“This is more a poem about how a good religious impulse can become perverted.”
This morning, in search of the Tranströmer poem with a line I always liked about the Fanatic and the Doubter, I came upon a treasure. I had forgotten which poem it was. (It was “Golden Wasp.”) The search yielded some kind of audio clip. I heard a deep voice I did not recognize, and then I startled—wait, what?
It’s him, it’s Tranströmer.
I think of him as always having been mute, though I am well aware he was struck mute only after his first stroke in 1990.
I saw that the recording was from 1988. Yes—it made sense. Pre-stroke Tranströmer. They had tape recorders in the late 80s.
What a wonder the internet can be.
I stopped whatever I was doing, sat stock still, listened, and felt certain shadows and depletions leave my body, changed for a different currency.
Poetry is an escape from dead currencies, ideas that can only ever line up, add up, make sense, and be that dead sterile thing we call “correct.”
I insist on talking about poetry because it represents freedom of thought, not speech.
So much emphasis on “truth”and none on the alchemy of words. In the end, only the most aggressive fact hammerers get their say.
I hope you take a few moments to listen to this poem.
Recording of Tomas Tranströmer reading “Golden Wasp” in 1988, here.
For context, T.T. was a bug collector and amateur zoologist before he was a poet and a psychologist.
My essay about Tranströmer, An Artist In The North, in Lapham’s Quarterly, 2015. (Has humor.)
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I love how TT's poems always seem to viscerally connect my spirit to the spirits of the physical world. This one's no exception. And, so richly complex, this one is -- I've listened to it multiple times now, 'still engaging with the meanings flooding over me... Then there's the archetypical symbolism of the 'golden wasp', appearing ever so briefly -- like a subliminal cut in a movie, and how that parallels the cockroaches scattering in the mid-morning morning light as the barn door is open -- "did you see them or not see them or both?" (at the beginning of the poem). But that's just the tip of the iceberg...
Then, there's this "trauma release" line, at the very end...
"...My blindness has gone away. That dark bat has left my face and is scissoring in summer's bright space."
I love what you write about poetry:
Poetry is an escape from dead currencies . . .
poetry represent[s] freedom of thought . . .
the alchemy of words.