Bøger af Martin Bidney

My collection of tone-crafted poems is a call to song. I named it "Book of the Floating Refrain" to highlight a musical feature of each poem: the line that's repeated in every stanza appears in line 1 with stanza one, in line 2 with stanza two, and so on, till it floats down to line 5 in stanza five. Refrains were typical of the word songs a late medieval "troubadour" poet would write to his lady love, and I'm a modern troubadour who hopes to awaken in you, the reader, a liking for this noble, mellifluent, canorous craft. My dream is that, at some point, you'll put the book down and write a word song of your own. Because troubadour word song writing is an existential project, a quest, a therapy, a sensual pleasure, a means toward love and friendship, an overcomer of doubt and even a builder of character, the result is that art and life merge. A way of art-making becomes a way of life. And a word song form devoted to enhancing both art and life becomes a kind of "wisdom literature" in its intent and goal. Bidney includes a "blogatelle" (blog + bagatelle) of commentary to accompany every poem in the present book, though often the blogatelle refuses to be wholly, or even partly, written in prose and sprouts wings for its own lyrical flight!

As a songwriter, I think about music every day . . . As a poet, I value melody and rhythm and harmony.My adventure in this 2-month verse journal is to unearth an ancient treasure unknown to most poetry lovers, the Greco-Roman "alcaic" stanza form. There had been earlier rediscoveries of this appealing melodic achievement-in Britain, Germany, and Russia-but I don't know of any other poet writing alcaics today. Here you will find 99 new original poems in the old-time rhythm, plus 5 alcaic art songs I've composed, with the sheet music included. You can do all sorts of things in this adaptable stanza: create a memoir episode, a childhood awakening, a tribute to a mentor-friend, a nature sketch, a painting or musical work, a satire, a therapeutic sermonette, a hymn, a psalm. And I'm guessing you'll want to sing the "alcaic revival" music, too.

Jump in! The six "chapbook" collections were composed purely for pleasure - mine and yours. I have one theme and one technique. The theme is dialogue, and the technique is music made with words. Every numbered entry is dialogic, an encounter of two voices. First I write about fictive taxi drivers I talk with. Then I hold dialogues with 48 paintings by Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967), one of the world's most enjoyable painters. My third venture is to converse with the spirit of the Gallic ballade writer François Villon (1431-ca. 1463. I alter his ballad form in small ways while keeping the Frenchman's tight, sweet harmonies. Project number four is to reveal my "Russian Loves" by translating some all-time favorite lyrics from the Russian, while answering them with "replies" or commentary poems with similar forms or topics. I focus on Afanasy Fet (1820-1892), a major though neglected Russian master. The strangest item in this section is my re-translation of K. D. Balmont's version of Poe's "The Bells" back into English. Ten times better than Poe! My fifth offering is a set of "reactions" to the flash fictions of Franz Kafka. I include comments on his life and writing - plus a comment on a slightly longer story in my poem "Blumfeld's Two Balls." Don't skip this one... Finally, you get a tour of Dante's hell, freshly updated in a sonnet for each canto, with some "other treats" to clarify the medieval monsterpiece. You see that dialogue's my theme: I'm always responding to a mentor, a guide, a teacher, a friend. As for the technique - music made of words - I care just as much about that. Read every piece aloud and enjoy what it does for your ears. This is the fifteenth poetry book by Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.

I want this book to be life-giving. I've called my poems "fourteeners" because the traditional name of "sonnets" might perhaps remind too many people of high school Shakespeare and boredom brain-death.(In fact, the bard's fourteeners are a bisexual diary that could easily be a TV series-look at my Shakespair dialogues with him.) "Artisanal" suggests the care that craft-beer brewers take in choosing and preparing authentic ingredients. In my 100 poems, the components are chiefly "tonal" because I'm offering a musical entertainment. The poems are "slimmed down" to four-beat lines to give them the beauty we admire in a slender shape. And should the phrasing "tight, sweet harmonies" convey a sexual mood, that's because poetry is passion. Every fourteener is provided with its own conversational intro-a "blog." The topics range throughout my life and interests, and they include novelists, composers, philosophers, psychologists, mythic and religious traditions - an index of names at the back will direct you to these and the rest.

WHEN A THOUGHT BECOMES A WORDSONG, its transformation into verbal art is an imaginative one. My candle flame emblemizes transformative imagination. "When one learns from a master one becomes connected on a deep level. This surely happened in your case, as you not only learned but integrated the teachings to the point where you could generate your own."-Rivkah Slonim, Education Director The Rohr Chabad Center for Jewish Student Life at Binghamton University. THE LATE RABBI ADIN EVEN ISRAEL STEINSALTZ (1937-2020) was indeed a master-a prolific author, translator, and scholar who as interpreter of Judaica is unsurpassed in modern times. The import of his work is universal. Among his commentaries on spiritual treasures was an interpretation of the Tanya, by Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1813), the great moralist and mystic. THE STEINSALTZ TANYA (THREE-PART VERSION in English 2003, 2005, 2007) is extraordinary in prose style, in fullness of elucidation, in wisdom of both mind and heart, and in spiritual depth and scope, as it abounds in a wealth of anecdotal and philosophic traditions from the entire range of Hasidic mystical literature. Reading it, I was seized with a kind of fervor and in 13 days wrote 108 poems, interpreting passages I admired from all three volumes. WHAT I OFFER YOU IS A BOOK OF MUSICAL compositions that happen to have words rather than prescribed pitches. Every poem in the book will show you my care for craft and joy in musical rhythm.

The Boundless and the Beating Heart is a dialogue with Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), a world-class poet-Gustav Mahler's favorite-whose lyrics have been set to music nearly 2000 times. I translate the first 4 books of The Wisdom of the Brahman: A Didactic Poem in Fragments (1835-6). It's a guidebook fashioned by a western Sufi pilgrim, a lyrical imaginer who in a poetic diary is journaling his way toward an understanding of the human condition. The word "Brahman" indicates a solitary thinker, but in this book he doesn't walk alone. The translator replies to each of Rückert's religious musings, nature thoughts, reveries, parables, anecdotes, maxims, and jokes with a related original poem in the same lyric form the poet used. A comparative scholar of world scriptures, Rückert wants The Wisdom to be not only broad but deep, so he aims at universal thought-songs not confined to one tradition. His mentor J. W. von Goethe had a similar goal in West-East Divan (1819), and the Sufi sage Ibn Arabi formulated it by saying that all religions are shape-giving containers for Spirit. Rückert's "Brahman" reads no scripture but that of Nature. Each "gleam" of insight he gets he will make into a "rosary bead" of prayerful poetry with the rounded shape of the changeful horizon. Only the human "heart" can transmit these gifts. Boundless Reality and the unbounded heart, as it beats in rhythmic song, are in dialogue. Goethe offered two more symbols that clarify Rückert's gleam and bead. Goethe views inhaling and exhaling, concentration and release, as two "gifts of grace," like the receiving of a gleam and the shaping of it into a poetic bead. I combine this idea with another one, taken from Goethe's personal myth of Lucifer and God. Seeing Lucifer as repeatedly rebelling against and then returning to God, Goethe thinks we should all live like this, alternating between self-assertion and self-transcendence, between "selving" and "unselving." This image of contrasting movements reveals the implication of gleam and bead for moral psychology. They are emblems of the thoughtful and the active life. The four "books" of our dialogue develop these seed-ideas. Book I shows Being as activated in Becoming when we alternate between heart and horizon. Book II offers moral psychology, illustrating "selving" and "unselving" in parable-stories. Book III turns toward maxims, free-associative journaling, and humor. Book IV adds to our awareness of the problems of practical life a grateful recognition of the aid given by prior finders of the Boundless in the beating heart.

ONE OF THE MAJOR BISEXUAL IMAGININGS IN WORLD LITERATURE, the Eclogues of Virgil are ancient Roman musical masterworks, RIVALING THE SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE. Every wordsong in the group of ten is a one-act play, and every character is a music lover. Love and Death are always with us, to enjoy and to suffer, but WORD MUSIC IS THE GREAT TRANSCENDER: ART REDEEMS LIFE.

A villanelle is a brief poem with a double refrain, suited for personal wisdom writing. A blogatelle is a hybrid word: blog + bagatelle (meaning a light, playful piece of music). The dialogues between casual blogatelle and focused villanelle offer a continuing conversation to engage the reader. My hundred colloquies have themes taken from the Sufi thinkers. (1) Each of us shares with the origin or cause of the universe an inmost Being or Essence that is unknowable. (2) So everything in yourself or in the surrounding world can be a metaphor of the Unmanifest, the Unknown in both you and the world. (3) Every myth, religion, creed or legend is a metaphor of that same twofold Unknown in the individual soul and the surrounding Boundless. Every formulation or imagining is a glass to hold the water of Spirit, giving it form and color. Your nature and your world - your personality and your individual sexuality - are each a spectrum, a continuum, where metaphors can blend, change, and switch form or meaning. Metaphoric disclosures of the Unknown are partial, oblique, and momentary. Their unboundedness of implication encourages alertness to each moment of your experience. A disclosure of the unknown can be an epiphany configured in the senses. It can also take on the nature of a summons by a potential arising in your awareness, a means to acquire fuller Being, greater nearness to your own depth of Unknown Being. So here's a final theme. (4) Be open to the summons of potential, as to the call of an angel, friend, mentor, companion, or other metaphoric Name of the Unnamable - each one of these uttering a call of the heart to become who you are.

INthis volume you'll find, form-faithfully translated, New Poems I and II (1907-1908), containing 179 works by lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). An innovative feature is the pairing of each lyric with a "reply" poem by the translator, or translated by him from another poet writing on a related theme. The result is a richly diverse book-length dialogue or symposium, a pioneering colloquy on comparative literature. Rilke's interests-in mythology, history, religion, travel-range widely, and the manifold dialogue extends them further. To a startling degree, every Rilke lyric is like "The Panther" or "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the two exemplary poems treated in the "Introduction." Each is a matter of being and becoming, dream and reality, space and time, life and death. Rilke is the foremost ontological poet. Because this dimension of his thought and feeling is at once so wide in implication and so intently focused on the concrete existence of a thing or creature as we watch it develop from within, he will often approach the limit of what can be sung in language. The means of expression he employs to do this are so intricate and subtle that we must empathetically follow the windings of his syntax as well as the rhythm and harmony of his words. Together they provide the means whereby music can aid speech in winging the distance from heart-thought to expression.

Here are lyrical treasures from lands where the heights of poetic achievement have been reached over the course of centuries.The first third of the book is focused on a Hindu-based world, the last two thirds on worlds of Islam. In ancient story poems by Kalidasa preternatural realms intensify the highest blessings we enjoy (or, at times, enjoy-and-suffer) on our glorious earth. I feel here an implicit metaphysic of life-making energy as an overflowing and spendthrift strength. My dialogues with poet Bhatrihari elaborate this feeling. The Islam-nurtured anecdotes, parables, legends, metaphors, and other vehicles of spiritual nourishment challenge equally the mind and the emotions-adding, as well, copious portions of wit and irony, satire and whimsy and humor. Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), a German poet and translator of genius who learned 44 languages, made these rare poetic treasures available for me to render into English wordsongs for you. I write verse "replies" to all the poems, and together they form an extended time-travel "interview."

For 600 years, roughly 1050 to 1650, Persian-writing poets created a renaissance of lyrical expression, a treasury of entertaining and thoughtful wordsong. I've selected 15 poets who amaze me from Joseph von Hammer's encyclopedic German anthology of 1818. I translate 7 poems by each poet, and in my "interviews" I reply to every poem in my own original verse, adding further context in a little "blogatelle." Each poet is a friend to me as well as a mentor. What unites them is an exploratory tradition. All are influenced by Sufi mysticism, an outlook based in Islam but trying to transcend it and all other scriptural religions. Love is the predominant focus: love for God and creation, for heaven and earth, for men and women, for wine and travel, and always for vigorous, mellifluent verse.

The works of Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) are a gift of immense value to the creative artist, for this prolific Sufi thinker tells of God the All-Imaginer, Poet of the Pluriverse. The inmost Being of the Real, the Infinite, not knowable by mortal minds, is symbolically shown in the worlds and creatures God imagines, which are metaphors. God is a poet, and only a poet can "taste" the Real via sensory emblems. The Real must be imagined. Is Ibn Arabi, then, the prose counterpart to Rumi (1207-1273), the world's greatest mystic poet? This might be true, except that Ibn Arabi's prose is so ingenious and heart-expanding in resourceful metaphor that even in a prose medium he, too, is a Great Imaginer. For Ibn Arabi, God is a longing Lover, whose breath of yearning was the origin of our world. Responding to His love, we increase His fullness of Being! God's activity is one of partial, unrepeatable, extremely rapid poetic self-disclosures. He is vividly present in His Names, not Platonic "Forms" but rather Forces that call on us to embody them and so to actualize changingly the potentials in God's Mind. Three sources helped me with the dramatic monologue sonnets I wrote for Ibn Arabi to speak. In The Meccan Revelations we learn that beliefs are knots: they tie things together but can also tie you up. Religions are only cups giving color and shape to the water of spirit. Potential beings in God's Mind cry out to be created, and when given birth they are wedded to Him forever, so deep is their love of embodied Being. In The Bezels of Wisdom Moses tells of Pharaoh's compassionate wife who influenced her husband to turn to God before he died. Jesus thinks delay in answering a prayer may mean the Lord wants to hear again the voice of His beloved. In The Seven Days of the Heart we transcend the thinghood of things to feel the breath they bear of the Lover that had made them.

MORE FOUR! is a celebration of metric music and rhythmic wordsongLike my sister and our late parents, I'm left-handed. Four are the beats of a march. I love to imagine somebody inventing the rhythm LEFT right, LEFT right. A left-handed violinist and vocalist, I'm fond of march music: ONE two, THREE four! The human heartbeat. And yet there are highly diversified "tunes" you can play with a four-beat line, as I'll show you. Inspired by mentors from Gustav Mahler to Gertrude Stein, by 79 years of living and listening, I'll make my four-beat rhythms do things you never heard before in this festival of original poems!

In my 79 years of life so far I've probably never had a more productive period than the joyful month in autumn I spent creating this collection of 96 poems. As an explorer of rare verse forms and gorgeous rhythms in danger of going extinct, I was beside myself with joy in its creation. I invite you to join me on this spirited journey tuning into the beat, the music, and the flow of an unusual rhythm which proves itself wonderfully versatile and modern.

This book of word songs in unexpected melodic patterns will surprise you by its equally unusual liveliness. I'm so eager to begin singing for you that, as you noticed, I've already written a prefatory poem in one of the varied kinds of triple rhythm units I'll be illustrating (la LA la; weak STRONG weak; one TWO three; x/x). The strangest thing I'll be doing in my collection is to bring about a resurrection of ancient stanza patterns embodying the musical structures I love. The uncustomary triple-rhythm stanza forms richly displayed will acquire a real if unlikely novelty by presenting tools so extremely old.

This book is like no other presentation of Rumi you have ever seen: a diversely representative 99-part translation set up as a talk show of conversations in artisanal lyrical verse, where every Rumi selection stimulates a carefully crafted sonnet as a modern-day comment-reply to a medieval Persian poet of world stature. The appealing poet Maulana (or Mevlana) Jalalaldin Muhammad Rumi(1207-1273) gave the impetus for the order of Whirling Dervishes, who emblemize, in their solemn, graceful circling dances with mystically symbolic gestures, the nature of the universe itself. The created world is a gigantic circle of fire that dances forever in amorous adoration around the Throne of God. This God is beyond all concepts: His 99 "names" are only rubrics of qualities or attributes. Closely allied with medieval mystic teacher Ibn Arabi, to whom Rumi is often compared, the Persian lyrical dancer-visionary sees us in God's likeness. God, Ultimate Being, is unknowable; the created world reflects him (or her, or it, or them) only obliquely and incompletely. We, too, are unmanifest, hidden even from ourselves, in our essential Being; and, as with the unmanifest nature of God, we can be known to ourselves only in fragmentary flashes. What does this mean for us? It means we must each be a poet, using metaphor to imagine whatever in ourselves cannot, because of its depth, be known by intellect. God is the First Poet, and we, created in His likeness, must be the creative artists of our imagined worlds as we seek, in our pilgrimage-lives, to imagine the two Great Unknowns, the unmanifest Ultimate Being in our Source and within us. In the book you are holding, I allow myself the privilege to converse with Rumi by means of "dialogic translation"-a newly conceived genre of literature. It's like a series of YouTube or podcast interviews I set up here with my medieval friend, the engaging Sufi mystic who unfailingly invigorates the hearer in many countries of the world today

The poetry of Nikolay Gumilev (1886-1921) is part of the life of every educated Russian. Children read him in school for his appealing adventure tales-notably "The Discovery of America," where he shows Columbus guided by the same spirit that gave life to the Russian poet's own lifetime work-the "Muse of Distant Travel." To young Russians Gumilev plays a role like that of Antoine de Saint--Exupéry for the youth of France. Yet, characteristically, the "Discovery" is filled with meaning for every mental traveler. One of the central poets of the 20th century, a celebrator of love and risk, heroism and passion, a psychological explorer of deep acuity and a wanderer whose work could almost serve as a poetic world atlas, Gumilev was an officer in the White army and co--founded the influential poetic movement of Acmeism. Contemporary with Joseph Conrad, he devoted a book to his pioneering journeys in Africa-where he mapped uncharted terrain. There is nothing like this African panorama in modern Western verse. Gumilev needs to be better known in America for his lyrical work-mellifluent, vigorous, and riveting. The eight unabridged Gumilev collections offered here in form--true renderings will at last allow speakers of English a chance to acquire a thorough acquaintance with one of the finest and-to native speakers-best--known poets of the Russian canon. Romantic Flowers (1908) offers a kaleidoscope of the poet's early interests, mainly in the Symbolist tradition. Pearl (1910) adds a more detailed realism and offers outstanding narrative poems on Odysseus and Adam. The five--part Alien Sky (1912) combines the vivid concrete imagery of Acmeism with passionate lyrics often conveying a religious dimension, as in "The Prodigal Son" and the Islamic poem "Pilgrim," and ending with a hilarious one--act comedy in verse, "Don Juan in Egypt." Quiver (1916) is filled with European travel postcards and character sketches. In Pyre (1918) many lyrics are tenderly personal. In the brief Porcelain Pavilion (1918) we find vignettes of domestic life in China and Indochina, while Tent (1918) is an epic--scale travelogue of Africa, blending realism and boys' adventure fantasy. Fire Column (1921) achieves a culminating religious and philosophic depth.

During the 30 days (2011) I spent teaching English in the Egyptian desert settlement of Sekem, a sustainable eco-friendly farming community, I was on a Sufi pilgrimage of inner and outer discovery, embodied in the 90 poems I offer here. In my Introduction you'll hear additional lyrics I wrote about the mystical teachers in Islamic tradition who galvanized my efforts in exploring and have continued to guide me in the 15 years of my "retoolment." The form of my daily triple entry in the spiritual diary at Sekem evolved from the initial inspiration of Edward FitzGerald's rendering of quatrains by Sufi poet Omar Khayyam. Here's the best known of these: "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness - / Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!" By following my pilgrim journey, you'll see how I got from there to entry #90: "A vast and mighty wind passed through / My hair and eyes and mind: I knew / It was a moment only, though / Undimmed the flare; unmuted blew / The summons. You, that made me grow / And want me to the world to show / A tone, a word - what shiver shook / The body-soul, and loved it so! / O blood-tone of our ocean-brook, / And pounding heart, and lightning look, / If at this moment I should die, / There's none will say that I mistook / What might all sighing justify - / The life lines that before you lie. / Inhale again the heaven-blue: - / Blest every breath, west-heading cry."

Book of the Amphibrach is the first of several verse journals I aim to offer, each of them highlighting a "foot" (syllable structure) or line unit largely neglected or under-used in Anglo tradition. An amphibrach is a three-syllable rhythm unit: weak-STRONG-weak, represented as x/x or U-U. Like the medieval troubadours, I'll be inventive in structuring each musical line and stanza. The entries retain the dates of their composition, showing how my life and art proceed from day to day. My journals are journeys, and my mentality is that of a pilgrim. I'm attached to the Sufi idea that every creed, myth, religion, or metaphor is just a glass lending form and color to the water of spirit as revealed in ways suitable to one's current level of awareness.

In the Bible text called "The Song of Songs, Which Is Solomon's" we have one of the most passionate love poems ever composed, and a shining guide. Because the word "song" will imply, for most music lovers, a regular, steady rhythm with word harmonies and usually rhymes, I have versified the Authorized Version in heart-welcomed English meters with patterns of assonance, alliteration, and rhyming. King Solomon addresses loving words to an unnamed woman he calls "the Shulamite," and in A Lover's Art I name her Shula. Solomon also authored the biblical Proverbs, a book of wisdom, and in the 16th century arose a tradition of regarding the recipient of the love hymn as Lady Wisdom (Hokhmah, or in Greek Sophia). In stage three of this wonderful progress, Kabbalah or Jewish mystical thought has tended to equate the woman embodying wisdom to the Shekhinah, or indwelling female emanative presence of God, the vitalizing energy of the world. Invigorated by the Solomonic example, I have replied to his masterly Canticle with 280 original love lyrics. To Shula, Sophia, Shekhinah--or Woman, Wisdom, World-- dedicate this modern dialogue with my mentor in the lover's art of song.