Hypnotic Qualities

Michael Lista tries to get at the magic of Ricardo Sternberg's poetry:

Magic, by definition, is an exemption to the natural order, and the first thing readers notice and admire about Sternberg’s poems is the overwhelming sense that they shouldn’t work as well as they do. Their constituent parts are too simple; the language is that of everyday speech, sparingly multi-syllabic and rarely sending you to the dictionary. Faulkner once said something like that to Hemingway and intended it as an insult, but as Hemingway knew, it’s hard to cast a spell on someone whose nose is in the OED. And that’s just it: Sternberg’s poems operate the same way that spells do. He describes his own technique as “slowly blowing breath/ into each syllable,” and even here we can see the magic at work: the expertly weighted lines balanced by alternating alliteration, the bookending L sounds, the enjambment machine-tooled to correspond to the length of a breath. But what puts the lines over is that the mechanics of the artistry are hidden in the rafters, leaving only the illusion onstage. The sense is less that the magic has been muscled into place than that Sternberg has divined the secret connections between the words, unlocking their hypnotic qualities. As Quintilian said, “the perfection of art is to conceal art.” The effect is a feeling that the laws have been upended, of discovering that the magician’s coin has vanished from his hands and, abracadabra, appeared behind your ear.

Perfect Phrases

Michael Lista reviews Ricardo Sternberg's latest collection and pronounces him "one of the absolute best poets in this country."

Some Dance doesn’t so much mark a departure from Sternberg’s previous work as continue to plot a trend, an evolution from the folkloric and fantastic to the secular and contemporary. Written in the voice of an “inveterate optimist,” Some Dance finds Sternberg taking account of his world, his life, and bestowing to it the dignity of his style, transforming it like the inveterate optimists of the insect world, “The Bees,” with “the trick (or is it wisdom?) / that allows them to distil / from the thorn of grievance, / the sweetest honey.” He takes us through his encounters with charlatans and stoned surgeons, lost loves, failed marriages, dead friends and relatives, the dictionary, a fridge full of expired food and more, and attends to each with the same verbal precision, panache and pathos, so that the unerring consideration of his aesthetic becomes a kind of ethical invigilation, the redemption of imperfect lives by perfect phrases.

Sunday Poem

THE BENCH 

Forget the fiddle faddle,
make do with just one fact:
blueness runs deep as this ocean
he stares at from the bench
here where the bay narrows
to a stone throat words rush through
gushing at full throttle
as if with too much to say
and hardly the breath to say it
while he, scrambling events from his life
with fiction and the TV soaps,
nudges the scales in his favour
but getting no purchase on truth
has almost convinced himself
that, throughout,
he merely did what needed done.

From Some Dance (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014) by Ricardo Sternberg

(Illustration by Christopher Nielsen.)

Sunday Poem

FROM A LINE OF DARIO

"da al viento la cabellera"

With no dissenting votes

we gave to the wind her hair.

It brushes your cheeks,

now it brushes mine.

To the bee and to

the hummingbird:

her breasts.

We envy them the sweetness

that will be gathered there.

To the ocean belong

both her feet.

They will become

two inseparable

incredible fish

who may come out to leave

strange prints

beckoning bachelors

to walk out to sea.

We give the ocean

both her feet

and we warn you.

Many claimed her hands:

A tree wanted them

for fruit that would

be eager, for fruit

that would not wait.

A flock of birds

petitioned for her hands

claiming poetic justice

would be served were

the feet in the water

to be echoed by

the hands in the air.

We agree with this logic;

give instead to the tree

her ears

that it may hear itself

stretch and grow.

From The Invention of Honey (1990) by Ricardo Sternberg.