#Martyn Crucefix

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

“Before He Creates us, God speaks to each of us just once.

Then, into the night, he goes with us in silence.

Yet these words, at the start,

His cloudy words are:

Rilke- before he creates us (from the book of monastic life)

[martyncrucefix]

Reading Rilke's poems - 6pm this Saturday in Bristol

I will be giving a reading from this year’s Pushkin Press publication, Change Your Life: Essential Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. The reading is being organised, and taking place at Heron Books in Bristol as follows: Heron Books Unit 5, The Clifton ArcadeBristol, BS8 4AA United Kingdom + Google Map Join us for Poetry In Herons with Martyn Crucefix Join us in the Arcade after hours for our…

[limejuicer1862]

wonderful blog post by Martyn Crucefix

This Thing Called Bhakti: Vacanas and Ted Hughes

[billherbert23]

The Gairfish Years (1/3)

Here, in a rudimentary attempt at cataloguing, are the front and, where informationative, back covers of Gairfish, the late 80s/early 90s Scottish literary magazine I edited with Richard Price.

I’ll present these over three posts, this first one covering the initial two issues, slim Oxford-based publications more or less reflecting my research into MacDiarmid and scant Scottish contacts, plus writers from that milieu (the same folk were publishing New Poetry from Oxford around that time).

Then there’s the first issue with Richard, whom I was introduced to by Robert Crawford, and who essentially reinvented it as a proper mag.

[kitchen-light]

Und alles schwieg. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor. And all things hushed. Yet even under cover came a new start, a sign, a transforming.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnet 1, of Part One, to “Sonnets to Orpheus”, translated by Martyn Crucefix, Enitharmon Press, 2012

[antigonick]

hello! hope the new year is treating you well (so far!) i decided i wanted to read more in translation this year, especially poetry, and i was wondering if u had recommendations for works translated into english (or french) from living or 20th century poets. it’s not a strict preference i just really want to expand my horizons ! anyways i love your blog it’s a much appreciated resource ❤️

Hi! Aw, that’s such a lovely idea. Honestly I mostly read English-writing authors (you must have noticed...) but I do have a few things to recommend.

• Rainer Maria Rilke’s works, most notably Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies trans. by Martyn Crucefix, but also The Book of Hours trans. by Babette Deutsch.

• Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. by Jane Kenyon, though I also like Stanley Kunitz’s take, and Marina Tsvetaeva’s Selected Poems, trans. by Elaine Feinstein.

• Odysseus Elytis’ What I Love, trans. by Olga Broumas, and my favourite The Sovereign Sun, trans. by Kimon Friar, who also translated Sodom and Gomorrah by Nikos Kazantzakis. Also, C. P. Cavafy’s The Complete Poems, trans. by David Mendelsohn or Poèmes, trans. by Marguerite Yourcenar (what??) and Constantin Dimaras.

• Federica Garcia Lorca’s A Season in Granada, trans. by Christophe Maurer, and Octavio Paz’s Collected Poems, trans. by Eliot Weinberger, others (including Denise Levertov and Elizabeth Bishop) and Octavio Paz himself. Also, Kelly Martínez-Grandal’s Zugunruhe, trans. by Margaret Randall, and of course Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems, trans. by several translators (among others, W. S. Merwin and John Updike.)

• Speaking of W. S. Merwin, he translated a lot of poems, spanning centuries and languages, and he’s a beautiful translator; I’d recommend his Selected Translations. 

• Edith Södergran’s We Women, trans. by Samuel Charters, and Matilda Olkinaitė’s Matilda, trans. by Laima Vince. 

• Adonis’ Selected Poems (trans. by Khaled Mattawa) and Saadi Youssef’s Without An Alphabet, Without a Face (by Khaled Mattawa too). 

• I’m also thinking of Women of the Fertile Crescent: An anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women. You can find a lot of beautiful excerpts on @soracities blog.

• I know it’s not 20th century, but I have a soft spot for modern translations (some more interventionist than others) of classic poetry. My very favourites include Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (obviously), Mary Barnard’s Fragments of Sappho, Renée Vivien’s Sapho, Marguerite Yourcenar’s La Couronne et La Lyre, Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Japanese (some of them you can find in this one—though be careful! Sometimes Rexroth claims he’s translating for shits and giggles when he’s really the writer, like in The Love Poems of Marichiko), A. K. Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape: Classic Tamil Love Poems and the gorgeous Andal’s Autobiography of A Goddess, trans. by Priya Sarrukai Chabria and Ravi Shankar. 

• In the same vein, though they’re plays rather than poems, I’d recommend Oliver Py’s very cheeky take on Shakespeare’s Roméo et Juliette, and Anne Carson’s Bakkhai (Euripides) and An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophokles, Euripides). 

Aaaaand... that’s that! Sorry, this is severely lacking in contemporary poetry, but I hope this helps—oh and happy new year to you too ♡

[anthonymhowellblog]

POETRY AT THE ROOM

POETRY AT THE ROOM

Saturday 3 March at 7.30 pm – 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale N17 9AS

£5 entry, then donation for refreshments.  8801 8577

Your host Anthony Howell invites you to Celebrate the Sequence and the Longer Poem

With Jacqueline Saphra, Martyn Crucefix, Graham Buchan/Nandita Ghose

Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra’s If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women was published by The Emma Press.…

[gegensmith]

The First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks of the angels?  Even if one of them clasped me suddenly to his heart, I’d wither in the face of his more fierce existence.  For their beauty is really nothing but the first stirrings of a terror we are just able to endure and are astonished at the way it elects, with such careless disdain, to let us go on living.  Every angel is terrifying.

So I hold back – I swallow back the bird-call of black grief that would burst from me. Ah, who is it we can turn to for help?  Not angels. Not other people.  Even the knowing creatures already dumbly see we do not feel at home in our interpretations of the world, though there is, perhaps, a specific tree on a hillside we settle on over and over.  Or yesterday’s stroll remains, through the usual streets – the comforting loyalty of a habit that took a liking to us, that moved in and now will not leave us alone.

Oh, but the night.  Night with a wind that comes as if filled with infinity and gnaws at our faces. This is what awaits every one of us – that looked-for, tender disenchantment of the night – so hard for hearts alone to bear.  Though is it any easier for lovers?  They make use of each other to hide what they know what must otherwise come.

Don’t you see this yet?  Fling this emptiness out of your arms, back into the spaces into which we breathe and suddenly the birds will feel the more expansive air, will sense it, perhaps, with a more fervent flying. Yes – the springtimes needed you.  There were stars waiting to be seen by you.  A wave rolled to your feet in the past, or as you strode beneath half-shuttered windows, the bowed violin leant itself to you.  All this was your mission. But were you up to it?  Weren’t you more often distracted by anticipation, as if everything about you was there only to herald a beloved? (Oh but where would you keep her – what with strange thoughts looming in and out of your head from dawn to dark, so often staying in the night?) Rather, if desire tempts you, sing of the lovers those famous ones, though even their love’s not immortal enough, those –  you almost envy them this – forsaken, abandoned and unrequited, who have so much more loving in them than those who are satisfied.  Like them, begin and begin again the eternal task of praising! Remember this: the hero lives for ever. His death is no more than a pretext for being, for his latest birth – whereas lovers are withdrawn, sapped and spent, back into Nature, as if it had no strength left to create their like again. Have you imagined the love of Gaspara Stampa? Recalled it so intensely that any girl – deserted by her lover – might emulate her fine example and might say to herself: let me be like her! Because isn’t it time this oldest of heartaches finally bore us some fruit?  Isn’t it time, though still loving, we learned to wrench ourselves free of the beloved and, though trembling, endure as the arrow endures the tensed bowstring, becomes something more than itself in the leap of release? For our point of rest is nowhere.

Voices. Voices.  My heart, listen, listen as only the saints have done before you till a gigantic calling lifted them bodily from the ground and they rose, impossibly, still kneeling, still unaware, so intently they listened. Not that you could hear God’s voice – far from it. So then listen to the wind’s, its ceaseless message rising out of silence, bringing whispers of all who died young.  Didn’t their fate come to you to speak quietly when you stepped into churches in Rome or Naples?  Or didn’t some sublime epitaph impose on you?  Remember, so recently, that day – the plaque in Santa Monica Formosa? What they ask of me is gently to shake off the sense of injustice that still troubles their deaths and sometimes hinders them a little, holds them back in the onward process of their soul.

It’s true enough, of course, no longer to live on earth is strange, to abandon customs barely mastered yet, not to interpret roses and other auspicious things, not give them meaning in a human future.  No longer to be as we have always been, in those endlessly anxious hands – to leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy.  Strange, no longer to know desires desired – strange to witness the involvement of all things lost suddenly, each drifting away singly into space. And truly, to be dead is hard, so full of making up lost ground, till little by little we find a trace of eternity.  Yet, the living are wrong to draw such distinctions so clearly: angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead, since through both these realms, and forever, eternity’s flood tumbles all the ages and in both their cries are drowned out by its roar.

In the end, the young-dead do not need us: they are weaned off the earth mildly as a child will outgrow the mother’s breast.  But we, who long for such great mysteries, we, for whom sorrow is often the path on which we progress – can we exist without them?  Is the old myth really nonsense?  The one about the mourning of Linus, how music first broke on the barren wilderness; how, in the startled space left gaping by the loss of a boy like a god, emptiness rang as never before with what holds us rapt, comforts now and can help.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (1923) Translated by Martyn Crucefix (courtesy of the Enitharmon Press – http://www.enitharmon.co.uk)

[thisisyournarratorspeaking]

reading notes: feb. 2021

fin:

Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

in progress:

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard

Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile (perpetually lol) (trans. Nancy L. Canepa)

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in WWII by Svetlana Alexievich

Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Martyn Crucefix)

other media:

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix)

Pretend It’s a City w/ Fran Leibowitz (Netflix)

“Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story” by Abigail Thorn (Philosophy Tube)

notes:

slow month this time around, whoops

Children of God by Mary Doria Russell - the letter to the pope at the beginning is a tool to catch readers up on what happened in the last book. somewhat of a slow start overall

I had my doubts at first but eventually ended up grateful that I’d read the first book so close to reading the second, particularly because a pivotal moment rolled around when a member of the species Emilio fears unknowingly parrots back the exact same words, the same motive, that sparked his own launch into God’s space and it killed me oh my gosh

all over again this month I’m struck by the way the Queen’s Thief series and the Sparrow books occupy parallel tracks in my mind. both manipulate communication and miscommunication - between characters, between you and the narrator - to move the plot forward. and I keep trying to think about how this is done in each. the closest I can get (and it’s not very close) is that Queen’s Thief feels like a dance whereas the Sparrow books are heavily rooted in culture clashes. both gripping! enjoyable! but in such different ways.

(things I want to keep thinking about: is ‘too late’ ever truly too late? what do we do with damage? looking at Children of God alongside the story of Abraham and Isaac (re: Fear and Trembling), particularly between the two Isaacs and their parents.)

Didion: she moves her hands in gestures like Fran Leibowitz does in Pretend it’s a City and I wonder if that’s a habit they both picked up from New York life, or if it’s a mannerism that belongs to their generation.

(I love Fran’s rapid-fire speech, and how she pauses a little after each thing she says to see if it lands - she’s a critic, yes, but she’s also deeply invested, cares deeply about how what she says is received when around those she likes. I’m assuming anyway)

Didion talks about meeting John Gregory Dunne, falling in love with his family, and about how ‘falling in love’ itself is not part of her world - “I liked having somebody there...all I knew was I wanted this to continue.” (and her nephew, telling her a story, talking to her as they both look ahead rather than at each other, and she smiles and laughs and is happy to hear it. and he’s happy to tell it to her in a way she’s comfortable hearing, not headlong but with her regardless)

“They were each other’s most trusted reader.” 😭 and then later: “It was not a good time. Actually, it was a wonderful book, it turned out.” -> you see a bit of a disconnect of someone so used to observing, bent on life feeding art and not the other way around. there was a bit in here where she talked of this traumatic sight she and other reporters witnessed and she was like “it was a great story, it was golden” and. huh. that’s a place to be grateful not to be in. 

Abigail’s sound-effect captions are a work of art to be treasured 

[martyncrucefix]

Ian Brinton reviews 'Between a Drowning Man'

Here is Ian Brinton‘s recent review of my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man. It was first published by Litter Magazine in January 2024. The invitation at the opening of these two remarkable sequences of poems by Martyn Crucefix emphasises both ‘difference’ and ‘ambiguity’, an ‘othering’ which hones attention rather than dulling it. Divided into two sections, Works and Days (forty-nine…

[limejuicer1862]

Chen Xianfa: Five Poems Translated by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang

[billherbert23]

Following recent posts here of things which should have already been posted, here’s a link to Martyn Crucefix’s excellent blog where he posted this kind note on The Kindly Interrogator back in November. - TKI being the volume of translations from the Persian on which I worked with the poet Alireza Abiz, initially as part of his PhD thesis, and latterly because we had the strong sense we could produce a good (in the sense of internally coherent selection) from a couple of volumes of his work.

In the course of his judicious assessment of the book, Martyn had a couple of textual queries about the intro I should answered more promptly and publicly - to the extent that this site is public.

Firstly the unascribed intro was co-written by Alireza and myself: he contributed the succinct history of modern Persian poetry, while I attempted a description of the unique flavour of his work. To give a flavour of that attempt, here’s a paragraph: ‘His work has what feels to an English language reader like a unique but not entirely unfamiliar texture which you could classify as a dialled-down or even buttoned-up surrealism. Extraordinary, terrible things appear to be happening - his speakers move between life and death, and between victim and torturer or even murderer - but no-one, least of all the poet, seems to draw attention to the fact. The impact of his work depends on this extreme tension between the calm of its surface and the unfathomable uncertainty revealed to occupy its depths.’

This division of labours should have been seamless and unambiguous, except I failed to knock out a couple of quote marks around the following paragraph: 

'The book is illuminated by the, properly, tragic insight that, in a world constructed along lines of absolute right and wrong, while it can become tragically clear at any moment who is the perpetrator of oppression, the corrupting influence of dogmas is so insidious that no-one remains entirely innocent, or, if carried along by the paranoias of ideological purity, should be considered completely guilty. It is an insight of immediate relevance to the polarising factions of liberal democracy, which presume themselves capable of right and even righteous thinking, but who are therefore lulled by the seemingly permanence of their governing structures into imagining themselves immune from precisely this temptation toward unequivocality. Our humanity, it implies, lies in our doubt, and, most especially, in our self-doubt.’

Oh well, hopefully it bears repetition here... A few instances of the key thing, the poetry, can be sampled in a PDF here.

[anthonywilson]

Guest blog post: David Ferry's 'Lake Water', by Martyn Crucefix

Guest blog post: David Ferry’s ‘Lake Water’, by Martyn Crucefix

This is the second in a series of guest blog posts about poets who have been overlooked and who should be better known.

———

In the French Alps above the Trois Vallées, the woven steel cables of chair lifts and cable cars hang still overnight as if dead and the cold air seals them in icy sheaths. Come morning, when the massive engines whir into action at either end of the lifts, the cables must…

[antigonick]

do you have any quotes on loneliness you particularly like?

Oh, boy... I do. Let’s see.

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This night is now half-gone; youth goes; I am

in bed alone

Sappho, trans. by Mary Barnard in Fragments

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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Nine Lives”

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My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.’

Anne Carson, in “The Anthropology of Water”, from Plainwater

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Heaven be praised for solitude that has removed the pressure of the eye, the solicitation of the body, and all need of lies and phrases.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread.

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

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And no one else remembers       Except the moon and I.

Roland Leighton, in “Clair de Lune”, quoted in Testament of Youth

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I have come home in love with loneliness.

L. M. Montgomery, in Anne of Avonlea

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and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling, I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too.

Anne Carson, from “Three”,  in The Glass Essay

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Thomas Alexander, Solitude

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—the way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.

Mary Oliver, from “We Should Be Well Prepared”, in Red Bird

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I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

Christina Rossetti, from “Who Shall Deliver Me?”, in Poems and Prose

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I know you want me to tell you that hunger and silence can lead you to God, so I will say it, but I awoke. As the nail is parted from the flesh, I awoke and I was alone.

Anne Carson, in “The Anthropology of Water”, from Plainwater

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Ce n’est pas par hasard que tu n’as jamais été aimée… Désirer échapper à la solitude est une lâcheté. / It is no coincidence that you have never been loved… Wanting to escape loneliness is cowardice.

Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce (Gravity and Grace)

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So. What are you seeking? The image you’ve each created of the other? The people you think you love don’t exist. Not really. And that’s a very lonely place to be.

Jonathan Sims, in The Magnus Archives [MAG 159]

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aber immer wieder weggedreht, wenn du meinst, sie endlich zu erfassen. / 

over and over always turning away just as you think you have grasped it at last.

Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of “Sonnet 23 (Part II)”, trans. by Martyn Crucefix in Sonnets to Orpheus

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Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and that they were alone with each other.

A. S. Byatt, Possession

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Child of our time— haven’t you found the right shell for your soul?

Before I die I shall

Edith Södergran, excerpt of “Hope”, trans. by Herbert Lomas in Contemporary Finnish Poetry

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When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones on Herakles’ back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own—

Anne Carson, excerpt of Autobiography of Red

[latefrequencies]

There exists a poet called Martyn Crucefix.

It's people like him who make you stop and think, "How is it that people can have such cool names?"

[martyncrucefix]

Two new prose poems at Black Nore Review

Many thanks to Ben Banyard for accepting these two recent experiments in prose poetry. Do check out other postings on Ben’s site at Black Nore Review. Click on Martyn Crucefix – two poems below to read the pieces. Ben’s details are as follows: Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, near Bristol. His three collections to date are Hi-Viz (Yaffle Press, 2021), We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018)…