Yesterday, I posted here about the devotional mode in poetry and my forthcoming anthology, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and featured two poems from the anthology. Today, I'd like to highlight the work of two additional poets from the anthology about whose work I am very enthusiastic.
As far as I can tell, Patrice de la Tour du Pin has been little known in the U.S., but thanks to the efforts of poet and translator Jennifer Grotz, he has begun to reach an English-language audience in literary journals, and will continue to do so in Grotz's translation of his collection Psaumes de tous mes temps [Psalms of All My Days], forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013.
Patrice de la Tour du Pin (1911–1975) was a French, Catholic poet who achieved fame for individual collections of poems as well as Une Somme de poésie, a three-volume multi-genred work he wrote and continually revised throughout his life. Late in his career, de la Tour du Pin distilled and collected his most powerful lyrical poems, written in the form of psalms, into Psaumes de tous mes temps [Psalms of All My Days]. As Jennifer Grotz says, "These psalms articulate his struggle to find poetic authority and spiritual meaning in the midst of world war and modern tumult." I'm thrilled to be able to include four of de la Tour du Pin's psalms in Poems of Devotion, and I'd like to share one of them with you here. More of Grotz's translations of de la Tour du Pin's work can be found online at Blackbird.
PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN
Psalm 41*
My God, I know only my debt,
all my life carried in debt--
and you who repay it in a word!
Forgive me my shamelessness:
you who have hedged me in from all directions at once,
deliver me in time for your day of rest.
Set the night sky back in motion,
reweave the constellations
into a scaffold for your praise.
On that day when you judge
the taste of my joy with your lips,
my sorrow at your Passion,
will you be able to say: “Here is a man
who valued me
over thirty radiant ideas”?
-translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz
*"Psalm 41" by Patrice de la Tour du Pin, translated by Jennifer Grotz, appears here by permission of Jennifer Grotz.
Another marvelous poet featured in the anthology is Amit Majmudar (b. 1979), a diagnostic nuclear
radiologist, poet, and fiction writer who has published two collections of poetry and a novel to date. The work I chose to include in the anthology is a prose work that transcends genre distinctions called "Azazil." It is a revisiting of Paradise Lost from a mystical Islamic perspective, taking the form of an epic prose poem, and it is profoundly beautiful and powerful. Here is an excerpt. Two notes the reader might need are that ishq in Islam is a self-effacing love for Allah and Allahu akbar (Arabic) means "Allah is the greatest."
AMIT MAJMUDAR
from Azazil*
He
[Azazil] was told: Bow down! He said,
“I will bow to no other.” He was asked, Even
if you receive My curse? He said, “It does not matter. I have no way to an
other-than-You. I am an abject lover…. There can be no distance for me. Nearness and distance are one…. A
servant of pure heart will bow to no other than You.”–Mansur Al-Hallaj, The TaSin of Before-Time and Ambiguity
In the beginning, I was a word in his mouth. I slept under his
soft, wet tongue. I came out wet, like a human baby, but I was smokeless fire,
and I burned his saliva caul away. When the magma slowed and the earth cooled
down and mist rose white off the black stopped magma, He pointed and said, That was what you looked like. Only what’s
black there was blaze.
I remember he took me riding in the whirlwind once. I was the only
angel invited inside it. Its cockpit was a noiseless sphere, see-through. We
went around inspecting the underbellies of black holes for signs of light. He
said, Here, Azazil, you can steer.
I had my arms crossed over my
chest. My knees touched my elbows. I was scared to touch the walls circling
me.
Be Me,
Azazil, and will it left.
The whirlwind
banked. I was, like all the angels back then, Him.
But I was different than the other angels, though I did not know
it yet. Closer.
Jibril asked me,
eyeing my wind-mad hair, “What does that mean, ‘Be Me’? We can’t be Him. To say
we and He are the same…that’s blasphemous.”
The others nodded
to either side of him. He was their leader. And that was only right. He was,
after all, one of them.
“We don’t will as Him, Azazil. He wills for us. We must have misheard.”
These were
distinctions. I did not understand distinctions, in those days. I wasn’t far
enough away to see Him whole and look down and see me whole and think, those
are two different things. Unlike Jibril, I really believed what we recited.
Say: Allah is One….
They saw us as bricks of the same mosque. I saw us as drops of the
same wine, and not in the glass, either, but on His tongue, eternally being
tasted.
We called our prayer the Unity. They said the Unity to Him, and
they said it in unison.
All those voices,
saying it at the same time: all wrong.
said the Unity alone. When I
said it, one voice said it.
His.
[…]
I did not know I was different yet. But He knew.
I was the third living thing He
made after light and water. He had not yet decided how far away He wanted
angels to stand. So I turned out less…less differentiated
than the others.
What I mean is, they were
servants, I was a limb.
That is why He entrusted me with dawn.
The Greeks tell a story about
Sisyphus. He rolls a heavy stone up a hill, and he gets to the top, and it
rolls down the other side, and he has to start over. He’s being punished like
that.
I did the same thing, but for me
it was an honor. I pushed the sun out of the east sea all the way to noon, then
let it roll on its own weight into the west. When I got to noon and the sphere
started rolling away from me, I would clap my hands with joy and chase it
barefoot down the mosque dome sky.
You cannot handle a star from dawn to noon and not get burned.
Even if your hands are made of smokeless fire, you can’t.
Allah said to me, The scar tissue webbing your palms is as
beautiful to me as your face.
I was a part of Him. When He cut me off with an ax called Adam, He
bled, and I bled. He cried, and I cried.
A servant could have been sent
away and called back. I was a limb, and there was no reattaching me.
How can someone be All-Powerful
and incomplete at the same time?
I imagine Him turning Adam this
way and that, pressing different sides of man to the stump where I used to be.
The Catastrophe happened aeons in. He decided water and light were
not life enough for earth.
He wanted the dirt it was made of
to live, too.
We were fashioned out of His voice. We came out smokeless fire
because that is what thought is, and He alone can say thought raw.
Adam He fashioned out of His
blood. He mixed His blood with hard dirt, and the dirt slucked and softened
under the heels of His hands.
A new emotion, the first other
than ishq I had ever felt, interrupted my love like a hiccough.
It wasn’t envy, not at first. It
was disgust.
Not even Jibril was comfortable with things. The planets were
matter slums, dumps for elements too clunky to disperse or burn. Earth in
particular. It wasn’t like some planets, the gaseous ones, that made their own
light. Earth was cosmos clutter.
And there Allah
was—kneeling in it, forearms flecked with it.
“These species
You’re making,” Jibril worried, “they are going to shed each other’s blood
someday. And the blood they shed will be Your own.”
Allah said
nothing, busy kneading flesh.
I said nothing. I
trusted him, back then.
He brought me there and showed me by moonlight.
I call
this species Man.
“Have you named
him yet?”
No.
“What are you going to
name him?”
I want you to name him, Azazil.
I climbed into
His lap and thought about it.
“Adam.”
I like that name. Adam he is.
“Adam.”
Go closer to him. I brought you here so you
get to be the first, Azazil.
"The first to touch him?”
Not yet—he’s still cooling.
“The first to do
what, then?”
Bow to him.
Denying Him exhilarated me in a way bliss didn’t.
I had known the word “no” till
then only from prayers affirming His Oneness. The same word made us two now.
How odd it felt
to use that word in isolation! I took the Unity apart and found blasphemy in
one of its components. No.
I was His limb—paralyzed at his
side.
We were obedience and ishq, only more ishq. Adam? All obedience.
Only through grace, verse, or drugs could that creature ever work himself up
into ishq. Ishq even then a feeling, momentary. Not a state.
[…]
Allah projected, on the bare white walls of their minds,
bulletins, calming images, orders of the day.
Obey Me.
There is
no God but Me.
Everything
depends on Me.
I stared at my
mind and saw my own desires streaked there in childish crayon, the receptive
purity defaced.
He’s
thinking it for me.
That is one
definition of blessedness: being thought for.
Which would make damnation having to think for yourself. To steer,
to generate, to choose. To pour perceptions into a mind with a hole in its
memory. To will.
If willing is
suffering, Who wills all? Who was first in the universe ever to will? Who was
damned before Azazil?
I joined Him.
How we warred:
Two black bees in
a bobbing sunflower.
In the North, the
aurora borealis.
On the plains,
brushfires; ignis fatuus over water.
Swallows, mated
for life, pecking a hawk back into the clouds. Leave our young alone.
Underwater, in
chariots drawn by teams of leviathans.
As scorpions in a
ring, tails high, circling.
Hemorrhage of
ishq and ichor.
Wind passing
wind, catching; abruptly torqued. We drilled into the ground as one tornado.
In a sky
crosshatched with threads of flash.
Biceps and
triceps that pulled at the same elbow.
Panting, wings
flaccid, against facing asteroids.
Allahu
akbar their warcry, our warcry Allahu
akbar. Allah listened in and corrected neither side.
Dog barking at dog
across a light year.
A bruise,
spreading its blue faith.
In the south,
migrations; massacres in the east.
Two stags locked
and skidding dustily down a raw-rock mountainside.
Octopi, knotted.
Leeches mouth to mouth, sealed.
Azazil-Jibril.
Eventually He intervened. He had to; I was winning.
I kept a staff of
angels to track all the comets in the universe. They broadcast the warning to
my forces in the field: New comets, over twenty of them.
Bright boils swelled on the skin
of space and ruptured into speed. Hatched, the comets flew in a V for earth.
Except one. The largest broke off
and steered for the asteroid where I had pinned Jibril.
[…]
When I was hit, Jibril was choking words of pity past my thumbs on
his throat.
“He says you’re
infected. And you’re infecting the others. He can heal you.”
“Infected?” I did
not ease up. And yet—infection—something
outside me, acting on me—it would explain everything. “Infected with what?”
“Will.”
I was light years toward hell when I came to. My spine draped like
a streamer over the nose of the comet.
I turned in a fitful coma before
I finally awoke. So my face burned, too.
The scar tissue webbing your palms, He
once told me, is as beautiful to me as
your face.
I wonder if that
is still true.
Worst burned were my wings and back. They healed as one ridged
mound. I went from winged dawn to hunchback.
I had my fellow
exiles chip ice scalpels off a lake. It took three days’ surgery to free my
wingbone fans. Ashen rubber clung between their storm-snapped umbrella prongs.
I was as
landbound as Adam.
[…]
Seeing was not much different than not seeing, the darkness was so
thick. If you stuck your arm out your hand disappeared. It was like dunking a
torch underwater.
You could be standing in a crowd
and never know it. That was how He wanted things. Unity was heaven’s principle,
atomization, hell’s.
We had joined
against Him. Now, to punish us, He kept us apart—from each other, and from Him.
For the first weeks no one said anything.
No stirring addresses out of me,
no great monologues, no exhortations. The last thing devastation does is
speechify. That would be action.
Despair, at its purest, shuts the
body down. That’s why people don’t commit suicide until the upswing. Suicidal
is the floor above hell.
We survived by tonguing Qu’rans into the snow, that we might read
the text if a sun should rise someday.
We survived in
contemplation. In regret.
By sculpting our own scar tissue
by burning ourselves anew. By base jumping in the hope our wings might snag the
air.
We clawed holes
in the snow to find ground. When we found ground, we clawed further, but our
world’s core had gone cold.
In cartography.
In deriving a whole astronomy from the starlessness over our heads.
We splashed the shallow puddles
that melted at our feet. Lift one foot and it flash froze around the other
ankle.
Ishq I had in abundance. On ishq
we survived. We survived on a ration of five prayers and a thousand tears a
day.
I had seen Adam up close. I had seen the hairs that grew out of
him—a whole body colonized with black grass. The skin wrinkled at his knuckles,
the fingers’ flesh sleeves too long, bunching when they straightened. When he
turned in his sleep, the dirt kept a print in his shape.
This was the ugliest thing about
him, to an angel. His solidity. How he blocked light instead of intensifying
it. How the ground recorded him, and the air swirled in and out of him. He was
a bone stuck in the throat of dissolution.
[…]
I never said I will not bow. I said I cannot bow.
He wouldn’t ask
Adam to violate a law of physics, would He? Yet He asked me to violate a law of
metaphysics, and raged when I couldn’t. Acted like it was my choice not to bow
in two directions, when it’s the equivalent of standing in two places at the
same time.
[…]
*"Azazil" originally appeared in The Kenyon Review, and this excerpt is reproduced here by permission of the author.