I love you without knowing how…
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where…” This is part of a longer quote from Pablo Neruda that my wife and I have hanging above our bed. He is out favorite poet (well, one of them, anyway—what writer can pick a favorite?) and is part of our literary history together. One of the first gifts she gave me is his Extravagaria (what a fabulous collection).
Neruda’s love poems are… everything. His writing is more than just love poems and our collection of his covers his many seasons.
A friend of mine knows our love of Neruda; he is a retired, old guy that works at a bookstore and he came across two Neruda books and decided to ship them to me here in South Africa. Of course, sending packages to South Africa through the normal mail is always sketchy. These books left Florida in April or March and disappeared until August'; they probably arrived in Johannesburg in a couple of days… It took that long just to work it’s way to our address (less than an hour drive to downtown).
This book, Bestiary/Bestiario is so… cool. It’s a single poem with woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi. The poem is along the lines of those found in his works like The Book of Questions and Stones of the Sky. It’s light, yet philosophical and sometimes kind of absurd.
“Fleas interest me so much/ that I let them bite me for hours. / They are perfect, ancient, Sanskrit, / machines that admit of no appeal. / They do not bite to eat, / the bite only to jump” he says and he goes on with more imagery describing fleas and what they do with blood. Finding the beauty in the ugly? That is one of our jobs as Poets, right?
Of the rabbit he says: “Who excites them and whispers / in their genital ears? / They procreate endlessly / and pay no attention to Saint Francis.” What an image, genital ears being whispered into. Neruda really takes the time to think about each of the animals that you find in this book.
What really caught my attention, is the woodcuts. It’s not often that you find the visual with the written, and especially in poetry. Frasconi’s (a famous visual artist) woodcuts are brilliant. I absolutely love this style, the use of negative space, using only black, white, and orange… They add so much to the book.
It made me think, can I do the same with photography and poetry? It would be an interesting project to take on. I think the poem must have existed before the woodcuts (I’d have to look into that) and that’s how I would approach it. Poem first, photographs to match. It would be difficult to create beautiful, minimalist images that don’t distract/detract from the writing. They have to be complementary. Also, would I write and then create images? Write and then ask another to create images or vice versa? Either way, it’s a fun project to consider.
What do you think?