“The Ape in the Garden;” “Such was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses;” “Muscovy Ducks;” and “Visitors” by George Franklin Franklin appeared in Issue 34 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
It’s always interesting to be asked a question that makes you see some work in a different way. In this case, I immediately notice a certain morbidity (or I could put it less self-critically and say “awareness of death”) that is present in all four of these poems. I can only hope that element is balanced out by a vividness, perhaps even a pleasure taken in the facts of the world.
“Visitors” is based on strong childhood memories of how my family responded to our losses. We were part of a way of life that was trying to hold on to the past. I don’t think I understood that impulse at the time, and I just wanted to get away from it. However, now I’ve collected enough years for that attitude to make a kind of sense, at least on a personal level.
“The Ape in the Garden” approaches this theme from a different angle. I was listening to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, and the poem gathered as fragments from what I’d read (especially HD’s wonderful account of her analysis with Freud), some thoughts about Mahler’s understanding of how the vulgar intrudes into the sublime, and personal experiences—Dublin in 1971 and a ratcatcher’s window in Paris.
“Such Was the Funeral of Hector, Breaker of Horses” looks to Homer, not for an answer, but for an attitude. The end of the Iliad is the masterpiece of understatement, and the last line is the height of that understatement. The implication is that the Trojans are all Casandra; with Hector’s death, they can all see the future. The translation that is the title of my poem was, I thought, from Lattimore, but it doesn’t match my copy of his Iliad. Maybe it has shifted in my head over the years, and I creatively misremember.
“Muscovy Ducks” is almost reportage. In Miami, this odd-looking breed has made a home for itself, and when our canals and lakes become inhospitable, they’re forced to pick up and move. Much like the rest of us, their lives are constantly subject to what they can’t foresee.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
The most difficult part of any poem is to preserve the impulse that made you write it. It’s often like trying to remember a dream: you know what you remember is a reconstruction. The dream was somehow different, and in the dream, you were somehow different. Tranströmer said that the poem is a meeting between the conscious and unconscious minds, and that’s true. However, it also means the poem is never entirely one thing or the other and can never entirely grasp what caused it to be written.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’ll recommend two, one poetry and one prose.
For poetry, John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. I don’t know of another poet who can be so formally perfect and at the same time so real.
For prose, Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Shape of the Ruins. It is a great novel, filled with the history of Colombia, and it explores the limits of what we can know in history and simultaneously looks for the origins of violence. It is also beautifully translated by Anne McLean.
As you can see, I like writers who aren’t afraid of what might look like contradictions to other people.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
This is a hard one to answer because I have so many writer friends I’ve never met in person or haven’t seen in years. I look forward to talking with them, to sharing a good dinner and a good bottle of wine, and hearing all about whatever it is they’re working on. Covid has inhibited the kind of travel that would make this possible. But, maybe soon.
I am also lucky enough to share my life and many good dinners and good bottles of wine with mi compañera, the Colombian poet Ximena Gómez, so I don’t lack for good conversation about literature.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
My new collection of poems, Remote Cities, will come out later this year from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, and while I can’t say I have another manuscript ready to go, I’ve written a number of poems that I can at least intuit as the framework for a book.
Our thanks to George for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this poetry. Read “The Ape in the Garden;” “Such was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses;” “Muscovy Ducks;” and “Visitors” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/four-poems-by-george-franklin.
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George Franklin is the author of four poetry collections: Noise of the World (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018), a dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press). Individual publications include: Sequestrum, Cagibi, Into the Void, The Threepenny Review, Verse Daily, Pedestal Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores). Website: https://gsfranklin.com/