall they reissued Dagerman’s shattering reportage from war-ravaged Germany, German Autumn, with a moving and pertinent introduction by Mark Kurlansky. This fall David R. Godine will bring out To Kill a Child: Selected Short Stories.

Stig Dagerman grew upon a farm in rural Sweden with his grandparents after being abandoned by his unmarried mother in infancy. When he was ten years old his grandfather was murdered and his grandmother died shortly after from shock. Dagerman was then reunited in Stockholm with his estranged father, an itinerate day laborer. Through his father he joined the Syndicalist Youth Federation and began editing their newspaper at nineteen. From there he began a meteoric rise, lionized in Sweden for the novels, plays, poems, and reportage he managed to write before his suicide, after years of depression, at the age of thirty-one. Kurlansky argues persuasively that Dagerman’s own extreme experience of sorrow contributed to his intense sensitivity, as a writer and a person, to the suffering of others, with which Island of the Doomed and German Autumn are intensely redolent.

Wislawa Szymborska, who died this past February 1st, at the age of 88, won the Nobel Prize in 1996. She insisted no one was more surprised by this than she was. Newspapers all over the world reported her “embarrassment” at the attention brought to her by the Prize. The humility seemed then, and still seems, genuine.

Szymborska’s poems are, as they say, “plain spoken,” and also continually charged with a sly irony that manages to be both rueful and insouciant. She was 16 when the German army invaded Poland in 1939. She came of age in the era of Auschwitz and the Warsaw uprising, and after the end of World War II, Poland, as you know, was dominated by a totalitarian government, installed by the Soviet Union, for much of the next half century. Her first book was deemed unworthy of publication by government censors in 1949. It was reported (by those censors) that the book did not live up to socialist needs and that it was “too obscure” for the people’s standards. That was probably the last time anyone ever judged Ms. Szymborska’s poems to be “too obscure.” She was a child of her age, and it was most certainly a political one.

Her poem, “Children of Our Age” is, it seems, an overtly political poem, though it is also a poem that states that fact with her trademark irony and rue. She was once asked by an interviewer why she didn’t write more overtly political poems, and her response delights me: “Because I have a trash can,” she replied.

As a poet, I have always had an uneasy relationship with overtly political poems. I had committed myself to the life of poetry in 1971. I was twenty years old; I’d been drafted into the army and, after basic and advanced training, applied for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection. For the last five months of my military “career,” I was attached to an army company known as “Special Training Detachment,” although the training I received in that company was nothing the army would have approved of. My fellow soldiers in STD (an acronym not meaning in those days what it means today) were all like me: either COs trying to get out of the military by legitimate means, or they were something known as “212s,” men deemed “unfit for military service”: a few gays, a sociopath or two, and some guys who might be charitably described as “thugs.” There was one guy, whose name I can’t remember, who one night recited from memory Edwin Muir’s poem “The Horses,” a post-apocalyptic narrative fable. I’d never heard anyone say a poem aloud before, and it was probably that recitation that moved me, more than anything else, toward the possibility of a writing life.

In other words, it seems to me now that, early on, I aspired to write poems that addressed my age, and as Szymborska makes clear, they’re all political. The problem is that you somehow have to be a poet first, then a partisan. The reason most (not all, but most) of the plenitude of poems written throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in opposition to the war in Vietnam have been forgotten, is that they were, and are, forgettable. They were propaganda; they preached to a devoted choir; and more often than not, while they may have aspired to the condition of literature, they did not attain it.

A fair question to ask at this point is, what on earth is the condition of literature? Well, let me saunter out onto this thinnest of ice with an anvil under each arm, and say this: the condition of literature of which I speak, as far as I can tell, is attained in a poem, when how one says something is of equal value and significance to what it is one says. One brings to the page an aesthetic, a poetics, and one uses that aesthetic to confront a political issue. One does not compromise one’s literary and poetic values, and one does not shy away from the complexities of the political situation. One welcomes complexity and one maintains one’s commitment to one’s aesthetic.

For me, this has to do with responsibility. A poet’s primary responsibility is—must be—to the poem itself, to the art: the what one says must, in fact, be subservient to the how one says it, and if one maintains the determination to make a statement of political significance that is aesthetically vital, one might achieve the condition of literature. And the responsibility of literature is to tell a truth that cannot be said any other way. This last point seems indisputable to me.

The poem of my own I’m about to read was written over a period of months, from late 2006 through mid-2007. It began as a meditation on the word “tolerance,” as an engineering term. In the engineering world, “tolerance” is the amount of space between two moving parts of a machine. The smaller the space, the more finely machined the parts must be. A BMW engine is machined to the finest possible tolerances; a Yugo’s, not so much. I had thought the poem might be about human relationships. I live in a state that has an unfortunate reputation for intolerance; it is not nearly so intolerant as its reputation suggests, but that reputation is out there and for many of those of us who are citizens of Idaho, it is hateful and embarrassing. I had thought the poem’s political urge was in that direction, but as I worked things began to happen that surprised me, and the poem began to move in a different direction.

It was in January, 2007, that the Bush administration began what was at first called “A New Way Forward,” then quickly became vernacularized as “the troop surge.” By then we all knew what an IED was; we all knew about “stop-loss policy” and “extended tours.” It was one morning, early in 2007, that I googled the phrase “tolerance in engineering,” and trolling through page after page of the typically otherwise useless information google gathers, I came across the website of LTI, Liberating Technologies, Incorporated, a company—a very good one, it seems—in the business of manufacturing prosthetic limbs, and the poem turned completely toward the war in Iraq. A passage from LTI’s website, describing an artificial arm, even made it into the poem. In late 2008, a fact-checker at the magazine I published it in emailed me a couple of weeks before the poem ran to ask if I knew those lines (they’re in quotes, for heaven’s sake) came verbatim from LTI’s site. Uh-huh, I replied.

Finally, I will also say that I sat on the poem for quite a while. I believed in it, but I only half-trusted it in some way—primarily because it was overtly political. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing worse than sitting down at the desk to work and actually having something to say. Generally-speaking, ax-grinding does not make for quality poetry. This poem felt different, however; it had surprised me and I had surprised myself in the writing of it. Its original title was “Allowable Error,” another definition of engineering tolerance being “the limits of allowable error.” This too pleased me.

Just before I finally sent it off into the world, I changed the title to “Exxon.” That was, it seemed to me then and still does, really, the poem’s most significant risk. It might seem to suggest that the poem, like the war, was and is about oil, but I maintain that it, the poem, is not. Or rather that it is about much more than that. Most importantly, for me, at least, Exxon is simply the brand of gas station that appears at the poem’s end. It’s part of the poem’s setting. Of course the poem’s about oil, at some level, but I’ve always believed it is, more than anything else, about responsibility.

EXXON

Behold the amazing artificial arm, a machine
eerily similar to the arm it replaced, machined
to exacting tolerances, as its engineers say,
to “the limits of allowable error.”
Think of the hand in the glove, the piston
in the cylinder, the cartridge in the chamber
of an arm: a weapon, that is, a firearm,
to say it more primitively, more exactingly,

more ceremonially, and with more appropriate awe. [Read more here]

Read a poems by Szymborska on Little Star here (more in Little Star #2).
Read a poem by Robert Wrigley on Little Star here. Poems by Robert Wrigley appear in Little Star #1 and Little Star #2. His most recent book is Beautiful Country.
Coincidentally, Jenny Holzer projected “Children of Our Age” onto the wall of Tribune Tower in Chicago, just up the road from Wrigley’s lecture, as part of her Projection for Chicago series with Szymborska’s poems in 2008. More about it, with links to Szymborska’s work, here.

Belovèd, how in these distances are fixed
The cloudy locutions of a rhetoric
Enchanted by its own stupid music!
How, gliding along, these bikers are paralleled
By larger, iconic versions of themselves
As if they glided down the portrait-hung
Corridor of a great house, a hallway leading
To the horizon-hinge, which opens, and then
You’re on the other side of the billboards,
Where there’s scaffolding, the road toward
Wyoming, and you feel as if an after-shock
How their great hits trembled our green Civic,
How static amplified becomes applause,
And how South Dakota is to Wyoming as
TV is to the big screen. Kind of a let-down,
Really, how in my rearview Sturgis browned
Out, switchgrass twisted int the trucks’ back-draft,
And I was an eye inside an eye, looking back.

When I passsed through and was so briefly there
All I felt was a sense of lessened pressure,
Not an azure, dream-pulsed awakening
But a kind of leeching-off, a suppuration.

Then, to refute my ill will’s sour self-taste
The signs announced my passage to a state
Where different rules applied—no more billboards!
And to enhance that sense of progress toward
An unseen goal borders are for, the highway curved
Through crumpled hills and closely cropped pastures;
The uplands rising to the great divide—
Seen now, as the landscape opened to provide
Sudden, heart-stopping panoramic views
Of peaks, the pangs of distance sharpen to
Inverted points of empty, metallic gray
Against, until the road twists me away
From that vision, towards the point of this
Poem, its destination and genesis.
A snapped-off piece of road straight up a hill
Pitched steep as the bucket of sand Lukas will
Dump on the beach, in the now-past future,
And on the margin’s dirt like sun-dried leather,
Bird and prey. Alone, on the opposite side
Of all the traffic swarming towards what I’d
Been through, I slowed to 40, 30,
20, 10. Then what at first had seemed only
Part of the casual slaughter of our highways—
Crow, hawk, vulture, fawn, doe, stag—and O days
Spent in the in-between, lost, desiring, time’s kill—
Revealed itself as a golden eagle
Choking, or claiming by the neck—a goat?
No, knuckled graphite horns: an antelope.
Head twisted around as in The Exorcist,
Owl-wide, pink slip of tongue between black lips.
Its animal athleticism, so freshly killed,
Gave to the strip of dirt where its guts spilled
A still-vibrant significance which far
Exceeded the lane of fast-food wrappers,
Piss-filled bottles and stubbled weeds we’ve left
Allotted to its kind. I felt the death
Blow on my neck, transfixed into the here
And now by what possessively returned my stare,
As the brown bird shrank in my rearview mirror
(I had to move), watching me watch it disappear.

From Raptor, coming soon from the Phoenix Poets series at University of Chicago Press. Many poems in this book encounter predatory birds; read a few more here.

Andrew Feld is the author of Citizen (read some here), and the editor-in-chief and poetry editor of The Seattle Review.

I, too, looked through a chink. Only what I saw as not riches, but the truth.

I was shaken by the depth and variety of life. I saw how low a man could fall, and how high he was able to rise.

For the first time, I understood what freedom is, and cruelty and violence. I saw freedom behind bars, cruelty as senseless as poetry, violence as common as dampness.

I saw a man who had been completely reduced to an animal state. I saw what he could be gladdened by. And it seemed to me that my eyes opened.

The world in which I found myself was horrifying. In that world, people fought with sharpened rasp files, ate dogs, covered their faces with tattoos, and sodomized goats. In that world, people killed for a package of tea.

In that world, I saw men with a gruesome past, a repulsive present, and a tragic future.

I was friends with a man who had once upon a time pickled his wife and children in a barrel.

The world was horrible. But life continued. What is more, life’s usual proportions stayed the same. The ratio of good and evil, grief and happiness, remained unchanged.

The life had in it whatever you could name. Diligence, dignity, love, depravity, patriotism, wealth, poverty. These were lumpenproletariat and rich profiteers, careerists and profligates, conformists and rebels, functionaries and dissidents.

But the content of these concepts was radically changed. The usual hierarchy of values had been demolished. What had once seemed important receded into the background. Trivialities blocked the horizon.

A new scale of values for “the good things in life” arose. On this scale, people especially valued food, warmth, the chance to avoid work. The commonplace became precious. The precious—unreal.

A postcard from home precipitated an emotional upheaval. A bumblebee flying into the prisoners’ barracks could cause a sensation. A squabble with a guard was experienced as an intellectual triumph.

In maximum security I knew a man, a long-term recidivist, who dreamt of becoming a bread-cutter. This job carried with it enormous advantages. Once he got it, a zek could be likened to a Rothschild. The heels of bread were comparable to diamond deposits.

Fantastic efforts were required to land such a position. You had consciously to sell out, lie, climb over corpses. You had to bribe, blackmail, and use extortion—fight to win at all costs.

This kind of effort in the outside world would have opened the way to the sinecures of the Party, economic and bureaucratic leadership. The highest levels of government power are reached by the same means.

Once he became a bread-cuttter, the zek fell apart psychologically. The struggle for power had exhausted his inner strength. he was a gloomy, suspicious, lonely man. He reminded me of a Party boss, tortured by oppressive complexes.

One episode comes to mind. Some prisoners were digging a trench outside of Yosser. Among them was a burglar named Yenin.

It was getting on towards lunchtime. Yenin shovelled once last clod, reduced it to fine sand, then leant over the pile of dirt.

He was surrounded by zeks who had fallen silent.

He lifted a tiny thing out of the dirt and rubbed it on his sleeve for a long time. It was a shard of a cup, the size of a three-copek piece. It still had on it the fragment of a design—a girl in a blue dress. The only thing left intact was her little shoulder and blue sleeve.

You could see tears in the zek’s eyes. He pressed the glass to his lips and said quietly, “Seance!”

In prison-camp jargon, “seance” signified any experience of an erotic nature, and even beyond that, any instance of positive sensual emotion. A woman in the zone was “seance.” A pornographic photograph—“seance.” But a piece of fish in the slops was “seance,” too.

“Seance!” Yenin said.

And the zeks who surrounded him confirmed in unison, “Seance!”

The world in which I found myself was horrible. Nevertheless, I smiled no less frequently than I do now, and was not sad more often.

When there is time, I’ll tell you about all this in more detail.

The Zone, by Sergei Dovlatov (1982)
translation by Anne Frydman
New in the Counterpoint Press series of the works of Sergei Dovlatov

Read Barry Yourgrau on Dovlatov, The Paris Review Daily, January 2012