For J.C.’s initial account of the Lithuanian International Poetry Festival
For J.C.’s Spring 2001 riverviews
For J.C.’s translations from the Spanish of Ivón Gordon Vailakis
For another review by J.C. Todd
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J.C. Todd’s work can be found online at:
www.frigate.com
www.cortlandreview.com
www.grdodge.org
www.artistsandcommunities.org
“Why I Teach Poetry,” an on-line supplement to the PBS special Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers, Fall, 1999 is located at www.pwnet.org
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J.C. Todd is a Contributing Editor of The Drunken Boat
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Email[email protected]
Lilacs and a Resinous Will: Poetry Spring in Lithuania
By J.C. Todd
***** A wall of windows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vilnius displayed thecraftsmanship of Lithuanian artisans: amber jewelry, ceramic tea sets, leather boxes and books, delicate silverwork, weavings of linen and wool. Tobetter see through late afternoon glare, I stepped back and was down beforerealizing I had tumbled, tucked in elbows and rolled onto my scapulae,wing-bones, my mother use to call them. Although they could not raise me up,they had interrupted a fall down a tier of polished marble. I did the bodycheck–wiggled this and that, rolled to my knees, rose to my feet. Thewindow showed a streak of dust across a cheek bone, tossled hair, a clerk,holding very still, watching. There was something I had wanted to see. Myankle twinged. I bent to touch it, and there in the stone, in faint Hebrewscript, a word, another. I couldn’t read them, but their shape reminded methat this stepped plaza had been built from gravestones of a Jewish cemeterydismantled by the Nazi military, one of many across the Baltics and EasternEurope whose stones were used to pave the shopping streets and plazas ofoccupied cities. Over whose lineage I had stumbled, I did not know, but itmarked a border more profound than passport checks, semi-automatic bearingairport guards, electronic luggage and body scanners. I had fallen intoWilno, Jerusalem of the North before the German occupation of World War II,when forty percent of the city’s population was Jewish, a fall which openedme to the erasures of Lithuania’s 900 years of invasions and occupations aswell as to the traces of what had disappeared since the Lithuanian peoplefirst united as a nation in the late 1100’s. Puffy ankle on ice, my re-education began with The Captive Mind, CzeslawMilosz’s study of the Soviet occupation of the Baltics, and led to a closerconsideration of a people about whom I knew little more than Tacitus had in100 AD–that they traded in amber. Amber is a gem composed of traces trappedin other traces: fossilized insects and bubbles of ancient air contained infossilized pine resins of the boreal forests that slid into bog or sea. Traditionally, Baltic women wear this symbol of erasures and regenerations attheir throats or over their hearts. To them it is the sun’s stone, source oflife.
***** I had come to Lithuania not for amber but for poetry, one of many poets fromEurope and the Americas invited by the Lithuanian Writers Union toparticipate in their annual international poetry festival, PoezijosPavasaris, Poetry Spring. For a week in May, the people turn to poetry, astheir forebears turned to dainos, the folk songs that celebrate their sourcesand remind them of the long way they have come. A laureate is chosen; prizesare awarded. Although the festival begins in the capital city of Vilniuswith a scholarly symposium and ends there as well with a reading in thecourtyard of the five hundred year old University of Vilnius, poets fanacross the country to read in major cities such as Kaunas, Siauliai andKlaipeda, in towns such as Elektrenai, Rumsiskes and Joniskis and even insmall villages. In keeping with the Spring, the festival encouragescross-pollination. Lithuanian poets translate the work of visiting poetswhich then appears in Lithuanian in the weekly cultural newspaper, LiteraturaMenas, and in the festival anthology which this year included more than onehundred Lithuanian poets and more than forty international poets, some ofwhom are emigrés to America writing in Lithuanian. Traveling around thecountry in buses and small vans, visiting and native poets and translatorstalk for hours about poetry, art, history, aesthetics, philosophy,translation, also food, wine, men, women. Often the mood is like that ofthe band bus coming home from a game their team has won. Returning toVilnius one evening, writers from Iceland, Scandinavia and the Baltics sangSwedish folk tunes as the bus passed one-ox farms and stands of deep forestwhere thousands had been buried in mass graves and thousands of insurgent“forest brothers” had repeatedly mounted resistance to the Soviets and beenquashed. Earlier that day, walking in the forest, cushiony ferns and mossesunderfoot, I had felt ungrounded by that history, as though I could not plantmy foot securely. Later, at the country home of an artist, we had read toeach other and a gathering of artists, students, writers and their families,forest at our backs. Wind came up in the trees, shredding the words, thepoems dematerializing (if they ever had been matter) on updrafts, comingapart as surely and unpredictably as they had come together in us, becomingpoem. “I could hardly hear,” someone complained. But isn’t that it? Tolisten in the direction of poem. To catch what we can of its sonics. Isn’tthat how we write–some of us–ear in the air, to the ground, vibrating withwhatever strikes into us?
***** Traveling to towns far from the sophistication and elegance of Vilnius, Ikept picking up the vibration of history, what little I knew, tuned by mystumble on the plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art, a fall into thehistory of a people and into a way of seeing through a lens tinted bycenturies of bloodshed. In the farm village of Gatauciai, just south of theLatvian border, half the population of 300 was waiting in the reception roomof the cultural center built under Soviet rule. Now, three generationslater, Soviet farming collectives have reverted to single owners who cannotcompete in the global market, a common problem that retards Lithuania’sacceptance into the European Economic Union. In this village, subsistencefarming has created a dust-bowl economy, and Soviet economic withdrawal haseliminated the demand for goods manufactured in nearby factories. No jobs. On the villagers’ faces, pain, struggle, pride, also depression and theravages of hunger and alcohol. Yet when we entered the auditorium the stagewas banked with lilacs, masses of lilacs through which the sorrow and promiseof Whitman’s dooryard burst in me. I imagined the tender effort of cutting ahundred branches from bushes all over the village, one here, one there, todecorate for the poets. To be a poet worthy of lilacs! I chose “How EarthSpins,” a poem whose central image is pre-teen girls and their ovaries, andread the English first. Looking at the audience as Marius Burokas read histranslation, I noticed the aged faces of old women in the youthful faces oftheir daughters sitting next to them, and, in the faces of their children,the youth of the grandmothers continuing under their gaze. It takes morethan biology and good luck to raise one generation, and then another. Ittakes a resinous will, and a belief in life, and a means to tap into sourcesof native strength. As Milosz suggests, poetry can be that means. Perhapsthat is why in Russia, the Baltics, across Eastern Europe, ordinary peoplecherish poetry and memorize poems; they nourish when food is scare and lifeis constrained by unrelenting work and destabilized by a pervasive sense ofthreat. Despite the relative comfort of my life, in Lithuania I saw clearlythat the world offers far fewer protections than I had assumed, but that themoment, fully lived, elusive, may be all we truly need, that and a poem tocatch its trace before it, too, dissolves.
