Poems from Uche Nduka

I met Uche recently in New York. I didn't know his work, but came home to San Francisco and checked out his book eel on reef from the public library. Here are some of the pieces from it. No titles. Lots of water and linguistic jouissance. And apropos of recent posts here--some ships/boats.

your father was
a seaman who could
not disown the bells
of the waves.

a liquid sessioneer, he bawled:
give me some mammaries!
where is your stepladder?
where is your screwdriver?

his gigs were interactive.

he mined your line
for age and rust
and made you wobble and
sink in the dust.

his nuggests, frameable.

************************

centralize my prayers
certify my wankings

fumigate cultivate
the gardens of my body

my interrogational
abysses and crossings

my attempts to come ashore
upon your summering affection

leaven with delight
my fisherfolk my naturalists

the vagaries of faith
on the edge of days

absolve needy eyes
from fractal entrapments.

************************************

are we only to have
flowers and fruits
talk to us
at table,
hug us
with stalks,
chasten us
with
seeds where snowflakes
veil our blemishes?

water splashes through itself
and into its own door.
we dive into it
and emerge on the other side
of a glistening tabernacle
a unio mystica?

we fall into ourselves.
we fall like rainsnakes and rain,
droplets on bellies and
details of sailing.
without our knowing,
we are water's burden.
fugitivies from
the hotchpotch of highrise blocks.

**********************************

you danced slaveships into you.
rejoiced at bloated bodies.
chained hands and feet
flattered your waves.
you betrayed your algae
your conches your anemones.

i'm a victim of your speech
yet i like to hear you speak.
perishable is sleep perishable is sleep
yet i like to fall asleep beside you.




eel on reef is published by Black Goat. The cover painting is by Chika Okeke. Uche Nduka was born and raised in Nigeria. He is a poet, percussionist, essayist, and lecturer. He lives in New York.

Ships & the Maritime: George Oppen & Norma Cole

from George Oppen's Of Being Numerous

6
We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always.  Crusoe

We say was
'Rescued'.
So we have chosen.

7
Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.


from Norma Cole's Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008

Conditions Maritime


THE TEXT IS SHAPED AFTER
the letter of the ocean

THIS SHAPE ONCE REFLECTED
becomes its own narration

The fragmentary teeth become the
allegory of completion

There she stood, dressed like a sailor
in black pants, striped jersey, pea jacket

Wearing amber for luck
and company

"into eventual accuracy" (Michael Ondaatje)

Inverted lives
it was said refer to the ocean

There she stood, etc.

Thus the false map is scrawled
by sleep as if history assembled
these names

This time and its history a calculus of stars, the limit of
the formal plain, its proportions

the sign for division

outside its context

its issues' decision

(soon we would begin to lose
the feeling in our fingertips)

that it was science; that it was so

appealing; that rules are the instrument


Here we are talking about the playful
handling of an object
the negotiation with an imagined acceptable

That the poem is a toy
with the structure of insomnia

That gardens being lit thus saved
just to know and not have
in local practice
given up that control
"in your dreams"

That time, that spiral marrow
(the space between shoulder blades)
that hyphen without reason
lashed to death by virtue=reason=virtue
(the reason between knowledge and fact)

I   wash my feet
before going to bed
contrafact:one complete thought

(note: line breaks approximated as best as possible given limited spacing options in html.)

More Ships: Moriarty and Mackey

"'Where there is paper,' Marty thinks hungrily, 'there is human passion and trouble.'"--from Ultravioleta.

Two poets who, like Bob Gluck, also write in prose. Moriarty and Mackey's prose is porous, permeable and yet viscous. Each sentence sounding the depths. Deeply pleasurable.

Who rides on ships anymore? Boats and ships are, simultaneously, common and ubiquitous, and yet completely strange.

Laura Moriarty





from "Maps and Plans" in Laura Moriarty's Ultravioleta

"Looking out from his workshop on Luna, Marty closes his eyes and pictures Ultravioleta fully formed. Marty approaches the great ships as both builder and sailor. He records his commentary as he works. Occasionally he stops fashioning thick sheets of paper into the massive craft and puts words on them.

'The paper ship dominates our age,' he notes. 'It is the nature of the ship to float and tear and turn like a page. A certain formality obtains on these vessels. Once elaborated, they are able to anticipate the dangers of the enhanced relaxation required in thought travel. The vicissitudes of associative movement through imagined space are survivable only as a result of the collaboration of beings who doubt each other's existence while depending on each other for their livelihoods. Group travel by this kind of consensus is so dangerous as to be considered impossible by some and by others not to be happening even while it is occurring.

'Brain cell meets paper airplane,' Marty mutters to himself. 'Ultravioleta,' he whispers in I as he applies himself to the mainmast. Marty's particular refinement is to include personal correspondence in the mix. The added distance available from such an innovation is as great as the corollary danger of foundering by sheer excess of emotional content.

'Where there is paper,' Marty thinks hungrily, 'there is human passion and trouble. There is thinking and travel. There is time.' Tiny thoughtful ships inundate Marty's revery but when he works he has only one ship in mind.

'Ultravioleta. Boat of being, Titanic of time,' he hums. 'Bigger and better. Thick with letters. Note of seeing. You are alive,' he sings, 'and you are mine' (83-84).

Nathaniel Mackey



Mackey has written four epistolary prose books–Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus’ Run (1993), Atet A.D. (2001), Bass Cathedral (2008)–that are all part of the ongoing series From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.

The quote below is from Atet A.D. In this book, the members of N's jazz band have recently added a new drummer to the group, a woman. Now they are in search of a new name for the band.

"Aunt Nancy's idea was that we call ourselves the Maatet, or, simply Maatet, a name the Egyptians gave one of the boats in which the sun sails across the sky, the one it boards at dawn, the morning boat (the other being the one in which it completes its journey, Sektet, the evening boat) Maatet joins Atet, a more common name for the morning boat, with Maat, the name of the goddess of truth: Maat + Atet=Maatet. Aunt Nancy said she likes the suggestion of maternity, matriarchy, in the very sound of it, as well as what she calls its feminization of SunStick’s claim, ‘I play truth.’ (It was at SunStick's aborted audition, remember, that we made the decision to seek a woman drummer.) She'd gotten intimations of the name, she said, a few weeks back, when we played the clamp-lilac-eelpot rendition of "Sun Ship." The glass-bottom disposition it opened up seems to've been an avatar of see-thru truth, a truth whose translucent body she rode, not yet consciously equating its light touch with Maat's ostrich feather. 'Ever since then,' she said, 'I've had a feeling of namesake encasement, see-thru cartouche, a swift, boat-bodied lightness, light-bodied bigness we'd grow into. It's a name we'll have to fill in, occupy, but I don't have any doubts we can'(43).

Ultimately, the band ends up with the name Molimo m’Atet.

Mackey's poetry is full of ships too. Sadly, the limited possibilities of html formatting here on blogger make an accurate representation of Mackey's linebreaks impossible. So, I'll prod you to go take a look yourself. Here's a brief section of "Eye on the Scarecrow" from Splay Anthem: "Low ride among ruins/ notwithstanding we flew./ Swam, it often seemed,/underwater, oddly immersed/bodies/ long since bid goodbye,/ we/ lay in wait, remote muses/kept us afloat. Something/called pursuit had us by/the nose. Wafted ether/blown/low, tilted floor, splintered/ feet. Throated bone.../ Rickety boat we rode.../ As/ though what we wanted/ was to be everywhere at/ once,/ an altered life lived on an/ ideal/ coast we'd lay washed up/ on, instancy and elsewhere/ endlessly/ entwined" (27-28).

More Ships and Poetry: Bob Glück

Bob Glück has a catalog of ships in his book Elements of a Coffee Service, published by the Four Seasons Foundation in 1982. The catalog appears in the short story "When Bruce was 36 (Gossip and Scandal)."

Like the folded pieces of paper that, once in water, turn into blossoms, this delicious story turns and blooms as if by magic. It begins with the line,

"When Bruce was 36 he learned the name and address of his real mother and introduced himself to her."

The narrator goes on to tell us that "I purposely forgot to ask Bruce about his new relationship; it was too big and knotty to broach, the characters wandering through their bodies and their congested structures of need and option. Usually when Bruce and I are together we seem to be on the edge of our lives looking in, prodding and enticing from realization to realization. This is true even, or especially, of gossip, to measure our common assumptions. As Rabbi ben Ezra used to say, 'Why bother to tell a story if you aren't going to include the meaning of your life?'"

The story goes on to recount one of the narrator's dreams about Bruce's encounter with his mother:

"In the first a woman rushes through woods on a fresh, moony night with her baby wrapped in bunting against a light breeze. A resonant voice from above, a phrase murmured, repeated by the mother: flesh of my flesh, flesh of my flesh, flesh of my flesh. Something is wrong though; she opens the blanket, looks up at us and shouts, "this isn't the flesh of my flesh. It's a giant pine cone. This is completely inaccurate!"

"I wanted to approach these issues with laughter while I dreamed them into metaphor, a satisfying if temporary solution. I wrote the dream in my journal, another temporary solution: documentation with the understanding that the world in the form of myself will discover and appreciate these fragments tossed up by myself as a ruined civilization...."

And then, a bit later, ships:

"From century to century things grow more estranged, said Walter Benjamin on hashish in Marseilles. He's wandering around a murky harbor like Port of Shadows and naturally the names of the ships convey great meaning, fraught as they are with departure."

Nine pages later we return to the ships......

"It's scandal's defining of boundaries that interests me, what is inside and what is outside--it's one way a community organizes itself, tells itself its story about what is forbidden and expected. Bruce's mother's possible shock [earlier in the story Bruce asks her if she is a lesbian] may have been based on a community tenet that homosexuality does not exist verbally. For example, I know a gay man who was raised--maybe not as a grand bourgeois, but many economic notches above me. His sense of himself is based on that class background; there are certain inbuilt sympathies, certain antagonisms. A person could not terrorize this man with high theory, he only grows more respectful, but he is susceptible to vulgarity. So when he says he's going to the ballet or some other elevated cultural event and would you like to join him, you reply that another time you would be delighted but now you are on your way to the baths 'to get your rocks off'--cruelly enjoying his expressions of dismay alternating with a polite interest that grows increasingly transparent, and you blandly continue with, 'It's been a full week and I'm really hot and horny.' What a betrayal! And what if you willed into the decaying conversation such formulas as 'well hung,' and 'seafood' for sailors, and other idioms from the no-nonsense dictionary of pleasure: top man, versatile action, Greek passive, French active, nipple master, cut/uncut, golden showers, French service, scat toys--they are more beautiful to me than the names of ships."


Stay-tuned for more ships and hunt down your own used copy of Elements of a Coffee Service.

Ships--Glissant

The last post, in the section on Jocelyn Saidenberg's reading, left you with a reference to ships. There are so many ships I wish to follow. I'll start here with excerpts from the evocative prose of "The Open Boat" in Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing:



For the Africans who lived through the experience of deportation to the Americas, confronting the unknown with neither preparation nor challenge was no doubt petrifying.

The first dark shadow was cast by being wrenched from their everyday, familiar land, away from protecting gods and a tutelary community. But that is nothing yet. Exile can be borne, even when it comes as a bolt from the blue. The second dark of night fell as tortures and the deterioration of two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, if you can, the swirling red of mounting to the deck, the ramp they climbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, this dizzying sky plastered to the waves. Over the course of more than two centuries, twenty, thirty million people deported. Worn down, in a debasement more eternal than apocalypse. But that is nothing yet.

...

The next abyss was the depths of the sea. Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains. These underwater signposts mark the course between the Gold Coast and the Leeward Islands. Navigating the green splendor of the sea--whether in melancholic transatlantic crossings or glorious regattas or traditional races of yoles and gommiers--still brings to mind, coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these deeps, with their punctuation of scarcely corroded balls and chains. In actual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green.

....

For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea's abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange.

....

This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another--from forest to city, from story to computer--at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.


Glissant's book begins with the following two quotes: "Sea is History" from Derek Walcott and "The unity is sub-marine" from Edward Kamau Brathwaite.