I thought I would talk today about “occasional poems,” poems written—or sung—for a particular occasion—like a praise song, the act of celebration; or an elegy, memorializing loss or mutability, the transience of all worldly things. And the framing of the occasion, occasion as a pretext or context for a poem. Usually a lyric poem, so a shorter poem, not an epic, expressing something like a state of mind.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) the poet, artist, natural scientist & politician, but we’re thinking of him as a poet at the moment, said that occasional poems are the highest kind of poetry and, “All my poems are occasional poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” (Goethe to Eckermann)

In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Wallace Stevens wrote, “The poem is the cry of its occasion.”

Let’s keep that in mind.

I also wanted to read from Dante, I always want to read from Dante, but also because his poem The Divine Comedy opens on Good Friday, two days ago. In the year 1300, that is. That is, Dante, who was born in the year 1265, in Florence, Italy, set the poem, which he had not called The Divine Comedy, just The Comedy, in the year 1300, his 35th year, because it’s the apex of the arc of three score and ten, the seventy years of human life given to us in the Bible. One doesn’t think of it as an occasional poem but why not?

It begins:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smarrita

No, I’m not going to teach Italian today. But here’s a translation of these three lines:

In the midway of this our mortal life,

I found me in a gloomy wood astray

Gone from the path direct….

La diritta via. This translation is by the Reverend Henry Francis Cary, one of the earliest English translators of The Divine Comedy. The first section of the poem, The Inferno, was published in 1805, the entirety in 1814 at Cary’s own expense. Cary titled the whole poem as The Vision. Esteemed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it went on to take its place among the great translations. And there have come into being more than 200 translations since then.

Writer and sound artist Caroline Bergvall has collated forty-seven translations of this, the opening stanza, from the British Library and made a spectacular sound piece called Via. Translators use different words for one word in a different tongue. For instance in Italian the word “via” means “street,” like Via Veneto, Veneto Street. But for “via,” translators use “path,” “road,” “way” and so on. Translators use different words and also make syntactical shifts. Different translators have their perspectives, their own felt mindsets, for rhythm, meaning, tone, gesture and so on, and act on them.

From Caroline Bergvall’s “Via” here are the first three minutes transcribed from SoundCloud:

The Divine Comedy – Pt. 1 Inferno – Canto I – (1–3)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smarrita

1. Along the journey of our life half way

I found myself again in a dark wood

wherein the straight road no longer lay

(Dale, 1996)

2. At the midpoint in the journey of our life

I found myself astray in a dark wood

For the straight path had vanished.

(Creagh and Hollander, 1989)

3. halfover the wayfaring of our life,

Since missed the right way, through a night-dark wood

Struggling, I found myself.

(Musgrave, 1893)

4. Half way along the road we have to go,

I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.

(Sisson, 1980)

5. Halfway along the journey of our life

I woke in wonder in a sunless wood

For I had wandered from the narrow way

(Zappulla, 1998)

6. halfwayon our life’s journey, in a wood,

From the right path

I found myself astray.

(Heaney, 1993)

7. Halfway through our trek in life

I found myself in this dark wood,

miles away from the right road.

(Ellis, 1994)

8. Half-way upon the journey of our life,

I found myself within a gloomy wood,

By reason that the path direct was lost.

(Pollock, 1854)

9. half-wayupon the journey of our life

I roused to find myself within a forest

In darkness, for the straight way had been lost.

(Johnson, 1915)

10. In middle of the journey of our days

I found that I was in a darksome wood

the right road lost and vanished in the maze

(Sibbald, 1884)

11. In midway of the journey of our life

I found myself within a darkling wood,

Because the rightful pathway had been lost.

(Rossetti, 1865)

12. In our life’s journey at its midway stage

I found myself within a wood obscure

Where the right path which guided me was lost

(Johnston, 1867)

13. In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself

In a dark forest

The straightforward way

Misplaced.

(Schwerner, 2000)

14. In the middle of the journey of our life I came to

myself in a dark wood,

for the straight road was lost

(Durling, 1996)

Bergvall writes, at the close of her voiced piece, “The minutia of writing, of copying out, of shadowing the translators’ voicing of the medieval text, favoured an eery intimacy as much as a welcome distance. My task was mostly and rather simply, or so it seemed at first, to copy each first tercet as it appeared in each published version of the Inferno. To copy it accurately. Surprisingly, more than once, I had to go back to the books to double-check and amend an entry, a publication date, a spelling. Checking each line, each variation, once, twice. Increasingly, the project was about keeping count and making sure. That what I was copying was what was there. Not to inadvertently change what had been printed. To reproduce each translative gesture. To add my voice to this chorus, to this recitation, only by way of this task. Making copy explicitly as an act of copy. Understanding translation in its erratic seriality.”

Writers and translators choose certain words among others that would do just as well. Even if, even when you don’t exactly know the event, what the event is, you’re choosing words and writing them down in a certain order. Then you go back and sometimes change them around because writing is an act, an action that has meaning. Deep meaning. And sometimes you don’t even know what the meaning is until much later.

And speaking of words and meaning, I think about Denise Riley—you might know Denise Riley’s work, some of you—she is an extraordinary poet and philosopher from England. New York Review of Books recently published in one volume two of her books that had been published before now, a book of poetry, Say Something Back, and one a philosophical memoir, Time Lived Without Its Flow. These two stunning books were written on the occasion of her son’s death. Steve Dickison had the good sense to invite her to read at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in March. Maybe some of you watched? On Zoom. Because COVID. Otherwise, it couldn’t have happened. The Poetry Center doesn’t have that kind of funding, to bring people over from England for a reading. Denise Riley and Jennifer Soong’s reading for the Poetry Center on Saturday March 20th, 2021, is now up on YouTube.

On a Poetry Society podcast from June 2019, Riley is talking about writing poetry and focusing on “giving the poem its own lead” even if you’re using an “arbitrary scheme,” “some indifferent scheme.” She is talking about her own work, but I felt it could have been mine. Or perhaps yours? She goes on to say that like a jigsaw puzzle you have “edge pieces” and then “the middle starts filling itself in with words that slowly somehow have come round to boxing your own preoccupations where they’re not meant to be” with your “hopes, intentions, compulsions.”

I’ll read one of her poems, a short lyric written on the occasion of the death of her son. Again, the book is called Say Something Back. The poem I’m going to read is “Under the answering sky.”

Under the answering sky

I can manage being alone,

can pace out convivial hope

across my managing ground.

Someone might call, later.

What do the dead make of us

that we’d flay ourselves trying

to hear them though they may

sigh at such close loneliness.

I would catch, not my echo,

but their guarantee that this

bright flat blue is a mouth

of the world speaking back.

There is no depth to that blue.

It won’t ‘bring the principle

Of darkness with it,’ but hums

In repose, as radiant static.

There is an epigraph in Denise Riley’s book by W. S. Graham, from “Implements in their Places.”

Do not think you have to say

Anything back. But you do

Say something back which I

Hear by the way I speak to you.

This saying and the answering back reminded me of my poem “Ongoing,” written on the occasion of the death of a dear friend. It’s in my book, Fate News, from Omnidawn, dedicated to that family friend. When someone dies or goes away, the conversation you are having with that person does not stop. Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for death” comes back around, inside out. My poem “Ongoing” began with the “edge piece,” one word, tumulus, in the last stanza, and worked its way forward, that is, backward. But I’m going to read it from the beginning.


[Read “Ongoing”]


The other morning, I came across this sentence from the poet Kevin Young: “A poem is the most efficient form of time travel.”