by Kristen McHenry
Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo lived his short and tumultuous life on the island of Madagascar during the time of French colonial rule. He was born in the capital Antananarivo (Tananarive) in 1901 to a mother who had once been a Malagasy aristocrat but who lost her property and fell into poverty after French colonization.
Rabéarivelo attended mainly French Catholic schools, until being expelled at the age of 13. After a brief stint in public school, he dropped out entirely and worked at various odd jobs, all the while reading voraciously and teaching himself everything he could about poetry. He eventually found low-paying work as a proofreader at the printing house Imprimerie de l’Imerina, a position he retained until his death in 1937.
During Rabéarivelo’s lifetime, the French placed heavy restrictions on writing in Malagasy (the native language of Madagascar), and all texts written in French by the Malagasy people were automatically classified as French literature. Rabéarivelo acted as a sort of dual ambassador for French literature as well as traditional Malagasy literature. He was heavily influenced by both the French Surrealists and the pagan/folkloric traditions of the native Malagasy.
He wrote in French and Malagasy, and was as deeply invested in preserving Malagasy literature and language as he was in expanding on the work of the French Surrealists. Rabéarivelo translated several works of Malagasy into French. He encouraged French-language texts by Malagasy writers to be recognized as Malagasy literature.
In part because of his commitment to both languages and traditions, Rabéarivelo was held in suspicion and banned from traveling by the French government, yet he was never fully embraced by his native Malagasy. He resisted definition and continued to pursue his poetic vision while confined to a life of relative poverty on the island.
He started a literary journal called Capricorne, contributed articles and critical essays to numerous publications, mastered the Spanish language, and translated many poems. Over the course of his lifetime, seven volumes of his poetry were published. His accomplishments were accompanied by agonizing personal difficulties, including drug addiction, depression and physical illness. He married in his early 20s. He and his wife had five children, including a daughter who died at age 3.
In spite of his personal anguish, Rabéarivelo’s poems reflect an ethereal, mythic universe and a deep connection to the natural world. In the poem “You There,” Rabéarivelo speaks of a mysterious symbiotic connection to the earth, birth and growth:
You there
standing naked!
You are mud and remember it –
actually you’re the child of this parturient dark
who feeds on the milkstuff of the moon,
then slowly grows into a trunk
above this low wall the dreams of flowers crawl over
and the smell of summer at a lull.
To feel, believe, that roots push from your feet
and slide and turn like thirsty snakes
down to an underground spring
or clutch the sand,
and marry you to it so soon — you, alive
tree, unknown, unidentified tree
swelling with fruit you’ll have to pick yourself.
His poem “The Three Birds” also reflects an affinity for the spiritual reflected in the natural world:
The Three Birds
The bird of iron, the bird of steel
who slashed the morning clouds
and tried to gouge the stars
out beyond the day
is hiding as if ashamed
in an unreal cave.
The bird of flesh, the bird of feathers
who tunnels through the wind
to reach a moon he saw in a dream
hanging in the branches
falls in tandem with the night
into a maze of brambles.
But the bird that has no body
enchants the warden of the mind
with his stammering aria,
then opens his echoing wings
and rushes away to pacify all space
and only returns immortal.
Rabéarivelo’s unusual use of language is present in this translation of a traditional Malagasy poem, “Lamba.” An excerpt of that poem reads:
Few trees bloom without leaves,
Few flowers bloom without perfume
and few fruits mature
without pulp you have the foliage,
you have the perfume,
you have the pulp of the old tree
that is my race in lamba.
Your name rhymes well with legs
in this long that I chose
to protect my name of the forgetting,
in this language which speaks to the soul
while ours murmurs to the heart.
Your name rhymes well with legs
with the legs which cover
your transparent sharpness:
But you, you rhyme well with several other things in my thought.
Your appearance rhymes with rocks, in Imerina.
When there is feast and that the crowd goes on terraces:
With the strips of peaceful egrets
which come to arise on the forests of rushes
as soon as the sun capsizes.
Petri Liukkon, at Books and Writers, says of Rabéarivelo: “By replacing the reality of a colonized civilization with his own images, he created a new isolated world, full of melancholy and bitter-sweet beauty.”
In spite of his quiet rebellion against French control, Rabéarivelo’s lifelong dream was to live and write in France. An opportunity arose for him to represent the colony through a special French program, but it was denied when a group of basket-weavers were selected instead. Grief-stricken by the death of his daughter and feeling that he lost his last only chance to realize his ambitions, Rabéarivelo committed suicide by poisoning at the age of 37. Some reports claim that he recorded his dying moments in his journal.
Unfortunately it was very challenging to find a wide selection of Rabéarivelo’s work online. But don’t despair! Rabearivelo’s book Translated From The Night is available through the publisher Lascaux Editions, with English translations by Robert Zillar.
Note: Translations of “You There” and “Three Birds” by Kelli Boyles.
 Kristen McHenry works on poetry by night and health outreach by day. She created and facilitates the Poet’s Cafe, a weekly poetry workshop for homeless teens. She shares poetry and her thoughts on writing at The Good Typist.
by Nathan Moore
What is going on in this photo? Why is the figure staring at a three-legged chair? Why is the figure wearing a hood? What is keeping the chair from falling down?
This image appeals to me because of its enigmatic nature. In terms of writing, you might want to stay with the questions the scene elicits, linger over them, hesitate before rushing to an answer.
Or, as is often the case when faced with an enigma, you might start to symbolize. Is this is picture about facing a problem, contemplating mystery, the incomplete and frail work of human labor in the face of nature’s grandeur?
Offer ideas about what you see here in the comments section of this post. Next Thursday, leave a link to what you wrote in the comments section of the Get Your Poem On post.
(Note: If you include this photo in your post along with your poem, make sure you credit the artist.)
 Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
by Dana Guthrie Martin
Did you take this week’s prompt literally? Were you transported to another realm? Can you tell I am trying to do a little wordplay with the word transliteral?
Everyone has been sharing such delicious tidbits in the prompt this week — I really can’t wait to see what you all came up with. So leave a link. You know you want to.
Please read this page to find out how the Get Your Poem On and Read Write Prompt posts work.
Remember that work linked from this post is shared in precisely that spirit: sharing, as opposed to critiquing.
If you haven’t done so already, please read all the pages under About in the navigation bar.
If you participate in a Read Write Prompt, we ask that you link back here in your posts, either with a link to Read Write Poem or by using the Read Write Poem badge in your post. Sidebar links are great but it helps others find the site when you link in every post you contribute to the project. It’s not a lot to ask in acknowledgment of the work everyone is doing in providing prompts for members to use.
 Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. She writes things and stuff. Most of the time, her things and stuff happen to be poetry, or at least they call themselves poetry. She has a robot named Feldman. He’s writing a book of poems.
by Ren Powell
As long as I have been contemplating my own navel and how I can justify spending so much time with a computer, I have believed I am a poet because I see connections.
Not in the way storytellers see them, cause and effect, incident and influence — but I see how a moth that changes colors to adjust to the effects of industrial pollution in England can be connected to the camouflaging behavior of a victim of domestic violence. Tenuous connections that help me make sense of what seems senseless in the world.
While I know metaphor is not the definition of poetry, and though I have respect for haiku and for Language poets (in the abstract), metaphor is the only way I experience poetry. Probably the only way I experience experiences.
It is an uncomfortable admission to narcissism, either on a personal level or species level, that when I consider the other, I often experience it in terms of metaphors for the familiar. I anthropomorphize not only the dandelions breaking through the sidewalk, but the cracked cement itself.
A sunrise only ignites something in my solar plexus if it is mythologized somewhere along the path from my retinal nerve to my frontal lobe. It is the child dug from the rubble lifted to give us all the hope we need to keep thriving ourselves. It is the Egyptian god Ra rising from the tomb of useless artifacts to shine for 6 hours; magnificent, temporal and bittersweet.
Metaphor leads to metaphor in my mind: sunset. The letter ‘T’ and the finality of its percussive sound, despite the breath that lingers like the magentas of the setting sun; the reds, the blood that fades into blackness.
Isn’t this what we mean when we speak of accessible poetry? James Geary, in a Ted Talk on metaphors claims we speak six metaphors a minute. Many metaphors are very familiar to all of us, the connections easy to make. Metaphors stretch themselves through our subconscious synesthesia: We can skim a poem to see the shape of the letters, to know if the poem is bouba or kikki, whether the overt metaphors are familiar (e.g., sun, blood, tree). We get a feel for the poem even before we have read it. It points to the connections we know.
There are times that, as a reader, I crave this kind of accessible poetry for comfort and confirmation, but most often I need poetry that knocks my expectations out from under me, because that is also confirmation of my experience of the world: I am continually knocked onto my behind — and usually just when I am certain I am on solid ground.
It is comforting sometimes, just knowing I’m not alone in experiencing the world as a complex place: It isn’t psychotic to think lambs and lions may not, and maybe even should not, lie side by side in peace.
As a reader, I have been pushing myself lately to choose poetry that doesn’t immediately appeal to me based on biases and connections I’ve made that are limited in scope and lacking in imagination. This means I’m reading more bouba poems; it means I’m looking deeper into poems with overly familiar metaphors such as sun and blood and tree, searching for poetry that will allow me to break my familiar connections and establish new ones. I am reading poetry of the 19th century and growing as a person. Poetry as nourishment, as these lines from from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” express:
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not — lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
I just hope establishing more connections with bouba poetry won’t make me fat.
 Ren Powell has published three poetry collections and eleven books of translations. She is a graduate adviser with Prescott College’s master of arts program and is pursuing a doctorate in creative writing at Lancaster University. Learn more at her website.
by Nathan Moore
 Most Wanted, by Jeff Encke “Most Wanted is a multifaceted animal. It has many heads. It wears many hats.”
For this installment of Just One Thing, I asked Jeff Encke about his collection Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, which I find both intriguing and beautiful. The work opens up so many questions about the nature of a collection of poetry and about chance and reading.
Most Wanted is not your typical collection but instead one presented as a deck of cards. As such, word and image are married in a unique way. Why did you decide to present the collection in this manner, and what are your thoughts about how the reader might approach the work, what reading process they might employ?
Spinal Liberation: A Manifesto for Chance Operation
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000
Every poet who compiles a book-length collection faces a figure of this magnitude. Most Wanted consists of 52 poems. One can order 52 poems in exactly 8.0658 x 1067 ways — the factorial of 52, or 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 … 52. A group of 104 poems presents an even less imaginable total of 6.5044 x 10135 permutations. If each distinct arrangement represents a different possible book, then the work the poet would have to do to identify the best book from a group of 52 poems (assuming such a thing exists) is equally inconceivable. If the überpoet in question had the manuscripts printed and arranged ahead of time and could read one per minute, the task would still take 1.5346 x 1062 years. It’s probably safe to assume that our überpoet wouldn’t live that long. Even if Knopf published the collection.
Few poets I know see their work in terms of set permutations and probabilities, but most are familiar with the agoraphobic anxiety of infinite possibility — that perilous angst the artist in John Ashbery’s sestina “The Painter” feels as he tries to get the sea to sit for a portrait. An intimate recognition of and respect for infinite possibility has defined the work of many modern poets, inspiring them in varying degrees to embrace the futility of authorial intention, abandon narrative and write what Ashbery once called “hymns to possibility.”
For most, though, the consequence of uncertainty is a struggle against continuous failure with respect to self-inflicted notions of mastery. When sitting down to arrange a manuscript, a poet typically assumes that there’s a right way to do it. Certain poems belong together. An inherent natural order should be respected. While we can argue endlessly about what the specific principles of arrangement entail, the ethic of aesthetic perfection persists. If it didn’t, institutions like peer-edited journals, MFA programs, poetry prizes, state laureateships and genius grants would cease to exist.
Certain arbitrary impositions of order simplify the poet’s task. A subset of poems may share some common characteristic. You may decide, for example, that six sonnets belong together, and since there are only six, you’ll probably overlook the 720 ways to arrange them. Or perhaps you’ll decide to frontload the manuscript with the 10 best poems; even the 3.6 million variations of this subset are less daunting than the alternative (8.0658 x 1067). After months of rearranging, when you’re certain you’ve exhausted all the possibilities, you ultimately close your eyes and take the plunge. It’s called trusting your gut. Toss a pinch of salt into the pot and call it done — you don’t count the grains. You taste the soup and, like a little god, decide it’s good.
One’s comfort level with that ineluctable moment of arbitrariness — that surrender to chance operation — is what defines poet. No matter how much formal, psychological or narrative control the poet attempts to exert, writing for an audience is always a gamble. Each poet defines the stakes. When I consider the risk of writing, and the concomitant reward of complete freedom, W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” always comes to mind:
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
In their 1992 study “Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair” (appearing in the Annals of Applied Probability), mathematicians David Bayer and Persi Warren Diaconis famously averred that it takes seven riffle shuffles to randomize a deck of cards. On those rare occasions when I read Most Wanted straight through, I always begin by shuffling the deck seven times. I could do this for the rest of my life and probably never reproduce the same sequence.
I was recently invited to give a reading at a liberal arts college in Eastern Washington. When I came to Most Wanted, I decided to read from the freshly randomized deck continuously, as if it were a single poem. The natural symmetry and flow of the card order caught me by surprise, and I stumbled a few times as I read. I casted each card into a disheveled pile on the lectern, as if I were dealing a 52-card hand to eternity. During the post-reading Q&A session, a perceptive student asked me how I felt knowing that I would never read all the variations of Most Wanted. I answered that the thought was depressing, and the audience laughed, but I had meant it.
Most Wanted is a multifaceted animal. It has many heads. It wears many hats. Among other things, its form was meant to allude to the insurmountable distance between authors and readers (or lovers and beloveds), a distance that resides at the center of Merwin’s youthful self-doubt. My decision to print excerpts from the Most Wanted series on a deck of cards represented in some sense an attempt to free myself from the psychological strictures of literary production, throw off the shackles of the spine, and shift the anxiety of order to my readers. Together we — that is, all readers of Most Wanted — have a better chance, albeit an infinitesimal one, of discovering the best book. That may still be a hopeless cause, but at least the odds have improved.
The full-length version of Most Wanted is currently looking for a spine. Publishers may apply here: jeff (at) matlub (dot) net.
Jeff Encke’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Salt Hill and others. He published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse in 2004, through his imprint, Last Tangos Editions, and has since sold almost 2,000 decks to poets, tarot readers, book artists, playing card collectors and special-collections libraries throughout the world. Until 2003, he taught writing and criticism at Columbia University, where was writer-in-residence for the Program in Narrative Medicine while completing his Ph.D. in English. He now lives in Seattle, where he edits for a large philanthropic organization and teaches literature on weekends at Richard Hugo House.
Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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