Bly - Lorca and Jiménez: selected poems

Selected Other Books Edited and Translated by Robert Bly The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology (with James Hillman and Michael Meade) The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado Selected Books of Poetry by Robert Bly Jumping Out of Bed The Light Around the Body Loving a Woman in Two Worlds The Man in the Black Coat Turns Meditations on the Insatiable Soul Morning Poems Selected Poems Silence in the Snowy Fields Sleepers Joining Hands This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? Collected Prose Poems Selected Other Books by Robert Bly American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity Iron John: A Book about Men A Little Book on the Human Shadow (with William Booth) The Sibling Society I first read Jimnez in the early 1960s, which was, in the United States, a time with more innocence and hopefulness than we feel now, and a time when we expected more from poetry. Many readers fell in love with a Tao Yuan Ming poem they came across in an odd anthology, and people carried M. D. Herter-Nortons translations of Rilke as if the book were a letter from their lover. These longings for subtlety grew sharper in contrast to the Cold War brutalities. In a response to Lorca, James Wright wrote about butterflies.

A longing for what could never be achieved had not yet been dismissed. Lorcas poetry, as we know, revealed the coming agonies of the Spanish Civil War and the existing agony of industrialism, and his poems written in New York in 1929 are still the greatest poems ever written about our horrendous national city. He said: There is a wire stretched from the Sphinx to a safety deposit box that passes through the heart of all poor children. In these lines we are looking straight at what was later to be called welfare reform. The poetry he wrote in A Poet in New York is rough and prophetic, more than any poetry we have now, but the inner delicacy out of which the poetry came is even more distant from our contemporary spiritual mood, which is so diminished by pop culture. Lorca could be speaking to many contemporary professors and poets when he says, The leaves of the roses fall in the mud.

Oh sweet John of God! What do you see in these magnificent petals? Your heart is tiny! Medieval Arabic poetry infuses Lorcas images, but his spiritual father was Juan Ramn Jimnez. Jimnezs love of silence, his love of perfection, was famous in Madrid. To keep his solitude, he would answer his own house telephone, Juan Ramn is not at home today. He said: True music is the music of silence, the silent but well-heard music of thought in the head, passion in the body, reverie in the soul. Translated by
Christopher Maurer He wrote: Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?... I was thinking of a flowery meadow at the end of a road, and found myself in the slough.

I was thinking of the greatness of what was human, and found myself in the divine. If we read Lorca and Jimnez carefully, we can sense the subtle nature of the soul-ground out of which prophetic poetry rises. It is a ground cultivated in silence behind garden walls, shrewdly protected, loving the perfections of high art, an art that fights for the values of reverie, the feminine, and the spirit. Juan Ramn reminds us of our sadness: Mob of beings and things! A true sadness, because you are really deep in the soul, as they say, not in time at all! R OBERT B LY Selected Poems of
JUAN RAMN JIMNEZ

I No matter which poems of Juan Ramn Jimnez I had chosen, the collection would never be a heavy book, like a book of Neruda or Trakl. A single poem of Trakls would make a heavy book. Forty poems of Jimnez will be light as a feather.

Juan Ramn Jimnez vision of poetry is very different from that of Neruda or Trakl. Neruda and Trakl take all their weight as men, and put that into their poems. Their love goes out as a form of occult energy into boulders, river barges, crumbling walls, dining rooms, womens clothes. When they step back, they leave the energy there. Their poems lie there separate from them, massive, full of grief. To Jimnez writing a poem means something entirely different.

For him a poem has ecstasy: that is the difference between poetry and prose. Living as a poet means feeling that ecstasy every day of your life, every hour if possible. A poem flies out of the poet like a spark. Whatever the poet writes down will be touched with ecstasythe poem will therefore be light, not light in the sense of light verse that avoids seriousness, but light as a spark or as an angel is light. With one or two fewer words the poem would leap straight up into the sky. The heavy poems of Trakl lie brooding in alleys or on mountain tops, and when the reader walks up to them they hardly notice him: they feel too great a sorrow.

Jimnez poems on the other hand are nervous and alert, and when we come near, they see us, they are more interested in us than in themselvesthey try to show us the road back to the original ecstasy. The poems are signposts pointing the reader back to the poet, that is, back toward the life from which the ecstasy came. Juan Ramn Jimnez said that he lived his life in such a way as to get the most poetry possible out of it, and he loved solitude, private gardens, cloisters, silent women with large eyes. Jimnez poems ask the question: what sort of life shall we live so as to feel poetry, ecstasy? His emphasis on how the poet lived, rather than on rhythm or technique, is precisely why so much poetry flowed from him into the young poets. In his life he embodied as Yeats did some truth about poetry that everyone, but especially poetry professors, try to ignore and do ignore. II We can understand the subject matter of Jimnez poems if we understand that it is in solitude a mans emotions become very clear to him.

Jimnez does not write of politics or religious doctrines, of the mistakes of others, not of his own troubles or even his own opinions, but only of solitude, and the strange experiences and the strange joy that come to a man in solitude. His books usually consist of emotion after emotion called out with great force and delicacy, and it must be said that his short, precise poems make our tradition of the long egotistic ode look rather absurd. Seeing the beauty of a sunset, for instance, he does not, with many stanzas, complicated syntax, and involved thoughts, write a long elaborate ode on immortalityhe simply says: Serene last evening, short as a life, end of all that was loved, I want to be eternal! Translated byCarlos Francisco de Zea This is what he calls naked poetry. It is poetry near the emotion. He has a wonderful poem in which he says that, in his youth, when poetry first came to him, she came to him like a very young girl, naked, and he loved her. Then, later, she began to put on ornaments and become very elaborate, and he began to hate her, without knowing why.

Then, years later, she began to trust him, and now, at last is a young girl, naked, againnaked poetry, that I have loved my whole life! III Jimnez, as a poet, was born in the great and joyful reviving of Spanish poetry about 1905, led by Antonio Machado, Unamuno, and himself, who all dreamed of a new blossoming of Spain. Jimnez was not robust. He was delicate, neurasthenic, and slipped off into insanity more than once. Yet his devotion to poetry was healthy and rigorous. He was more generous to younger poets than Yeats was; he spent years editing poetry magazines and starting publishing ventures to get poets in print, endless afternoons poring over young poets manuscripts. His delight and Machados stubbornness prepared the way for the great generation of 28: Lorca, Aleixandre, Salinas, Guilln.