Yánnina

For Stephen Yenser

“There lay the peninsula stretching far into the dark gray water, with its mosque, its cypress tufts and fortress walls; there was the city stretching far and wide along the water's edge; there was the fatal island, the closing scene of the history of the once all-powerful Ali.”              — Edward Lear

Somnambulists along the promenade
Have set up booths, their dreams:
Carpets, jewelry, kitchenware, halvah, shoes.
From a loudspeaker passionate lament
Mingles with the penny Jungle’s roars and screams.
Tonight in the magician's tent
Next door a woman will be sawed in two,
But right now she’s asleep, as who is not, as who . . .

An old Turk at the water’s edge has laid
His weapons and himself down, sleeps
Undisturbed since, oh, 1913?
Nothing will surprise him should he wake,
Only how tall, how green the grass has grown
There by the dusty carpet of the lake
Sun beats, then sleepwalks down a vine-festooned arcade,
Giving himself away in golden heaps.

And in the dark gray water sleeps
One who said no to Ali. Kiosks all over town
Sell that postcard, “Kyra Frossíni's Drown,”
Showing her, eyeballs white as mothballs, trussed
Beneath the bulging moon of Ali's lust.
A devil (turban and moustache and sword)
Chucks the pious matron overboard —
Wait — Heaven help us — SPLASH!

The torch smokes on the prow. Too late.
(A picture deeply felt, if in technique slapdash)
Wherefore the Lion of Epirus, feared
By Greek and Turk alike, tore his black beard
When to barred casements rose the song
Broken from bubbles rising all night long:
“A ton of sugar pour, oh pour into the lake
To sweeten it for poor, for poor Frossíni’s sake.” ¹

Awake? Her story’s aftertaste
Varies according to the listener.
Friend, it’s bitter coffee you prefer?
Brandy for me, and with a fine
White sandy bottom. Not among those braced
By action taken without comment, neat,
Here’s how! Grounds of our footnote infiltrate the treat,
Mud-vile to your lips, crystal-sweet to mine.

Twilight at last. Enter the populace.
One little public garden must retrace
Long after school its childish X,
Two paths that cross and cross. The hollyhock, the rose,
Zinnia and marigold hear themselves named
And blush for form’s sake, unashamed
Chorus out of Ignoramus Rex:
“What shall the heart learn, that already knows

Its place by water, and its time by sun?”
Mother wit fills the stately whispering sails
Of girls someone will board and marry. Who?
Look at those radiant young males.
Their morning-glory nature neon blue
Wilts here on the provincial vine. Where did it lead,
The race, the radiance? To oblivion
Dissembled by a sac of sparse black seed.

Now under trees men with rush baskets sell
Crayfish tiny and scarlet as the sins
In any fin de siècle villanelle.
Tables fill up. A shadow play begins.
Painted, translucent cut-outs fill the screen.
It glows. His children by a jumping bean
Karaghiózi clobbers, baits the Turk,
Then all of them sing, dance, tell stories, go berserk.

Tomorrow we shall cross the lake to see
The cottage tumbling down, where soldiers killed
Ali. Two rugless rooms: Cushions. Vitrines
In which, to this day, silks and bracelets swim.
Above, a painting hangs. It’s him,
Ali. The end is near, he’s sleeping between scenes
In a dark lady’s lap. Vassilikí.
The mood is calm, the brushwork skilled

By contrast with Frossíni’s mass-produced
Unsophisticated piece of goods.
The candle trembles in the watching god’s
Hand — almost a love-death, höchste Lust!
Her drained, compliant features haunt
The waters there was never cause to drown her in.
Your grimiest ragamuffin comes to want
Two loves, two versions of the Feminine:

One virginal and tense, brief as a bubble,
One flesh and bone — gone up no less in smoke
Where giant spits revolving try their rusty treble,
Sheep’s eyes pop, and death-wish ravens croak.
Remember, the Romantic’s in full feather.
Byron has visited. He likes
The luxe, and overlooks the heads on pikes;
Finds Ali “Very kind . . . indeed, a father . . .” ²

Funny, that is how I think of Ali.
Gn the one hand, the power and the gory
Details, pigeon-blood rages and retali-
ations, gouts of fate that crust his story;
And on the other, charm, the whimsically
Meek brow, its motives all ab ulteriori,
The flower-blue gaze twining to choke proportion,
Having made one more pretty faces fortune.

A dove with Parkinson’s disease
Selects our fortunes: TRAVEL AND GROW WISE
And A LOYAL FRIEND IS MORE THAN GOLD.
But, at the island monastery, eyes
Gouged long since to the gesso sockets will outstare
This or that old-timer on his knees
Asking the candlelight for skill to hold
The figures flush against the screen’s mild glare.

Ali, my father — both are dead.
In so many words, so many rhymes,
The brave old world sleeps. Are we what it dreams
And is a rude awakening overdue?
Not in Yánnina. To bed, to bed.
The Lion sets. The lights wink out along the lake.
Weeks later, in this study gone opaque,
They are relit. See through me. See me through.

For partings hurt although we dip the pain
Into a glowing well — the pen I mean.
Living alone won’t make some inmost face to shine
Maned with light, ember and anodyne,
Deep in a desktop burnished to its grain.
That the last hour be learned again
By riper selves, couldn’t you doff this green
Incorruptible, the might-have-been,

And arm in arm with me dare the magician’s tent?
It's hung with asterisks. A glittering death
Is hefted, swung. The victim smiles consent.
To a sharp intake of breath she comes apart
(Done by mirrors? Just one woman? Two?
A fight starts — in the provinces, one feels,
There’s never that much else to do)
Then to a general exhalation heals

Like anybody’s life, bubble and smoke
In afterthought, whose elements converge,
Glory of windless mornings that the barge
(Two barges, one reflected, a quicksilver joke)
Kept scissoring and mending as it steered
The old man outward and away,
Amber mouthpiece of a narghilé
Buried in his by then snow-white beard.

                      

¹ “Time was kind to the reputation of this woman who had been unfaithful to her husband, vain, and grasping. She came to be regarded as a Christian martyr and even as an early heroine in the struggle for Greek independence. She has been celebrated in legend, in poetry, in popular songs and historical fiction, and surrounded with the glamour which so often attaches to women whose love affairs have been of an intense nature and have involved men of political or historical importance.”
                                         — William Plomer, The Diamond of Jannina

² Letter to his mother, November 12, 1809. Plomer observes: “... even allowing for Oriental effusiveness, it seems doubtful whether [Ali’s] interest in Byron was exactly as paternal as he pretended, for a father does not give his son sweets twenty times a day and beg him to visit him at night. It is worth remarking that Ali was a judge of character and a connoisseur of beauty, whether male or female, and that the like of Byron, and Byron at twenty-one, is not often seen.”

Q: Can you say something about the circumstances surrounding "Yánnina?

JM: It's a town I’d wanted to visit for years and had begun to fear I never would, like Proust and Parma. So that I must have worked myself into a fairly receptive state by the time I got there. No research, mind you — a phrase or two out of Lear, a dim echo of Byron, the foreknowledge of a lake. It never hurts, does it, to have a body of water up one’s sleeve, something that flows or reflects? Ali Pasha was just a name. Later on, halfway through the poem when I needed a biography of him, I was delighted to find the wonderful William Plomer had written it. In any case the day came — less than a day: I didn't spend twenty-four hours on the spot. But the piano had been prepared, and only the notation remained. That whole element — do we dare call it reality? — had to be unforeseeable, accidental, something to fill in then and there. I'd counted on that.

Q: Did you have a theme already in mind? Is that what you're saying?

JM: No, not really.... Wait-yes, I did! How odd not to have made the connection. Earlier that year I'd been concerned for a friend, a woman whose son had disappeared. He'd been teaching somewhere — a man in his thirties — and one day absolutely vanished without a trace. Weeks passed, months passed, his friends imagined the worst, his mother was beside herself. I was already in Greece when two letters came from her. In the first she had just heard from a friend of Bruce’s that he was well and living under an assumed name — she didn’t yet know where. Her second letter, not long afterward, said that she’d heard from Bruce (or Tom, as he now wanted to be called); he’d given her his address, told her he’d found work there. What he’d wanted was no less than a brand-new life, and it looked, at that point, as if he’d found it. Now it may sound — it may be — childish, but haven’t we all dreamed of doing exactly that? To disappear and reemerge as a new person without any ties, the slate wiped clean. Sometimes one even puts the dream into action, in a less dramatic way than Bruce’s, or do I mean Tom’s? In my own case I began going to Greece — over ten years ago — very much in the spirit of one who embarks upon a double life. The life I lived there seemed I can’t tell you how different from life in America. I felt for the first time that I was doing exactly as I pleased. How we delude ourselves! As if there were ever more than one life. Tom is as close to Bruce’s mother as Bruce had ever been. He’s in touch with many of his former friends — all this after scarcely a year of his new identity. I myself, after ten years of moving back and forth, can hardly distinguish, now, between Athens and Stonington, Connecticut. Anyhow, you might say that these “scissorings and mendings” are the theme of “Yánnina.”

Q: Does this notion of playing different roles connect with the shadow play in the poem? I’m not altogether sure what a shadow play is.

JM: They’re dying out, like everything. The one I describe was set up out of doors — a proscenium framing a long, white screen lit from behind. The puppets are two-dimensional figures of colored parchment, or maybe plastic nowadays, somewhat articulated but mainly relying on the verve and bounce of the manipulators who hold them flat against the screen with rods. Rather the effect of a primitive animated cartoon. Lots of contemporary allusion, popular songs, political jokes, but the main action generally refers back to the Turkish occupation. There’s always pompous, dim-witted Pasha whom Karaghiózi makes a fool of. Karaghiózi’s the hero — a wily little Greek, terribly demotic and down-to-earth. The play Byron saw in Yánnina reminded him of morris dancing, it was so indecent. I’m afraid things have changed since his day.

Q: About these changing roles. You appear to identify with the manipulator in one stanza — “to hold the figures flush,” etc. — and in the next with the translucent puppet itself — “See through me....”

JM: Yes. It was greedy of me to want that double life. A writer already has two lives, don't you think? Not so much in the obvious division between experience and its imitation on the page as in the two sides of — well, I’ll have to trust you, when this gets transcribed, to put in some less inflated term — the two sides of the creative temperament. That which conceives and that which executes. There are moments when the light does seem to shine through us. The rest of the time we spend trying to keep our images steady.

Q: The poem is full of paired figures, isn’t it? Frossíni and Vassilikí, the speaker and his companion. And it’s not just your poet who has a double life; many of the characters do as well. Frossíni in the text comes off as a chaste martyr, but as “unfaithful, vain, and grasping” in the footnote. Vassilikí gives her body to Ali but “goes up in smoke”; we never know what she was thinking. Ali himself is both gentle and cruel.

JM: Isn’t it odd? I mean, how one tries — not just in writing — to escape from these opposites, from there being two sides to every question!

Q: But you also show things being made whole. The magician —

JM: The magician, yes, performs the essential act. He heals what he has divided. A double-edged action, like his sword. It’s what one comes to feel that life keeps doing.

Q: You said once that your poems are not "historical." Yet I’d say that this poem is almost about history, that it’s a kind of stand against people locked into the present. Not history as public record, mind you, but —

JM: A kind of time-zoo?

Q: The vividness of your Ali —

JM: Historical figures are always so well lighted. Even if one never gets to the truth about them, their contradictions, even their crimes, are so expressive. They’re like figures in a novel read by millions of people at once. What’s terrifying is that they’re human as well, and therefore no more reliable than you or I. They have their blind, “genetic” side, just like my boys and girls in Yánnina.

Q: That’s the point, isn’t it? Not just that historical figures enter the poem, but that they’re creatures of history (“oblivion / dissembled by a sac of sparse black seed”). There’s no clear present in your poem; the past shadows it. It’s as if you always need the past as a sounding board.

JM: I liked that sense of sleeping presences. Ali, Frossíni, Vassilikí, the old Turk at the beginning — they’re merely asleep. The woman to be sawed in half. Even “you and I” toward the end seem half-absorbed into the dreaming landscape.

Maybe there’s something worth saying about tenses here, how one handles them. Last winter, I visited a workshop in which only one out of fifteen poets had noticed that he needn’t invariably use the first-person present active indicative. Poem after poem began: “I empty my glass… I go out... I stop by woods....” For me a “hot” tense like that can’t be handled for very long without cool pasts and futures to temper it. Or some complexity of syntax, or a modulation into the conditional — something. An imperative, even an auxiliary verb, can do wonders. Otherwise, you get this addictive, self-centered immediacy, harder to break oneself of than cigarettes. That kind of talk (which, by the way, is purely literary; it’s never heard in life unless from foreigners or four-year-olds) calls to mind a speaker suspicious of words, in great boots, chain-smoking, Getting It Down on Paper. He’ll never notice “Whose woods these are I think I know” gliding backward through the room, or “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure" plumping a cushion invitingly at her side.

Q: You’re talking about — against? — so-called confessional poems. Yet the present is still the lyric tense, isn’t it? Isn’t the point that it aims at an ecstatic, timeless state? “Earth has not anything to show more fair...”

JM: Ah, but that’s in the third person; that’s another matter. No, you’re right, and I don’t want to paint myself into a corner. Yet I can’t help... Think how often poems in the first-person present begin with a veil drawn, a sublimation of the active voice or the indicative mood, as if some ritual effacement of the ego were needed before one could go on. “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I...”; “Let us go then you and I...” The poet isn’t always the hero of a movie who does this, does that. He is a man choosing the words he lives by.

Q: Your own way of veiling the first person here has to do with the way you present the landscape, doesn’t it?

JM: You hardly ever need to state your feelings. The point is to feel and keep the eyes open. Then what you feel is expressed, is mimed back at you by the scene. A room, a landscape. I'd go a step further. We don’t know what we feel until we see it distanced by this kind of translation.

Q: So, people and places fade into one another. Like the sun in “Yánnina” sleepwalking down the vine and the provincial boys who wilt on it? In Yánnina — your Yánnina — we’re doomed to repeat certain experiences. Human contradictions appear to root themselves in nature.

JM: No wonder Nature revenges herself. Those lines in Jarrell — remember?

A quarter of an hour and we tire
Of any landscape, said Goethe; eighty years
And he had not tired of Goethe. The landscape had,
And disposed of Goethe in the usual way.

Q: Is that why you don’t write protest poems?

JM: I don’t know. Auden says they do no good, except to get you an audience among people who feel the same way.

Q: Wouldn’t you like a larger audience?

JM: When I search my heart, no, not really. So why invite it, even supposing that I could? Think what one has to do to get a mass audience. I’d rather have one perfect reader. Why dynamite the pond in order to catch that single silver carp? Better to find a bait that only the carp will take. One still has plenty of choices. The carp at Fountainebleau were thought to swallow small children, whole.

As to protest poems... they aren't poems first of all, so much as bits of honorable oratory. A protest poem would be one written against a poem of a different kind, one that reflected a different tradition. Wordsworth against Pope, Byron against Wordsworth.

Q: Would you like to say what kind of poem “Yánnina” is written against?

JM: You must be joking. Well...

Q: There’s a phrase in your second novel. You say about Racine — “the overlay of prismatic verse deflects a brutal, horrible action.” Not that the underlying action of “Yánnina” is brutal or horrible.

JM: No, but you mean it’s implicit rather than presented as narrative? Yes. I’d wanted to let the scene, the succession of scenes, convey not meaning so much as a sense of it, a sense that something both is, and isn’t, being said. I hoped that a reader’s own experience would remind him that some things can go without saying. I was trying for an intimacy of tone, not of content. People are always asking, Was it real? Did it happen? (Thank you for not asking that, by the way.) As if a yes-or-no answer would settle the question. Was it really Yánnina I went to? Was my companion real or imaginary? I can only say yes and no to questions like that.

Q: You used the image of a veil earlier, talking about reticence. Does your veiling of tense and voice have to do with your feelings about “real” experience in a poem?

JM: I suppose it would have to. We’ve all written poems that imitate a plausible sequence of events. “I go out” for a walk and find these beautiful daffodils or this dead songbird and have the following feelings. But, for better or worse, that walk is in fact taken — or Yánnina is visited — by a writer in hopes of finding something to write about. Then you have not simply imitated or recollected experience, but experience in the light of a projected emotion, like a beam into which what you encounter will seem to have strayed. The poem and its occasion will have created one another.

Saturday Review, December 1972.

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