Beauty and Form in the Work of Sidney Wade
Sidney Wade
© Marion Ettlinger SIDNEY WADE has published five collections of poems, the most recent of which is Stroke (Persea Books, 2008). Her next, Edge, is forthcoming from Persea in April 2013. Her poems and translations have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, Grand Street, and The Paris Review. She translates the poems of Melih Cevdet Anday and Yahya Kemal, among others, from the Turkish. She taught at Istanbul University as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in 1989-90. The poetry editor of the literary journal Subtropics, she has also served as President of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and Secretary/Treasurer for the American Literary Translators Association, ALTA. She has taught in the MFA@FLA Creative Writing Program at the University of Florida since 1993. |
Many of your poems seem very grounded in place, whether a natural landscape or the city of Istanbul. How would you say place affects you as a poet? Landscape has a profound influence on me, always has. And not just in terms of my writing — I respond physically and spiritually, as well as aesthetically, to the landscapes I inhabit. The speakers in your poems have very close connections to their landscape, be it a natural or urban setting, and, as humans, they seem to be placed on equal terms as the objects, particularly natural objects, rather than lording over them. A poem like “Locus Amoenus” in Empty Sleeves, for example, conveys a beauty that is both elegant and humble in its inclusiveness. Can you speak to your aesthetic in terms of the relation between human nature and nature? I have long objected to the Judeo-Christian assumption that humans were put on earth to dominate its other orders. I’m quite sure we were, instead, as so many indigenous cultures have recognized forever, offered the opportunity to cooperate with creatures and other living presences on whose good graces we depend for our sustenance, and, of course, our lives. Reading your translations of Turkish poems and your original poems set in Istanbul, I feel transported to a richly textured and ancient world. I imagine living in Istanbul had a strong affect on your aesthetic?
Living in Istanbul hugely broadened my understanding of beauty. I’ve never before or since had the great good fortune to live in a place that I felt sure was the center of the world. Aesthetically, Istanbul inhabits a deeply poetic space. I think this is due to the fact that it is so self-conflicted — it is at once European and Asian, the seat of Christian and Islamic empires, ancient and contemporary, conservative and liberal, filthy and clean, foreign and familiar. All these contrasts noddle along, nudging at everyone from every angle, insisting you take in both sides at once, just as Keats recommended artists accept the world, with what he called “negative capability.” Istanbul’s divided soul owes its life to uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt, and my experience there honed my sense of the central importance of this tension in art. And of course, coming into contact with the awe-inspiring artistic achievements that have accumulated over the centuries, both Eastern and Western, in that center of the world, significantly affected my aesthetic. |
 Stroke  Celestial Bodies  Green  Empty Sleeves |
You are known for the linguistic fireworks in your poetry and musical word play. Has translating at all affected the way you use language in your own poetry? Has it made you see your native language any differently, in terms of muscularity, elegance — or any other aspect of language that becomes more pronounced in poetry? My parents were both professional musicians. Well, my dad was, until he recognized he couldn’t raise a family on a French horn player’s salary, and so he went into business and did quite well. Even so, they often held chamber music evenings in our home, and for a while they had, along with a group of their friends, a box at the Metropolitan Opera, to which I was allowed to go when one or the other of my parents couldn’t attend. I grew up in a home saturated in classical music. For the past ten years, I’ve been learning to play the viola, which is one of the most rewarding and frustrating experiences of my life. As you can see, music is deeply meaningful to me. In fact, in my recent incarnation as a new birder, I’m learning the birds by their songs, as well as their shapes and colorations and habits, so it’s clear I have an aural way of approaching art and nature. Maybe the world.
As to your first question, I was tempted to say, no, translating hasn’t had much effect on my own language, but it just occurred to me that it just might have done so, in a deeply subconscious way. One of the many great differences between Turkish and English is the fact that Turkish is so much more economical than English. Turks use fewer words more flexibly, and therefore achieve a great economy in their verse. When I was translating from the Old Turkish of Pir Sultan Abdal, who frequently wrote in syllabic form, I tried to faithfully reproduce the form in my English version, but that was a quixotic battle. The information communicated in a single eleven-syllable line in Turkish takes, minimum, fourteen or fifteen syllables to say in English. What this might have to do with the development of my own verse is intriguing to consider, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me if you hadn’t asked the question. The poems I’ve been writing in the past few years have slowly but surely been morphing into pieces with shorter and more muscular lines. I now try to wring as much as I possibly can out of the music of the words, and this may well owe its impulse to my adventures in the Turkish language. In her keynote address at the 2004 American Literary Translators’ conference, Canadian writer Antonine Maillet described translating as getting inside the head of the original writer to start at the place where the writer began the original text, then writing it all over again in your own language. I love this description because it captures the intimate nature of translating another poet’s work. How have you experienced doing translation work, especially as a Westerner translating Eastern poetry? Ah. There are so many issues a translator has to consider — it’s a gigantic gestalt that seems able to wriggle just out of conceptual range at virtually every turn. And translating across the East/West divide only complicates matters, deepens the mystery as to how it ever works at all. I’m not at all certain I can place myself inside the head of a sixteenth-century revolutionary Sufi mystic and political rebel, as Pir Sultan Abdal was, but I can certainly inhabit the sonic, emotional, and visual worlds his words created. Once I understand those, I can begin to try to bring them over into English. Time is a great humbler as well — the Anatolian world of 1530 lives at a terribly challenging distance from us. |
From Istanbul has several sonnets in it, as does Green, which came out the same year. Did your translation work inspire you to explore that form?
From Istanbul
BY Sidney Wade
(Yapi Kredi Yayinlar, 1998)
No, I’ve always loved the imperishability of the form — as Paul Muldoon has shown, you can wrestle it into all sorts of peculiar shapes, yet it retains its essential “sonnethood.” There are a couple of sonnets in my first book, Empty Sleeves, and, as you noted, quite a few in Green and From Istanbul, as well as in Stroke. I like to stretch the sonnet into shapes it didn’t originally intend — I’ll rhyme it abcdefg/abcdefg, as I did in “No Comfort To Be Had” and “Sexual Blossoms and Their Fierce Addictions” (from Stroke). I like the fact that the distance of the rhyming words from one another makes it almost impossible to hear them, but then I get irritated when critics or reviewers don’t notice the form. Form has always been powerfully generative for me — in fact, most of the poems in “Stroke” are written in one form or another. There are several sonnets, many poems written in the stanza invented by John Berryman for his long poem, “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” quite a few syllabics, and one poem written in the form Richard Wilbur used for his poem, “A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” I arrived at that one serendipitously. I had long wanted to write a poem celebrating the remarkable fountain in Terminal A at the Detroit Metro Airport (if you ever pass through, make sure to allow enough time to go see and marvel at it — it’s the only fountain in the world, I believe, that has a sense of humor!), and just as I was most frustrated with my lack of ideas as to how to proceed, I ran across a review of Wilbur’s then newly published Collected Poems. The reviewer had mentioned his Villa Sciarra poem, and that brought me back to re-read it. I decided I would use his rhyme and metrical schemes in my poem, and, half-way through, I realized that with some nudging, I could get my poem to end on Wilbur’s poem’s final line. I was very pleased with my achievement, and still am, but when Les Murray read it, he told me he liked everything about the poem except the final line! Of course it would take an incredibly sensitive ear, like Les possesses, to perceive that there was a difference, but I have to say I’m still very fond of it.
I enjoy your slender “monosonnets” in Stroke. Can you speak to how you arrived at this form?
As I mentioned earlier, I love messing with sonnets, and my poems over time have become skinnier and skinnier. It was a natural progression, I suppose, to get to that extreme. I am only aware of one other poem written in that form — Brad Leithauser’s “Post-coitum Tristesse,” which I read way back in 1985, but I don’t know whether he invented or discovered it.
One thing I deeply admire in your poetry is the way in which what is not said in a poem brings so much power to what is said. I’m thinking of “On the Verge” in Green, in which the allusion to The Odyssey is so implicit that it taps into the power of the myth rather than the myth itself, and “No Comfort to Be Had” in Stroke, in which the word “stroke” is never once mentioned. Pulling this off as a poet takes an incredible amount of control — over language and over the shape of the poem. How do you do this?
One of the things I tell my students at the beginning of each semester is that they should trust that the reader can infer a great deal of information from strongly constructed lines, from metaphors, from careful word choice, so they shouldn’t feel obliged to get every little detail of “the story” in. It basically has to do with the lesson of economy, which is one of great poetry’s most salient characteristics. In editing and re-editing our own work, we must train ourselves to take everything out of the poem that doesn’t absolutely have to be there, sometimes including “a” and “the.”
I understand you have a new book of poetry, Out of this World, coming out in April. Can you give us a foretaste of it? What direction does it take in the arc of your development as a poet?
I’ve changed the title of that book several times already, and now I’m pretty sure it’s going to be called Edge. In it you’ll see the long, skinny poems I’ve been talking about — mostly one to four syllables per line. I like to think I’m achieving ever more compression of sound and sense to fit within those slender borders. Ah — there’s another monosonnet, this one with two stanzas. Since I finished the manuscript of Edge, and since the machinery of poetry production grinds exceeding slow, I’m now a third of the way through another book. A year and a half ago I magically turned into a birder, and the new poems are all about birds — so far I’ve written about a Cardinal, a Whimbrel, Pelicans, a Killdeer, sparrowing, spishing, my cat who eats birds, Starlings, Brown-headed cowbirds, and a Burrowing Owl. But there are 914 species of birds in North America, so I’ve got a ways to go. Oh. I’ve also got a poem about a radish in there amongst the birds.
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