If you want to respond to anything on this page, send an email to sponring.comments@gmail.com with the name of the post you are responding to. If your response is thoughtful/contains enough praise I will put a link to a separate comments page at the bottom of the corresponding post.

Hope for the Future

Monday, June 23, 2008 (12:01 am)

People are talking a lot about hope these days. Understandably. If you read anything, you know there are some very distressing things happening to our world. I guess people can only take constant pessimism for so long before they rediscover comfort in the idea that there might be a solution out there after all. That is called hope. It's as good a theme to write verses on as any. I wrote this poem at a time when the idea of hope really was something that comforted me.

Song for Hope

Hope is not ever lost.
Hope is the beacon on the strand,
The guiding light that shines on land;
Hope is not ever lost.

Though by rough waters toss'd,
This buoy sinks yet rises, rises.
Hope springs in many shifting guises,
Though by rough waters toss'd.

No small and simple cost
To see the lights through murk and throng.
Hope must be looked for, looked for long,
No small and simple cost.

Hope is not ever lost.
Without it life is short and drear;
Hope whispers to you, "Love is near."
Hope is not ever lost.

An Unflattering Angle

Saturday, March 29, 2008 (10:45 pm)

Things have been pretty slow lately. No mincing words about that. Don't worry though, brilliance sometimes just needs a rest before it comes back to dazzle you. In the meantime here is something I wrote a while ago. I consider it to be the dirtiest poem I've ever written.

An Unflattering Angle

The woman says she loves you, but
Her whole assertions do no more
Than chafe, and you don't trust just what
The woman says. She loves you, but
Behind her back they call her slut.
Your angle is unflattering, or
The woman says she loves you, but
Her whole assertions do no more.

Nicolae Grigorescu, Young Girl With Mirror

The Work of a Well-Known Poet

Monday, February 25, 2008 (11:00 pm? )

Richard Dehmel is considered one of the most important German poets of the pre-WWI period, but is hardly known in the English-speaking world (I am noticing a trend in my blog posts). Mostly he is remembered, if only in a footnote, for composing the lines which Arnold Schönberg rendered musically in the Verklärte Nacht sextet.

I'm sorry to say I'm no fan of  Schönberg's depressing atonal stew, nor am I a fan of free verse (that is, poetry which neither rhymes nor has regular lines), which Dehmel partly wrote. However, I have always felt more of an affinity for the Symbolist poets, who were active around the turn of the century in France and Germany and of which Dehmel was a part, than for the Modernists like Eliot or Joyce,who I believe are complete frauds. The poem Verklärte Nacht, for example, was not in free verse.

 Gustav Klimt, Der Kuß

Let me refer to this fact as adding some "street cred" to Herrn Dehmel. While flipping through my Oxford Book of German Verse, 3rd ed., looking for some other work by Dehmel, I came across this rare gem of a poem, simple, absolutely precious, and containing more depth than you would ever imagine. I decided to translate it.

Translations are complex and tricky things. Let me just say that, with all my innate modesty, and taken into account that I read German about as well as I do English, I actually find my translation better than the original and think that it makes certain structural improvements.

After the Rain

Look, the sky turns blue;
The swallows sweep and rush
Like fish above the dripping birches.
And you would weep?

Soon the bare trees and blue birds
Will be a golden portrait
Inside your soul.
And you weep?

With my eyes
I see in yours
Two small suns.
And you smile.

Call me a romantic. I get a warm feeling every time I read this. I feel as if I could deliver a 30-minute lecture on this poem at this point. However, picking apart poems like this is often like explaining a joke, meaning that the analysis ruins for most people what they liked in the first place. So in order that my genius not go to complete waste, I will put my short analysis of this poem, along with the original, on the first of my supplemental pages.

Pastimes of an Alpine Country

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 (8:22 pm)

At the risk of turning this blog into a place where I only speak about obscure German things, I wanted to introduce to the English-speaking world--and to certain of my friends who have not yet had the fortune to hear me speak on the subject--the classic Austro-Bavarian pastime known as fensterln. Griaß di?, that ever-helpful reference into this strange culture, defines fensterln, or "fenschtalan," as it is spoken in dialect, as "to call at the window to the bed-chamber of a beloved, or as the case may be of a furtive liaison, often under adventuresome circumstances, for the most part with the enterprise of sharing her bed in cozy togetherness."

The authoritative LEO German-English Dictionary puts it simply: "to climb through one's sweetheart's window."

 Painting from the Tirolean Folk Art Museum

I personally feel that this word should be adopted as soon as possible into English, for the practical and spiritual edification of our precious youth, accustomed to their "MySpace" and "Facebook," in order to show them how one really "got it on" in the old days, while "her parents are asleep oh god I hope they are asleep."

Das Fensterln gelingt nicht jedes mal!

I should mention that I first heard of fensterln from an obscure 1993 compilation of Bavarian folk songs, or maybe they are drinking songs, of which one is "Fensterln zu dir" -- "Fensterln to you." After a rousing yodel introduction, the song begins, "Dirndl heit komm i als fensterln zu dir, fensterln zu dir, fensterln zu dir." The rest is unintelligible.

Epitaph on a Tirolean Grave

Sunday, February 10, 2008 (11:00 pm)

I was flipping through my copy of Griaß di? Mein Tiroler Wörterbuch, a handy reference guide that teaches you how to talk bawdy in the German dialect of Tirol, and at the end there was a section of amazing (and real) epitaphs found on Tirolean graves. Here is a gem I found about a man who Took One For The Team, which I have translated, changing the name in order to rhyme.

Here rests with God Adam MacPherson

26 years he lived as a person

Here is the original:

Hier ruht in Gott Adam Lentsch

26 Jahre lebte er als Mensch

und 37 Jahre als Ehemann. 

Why I don't watch movies

Friday, January 18, 2008 (11:56 pm)

I believe that for an adult male of my age, I have an abnormally short attention span. You cannot get me to sit down the necessary two hours to watch a movie. Won't happen. I cannot sit still and focus on anything for longer than 15 minutes. This is why I read books. With no other medium can you so easily, at a moment's whim, throw away the material you are absorbing and begin again later at the exact place you left off without a great deal of trouble. I have, in fact, thrown several notable books away from me, in violent fashion, after disagreeing vigorously with their right to exist. I have fond memories of flinging James Joyce's seminal A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man across my patio one luscious summer day nearly year ago for taking, as I strongly felt, a shit inside my brain. 

My point is that books are convenient, and if there is an epidemic of shorter and shorter attention spans across the youth of this country, it is surely because of books. Books are great for the time-in-between, on the subway, standing in line, or waiting for some bore to stop talking (just say that you're checking the train schedule, he'll be too absorbed in what he's talking about to notice that you've taken 35 minutes or that the cover of the train schedule says War and Peace). Now, I realize that you can do some of the wonderful things I described with fancy technology, but trust me, it is much more painful, expensive, and--believe me--much harder to convince someone that the portable DVD player in your hand is a train schedule.

To all the people who have been bemoaning for the last hundred years the imminent death of books, first after the invention of film, then television, then the Internet, I think to myself, hey, it's sure taken you a while, but you just might be right this time. However, what I have done is to point out one important aspect of literature, often ignored and frequently derided, though it is the one advantage literature has left to offer against the other forms of entertainment. I want to elaborate on it in a later essay.

Rondel, or Here comes something confusing

Sunday, January 6, 2008 (8:25 pm)

Recently my good friend Alek broadsided me with a question in the poetry section of a bookstore: What is a rondel? The only answer I could give, after the strange qualification that I had written one, was that no one really knows. I chalk it up to an accident of history and probably a good deal of mistranslation. If you are really interested, and believe me it is exhilarating stuff, you can read this man's appraisal, who seems to be an expert on verse forms.

The more exciting part of this story, because it involves me, is how I came to learn of the rondel, and subsequently found the topic for the one I was to write. Among one of Chaucer's shorter works, which no one should ever read, there is a poem called "The Parliament of Fowls" that ends with an awful short lyric which Chaucer seems to think that we all know, though I'm thinking he just made it up. The narrator indicates this piece is a "roundel," but it has characteristics of its own, most notably a three-line refrain (a passage repeated exactly, like a chorus). I suppose it would have sounded better sung than read. 

I imagine that since writing out the song was tiresome, some bored scribe in several instances instead inserted the single line "qui bien ayme a tarde oublie," something of a French proverb meaning "who loves well forgets slowly." I thought this was a neat little line and decided I could write a much better poem based on it, using the modern consensus definition of a rondel. The result was this:  

Qui bien aime a tard oublie.

(After Chaucer)

Who loves well does not soon forget.
The midnight streets and morning tea,
The tide’s white tops: he'll only see
Them as some crease the scene has set

Around her vanished silhouette.
The seas will stroke new sands, though he
Who loves well does not. Soon, forget
The midnight streets and morning tea,

The lonely tides, your feet, your sweat;
Cast off your own identity:
Name, breath, loves, rest—look far and flee.
Life might be livable then, yet
Who loves well does not soon forget.

A Short Lyric

Friday, January 4, 2008 (12:50 am)

Here is the most recent poem I have written. If you wonder at the title, you are probably quite tiresome and ought to check out Robert Herrick's 17th century lyrics on Julia, the most famous of which you can find here.

Upon My Lady's Hands

How precious are my lady's little hands!
    Those thin rose-colored fingers seem
    Fit to be dipped and lapped in cream.
Each quickening curve or shake demands
Attention, which she gathers with a gleam.

How precious are my lady's little fists!
    Tight like two vises: what could live,
    Wrung through that pale four-fingered sieve?
Each move or menacing shake insists
Upon obedience, which I would not give.

Hello! We are on vacation.

Thursday, January 3, 2008 (5:39 pm)

Just created this site. Feels sort of ungainly, like a new glove (or maybe one found at the crime scene that doesn't fit, thank you Mr. Cochran). I hate commitments so I will not commit to being faithful about this site. When the time comes, I will post things that I write and think are worth being read. It probably won't be a lot. Not because I am not brilliant, but because my genius will fall on your deaf Philistine ears.