URSULA K. Le GUIN ~

 

Some of the Philosophers

can't use it

can't count it

so refuse it, this —

the inexhaustible, bountiful,

elusive

spring of the absurd,

brooding over the dark abyss

wing,

the word.

Self

You cannot measure the circumference

but there are centerpoints:

stones, and a woman washing at a ford,

the water runs red-brown from what she washes.

The mouths of caves. The mouths of bells.

The sky in winter under snowclouds

to northward, green of jade.

No star is farther from it than the glint

of mica in a pebble in the hand,

or nearer. Distance is my god.

Slick Rock Creek, September

My skin

touches the wind

A lacewing fly touches my hand

I speak too slow     

                            for her to understand

Rock's warm under my hand.

It speaks too slow

                            for me to understand

I drink sunlit water.

Flight 1067 to L.A.

Snowy sierra sawteeth

lift to leftward

as I drink white wine staidly

above the Great Valley in the belly

of a silvery psuedocetacean

sailing the airsea to a palmy city.

I am my ancestors' sci-fi.

Waking in April

Drifting on the birdsong river

between no light and light

and the sleep of  man and a cat,

I wear the soft old shirt

my mother made me seventy years ago,

nightshirt, dayshirt,

winter coat, wedding gown.

I wonder, as it wears away to rags

and gauze, will there be a mirror

to see the naked soul in,

or only an unraveling of shadow

as the day widens

and things grow clearer.

______________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Larger Reality

Winter Texts, 2025

URSULA K. LE GUIN ~

 

Extinction

Imagine dark.

Forty years'  rain.

The sinking ark.

No dogs bark

or doves complain

in the long dark.

No eel or shark

noses in vain

the ribs of the ark.

No star, no spark.

No full or wane.

Silence and dark.

Without mark,

without stain,

bright, stark,

the ocean's arc

is bare again

above the dark,

the sunken ark.

__________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

Collected Poems

The Library of America, 2023

edited by Harold Bloom

"Extinction" was first published by Longhouse in 2007

in Ursula K. Le Guin's foldout booklet Four Different Poems

reprinted here in the new The Library of America volume

Photograph by Theo Downes-Le Guin

URSULA K. LE GUIN ~ (So Far So Good)

Theodora

I think how fine my mother was.

Her doings and her things were lovable.

Her turquoise bracelets, her violet

dinner dress with a jeweled waist.

The way when she was undressing

she'd go around with her nylons unhitched.

I think of all this now with tenderness

and comfort in the recollection.

Oh I was so angry at her when she died

for dying, but at last that's gone

and she comes to me again with silver

and turquoise on her wrists

in the sunlight.

————————————

So Far So Good

Ursula K. Le Guin

Final Poems 2014-2018

Copper Canyon Press

ON WRITING ~

R E A D      M E

LONG GOODBYES ~

Author Ursula Le Guin at home with her cat, Lorenzo, in 1996. The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

Credit                                                                                                Jill Krementz, All Rights Reserved 

             

              1929 (Berkeley) ~ 2018

Nicanor Parra teaching in Santiago, Chile, in 1992. On the blackboard he had written: “Back to democracy for what? So the movie repeats itself? No.” 

   Credit

                                                                                                 Alvaro Hoppe/Associated Press

                                                                                          1914 (Chile) ~ 2018

                                                           

GENUINE ~

There is no one like Ursula K. Le Guin, no one, when it

comes to the enthusiastic and conversational book reviewer,

the love of reading, the writers, the readers and the

freedom of speaking one's mind.

She advocates all of this.

She practices.

Read her.

Published by a brave press 

from Easthampton, Massachusetts

S M A L L      B E E R      P R E S S

150 Pleasant Street

01027

smallbeerpress.com

EARTH ~

Ursula K. Le Guin

Photo by Wes Guderian

Ars Lunga


I sit here perpetually inventing new people
as if the population boom were not enough
and not enough terror and problems
God knows, But I know too,
that's the point. Never fear enough
to match delight, nor a deep enough abyss,
nor time enough, and there are always a few
stars missing.


I don't want a new heaven and new earth,
only the old ones.
Old sky, old dirt, new grass.
Nor life beyond the grave,
God help me, or I'll help myself
by living all these lives
nine at once or ninety
so that death finds me at all times
and on all sides exposed,
unfortressed, undefended,
inviolable, vulnerable, alive.





For the New House


May this house be full of kitchen smells
and shadows and toys and nests of mice
and roars of rage and waterfalls of tears
and deep sexual silences and sounds
of mysterious origin never explained
and troves and keepsakes and a lot of junk
and a flowing like a warm wind only slower
blowing the leaves of trees and books and the fish-years
of a child's life silvery flickering
quick, quick, in the slow incessant gust
that billows out the curtains for a moment
all those years from now, age.
May the sills and doorframes
be in blessing blest at every passing.
May the roof but not the rooms know rain.
May the windows know clearly
the branch and flower of the apple tree.
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument.





Song for a Daughter


Mother of my granddaughter,
listen to my song:
A mother can't do right,
a daughter can't be wrong.


I have no claim whatever
on amnesty from you;
nor will she forgive you
for anything you do.


So are we knit together
by force of opposites,
the daughter that unravels
the skein the mother knits.


One must be divided
so that one be whole,
and this is the duplicity
alleged of woman's soul.


To be that heavy mother
who weighs in every thing
is to be the daughter
whose footstep is the Spring.


Granddaughter of my mother,
listen to my song:
Nothing you do will ever be right,
nothing you do is wrong.





Infinitive


We make too much history.


With or without us
there will be the silence
and the rocks and the far shining.


But what we need to be
is, oh, the small talk of swallows
in evening over
dull water under willows.


To be we need to know the river
holds the salmon and the ocean
holds the whales as lightly
as the body holds the soul
in the present tense, in the present tense.





Stammersong


Let

let me

let me be

Set

set me

set me free



Own

only

only soul

Lone

lonely

lonely whole



Sigh

silence

silencing

I

island

and I'll sing

_____________________________

Ursula K. Le Guin

from Finding My Elegy

new and selected poems

Houghton Mifflin, 2012

READER REDUX ~

More books! being read all the time and shared. This is a companion piece with the Nov. 2011 "Reader" short film. Since then the small studio room has changed. I just finished building a double face floor to ceiling book cabinet ready to engulf more books, 100 square feet to be precise. It was halfway finished when I made this new film. I remember once reading Jan Myrdal's autobiography where he measured his library in feet. I was a hungry young lad then reading a book-a-day and making a floral personal library. Books by-the-foot to a builder and a reader is music to the ears.

The authors: Kent Johnson, Gabriela Mistral, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gerard Malanga, Eudora Welty, William Maxwell, Alfred Jarry, Bill Deemer, Peter Berg, Benjamin Cawthra, Johnny Cash, Kitchen Cat, Clarice Lispector

film © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Gabriela Mistral

FRUIT



---I'm scattering fruit around
on the sun-white ground.


---Tightwoven wicker baskets hold
piles of Brazilian gold.
From Brazil, look, child, they sent us
sleepy clusters of siestas.
As I empty out the glory,
colors and scents go rolling.


---You crawl off in hot pursuit
of the fleeing-maiden fruit —
see the melting medlars roll,
the tattooed, prickly pineapple.


---And they smell of Hy Brasil,
breast where earth can suck its fill,
that lets the whole Atlantic spill
from its lap when it's too full. . .


---Touch them, kiss them, play and suck,
learn the different ways they look.
Tonight you'll dream your mother's chin
has become as black as sin,
and night's a basket black as soot,
and the Milky Way bears starry fruit. . .




FRUTA


---En el pasto blanco de sol,
suelto la fruta derramada.


---De los Brasiles viene el oro,
en prietos mombres donde canta
de los Brasiles, niño mío,
mandan la siesta arracimada.
Extiendo el rollo de la gloria;
rueda el color con la fragancia.


---Gateando sigues las frutas,
como niñas que se desbandan,
y son los nísperos fundidos
y las duras piñas tatuadas. . .


---Y todo huele a los Brasiles
pecho del mundo que lo amamanta
que, a no rener el agua atlántica,
rebosaria de su falda. . .


---Tócales, bésalas, voltéalas
y les aprendes todas sus caras.
Soñarás, hijo, que to madre
tiene facciones abrasadas,
que es la noche canasto negro
y que es frutal la Víe Láctea. . .



~ Gabriela Mistral
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
(University of New Mexico Press)



from About Mistral


Like most North Americans I knew nothing about the poet. She was a whole world to discover, a wild terrain, a new language.


I'll say little here about her work; it seems better sense to let it speak for itself. My introductions to the six parts of the book sketch out her life story and the nature of the poems. Of her life it's enough here to say that she was born in Chile in 1889, traveled and lived all over Europe and the New World, and died in the United States in 1957.


I do want to talk about her current obscurity, for she was a famous poet in her lifetime. One would expect a Nobel Prize winner to be well represented in English. All I have found is a small volume of translations by Langston Hughes; a larger selection by Doris Dana; a good recent selection by Maria Giacchetti of poems and prose; and a translation by Christiane Jacox Kyle of some early prose-poems.


It is not just a problem of language, or a North-South problem. Mistral's work is only partly accessible even in Chile. Her roving life left her works curiously dispersed. The four books of poetry published during her lifetime came out in New York, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile...


...The problem of Mistral's reputation also has something to do, alas, with gender. Having been adulated as a poetess, she is not read as a poet.


Who's afraid of Gabriela Mistral?


I'd say anybody who reads her might well be afraid of her. She can be frightening strange. Many of those who wrote about her had to tame her, to reduce her, before they could admire her. The formidable woman who scared off her suitors and fled from her patrons got petted and patted down into acceptable femininity. Biographers have magnified an adolescent romance into a lifelong obsession, while either deploring or ignoring the fact that she lived most of her life in sexual independence of men. They have crooned over her for being childless, while scarcely mentioning the fact that she had a child by adoption and brought him up for seventeen years. The "Gabriela" they give us is all cliche — a blighted romance then a lifetime of tears . . . a sexless schoolmarm yearning over children . . .


She was a school teacher and also an eminent, internationally recognized, professional educator. She was for years a brilliant cultural envoy for her government — Madrid newspapers in 1933 called her the "spiritual ambassadress of Spanish America." She took children seriously and wrote poems for and about them; she also wrote about children and other underprivileged people with fierce political topicality. She grieved at being barren, was fascinated by motherhood, achieved it by adoption, wrote about it often, and was almost mortally wounded by the death of her son. Evidently a person of great kindness, who made deep, long friendships, she seems to have found her true home only in an absolute internal solitude. She left Chile at twenty-four and never lived there again and wrote about it all her life. Her passions and self-contradictions are like those of her native landscape — immense, volcanic, absolute.


What she was above all was a poet, self-taught, almost wholly self-made, who worked constantly, tirelessly, all her life, at her craft.

...


Mistral published about four hundred poems; this book contains a hundred and sixty-four of them.


My selection was almost completely subjective. I worked on those that I could translate and abandoned those I couldn't. Personal taste and prejudice certainly led me to some and away from others, but the act of translation is so mysterious to me that I'm unable to explain the process of finding the translatables and the untranslatables. Love and language lead where they will.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

photo:

redalyc.uaemex.mx

URSULA K. LE GUIN

She Remembers the Famous Poets


Quand vous serez bien vieille, le soir, à la chandelle . . . (Ronsard)

When you are old and grey and full of sleep. . . (Yeats)



Now I am old and grey and sit alone beside my fire,
I think of lovely boys I knew when I was young and fair.
And some of them wrote poems about my eyes and their desire,
My winsome Irish Willie and my gallant French Pierre.

It makes me smile to think about how we made love, and all
The tender things they told me, as I gaze into the flames
These winter nights; but, Lord! I never can recall
A single word of all they wrote, or even their last names.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of many works of enviable scope and craft — science fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and intriguing interviews. Go seek! The poem above is from the Longhouse title Four Different Poems pictured below.