Erik Noonan: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

Erik Noonan

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Erik Noonan

Three Poems

Gold

for Greg Santos

Air slants down

and makes dawn

a radiant space

turn

off your eyes

people

are talking to

each other

Orpheus

Later they claimed Apollo was my father

And heroes would follow in my footsteps

A song stirred the rocks of the Earth

Its melody cut gods off from humans

The flame sputtered at my wedding so

They whispered a dryad was what did me in

Meaning my wife the Symplegades

The Styx the Monarchs of Hell itself

No one can say why I let her go

Least of all me but a lover who has felt

The joy of love even once can't be called sad

I left pieces of myself everywhere I sang

It seems only fitting that my body would

Also be cut to shreds and the moment

Before they tore me apart I saw how

In the end humans only serve the Fates

But can't persuade them I glimpsed their eyes

In the Maenads’ eyes as they charged

A new song I thought but no time to sing

Star

                                              A perverse

Wilted flavor darkens the palette,

The sunlight has lost its whiteness,

Tinged bluish gold in the nicotine

Weave of the curtains. The perfume

The lady visitor puts down

On the dresser, while the child

Is allowed to watch her unpack,

Has the scent of memory, though

He breathes it for the first time.

Bare feet step soft on cool tile—

The boy follows her downstairs

To a bright expansive room, where

In the airtight undersea chamber

Of a mind that has grown hard

Toward itself in the forty years since,

She turns to him, smiles, takes his hand.

For Cathy

Interview

July 28th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Erik Noonan, Poet, Writer, Journalist, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to begin with your translation of Ricardo Piglia’s story, “A Fish in Ice.” In the introduction you write that it “was written in what might be called the voiceless colloquial. That is, the story has, or seems to have, no style—no verbal distortion to set it apart from what any person might actually say.” Did you choose the work because you wanted to explore the notion of a colloquial voicelessness, first and foremost, in the English language and, subsequently, whether that technique might then be viable in American poetry, or was there another reason for the choice?

EN: Words are the medium of writing, just as pigments are the medium of painting and tones are the medium of music. How do writers use words? They write the way people talk. But literary writing doesn’t copy their everyday speech, the way a transcription from an audio recording might. Instead, it copies the spirit of speech. Not what people mean to say, but what they actually do say. As a result, the voices you seem to hear in novels, stories, plays, and poems aren’t the voices of persons who really exist, they’re make-believe people, fictional people, who could be everyone or no one in a time and place.

Writing is an action, something you do, and it’s also a form of communication, something you say, but you can’t write unless you want to make something. Writing is creative. Even if you’re rambling, you need to know, or think you know, what you’re trying to achieve. You have to have an end in mind. And nothing ever turns out the way it was intended to be. Effort thwarts intent, you might say, the attempt distorts the aim. But there’s a way to write despite your intentions, and arrange things to your dissatisfaction. You scheme to surprise yourself, you plan for things to go wrong.

You can put the reader in the moment, by drawing attention to the space between one word and the next, and emphasizing what’s unsaid. When you want to do that, the words can’t be too conspicuous. The idea is to write by using the least individualistic means possible. I want a sentence with no “signature,” a line that doesn’t lead back to a personality. Style, to me, should be unseen style, style that’s felt. Some of the writers I read most aren’t the ones who show the complexity of simple things. Instead they convey complex ideas by using the simplest possible means.

I also feel that our petty, trivial world deserves grandeur. Sumptuous displays of excess against a dismal time. Overabundance and squandering, in the face of economy. The cumulative effect of multiple epithets. The pileup of the ictus. Obliquity and implication. The tacit fact, concealed behind a tapestry of surmise. Polyphony. Not the apt, but the supererogatory. Not the sweet accord that’s seldom seen, but a self-conscious departure from the consistent and the homogeneous.

We have touchstones for these two perspectives. Paul Verlaine said, “Take eloquence and wring its neck,” and John Keats said, “Be more of an artist and ‘load every rift’ of your subject with ore.”

DG: Do you believe there are things which are untranslatable?

EN: Writers wish to seize reality, or truth, and you probably can’t write at all if you don’t feel this desire, even though there’s no way to fulfill it. But if “untranslatable” means “impossible to carry across from writer to reader,” then I’d say what’s untranslatable is whatever you put into words, the thing itself, the nonverbal element you can name, but not grasp.

Writing uses the names of things in the world to name things not of the world. Every shadow has a shape, and that shape resembles something, it’s shaped like something. Objective reference is a necessary illusion. The name is the thing. So, though the words can’t capture what you want them to capture, you can make something new instead, a thing of its own. The thingness of the thing you make is equal to the thingness of the thing you didn’t make. The reader supplies the reality or truth.

DG: You’ve also translated from French, a fascinating language which contains one of my favorite terms: l'esprit d'escalier—the predicament of coming up with the perfect reply too late. Are there other unique words like that you love in the languages you translate from?

EN: People don’t understand others, or themselves. They’re deluded, they act in haste, they misremember, they black out, or they suppress their memories, they get sick, they become aware of circumstances that weren’t apparent to them before, and the new knowledge changes their actions in hindsight.

Timeworn phrases are the breath of social life. They connect us in ways we trust because they seem permanent. They’re a shorthand for norms. Their form is what they say. There’s nothing simple about them. The phrase someone says to his neighbor, just because that’s what neighbors say, is trite, and might indicate that he’s stuck in a trap, but it’s also the character stamped onto him, a mark he can’t help bearing, as he lives among others, who are stamped and marked too.

Such phrases remind me of the stories we espouse. Most of the time, it’s all we can do to live according to the narratives we’ve built our lives on. We aren’t aware we depend on fictions, and we don’t even notice they’re fictions, unless they change, because we’ve mixed them up with our lives. Our personal story is who we are, or so we believe, and we don’t like having this tale exposed as a tale, which is something philosophy does, if life hasn’t gotten there first.

The writer considers people’s mutual incomprehension, their misunderstanding of themselves, and the interplay of their narratives with their social lives and states of mind. Earlier I mentioned that the voices of fictional characters don’t say what we mean to say, but what we actually say. The same goes for the depiction of actions. Fiction shows, not only actions themselves, which can be seen, but also their inner workings, which can’t. Precision is often associated with lucidity, but there is such a thing as a precise account of the obscure. Literature should tell you about a feeling, but the feeling is in the precision of the telling, not in the feeling itself.

Unless there’s a crisis, people avoid reflecting on the brevity of life, but writers think about the human condition—that is, about our knowledge of death—as a vocation. Sometimes a writer compresses all the contradictions of a time and place into a single line, the product of years of contemplation and labor, which is also felicitous.

DG: In a review of Berta Vias Mahou’s book, They Were Coming For Him, you write that “fiction goes where biography can’t.” Do you see poetry as the bridge between storytelling and fact, or do you see it having another purpose?

EN: We can view this question after the fact, as if everything were already written, but we can also regard it as if we were the author in the midst of writing. Let’s suppose that, as long as we’re lost in the act, we can’t tell if we’re writing an autobiography or a work of fiction, or something else. Where might our suppositions lead us? What if we let ourselves forget we’re writing a biography, and begin to embellish, digress, and invent? Will we discard the “extra” material later, or is it the essence of what we’re trying to do, which we’ve only just found after a long search? What if, as Samuel Beckett wrote of Marcel Proust, the book is the search? This is the question a poet would ask. In this case, how does our approach to the endeavor change, before we even switch on the computer or pick up a pen?

When a person writes, things come to them that they wouldn’t have thought about reaching for. We don’t resort to neuroscience, but to the metaphor of the muse, the inspiration of a spirit, to explain what happens when someone writes. Think of the societies we live in. People seek out politicians and healers, not philosophers; they consult science or religion, not poetry. Everyone naturally wants an answer, an explanation, and our sort of society provides it, but philosophy and literature affirm humanity at its fullest, without answering questions, or solving problems, or explaining what happens. But this doesn’t assuage our fears. It just shows things as they are.

DG: Let’s shift gears a bit, but not entirely, and touch upon the 2019 essay you wrote dealing with National Book Award for translated literature; there you state “that for me almost all of the shortlisted titles share a certain kind of sentence, a way of writing that you might call ‘the middle style,’ neither plain nor ornate, neither abrupt nor long-winded, neither mono- nor polysyllabic, neither clear nor obscure, but able to become any of these, and then to return to a kind of equilibrium.” Do you think literature in general is becoming too formulaic and how do you see poetry in relation to all this?

EN: Life is formulaic, literature is freedom.

DG: Reviewing The Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia, translated by Robert Croll, you write: “Creative writing in any language depends upon foreign influence to challenge its authors and prevent it from going sterile.” In an ideal world, apart from Spanish and French, what languages would you love to see your own translated in, and why?

EN: I want to write a book that’s like a dream. It’s not your dream, but it’s close, it could be. And then all of a sudden, it’s not only mine anymore, but yours too. You could have dreamt it before I wrote a word, and maybe you feel like you did, so you add things to it. A feeling that came from a book becomes a fact of life and takes on a life of its own. That goes for any reader, in any language. Not everyone is going to care about the book. The people who bother to read it are the happy few. And there will always be specialists, like professors and critics, who discover that the book holds the answer to their problems, the solution that was right in front of their eyes the whole time but only appeared when they read it. But the dream belongs to everyone, and that comes first.

DG: You have a big interest in Camus, who was born in Algeria but wrote in French and lived in France. How do you see his writing?

EN: Someone recently explained Camus to me by saying his books make up a philosophical system. But he’s not that kind of writer. Camus himself said some farfetched things about his own work. If, as he claimed, a novel is a philosophy put into images, then The Stranger, his imitation of Crime and Punishment, is not an “image” of The Myth of Sisyphus, which is what Sartre thought it was, but an “image” of his master’s thesis, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. And I think the rest of his books are also “images” of this same mystical “philosophy” of his. I think Camus saw himself as carrying out a spiritual mission, which he considers to be a matter not only of literature, but also of the soul.

DG: You’ve also written about Zahia Rahmani, from Algeria, the Saudi Arabian novelist Raja’a Alem, and Ibrahim Nasrallah, the Palestinian novelist, among others. Though Arabic is a wide and diverse term, do you see a continuum of ideas, literary tendencies, or themes in the books that you’ve read by these authors?

EN: There’s “the region,” as they say, and its diaspora, and then there are nations, peoples, and languages, and finally there’s the tiny and unrepresentative sample of books that I can read in translation. All this excites me, but also makes me unwilling to generalize. I don’t think of classifications, but sensibilities, techniques, and themes. That is, I read authors and their works, rather than movements, periods, or groups. I admire too many of these writers to name.

Recently Khaled Khalifa’s novel No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, translated by Leri Price, impressed me. It’s about a family in Syria at the beginning of the century, seen in retrospect through the eyes of the youngest child: “At the time I had started to enjoy walking in the stillness of King Faisal Street, where I would reflect that Aleppo itself was as ephemeral as the act of forgetting; anything which remained of its true form would become a lie, which we reinvented day after day to keep from dying.”

DG: In a review of Rabee Jaber’s book, Confessions, you quote Egyptian-American translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid to highlight what a perfect translation must do: “the text…shouldn’t sound translated ... if it’s poetry, for example … it should sound like something that a good English or American poet would write. And the same thing in a novel.” And yet, does that leave space for the voice of the poem or novel to carry? Joseph Brodsky’s criticism of Constance Garnett comes to mind here: “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett.” In other words, a Russian novel in English can sound like it was written by a great English writer, but does that allow its Russian essence to remain?

EN: The English language is the bloody history of English. Translation is at the origins of our literature. Our earliest poets translated from French and Italian, and didn’t credit the authors, but claimed this foreign poetry was their own. Then William Tyndale translated the Hebrew and Greek Bible into the language that we speak every day. When a new spirit enters the written vernacular, there’s a new era. Writing in English is never the same after these things happen. Look at Arunava Sinha’s translations from Bengali!

Baudelaire presents an interesting case. In our fascination with The Flowers of Evil, we forget that the French poet translated Edgar Allan Poe, who isn’t so exotic, at least not in the US. English has absorbed Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, and their works have acquired another life in anglophone literature. And then there’s Tolstoy. His breadth, his impersonality, and his interest in what Iris Murdoch would call “other people” are all scarce qualities at any time.

The line you quoted from Brodsky doesn’t sound right. Are you sure he said that? I think the reader ignores the translator. In the early twentieth century, Italians read Melville and Hemingway in Cesare Pavese’s translations. Do I, an American, think they couldn’t tell the difference? Juan Carlos Onetti and Horacio Castellanos Moya speak with distinct voices in Katherine Silver’s English translations. Brodsky himself translated English poets into Russian. I assume Russian readers can tell the difference, even though they’re reading Brodsky.

DG: Reviewing Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, you write: “When we listen to music, the ear produces tones that complement the ones we hear; and when we look at paintings, the eye supplies colors to go with the ones we see: the imagination acts the same way when we read.” To what extent do music and the visual arts influence your poetry?

EN: A musician hears tones and rhythms in their head when they read notes on a staff. Phrases and changes pass through the hands of composers and players, as a part of the vocabulary of the art form. Writing resembles music in this respect. Words say other things, apart from their prose sense, if you read them as motifs.

The novel comes into being in the reader’s imagination over a period of time, and during the act of reading, the reader writes lines between the lines, and the writer leaves a space for this. The writer is attuned to the reader, the reader to the writer, and the two create a work together. The auditory and visual imaginations are also creative in this way.

I’m not much of a photographer or draftsman. I hang around them and watch. The visual artist’s perspective has always meant a lot to me. Time in a visual image, and the way the artist understands this in relation to space, interests me. What the viewer experiences is instantaneity, or simultaneity, but it’s never quite true that there’s no time at all in visual art. Where is it? The blink of an eye? I fall silent in the presence of an artist.

There’s nothing like The Leopard. As E.M. Forster said, it’s not so much a historical novel, as a novel that happens to take place in history. It’s about the emotion of history, the infiltration of history into the feel of a time and place, the way the currents of history take up residence in an emotional climate. What Lampedusa calls “the ambience of a conflict.”

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

EN: Is there a single word of mine in all I write? I don’t know who’s talking. At first it seems to be me, some recognizable extension of myself, or a self of mine. But then it turns out not to be. Everything recedes. It’s as if my words were being spoken by someone else. Does the novel describe a single self, or more than one? They come from me, and/or to me, I’m not them. If I strike an attitude, if I’m in a mood, those things aren’t myself, any more than I am what I will be, or what I was. I read to find out what the words say, not what I want them to say. I speak, but the sentence won’t hear my voice. I set pen to paper, I can’t tell what’s there, none of it belongs to me. I place lines in the mouth of an unreal person.

Author Bio:

Erik Noonan is the author of the poetry collections Stances and Haiku d’Etat, and his writing appears in the anthology Cross Strokes. He is Managing Director at JackLeg Press and Assistant Dean at the San Francisco Film School.