A poem for the new year

If I had to make a list of my favorite poems, this poem would certainly be on it.  (Which gets me thinking… could I make a list of my favorite poems?  How long would I be able to make the list?  Could I get it down to ten all-time favorites?  I think this poem would make the top ten.)

~~~

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

~~~

For the more visual among us, here is a picture of the sculpture referred to in the poem:

The first time I heard this poem, I was participating in a summer intensive creative writing course (intensive meaning it was a full two week course – 9am to 5pm, sometimes later – not that the writing was somehow extra intense).  I believe the class was during the summer of 2003.  In the morning, we had mixed group sessions with the university’s writing staff.  In the afternoons, we had sessions with visiting writers.  There were groups for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry writers.  I was in the poetry group and we had the remarkable fortune of having the poet Mark Doty lead our group.  I hate to admit that I hadn’t heard of him prior to that summer, but I haven’t stopped following him since.  If you are interested in contemporary poetry, check him out:  Mark Doty.  I really cannot say enough about both his poetry and prose.

I made the mistake of reading his memoir, Heaven’s Coast, while commuting. The memoir is about the process of losing his partner, Wally, to AIDS.  The writing is so moving that I found myself nearly sobbing… on the PATH train.  The book is a truly amazing account of love, loss, and community.  His book Dog Years is like Marley & Me for the more literally minded, and another book that made me sob.  In that book, he is so adept at moving through the moments one shares with one’s dogs that I would still be sobbing from a particularly sad passage but already be laughing out loud at a humorous anecdote.  His writing is so amazingly fluid that you move through moments and emotions like water flowing downstream.

I was really excited to read that he was nominated for and then won (!) the National Book Award for Poetry this year.  His writing is amazing and, without a doubt, my poetry top ten list would include one (if not two) of his poems.  In fact, I’d probably have to expand the top ten to include more of his poems.  To file in the “it’s a small world” category, his partner (also a remarkable writer) graduated from the same graduate program I did and had the same thesis adviser I did.  When I friended them on MySpace, I made sure to point this out, lest they think I was just any other fangirl.

Anyway, one afternoon Mark read this poem to us… in that way that he reads a poem… a way that makes you want to get naked and take the poem to bed with you.  Every time I read this poem, even if I’m reading it out loud to students of my own, I hear Mark’s voice in my head for the last line: “You must change your life.”

Poets.org has a short talk Mark gave about the poem: On “Archaic Torso of Apollo”.

“Change” is the theme for January’s NaBloPoMo, so I probably could have saved this entry for January 1 but sometimes a poem just hits you and you have to take some time with it immediately.  This poem wasn’t going to wait for Thursday.  It embodies the urgency of its last line.