A bicicleta amarela, de novo a melhorar o dia

Agora, que já aprendi o truque.


The Yellow Bicycle
Robert Haas

The woman I love is greedy,
but she refuses greed.
She walks so straightly.
When I ask her what she wants,
she says, "A yellow bicycle."
.

Sun, sunflower,
coltsfoot on the roadside,
a goldfinch, the sign
that says Yield, her hair,
cat's eyes, his hunger
and a yellow bicycle.
.

Once, when they had made love in the middle of the night and
it was very sweet, they decided they were hungry, so they got up,
got dressed, and drove downtown to an all-night donut shop.
Chicano kids lounged outside, a few drunks, and one black man
selling dope. Just at the entrance there was an old woman in a
thin floral print dress. She was barefoot. Her face was covered
with sores and dry peeling skin. The sores looked like raisins and
her skin was the dry yellow of a parchment lampshade ravaged by
light and tossed away. They thought she must have been hungry
and, coming out again with a white paper bag full of hot rolls,
they stopped to offer her one. She looked at them out of her small
eyes, bewildered, and shook her head for a little while, and said,
very kindly, "No."
.

Her song to the yellow bicycle:
The boats on the bay
have nothing on you,
my swan, my sleek one!

No livro "Praise" .
---
Entrevistado por Grace Cavalieri em 1997, para a American Poetry Review:
(aqui o texto completo, meus itálicos e negritos)

RH: Because of all that has been going on in Congress with the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, I’ve heard lots of speeches in which people say the arts in America in trouble and I always think, they are? It’s news to me. Do people really think that in the future they are really going to remember this as the age of Jesse Helms or the age of Toni Morrison? There are great writers working among us, doing great work. It’s not by accident that the last four Nobel Prize winners, none of whom were Americans, live and work in this country. Three of the four are American citizens. This has been a place enormously hospitable to poetry. We’ve had, after how many years between contact and 1965, let's say, there was very little Native American poetry in English. Suddenly there is a really interesting body of new work in poetry and fiction from Native American people. In my part of the world there has been the sudden creation of the voice of Asian Americans.

GC: That’s right. And a Latin influx. A second immigration. It’s incredibly influencing our work.

RH: Yes. And there an interesting new generation of postmodern writers, experimental writers, mainly concentrated in places like New York and San Francisco. I think that there’s a tremendous amount of liveliness in American writing right now.

GC: Is that what you call postmodern - experimental?

RH: Well I think there are different kinds of experiment but I would say that one quick way o thinking about postmodern work is that it always has an element of questioning the materials of the art, exploring questions around what the art can do.

GC: And accumulating a lot of it, different kinds

RH: There is dazzling work being done. I can name just a couple of writers and a couple of books for people who are interested in that sort of difficult, playful work at the edges. Work that’s like jazz. Some of these writers are going to be coming to the Library to read right now. I recently saw an anthology of poetry and poetry about jazz. And one of the things that struck me about it was there were an enormous number of poems about jazz and jazz musicians.

GC: Was that from University of Indiana?

RH: Yes, but almost none of the poems were like jazz. They were about jazz.

GC: You're right. Now who are the writers who are writing jazz, poetry like jazz.

RH: One is a woman named Lyn Hejinian, whose husband is a jazz musician. If you want to see what this kind of writing is like at its most dazzling and demanding. She has written a book which I think is one of the most interesting in my generation. It's called My Life. It’s a prose work, prose poetry I guess or in some borderland between prose and poetry. And the other is Michael Palmer. He’s like those jazz musicians who play chords all around the melody, never quite playing, don’t want to play the melody,and he’s extremely interesting in that way. There are at the same time powerful writers working in the realist tradition. So any way I would say a couple of other things. That there are 900 books of poetry published in this country every year. Three a day. There are 400 poetry magazines on the Internet. I think part of the ground work for this interest got laid by the work that’s been done by our cultural institutions including the NEA. (...)

GC: Can we have a final remark from you about American poetry?

RH: Poetry is alive and flourishing in this country, and people will find out just by going into their book stores and looking at the poetry shelves.

--
Robert Hass: "Eight years of activism, writing, and reflection":
outra entrevista, esta de Novembro de 2007, aqui:

"Some of the work I did during that period [1997-2007] was environmental work. In 1995, with Pam Michael, I started a nonprofit to encourage children to make art and poetry about their watersheds, as a way of encouraging environmental education of an interdisciplinary kind in the schools. That program, the Watershed Project, is now 10 years old."

A receber o National Book Award de Poesia:


A Story About the Body
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.--by Robert Haas