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Overview
A vibrant and eclectic collection from a stunningly mature young poet
"The world—the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone—has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether." Roberto Calasso's words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko's luminous fourth collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment.
Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu'allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation.
This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466876330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 165 KB |
About the Author
Ange Mlinko was born in Philadelphia in 1969. Educated at St. John's College and Brown University, she has lived most of her adult life in New York, and also spent time in Ifrane, Morocco, and Beirut, Lebanon. Mlinko's previous books include Matinées, Starred Wire, and Shoulder Season. She has received the Poetry Foundation's Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, and is currently teaching in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. She lives in Houston with her husband and two children.
Ange Mlinko is the author of several books of poetry, including Distant Mandate and Marvelous Things Overheard. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism, and served as Poetry Editor for The Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Parnassus. Educated at St. John’s College and Brown University, she has lived abroad in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville.
Read an Excerpt
Marvelous Things Overheard
By Ange Mlinko
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2013 Ange MlinkoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7633-0
CHAPTER 1
THE GRIND
Three ciabbatini for breakfast
where demand for persnickety bread
is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast
recalculation of my overhead,
which soars, and as you might expect
the ciabbatini stand in for my fantasy
of myself in a sea-limned prospect,
on a terrace, with a lemon tree ...
Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late.
Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book.
Better never lose track of the date.
Oversleep, and you're on the hook.
It's the margin for error: shrinking.
It's life ground down to recurrence.
It's fewer books read for the thinking
the hospital didn't rebill the insurance;
the school misplaced the kids' paperwork.
Here's our sweet pup, a rescue
which we nonetheless paid for, and look:
he gets more grooming than I do.
When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager
who ground gems on ham for her guests;
the queen who ground out two cups of flour
on the pregnant abdomen of her husband's mistress;
I think of a great "rock-eating bird"
grinding out a sandy beach,
the foam said to be particulate matter
of minute crustaceans, each
brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite
to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes,
and plain living which might be
shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.
WORDS ARE THE REVERSE OF PAIN
Had something gone wrong then I wouldn't be here
to tell you this: In November 1944 a baby boy was born
in Germany — "in a cave," they kept saying,
"she gave birth in a cave."
The villages between Minsk and Hannover
— untold dozens of them — zigzagged through,
one child on her back, another under her heart.
From the distance of the bombers,
she might have looked like she was dancing.
Who thinks a woman in labor might be dancing?
From a distance of gods, Leto might have been dancing,
the Leto whom Hera hated. The Leto who reeled
in search of a place to give birth. Fled Arcadia, Leto did.
Fled Parthenium, fled the land of Pelops,
fled Aonia too and Dirce and Strophia.
From such a distance it might have looked like a dance
as she tottered from city to city to city,
none letting her rest in their precincts.
None letting her loosen her elastic-panel
drawstring jeans.
Leto island-hopped. They would not let the baby drop,
not the Echinades of the famously welcoming harbor,
not the normally hospitable Corcyra, not Cos.
It can seem so cordial, this sea, with its views
clear to spiky urchins fifty feet below. And the islands
close but uncrowded, like cousins slumped about
on pillows waiting for an adored movie to begin.
Think of Leto groaning amid them — trying to sweat a pearl.
Think of us cousins, watching Rudolph on Christmas Eve,
so many years after the camps and the ruses —
lifetimes ago — pretending to be Polish!
The villages between Minsk and Hannover
— untold dozens of them — zigzagged through,
one child on her back, another under her heart.
From the distance of the bombers,
she might have looked like she was playing hide-and-seek.
There was an island not permitted to anchor,
named Asteria. Asteria wandered
across the Aegean, across the Saronic Gulf
until some unnamed wind blew that midwife,
part earth part skiff, and Leto together.
The island took pity, and let Leto deliver.
Hera couldn't intervene. Asteria had once been a woman
who accepted punishment rather than bed Zeus.
Double bind rebounded.
After succoring Leto, the island could anchor at last.
She became renowned as the heart of the Cyclades, Delos.
Why do we have to know this? That cruelty
has to exist to propel kindness into relief; that relief
must first imply pain? They said this was the turning point.
That her health was never the same.
Giving birth in a cave, on the frozen plain of Germany.
So it's ironic that Leto's jammed labor would yield a god
in whose presence it is forbidden to cry.
Did you know? Apollo! Arrester of tears.
A god in whose presence it is impossible to grieve.
Application of the tender to the elemental:
my thumb stops the knife's turn through a carrot.
A dog roughs his tongue lapping rain on cement.
A callus rises. But words? Words are the reverse of pain.
Where pain is, no words are. Apollo loves words.
THE GOD CATEGORY
1. FLASHFLOOD: ARETHUSA
The vibration running through the ebbing afternoon
isn't unusual. The wind is.
The direction of bent boughs
gives it away: All flags,
all fealty follows our sirocco, our feral
anti-zephyr, west.
Now they say the maiden spotted in the light
that bleeds through pine and oak and gravy moss
(it drips) was ankle-deep in
swamp violets when she
cried out to the goddess.
Oh, aid me! —
me, me, 'til all m was was wave. The exulting god
foamed, went after her, you know the way
the trickle of a levee
overcome by a storm surge
bucks furiously against
concrete retaining walls
and thrashes toward the culvert?
The shape of a freshwater spring
shot into the sea from an
underground grotto
was Arethusa fleeing
(see thermal imaging)
and the god in pursuit. Hence
rumors of underwater plumes,
grue and violet, that savagely
fluoresce offshore.
2. SQUALL: ECHO
Now, what if Echo came to their shores — somewhere between Westport and New Rochelle,
and made herself a paperweight on one of those overwrought wicker chairs
the wind could pulp to papyrus starter —
and holding a stem of chardonnay, eavesdropped on party chatter by the mod wok
before wandering on in search of her old suitor?
What we need is a suitor perpetually new, the wives agreed (their imported spreads, their filigreed eyelids).
What we need are marvelous things, they said, but Echo could not say what she had seen.
Sitting among their pale accessories, all in harmony with white ceramic tile,
eggshell balcony railings, green-grape sunlight spilling on the metallurgical sound of the waves — more like
staves — collapsing, and so collapsing every riff into one note.
The sand was all one color, oat, and the grasses kept rebearding where hosanna-ing thalassas
massacred oysters to pure nacre.
I have seen some things, she opened her mouth to say (this could have been anywhere: Tyre, Florida; Essouaira,
California; Texel, Massachusetts).
I have seen marvelous things, akin to shine on a child's straight hair or brushed titanium
of the early adopter's new trophy.
These things, against what they obsolesce do not make us feel less less,
they implied, giving Echo a severe look.
Echo wound a tress around her finger; they had all looked up at
comets through telescopes and at the ceiling of
Grand Central, when it came down to it;
Shakespeare in the Park, with actors previously seen onscreen;
traveled, raveled, veiled and led on donkeys through casbahs.
They were like poems conceived, typical poems, near the metronome;
they preferred common complaints.
Good riddance to the husband who put the steak knives point-up like myrmidons in the dishwasher.
And if in their co-ops in Westport, or New Rochelle, or
wherever, they resembled, a little, pigeons — "Djinns,"
Echo flattered them, making them feel less less, but somehow not all that appreciated for it,
as when she had whispered to Narcissus "Us!" rather than, as he would have had it, "Scissor us."
3. TORNADO: ARACHNE
Do you remember who it was Arachne offended
when she wove her fateful tapestry?
It was the goddess whose handiwork organizes
the transient fabric of tornadoes,
wedding tulle of broken homes
(exploded foam and particleboard).
One intrepid plane penetrates a chink
and drops a hundred golf balls in the vortex,
each equipped with sensors that relay
measurements back to the lab.
By these criteria, the rainbow,
statistically difficult to verify,
gets classified as pure illusion.
And so love. Even in the city,
which seemed to offer protection
from disaster sweeping in from the prairie,
we were alerted to the funnels
the spinning goddess wrought, a displeasure
like the one she unleashed on Arachne,
who had depicted Zeus's adultery
(the goddess was, of course, his daughter).
Who would agree to a tapestry contest
with a weaver of weather?
I mix up Arachne with Ariadne:
similar name, similar gesture —
the string flung from her spinneret sleeve
and given in trust to a lover, who dropped down
bravely into another family's entanglements.
4. HURRICANE: HERA
You never hear of Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel,
but it's an axiom that, sooner or later, a hurricane'll hit here.
The art students made a map of the one-hundred-year flood plain superimposed on the five-hundred-year flood plain
and you were supposed to stick a thumbtack on the street where
you were living in the prequel, shaded a blue so appealing
it seemed as though we might have taken nutriment from it, with some organ we have lost.
The art students were making their installation serve a religious function
by offering an opportunity for communal expression.
Catharsis.
Should we choose to participate, the result would belong to all of us.
The ironclad customs that once proclaimed the common good are vanished completely
but in the sanctuary city, just as in ancient times, people ask the gods a question in prayer and sleep on it.
When Ixion raped a Hera-shaped cloud, it produced the father of a new race, the Centaurs, whose specialty was
medicine.
The medical center is like a palace complex.
The live oaks knit their limbs in prayerlike attitudes that mimic, altogether, the vault of a cathedral.
I would ask the art students what kind of knowledge it would take to be able to paint a tortured body —
Christ in his passion, Ixion on his wheel. I can see them recoil.
Some kinds of knowledge are hateful, as the nuclear scientist, assassinated, will tell you,
or a Dutch gentlewoman who is so traumatized
when her husband buys an uncanny Ixion by the artist Ribera
that she gives birth to a child whose hand is withered and
twisted — as though pain
could be born of paint.
STABILE
I wake to light jackhammering, and news
follows: a plane
failed over the sea. All want to go home, but drastic curfews
obtain from a meridian.
* * *
We are a long way from a sea that cedes
black boxes from an area
forested like the Andes. Instead, a Mercedes,
black as La Brea,
leaps from the backlit red, anonymous,
when we try to cross
at the traffic island discarding hibiscus
with every wind-toss.
* * *
We are a long way from the courteous lilac
or waxwing
with sensitive feather tipped as a kayak
is tipped by a coxswain.
THE HELIOPOLITAN
"But the Romans must have built this here for a reason,"
he exclaimed. He was Jean Cocteau! Rain fell on the ruins
as he drew in his sketch pad the rooster with a toe.
"There are for instance," he instructed, "spots on the earth
where gravity is so light it barely exerts a pull."
He lightly clucked as the pencil ran about. "Pillars!
Like these! Do you imagine they moved themselves?"
"It's also unusual to be raining here," another guest remarked.
The owner of the Palmyra saw to us himself.
In the dim room the gold in the throw pillows
and tasseled pull cords glitt-aired. "Heurtebise,"
he said of me, tipping my chin: "L'ange Heurtebise."
And there where the mules were banked against the rain,
we heard the story of ____ the Flaccid
who sacked the temple of Hera and disturbed her cattle,
and not cattle only but the silver trees, and the hitherto
unstirred ashes on the altar. So when the redemptores
brought back the tiles of the roof ____ the Flaccid dismantled,
it was by vote of the Senate; for the idea of leaving roofless
even that humble shrine (humble, that is, compared
to the uses to which they could have put that marble in Rome)
left them terribly terribly uneasy, perhaps because
____ the Flaccid had since then lost his mind.
Do not lift a single tile, a single tessera, not a potsherd,
they laughed; but our hero kept his eye on his sketch pad.
"How easy it was to put treacherous beacons on the shoals;
steal a map; distribute counterfeit maps;
falsify navigational charts, or the names for things
in foreign languages." As a rhododactyl turns the page
tonight I blurted, "It stopped raining."
Then the man who said, "Etonnez-moi!"
and walked through a mirror
awarded his coq with its big toe to the proprietor.
NEO-AEOLIAN
"Next time," I heard the old one say,
"they want to throw a new wind my way,
for inclusion in the illustrious bag,
twinning the wind from a propeller
with the mistral or the levanter
along with the lesser breezes
from the electric fan and HVAC vent,
the wind from freeways
being all the same to them
as that which jittered palm trees
way back when
let them wake on the dawn side of an Airbus
to see a smaller plane go haywire
in those jazzy 'wingtip vortices'
and if that doesn't tap their fear of Erebus
show them what it'll do to a lyre
whose delicate artifices
hold up their lives like an eyelid's
unseen caryatid."
ALEXANDER'S NAMING OF THE WINDS
If you'd seen
lightning nets in clear water,
midnight blue beyond the reefs;
the pattern intact on nippled juglets;
if you'd seen
feral cats dozing on jagged steles when the noon sun
drugged us
you'd say too, Can't I have it —
Or if I could describe it,
I could have it? Like an ancient contest?
They say Apeliotes
is called Potameus here in Phoenicia;
between the mountains
of Libanus
and Bapyrus it blows from a plain like a vast threshing floor;
it might also be called Syriandus in the Gulf of Issus,
which blows from the Syrian Gates
between the Rosian Mountains
and the Taurus.
In Tripoli they call it Marseus.
On the border of Syria,
the southeast wind, the Eurus, is called Scopeleus,
but in Cyrene
it is known as Phoenicias. I can't have this.
But they say
these Phoenicians
who sailed to the Pillars of Hercules
with oil to trade
came back with more silver than they could carry
and were forced to refit their ship's wheel,
keel, and anchors
with silver,
not to mention their tableware,
cookware, and fixtures.
And though they say the Phoenicians received their name
from the Greek phoenixai,
"to stain with blood," because they slew
and murdered
as they streamed over the sea,
if you'd seen the murex pits,
the very waves disperpling the shore with the dye of the snail,
you'd know what those kingdoms were stained with.
I can have it;
describe it thus;
and though no one can claim "this wind
is the wind of the palace,"
we must hope for the Leuconotus,
the white wind,
to arrive from the south if the Potameus
or Syriandus
or Marseus or Phoenicias
won't come to our aid — no wind is the king's —
but if you'd seen,
as I saw,
at the fundus of the world,
snakes desquamate their own simulacra;
eggs shiver at a tambourine;
a Eurydice
essay toward the nest;
for good measure, not to lose the contest,
you would pray for a wind to come,
the rough marine roof
kicked up by the hoof of Notus if necessary,
its bad air
notwithstanding, to bear you back to where the language
bore its auger into ears of matching description,
though it cause great storms
in the harbor at Posidonium.
ETNA
She wakes at dawn. Eos has played some kind of trick:
all is covered in ash. As if she were in some old flick.
DUTCH
Bashing the butt end of a broomstick on my eye
I was in luck: the contact lens fell right out in my hand.
Sitting down, nursing my eye,
I let my son put in the disk of Sister Wendy
discussing a Dutch painting
with a man, a couple of women, and a coin in it.
The coin is the tip-off that this is a brothel.
I must pause and decide whether a six-year-old boy
should be watching a nun elucidate
a four-hundred-year-old painting on the sale of flesh.
On account of Omar Pasha's elegant handwriting,
the governorship of this port city fell to him.
His household women made soap.
The dissolving escutcheons released such perfume,
his musicians ran through "Ah! Che la morte,"
and his plans for desalinization
included a vast cistern under the tennis court.
That we're on this headland, surrounded by water,
makes atmospheric tricks; worlds in an optical inch.
It's spring and it's windy. Even my ears unsynch.
CIVILIZATION
I.
The Venetians, the Venetians —
you hear about the Venetians
picking off the black grapes of Izmir
or seizing a ship
bound for Egypt, to trigger a
war for Crete; grabbing the wrong rein
in the king's convoy, causing riots;
leaving their powder in the
Parthenon, to explode and singe
the ancient trees to extinction
along with the friezes and free-
standing tibias of Phidias
and Praxiteles. So when a
ruddy dove, as if burnt by sunset,
staggers onto the balcony
on the day the tripped munitions
kill more than a dozen
and destroy a power plant
months after being intercepted
on a ship bound for a Syrian port,
the first thing I think is
"The Venetians! The Venetians!"
collapsing the shelves
while olive silvers ...
II.
The Dutch called their money florins,
and their borrowed flora,
which didn't smell, made money.
They didn't smell,
those tulips from the east.
The east,
whose aitches and hitches —
an "a'a" like "raw almond" —
alternated
like the arabesques in assassins.
The Dutch were so proud
of their invincible navy ships
and varieties of tulips
that, crossing "Virgin"
with "Admiral van Enckhuysen"
or "Diana" with "Semper Augustus,"
they bred, by and by,
"General Bol" and "Admiral van Hoorn"
and sent their waves
on tiptoe.
THE MED
If there were a way to set it right,
because life, for all its shortcomings,
Aimée, is a resource not to be squandered
on desire for the impossible,
or love for that which is absent,
then Cheiron would know it, the Centaur,
who, roaming the meadows of Pelion,
knew every herb and its medicinal properties,
in one of the most florid
ecological systems in the world,
such that every island
in the Aegean archipelago
might contain plants indigenous to it
and found nowhere else, not even on the next island;
so I, raceme of pleasure, imagine the wind
as the instrument of justice, scattering memes
on territory unknown and stymied,
hostile to fennel — striving
to bless Pelion with diverse spore.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marvelous Things Overheard by Ange Mlinko. Copyright © 2013 Ange Mlinko. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
I
The Grind
The Reverse of Pain is Words
The God Category
Stabile
The Heliopolitan
Neo-Aeolian
Alexander's Naming of Winds
Etna
Dutch
Civilization
The Med
Symphonic Expanse
Naiad Math
Cicadas
Bayt
Bliss Street
After Sappho (The Volcano)
II
Azure
Cantata for Lynette Roberts
III
Chagrin
Wingandecoia
Angélique
Reason, Love, Control