Showing posts with label duende. Show all posts
Showing posts with label duende. Show all posts

Friday, August 13, 2021

The Muse of Duende

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of 

Death and His Lorca 


The Muse of Duende 

I’m wandering in a shadowy part of town. It is dusk in my dream. I am lost. Can’t find my purse. I think I’m headed for a staircase when I hit a wall. I am told I’m in the Duende—which is the name of a trickster spirit or elf in the mythos of Southern Spain. The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca insisted that duende was essential for the arts. For Lorca duende includes “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical” writes Christopher Maurer in the Preface to a lovely little book called In Search of Duende.

Flamenco Dancer


Lorca has been with me since college, when I was awe–struck by his Poet in New York. I was strangely at home in his nightmarish visions of that city ninety years ago—during the Great Depression. I shared his outrage about American materialism and industrialization and was spellbound by the prophetic tone of his poems, their musicality, and long Whitmanesque lines. As the firstborn in America child of a family that fled the Shoah I never felt at home in the death–denying, “positive–thinking” America of the fifties and early sixties. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Lorca’s duende opened my path into poetry. I recognized this spirit in myself—in my own intense relationship with the dead, and my tender feelings of kinship with Lorca, who died tragically in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. He was assassinated by Franco’s goons because of his leftist politics and because he was gay. He was 38. 

Federico Garcia Lorca


Lorca is a poetic ancestor, a Virgil who guides me in and out of underworlds, a major influence whose work derives from music—the Deep Song of the Gypsy siguiriya. In Search of Duende includes Lorca’s essay, Deep Song, in which he writes that the siguiriya “begins with a terrible scream…It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.” These gypsy songs have duende, Lorca writes—[they] “are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the mire that gives us the very substance of art.” Jung would recognize that mire as the prima materia of the alchemists. But for Lorca it is more embodied. He quotes “an old maestro of the guitar” who said: “The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of your feet.”

Alhambra Dome


Twelve years ago, when Dan suggested we travel to Southern Spain, I felt the duende climb up inside me, from the soles of my feet, insisting that we visit Granada—Lorca’s home. Granada is also the home of Manuel de Falla—one of Dan’s favorite Spanish composers. Dan and I had always wanted to see the fabled Alhambra— situated in Granada. The Alhambra, Lorca’s home, de Falla’s home, flamenco music and dance are etched in my memory and in a series of poems which poured through me during that pilgrimage. They are saturated in Lorca’s duende and later, as we travelled to Córdoba with its tragic history of the Jews, by the duende of our ancestors. 

Lorca makes a distinction between the Muse and duende. I don’t. My Muse comes to life when the duende appears, when the flamenco dancer raises her skirts and stamps her feet, when the gypsy singer screams, when death makes an unexpected appearance. She and the duende dance, sing, and poetry begins. As fate would have it, when we returned from that trip, the duende came home with us. We suffered a series of significant deaths among friends and family. And both Dan and I had serious health issues. The duende had escaped from its Spanish container and leaked into our whole lives and into my fifth collection of poems. 

According to Lorca, “the true fight is with the duende.” The duende, unlike the Muse, is a combatant, who “does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house.” Why is this so important? Because, Lorca explains: “The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it, for with duende it is easier to love and understand.” It is the duende who insists I face my own mortality, that I let in the dead who knock on the windows of my heart, wanting to be remembered. it is duende which became the magnet for the poems in Death and His Lorca —a collection in which death takes many forms and the dead show up as spirit guides and companions. 

These poems were written before Trump was elected, before the pandemic hit, before mass death invaded our safe American world. I hope Death and His Lorca will bring you who read it to the confluence of the “dark waters” of duende—where life and death flow together—aspects of the same mystery. Here is the opening poem: 

Flamenco Dancer 

When her arms rise up like Gaudi’s spires 
and her hands unfurl like forest violets 
When the lamentation of the Moors    the Gypsies    the Jews 
makes an agony about her eyes   and her spine 
is a wild and supple snake   When she hitches up her skirts
and the stamping begins   in red shoes   She is riding 
the exiled horse of her hips   over the yellow land 
over dust that remembers   ashes of the burnt 
bones of the broken   The soles of her feet 
beat a drum   arousing the spirits   of her great 
great   great   great   grand   parents 

                                                    She rides and she rides 
                                                                    that exiled horse 
                                                                            over Lorca’s unmarked grave 



* * * * * *

August 24th Event Invitation:

Please join me on Zoom on August 24th from 7-8. I’ll be reading from Death and His Lorca as the featured reader in the Poetic License Fourth Tuesday Series. Check out the website at www.poeticlicensesonoma.com for more information.

Order Death and His Lorca from Amazon here.

To order from your favorite bookstore: ISBN: 9781421837024 (Distributed by Ingram)

To order a signed copy from me, send an email and I’ll send you the information.
 

Friday, November 11, 2011

News from the Muse: My Lorca Muse

The Story Behind the Poem

Where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes a windblowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things. Federica Garcia Lorca


It is just over a year ago since Dan and I were in Andalusia (Southern Spain)--a trip we’d planned for many years. It was a pilgrimage for both of us. Dan’s Sephardic Jewish ancestors called us. My dark eyed, dark haired grandmother, who left me her Spanish shawl, called us. The Golden Age of Spain, when Jews, Muslims, Christians lived together--mostly in harmony--influencing each other’s cultures, poetry and music--called us. The restless dead--those who suffered terrible deaths in the Auto da Fe of the Inquisition, or in the Spanish Civil War--called us. The ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet who was murdered by the fascists in Granada, whose work has spoken to me as long as I’ve been writing poetry, called us.


Today the mail brought me a small poetry magazine, Visions International, which has published four of my poems from that trip to Spain. This is what calls me to write about Lorca, who sprang to life as my muse in Spain. I was reading Leslie Stainton’s fine biography, Lorca: A Dream of Life, all over Southern Spain; it helped me understand Lorca’s power over me. Stainton writes: “The poet’s mission, according to Lorca is ‘to animate...to give life’” Yes! “Metaphor, Lorca insisted, must give way to the hecho poético--the 'poetic event' a phenomenon at once illogical and incomprehensible, as miraculous as 'rain from the stars.'” Yes!

Lorca cuts through to the essence of image, to the immediacy of experience. He works to achieve those moments when something from the depths leaps to mind, breaking the rules of rationality, yet making a deeper kind of sense. In Lorca’s poetry, the conscious and the unconscious meet. This is what I’m after in my own poetry, but it is not easy. Lorca gives me courage and inspiration. The distinction he makes between metaphor and “poetic event” strikes to the heart of what I’m after both as a poet and a Jungian--felt experience that brings together body, soul and spirit, inner and outer, dream and waking life.

I remember standing in his bedroom in the lovely Lorca home outside of Granada--the Huerta de San Vicente. There were red, blue and yellow Moorish tiles on the floor, a tall palm outside his peaceful window. It was there--at his small wooden desk--that he sat and wrote. Over his bed hung a shrieking image of the Mater Dolorosa. Lorca carried within him that paradox--deep peace and great agony.

I saw the grand piano, and the Victrola on which Lorca is said to have played a recording of a Bach cantata over and over while working on “Blood Wedding.” Again, the tension of peace and agony. I remember white lilies on the table, and a portrait of his little sister Isabel playing the piano.

I mused over the distinction Lorca makes between the Muse and duende. “All that has black sounds has duende,” Lorca said. “These black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and ignore, the mire that gives us the very substance of art.” For Lorca, the duende has everything to do with death. Spain is a country haunted by restless ghosts and their terrible deaths. But Lorca doesn’t think much of the muse. For him she is distant and tired; she doesn’t deal directly with the dead.

Not my muse! My inner landscape is haunted by restless ghosts and their terrible deaths, and the Sister from Below speaks directly from their realm. In my memoir, The Sister from Below, she appears as a ghastly Eurydice, a “ghostly wraith, a dark specter....Her dark eyes are black eye sockets." She describes herself as “the black hole, the void...the place of rot...the black earth of the soil being turned.” So you see, she is the mire of which Lorca spoke, the duende which blows “over the heads of the dead...smells of baby spittle, crushed grass...,” becomes the rich soil of poetry and deep song in which new life can grow.

Turning over the mire and the soil of my experiences in Spain when we were in Granada, I worked on a poem that had begun in Madrid. I hoped to evoke Lorca. It was difficult. I kept sliding into story when I wanted deep image--bitter root from Africa, incantatory Arab magic, duende. So I sat with my notebook, looking out a window at the luminous Alhambra, and called on Lorca to help me with the poem.

He turned out to be a charming ghost--said he loves visitors. He was also a very generous ghost. He lent me his tools: his gypsy knife (the courage to slash away at what is not essential), his Harlem feet (those jazz rhythms he heard in New York that break through expected beats) and his abracadabra tongue (the incantatory use of language--just this side of magic which casts spells, invokes gods or moods, calls up a dead poet).

Here is the poem my Lorca Muse helped me write:


FOR LORCA, ON THE BROKEN BACK OF HIS STORY

Always, always: garden of my agony… The blood of your veins in my mouth
Federico Garcia Lorca


Time has not washed you away, nor have the rains
In the Puerta del Sol, or sorrow’s brown river

They still dream you in Madrid, they feed you
apples and honey, but what of

The hungry mouth of your grave, what of
The silver coins that never found your eyes?

Eyes of the Guernica bull. Burning eyes
Of my ancestors in the Auto de Fe…

Feed me on pomegranate seeds. Long ago
You promised me, what Grandfather Goethe

Promised us both. Show me
The face of your death. Hand me

A basket of bone to gather the parts
I need— your gypsy knife, your Harlem feet

Your abracadabra tongue. Your blood sings
In my veins. Your roots grow in my belly. Time crushes

Your harvest, with purple feet. Time has not
Washed you away, nor have the rains

In the Puerta del Sol, nor sorrow’s brown river
(published in Visions International #85)




Picasso's Guernica