Poeta Doctus

Like many these days, I’ve been passing the time enjoying various televisual entertainments, most notably very carefully rationing out my viewing of Paolo Sorrentino‘s The Young Pope and The New Pope. Among these series’ many pleasures is the soundtrack, which introduced me to the British cellist and composer Peter Gregson.

Gregson, along with Max Richter, have both written what they term “recompositions”, Gregson recomposing Bach’s cello suites and Richter Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Gregson’s and Richter’s reworkings are not without precedent:  it’s an old compositional trick to take a phrase or theme from another composer’s music as an element for a new work of one’s own. These recompositions are, however, admittedly more radical and thorough reworkings of the original material.

In my own way, I’ve been writing recompositions for a long while. One form, inspired by Pound’s found dictum that “dichten = condesare” (roughly, to write poetry is to condense), I termed “condensations”. The simplest compositional procedure, a manner of erasure avant le lettre, was to reduce a given text according to a rule.

The example I share below compresses H.D.’s book Sea Garden into a single poem, rendering each of the volume’s poems as a couplet made of the poem’s first and last line. I retained H.D.’s original capitalization and punctuation as a tacit way of  indicating my recomposition was in a no way a unified, straight-ahead lyric poem. The results of this poetic compositional procedure strike me now as being very aesthetically similar to Gregson’s and Richter’s musical recompositions, which is why I share the poem “Sea Garden” from Ladonian Magnitudes, below.

 

 

Sea Garden

after H.D.

 

Rose, harsh rose,

hardened in a leaf?

 

Are your rocks shelter for ships—

from the splendour of your ragged coast.

 

The light beats upon me.

among the crevices of the rocks.

 

What do I care

in the larch-cones and the underbrush.

 

Your stature is modelled

for their breadth.

 

Reed,

To cover you with froth.

 

Whiter

Discords.

 

Instead of pearls—a wrought clasp—

no bracelet—accept this.

 

The light passes

and leaf-shadow are lost.

 

I have had enough.

Wind-tortured place.

 

Amber husk

as your bright leaf?

 

The sea called—

The gods wanted you back.

 

Come, blunt your spear with us,

And drop exhausted at our feet.

 

You are clear

of your path.

 

The white violet

frost, a star edges with its fire.

 

Great, bright portal,

still further on another cliff.

 

I saw the first pear

I bring you as an offering.

 

They say there is no hope—

and cherish and shelter us.

 

Bear me to Dictaeus

and frail-headed poppies.

 

The night has cut

to perish on the branch.

 

It is strange that I should want

as the horsemen passed.

 

You crash over the trees,

a green stone.

 

Weed, moss-weed,

stained among the salt weeds.

 

The hard sand breaks,

Shore-grass.

 

Silver dust

in their purple hearts.

 

Can we believe—by an effort

their beauty, your life.