Grace Butcher: Learning from Trees

Anne Marie reads Marie Ponsot's poem Discovery. 

Clare Sullivan is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville, and translates the poetry of Natalia Toledo, a Zapotec poet from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Clare fell in love with the Spanish language growing up in Chicago, and became a student of literature and Spanish in her graduate studies. As a translator, Clare listens to the weaving of sounds and rhythms as she strives to maintain the playfulness, beauty, and complexities of Natalia’s poetry. In our conversation, we explore the many ways language is a reflection of culture and how poetry is a vessel for the sounds of tradition and evolution.

"If we could, like the trees, practice dying, do it every year just as something we do...Whatever the trees know when they stand undone, surprisingly intricate, we need to know also so we cal allow that last thing to happen to us as if it were only any ordinary thing..." from Grace Butcher's poem, Learning from Trees.

"...Does all grow slowly nameless in your mouth? Where words once were, discoveries flow, set free from the fruit's flesh, amazed...O knowing, feeling, happiness--, immense!" This morning's poetry reading is Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus, 13. A poem for the ripe fruit of autumn. Feel, taste, grow clear, awake, and be transparent. 

"...In the newborn orchard each morning I ponder. And sense the vibration of bonds that wed me to the great host of invisible stars, to the sunken moon, to the sun whose laughter flushes the hill with crimson..." from Denise Levertov's poem "Are We Ruled by the Wind?"

Today's daily poetry reading is from the Sufi poet Kabir, translated by Robert Bly. "The Guest is inside you, and also inside me...inside love there is more joy than we know of...Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail..." Music by Kayhan Kalhor, "Silence of The Night."

"...I did not see Life was About to change, as it does, When odd magic appears: There was No music Yet..." Music: As Time Goes By, Stephane Grappelli. 

"...listen: hang on keep your silence until the words ripen in you, look at and caress things the hands know, their is a blind wisdom..."

"...Undeciphered let my song rewire circuits wired wrong, and with my jingle in your brain, allow the Bridge to arch again." - Leonard Cohen, All My News from his Book of Longing.

The sea is still there after dark...I want to bring the sea back...Yi Lu (伊路) is one of the most widely read poets in contemporary China. Known for her elegant and distilled lyrical voice as well as her ecological awareness, Yi is the author of five collections, most recently Forever Lingering, Using Two Seas, and See. Sea Summit, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, is the first appearance of Yi’s work in English.