Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following poems were published in Gods of Rapture: Poems in the Erotic Mood by Steve Kowit.
From “A Prefatory Note”:
Love is a perennial theme. No subject has been sung with such constancy by so many cultures. Among the greatest of such songs is the amatory poetry of India, a poetry composed in what Sanskrit prosodists call srngararasa, the erotic mood. With tenderness, passion and grace, those poets transmuted into song almost every aspect of human love, from the rapture of the first adolescent embrace to the grief of age and irrevocable loss.
From English-language translations of that material I have taken situations that charmed or moved me and shaped them to my own taste. Often an idea of a single line or a vivid image in one or another English-language translation would send me to my notebook or keyboard. So the poems in this collection, most of which bear little or no resemblance to the verses from which they emerged, are not translations—nor are they adaptations. . . . the poems in this volume are simply new poems based on ancient themes.
Behold the archer’s skill
that leaves the body whole
but breaks the heart.
after Utpalaraja
When the water lily opens
in the fresh spring
it has not her charm.
Nor has the white moonlight
Spilling over the hills.
When she moves
she sways
like a field of grain
in a summer breeze
but with more grace.
Even the peacock
is not as lovely as she.
after the Tamil
I bent my head
to stop my eyes
from stealing glances
but they rose again
to drink that face,
& when I lowered them
again they rose.
& so I closed my
eyes & suddenly
I was floating,
borne away,
miraculously
soaring—
O something
in that instant
opened
in my body
like a spray of light,
a lifting
of golden plumage,
an exaltation of wings.
after Vidyapati