Sunday, August 18, 2013

Anna
Akhmatova discovered a lyre-shaped charm when she was a young child. As a result,her nanny predicted that little Anna would grow up to be a poet. When she decided to be a poet, Akhmatova’sfather, Andrey,demanded that she
choose a different surname so as not to tarnish the Gorenko family name. Akhmatova herself explains his concern, and
her high-born family ancestry:

No
one in my large family wrote poetry.  But the first Russian woman poet, Anna
Bunina, was the aunt of my grandfather Erasm Ivanovich Stogov.  The Stogovs were
modest landowners in the Mozhaisk region of the Moscow Province.  They were
moved here after the insurrection during the time of Posadnitsa Marfa.  In
Novgorod they had been a wealthier and more distinguished family.  Khan Akhmat
[was] my ancestor. [...] It was well
known that this Akhmat was a descendant of Genghiz Khan.  In the eighteenth
century, one of the Akhmatov Princesses – Praskovia Yegorvna – married the rich
and famous Simbirsk landowner Motovilov.  Yegor Motovilov was my
great-grandfather; his daughter, Anna Yegorovna, was my grandmother.  She died
when my mother was nine years old, and I was named in her honour.* 

So,
for a pen name, she chose the aristocratic name Akhmatova—the name of hergreat-grandmother, who had been “one of the Akhmatovprincesses. ”She then ventured into thelife
of,in her father’s words, a“decadent poetess.” 

***

One
spring years ago, I first discovered AkhmatovawhenI saw thebeautiful Cubist painting, “Portrait of Anna
Akhmatova,” by Russian artist Natan Altman. Clothed in a long royal blue dress, her legs crossed, Akhmatova bears
her characteristic solemnexpression in
the painting.(She never smiles.)Her shoulders
and arms are enveloped in a shawl the color of mustard; her face, with an “aquiline
profile”; her neck and collarbone are pallid, nearly transluscent. She looks regallyaway
from the observer, unbowed yet weary. 

In
the poem “A string of little beads at my neck,” she gives an accurate
self-portrait:

A
string of little beads at my neck,

In
a broad muffI hide my hands,

The
eyes stare vacantly,

They
never shed a tear. 

And
the face appears pale,

Against
the lavender silk,

My
straight bangs

Almost
reach my eyebrows. 

And
how dissimilar to flight

Is
my halting step,

As
if it were a raft beneath my feet,

Not
these wooden parquet squares. 

And
the pale lips are slightly parted,

The
breathing laboured and uneven,

And
over my heart tremble

The
flowers of a non-existent meeting. 

***

A
grey-eyed beauty with a wistful solemn expression, Akhmatova was eleven years
old when she began writing poetry. In Anna of All the Russias, biographer
Elaine Feinstein states that by age sixteen, a deep melancholypervaded Akhmatova’spersonality. She published her first poem—entitled “On his hand there are many shiny
rings”—one year later. Then, atage twenty-one, she married Nikolay Gumilyov,
a fellow poet she knewfrom
childhood. He had loved her with an
unwavering love. Once she’d decided to accept
Gumilyov’s marriage offer, she wrote in a letter to a friend, “I believe that
it is myfate to be his wife. Whether
or not I love him, I do not know, but it seems to me that I do.” 

Eight
years later, in 1918, they divorced. Two
lines from her poem, “Departure,” might describe how Akhmatova felt in the
months that preceded the divorce:“I
cannot say if it is our love,/Or the day, that is ending.” 

In
search of love, she wed twice more—to men who did not truly understand or
appreciate her. Or they may have loved
her but not in a way she needed. “He loved three things, alive”is
the first line of one visionary poem that hints at her predicament:

He
loved three things, alive:

White
peacocks, songs at eve,

And
antique maps of America. 

Hated
when children cried,

And
raspberry jam with tea,

And
femininehysteria. 

…And
he had married me. 

Of
one lover, she writes,“He talked of the
summer and said,/How absurd—a woman
poet!”  Nonetheless, she was sought after as a beauty; and so had several
relationships. To a former lover who had
recently wed someone else, she wrote:

I
won’t beg for your love. 

It’s
safely laid aside…. 

I
won’t be penning jealous

Letters
to your bride. 

But
be wise, take my advice:

Give
her my poems to read,

Give
her my photos beside –

Be
kind to the newly-wed! 

***

Many
of the poems are self-revealing, yet understated. Akhmatova gives a woman’s perspective in a
time of misogyny in Russia. A wife was
basically a commodity: women were
often reviled and abused. Incredibly,aRussian proverb was:“The more you beat your wife, the tastier the
soup will be.” 

Luckily,
Akhmatova did not witness such brutality as a child. Several poems evoke sentiments from her
sheltered childhood. She was“the wild girl”that jumped into the Black Sea with scant
hesitation.  The beautiful poem,At the
Edge of the Sea, draws on this magical time in her life. 

At
the bottom of her well of sorrow is, perhaps, that Akhmatova never actually raised her son, Lev. At her husband Nikolay’s insistence, Lev grew
up with his grandmother and only saw his mother in summer. 

OfLev the child—beloved in absentia—she wrote:

I
know you won’t be able to

Remember
much about me, little one:

I
didn’t hold you, or even scold you,

Or
take you to Communion. 

Sadly,
Lev in later years expressed that he did not feel loved.  He wrote, “If I were not her son, but the son of an
ordinary woman, I would have been before anything else a blossoming Soviet
professor. . . .”  During his lifetime, he was a well-regarded historian of Eurasian subjects, and wrote poetry.  Not surprising, however, his relationship with Akhmatova wasturbulent; and he
neverforgave her. 

***

The early poems are simple, brief, ethereal in
nature. They describe real moments and
loves in her life. I think of an
Akhmatova poem, phrase or image long after I’ve read it. The image—of “raspberry jam with tea” or“lavender silk”—floats into my consciousness
and stays with me. 

The
later poems are longer, more complex in imagery and ideas/ideology. They are the poems of a mature “poetess”;
they evince masterful
craftsmanship. Akhmatova wrote some of
these later poems in hardship, during a turbulent era in Russia.  In the months before the Bolsheviks came into
power, women stood in ‘bread lines’ for hours, daily. InRequiem,
she states that she“stood [in line] for
three hundred hours”;and she refers to herself in an ironic
situation:

They
should have shown you, little teaser,

Little
favourite, friend of all,

Sylvan princess, happy charmer,

What
situation would be yours –

As
three-hundredth in the line

You’d
stand. . . . 

Thus,
these later poems transformed Akhmatova into the voice of“a hundred million people.” 

That
said, I ‘enjoy’ the shorterpoems
more—mostly because they are subtler, seem more personal and heartfelt, are
infused withgenuine emotion. These shorter poems reflect a “lyrical
soul”—as Akhmatova’s friend described her; but they also make one reflect on
one’s own life. 

Five
original volumes of poetry are the core ofAkhmatova’s oeuvre: Evening (1912), Rosary (1914), White Flock
(1917), Plantain(1921), and Anno
Domini MCMXXI (1922).  Each volume flung out into the world, like
a blue frisbee. For this essay, I readAnna Akhmatova: Selected Poems Including Requiem,withpoems compiled from each of the Russian poet’s major works; it is
brilliantly translated by British scholar A.S. Kline and an excellent
introduction to Akhmatova. 

***

In
an homage to artist Boris Anrep, the love of her life, Akhmatova lamentsaspects of her life and asks her lover to
forgive her:

The
evening light is broad and yellow

Tender,
the April chill. 

You
are many years late,

Yet
I am glad you are here. 

Sit
down now, close to me,

And
look with joyful eyes:

Here
it is, the blue notebook,

Filled
with my childhood poems. 

Forgive
me that I lived in sorrow,

Rejoiced
too little in the sun. 

Forgive,
forgive that I mistook

Too
many others for you. 

--YolandaA.Reid

Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of
All the Russias (2007).http://www.elainefeinstein.com/Anna-Akhmatova.shtml

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite
books. I loved the courage Gilbert
showed in transforming herself and her life. Now, she has written a new work--a novel entitled The Signature of AllThings--due
for an October 2013 release.  Here's an
excerpt from her interview with Chantal Pierrat. 

Chantal
Pierrat: What is it right now that is stoking your passion?  What perspective or
practice is setting you on fire? 

Elizabeth
Gilbert: Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it.  Returning to
the rootstock of my whole life as a writer.  It’s what I had wanted to be for my
entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial.  It’s
how I got my start as a writer.  My first two books were a short story
collection and a novel.  Then I took this weird, sharp left turn away from that
aspect of my imagination, and very much into the world of the real.  For the
entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn’t write a word of
fiction.  I just left that behind, this dream of my life.  It wasn’t a bad idea--Eat Pray Love came out of it.  I moved into journalism,
biography, memoir (in that order), and started to feel like I had left behind
something really important.  I made myself come back to it, even though it was
frightening and intimidating.  I wasn’t sure if I still even knew how to do it
or why you do it.  I felt like I had to return or else it was going to be gone
forever.  So that’s what I’ve spent the last few years doing and what I’m going
to spend the next few years doing.  It’s such a homecoming.  I feel all abloom
with excitement. 

CP:
Do you feel that there’s any real in the unreal?  Or vice versa? 

EG:
I think there’s more real in the unreal than there is in the real.  I think the
thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I
rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. 
It’s the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.  I’ve
always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice.  But I think that fiction
is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do -- or that I can do --
because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create
something that feels more true than anything.  It feels like a collaboration
between yourself and inspiration, a collaboration between the facts upon which
your book is based and the lives you invent around those facts.  There’s this
great kind of spooky dance that happens that I can’t access any other way.  I
think most of us are given kind of one pathway to that dance, and that’s why
I’m a writer -- it’s the only way I can get there.  I can’t do it through art, I
can’t do it through singing, I can’t do it through mothering, I can’t do it
through invention.  There are other ways that people participate in that
collaboration.  This is the only way I can do it.  What happens and what you
encounter, what you collide with -- it’s so exciting and revealing about how
much more interesting and tricky the universe is than we think in our daily
lives. 

CP:
Since you are coming from the world of memoir with your last two books, how are
you represented in this new work? 

EG:
Somebody said once that when you write fiction, you’re writing memoir, and when
you’re writing memoir, you’re writing fiction.  When you write a novel, there’s
a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re
less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself.  You are accidentally
leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from
you.  I had a wonderful conversation with my friend, the novelist Ann Patchett,
after she read this book, and she said, “It was so exciting to read that
character and see bits of your hair and fingernails growing out of there!  I
think that what I personally know about you was showing up in this person who
you invented.  Who you can also embolden to do and be things that you would
never do or be.” 

It’s
funny.  So I’m all over this book.  It’s about a 19th century botanical
exploration.  My character, Alma Whittaker, is a botanist who is the daughter of
a great botanical entrepreneur, and she’s looking for nothing less than the
signature of nature.  She’s a real scientist and she’s stubborn about her quest. 
At the same time, this novel is a love story, and there are great
disappointments in the love story.  All of women’s stories in the 19th century
had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the
end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall
because of your own hubris as a woman, or you’ve made some great error leading
you down a path to ruin.  One is the story of love that’s successful and the
other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that
destroys the woman. 

But
the reality, certainly in my life, is that we all have love stories that go
terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts.  And somehow we endure. 
We’re not destroyed by it.  We endure and go on to do interesting things and
have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us.  That’s a kind
of personal story of mine that I don’t think I would tell in memoir but I do
think I can tell in fiction. 

CP:
How has disappointment changed you? 

EG:
It softens me.  It makes me be a more sensitive, kinder person.  I know what it
feels like to be bruised; I know what it feels like to carry things around with
you that never totally heal.  There’s closure and then there’s stuff that’s kind
of like, Well, I guess it’s going to be in the minivan forever.  And you carry
it with you and you continue on your journey with your minivan full of stuff,
which I think most of us do. 

All
the parts of us that we ever were are always going to be with us.  You make
space to carry them and you just try not to let them drive.  But you can’t chuck
them out either.  I think I have more compassion than if I had led a life where
everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or
if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed.  I don’t think I would
be as good a person.  I’m still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I
think those disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their
disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure. 

CP:
In The Signature of AllThings, the character is looking for
meaning through plants and nature.  Is this a reflection of a connection that
you might have? 

EG:
My mom is a master gardener and I grew up on a farm.  I came back to it really
late in life and discovered that despite how lazy and inattentive I was as a
child, I had managed to accidentally learn quite a bit about gardening.  This is
a nice metaphor, too, about mothers and daughters -- that when it came time for
me to make my own, I was making a completely different garden than the one that
my mom has.  They don’t look like they came from relatives.  Hers is a very
productive and pragmatic vegetable garden, and mine is a ridiculous
overabundance of useless plants.  It doesn’t feed anybody, it doesn’t serve any
purpose.  I guess it feeds hummingbirds. 

It’s
definitely a question of following your fascination.  When you want to do
something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the
thing that’s making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning, and for me
that thing was gardening.  I thought, this book is going to have to be about
plants, otherwise I’m not going to want to spend three years with it; I’ll
resent it if it’s taking me away from the garden. 

CP:
What do you think the world needs from women right now? 

EG:
I think the world needs women who stop asking for permission from the
principal.  Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often
should.  I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition,
permission. 

I
see women who have this struggle between what they know is right, what they
know is necessary, what they know is healthy, what they know is good for them,
what they know is good for the work that they need to do, what they know is
good for their bodies, what they know is good for their families -- all too
often ending that statement with the upturned question mark: “If it’s okay with
everyone?”  Still asking, still requesting, still filing petitions for somebody
to say that it’s all right.  I think that, myself included, that has to be
dropped before we can take our place in the way that we need to and the world
needs us to. 

The
best and most powerful things that I’ve done in my life were when I decided
that I don’t f***** need somebody to tell me that I can do it.  To just go and
make it myself, do it myself, build it myself, do the project first and not
bother along the way to get the requisite paperwork.  That requires faith. 
Primarily it requires a faith in the condition that you are allowed to exist. 
You are here and you are allowed to be here and therefore you are allowed to
make decisions about yourself and the people in your life; rather than sort of
backing up and making sure it’s okay with everybody at every turn. 

CP:
Hallelujah!  Do you have a consistent practice or a perspective that helps you
through times of contraction? 

EG:
I do.  It all comes down to these two words: “stubborn gladness.”  It’s from a
poem by my favorite poet, a guy named Jack Gilbert.  He’s sort of the poet
laureate of my life.  He has a poem called “A Brief for the Defense.”  In the
poem he says, “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.” 

Which
is not to edit him but I guess that’s how I took him in.  He carefully put those
words in the order that he wanted them, but somehow in my mind they just go
into the furnace and come out like two ingots, sort of melded together, these
two words that I keep together.  Stubborn gladness. 

What
I love about the line is that it doesn’t deny the reality of the ruthless
furnace of the world.  That God wants us to be in joy, God wants us to be happy. 
Because of this extraordinary consciousness and this great ability for wonder
and marvel, and without denying any of the terrors and horrors of the world, we
also have an obligation toward joy and toward miracle and excitement.  I feel
like if I were to get another tattoo, it would probably be those two words. 
Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn gladness. 

About Me

Yolanda A. Reid is the author of The Honeyeater--a contemporary women's novel about love, heartbreak and betrayal that was a finalist for the 2014 Diva Awards.  Her poems and short fiction have appeared in literary journals and e-zines such as “Women Writers: An E-zine”; Starlight Poets; Mysteries of the Lyric World; Many Voices, Many Lands and others.  Her first novel--Porridge & Cucu: My Childhood--is about a young girl's adolescence.  Her debut poetry collection, SONNETS TO THE JAPIM BIRD, is scheduled for release in June 2017.  She lives in the USA.