#4. Entrance to the Rodeo where we begin to permutate
#4. Entrance to the Rodeo where we begin to permutate
Featuring William Wordsworth reading Dorothy Wordsworth's journal entries as read by Garth Graeper in conversation at some point with Dorothy Wordsworth, Aase Berg, and Johannes Goransson
Everyone is welcome at the Rodeo!
Good Friday morning, everyone! This week our editors found themselves alive and interconnected across various bodies of waters and flowers. The weekly link rodeo is concluded with a writing prompt. It is our hope that whether you are a fiction writer, poet, or multi-disciplinary artist that you can take the links and use them as inspiration.
⍀ Weekly Link Rodeo
We’re all here for a brief moment and like the paintings of Akiko Nakayama we change into something new. We undergo a constant evolution from one form to another, most times imperceptible to ourselves, yet to the viewers the changes come rather drastically. Akiko Nakayama’s Alive Paintings are a cross between installation work and poetic performance. Poems like Nakayama’s paintings are alive, and later except for William Wordsworth’s “I Wander’d Lonely as a Cloud” we’ll see the solitary, enlightened figure recling on a couch disturbed by a historical account.
Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William visited the Lake District many times in 1802. It is here in a journal dated April 15, 1802 that Dorothy Wordsworth observes the daffodils that later danced in her brother’s poem “I Wander’d Lonely as a Cloud”:
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.The speaker observes the daffodils’ dance spurred on by the windy day. The same windy day that Dorothy Wordsworth accounts in their walk home from Eusemere. It is on this walk after dinner that Dorothy Wordsworth observes the same simplicity and unity that the speaker remarks upon in the poem’s closing stanza:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.The idea of the lone, solitary figure of British Romanticism. The hero reflecting on his couch. A speaker that finds happiness in solitude while they watch the dancing daffodils. With that in mind, Dorothy Wordsworth destabilizes this solitary figure with her historical account:
We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again.
Leaving it at that, I do not like William Wordsworth. Never have. In high school, I had a brief moment with British Romanticism, where I learned about poetry by copying poems into notebooks. William Wordsworth always seemed uptight. John Keats was the only one of that bunch that I actually enjoyed.
Although this semester, I taught a survey of British Literature, and in the class when we covered Wordsworth, for a brief moment, I was able to appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry.
Maybe John Keats’ dissolution is similar to Dorothy Wordsworth’s dissolution of the William Wordsworth solitary figure ideal, whereas with Keats, many of his poems were spent with the speaker dissolving themself into various cosmographies.
For more on being absorbed into the darkness and losing our own body to the darkness read some poems by Garth Graeper here.
The poems are featured in Graeper’s collection The Sky Broke More (May 2023). evelyn bauer reviews that Graeper’s work turns ecopoetics into horror that the speaker ultimately is confronted with something they truly don’t understand. Here is the review at Heavy Feather Review that initiated my reading of Garth Graeper’s work that led me to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and a book titled The Calamity Form by Anahid Nersessian, which was recommend to me by Carl Watts.
In the second part of Graeper’s book, the speaker dialogues with Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. Here’s a messy segue - a poem by Aase Berg.
Published at Double Room in Spring/Summer 2004.
Even messier segue dredged from an interview from the Rumpus with Aase Berg, Johannes Goransson1, Garth Graeper and others discussing translation, Tarkovsky, and other topics:
Language is slippery. Often times translators are stuck with the multitude of possibilities inherent in a poem. The limitless possibilities opens up avenues for fun, enriching worlds on the page that hopefully spill over into the reader’s daily experience.
Bomb Magazine’s series of mistranslations follows a poem through a permutative process, guided by the personal and place entering the poem, only to culmiate with the poem’s mistranslation abstracted away of self and place.
Paul Cunningham and Katrine Øgaard Jensen work through a call-response translation process. Each translation the poem goes through a different iteration, each step governed by a rule. For example, Rule 1: Place the poem in the person concerned and repeat the situation. A poem is a set of rules in dialogue with its community.
Circling back to Nakayama’s Alive Paintings, hopefully this elucidates the idea that a poem is not as a static text, yet a living, breathing object that enters into the world.2 The idea that Graeper’s work in some regards utilizes Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal to confront the dynamic and shifting environment, especially one fraught with climate change/global warming. Yet that all these things come together to expose the staunchness of the enlightened, solitary figure.
×/⍳ Writing Prompt
Find a William Wordsworth poem.
Append “a boring walk” to the poem’s title.
As translator of the William Wordsworth poem, place yourself in the poem.
Give the translation to the loved one. Place the poem in their pocket.
Carry the poem in the pocket for a week.
Make the poem into a boat and set it asail upon a lake.
Find a leaf washed ashore and from the perspective of your least favorite literary character, write on the leaf the original poem from memory.
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Leave a comment to contribute to the discussion. What are your thoughts about William Wordsworth, translation, or ecopoetics?
May you be forever on your way.
The title to EarShrub’s rodeo series is cribbed from Goransson’s book Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
In my craft, I try to adhere to the rule: avoid meditative writing and to avoid the epiphanic moment that sometimes follows. For example the moment found in James Joyce’s short story “Araby”.