5th Post: (Paul Celan, Selected Poems)
"Go. Come.
Love blots out its name: to
you it ascribes itself."
the mathematics of witholding, a tension of revelation and reserve, a paradox of speech. to speak of horrors, of tumults of a spirit, of mothers buried in snow. to tell this to the reader, a reader's heartland, and yet write one's doubt into the form of the poem, to write a poetry that hangs, eternally, on the threshold of breath and absence, on the threshold of being and not being at all. may it be that the message is not in the words themselves, but in the spirit that unfastens them!
Friday, July 6, 2007
4th Post: (Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Poems)
"Who showed you the path of the poets?
The fountain and the stream of the antique song."
I am stunned again and again by Lorca's singular reconciliation of a mysticism and a classicism. there is the Lorca of feverish anarchy, of uprooted streets and crimson rain, but also the Lorca who masters the absence, the terse dialect of words, like Franz Wright, or like Jack Gilbert, (contemporary poets). Here, it is Lorca's humility, his sense of time, of time and of a melody of light, that ushers his poems up through the page, like a faint mist over the more furious tempests of his soul.
"Who showed you the path of the poets?
The fountain and the stream of the antique song."
I am stunned again and again by Lorca's singular reconciliation of a mysticism and a classicism. there is the Lorca of feverish anarchy, of uprooted streets and crimson rain, but also the Lorca who masters the absence, the terse dialect of words, like Franz Wright, or like Jack Gilbert, (contemporary poets). Here, it is Lorca's humility, his sense of time, of time and of a melody of light, that ushers his poems up through the page, like a faint mist over the more furious tempests of his soul.
Post 3: (Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat)
"Had I but antecedents at some point in the history of France! But no, nothing. It is quite clear to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I cannot understand revolt. My race never rose except to pillage: like wolves that worry the beast they have not killed."
central to much of Rimbaud is a frantic idea of absence. of an absence that alienates the poet, the individual, against a spiritual collective. it is Rimbaud's various, incessant sense of removal that urges him to the page, as well as a historical self-disdain, the insurgent self-deprecating lament. "My race never rose..." Rimbaud's identity is conceived in a memory of nothing, and still this attachment. a poet whose conscience is laden with the crimes of all his men, his compatriots, even when his country is none other than his own. even from the limelight of his attic, the poet sees his face of all the dying imperial.
"Had I but antecedents at some point in the history of France! But no, nothing. It is quite clear to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I cannot understand revolt. My race never rose except to pillage: like wolves that worry the beast they have not killed."
central to much of Rimbaud is a frantic idea of absence. of an absence that alienates the poet, the individual, against a spiritual collective. it is Rimbaud's various, incessant sense of removal that urges him to the page, as well as a historical self-disdain, the insurgent self-deprecating lament. "My race never rose..." Rimbaud's identity is conceived in a memory of nothing, and still this attachment. a poet whose conscience is laden with the crimes of all his men, his compatriots, even when his country is none other than his own. even from the limelight of his attic, the poet sees his face of all the dying imperial.
Post 2: (Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods)
"In the moon who showed him how
To tread footsteps Napoleon left.
After prisoners worked ice,
Routing a canal through an eternal
White field of loneliness, he didn't
Want anyone to remember his hands
Trembled as he placed flowers
On her snowcapped grave."
From Stalin, a gem of Y.K's roving imagination. As in all of his poems, the historical fades, falls into its disembodied light. Instead, what the poet sees, what the reader hears, is the human, a face, a small evocation, as the flowers on the snowcapped grave, as in this samplet, we move from a world of "movements," of states and projects, of a distant language, into an earth of intimacy, and of tremendous precision.
"In the moon who showed him how
To tread footsteps Napoleon left.
After prisoners worked ice,
Routing a canal through an eternal
White field of loneliness, he didn't
Want anyone to remember his hands
Trembled as he placed flowers
On her snowcapped grave."
From Stalin, a gem of Y.K's roving imagination. As in all of his poems, the historical fades, falls into its disembodied light. Instead, what the poet sees, what the reader hears, is the human, a face, a small evocation, as the flowers on the snowcapped grave, as in this samplet, we move from a world of "movements," of states and projects, of a distant language, into an earth of intimacy, and of tremendous precision.
Post 1: (Nathaniel Mackey, splay anthem)
"What we rode was a book. We
fell out of it, scattered.
The book fell out of my
hand while I slept. Page
upon page upon page
nodded
out on... "
a poetry of alighting syncopation, a poetry that is at once ancestral and visionary (that is to say, modern in its motion and direction), polymathic, and above all something that is beyond the pidgeonholing epithet of jazz-poet. no, this is a poetry that scatters the mind, invisible, into discollected fragments, small anecdotes of the mind's ceaseless theatre.
"What we rode was a book. We
fell out of it, scattered.
The book fell out of my
hand while I slept. Page
upon page upon page
nodded
out on... "
a poetry of alighting syncopation, a poetry that is at once ancestral and visionary (that is to say, modern in its motion and direction), polymathic, and above all something that is beyond the pidgeonholing epithet of jazz-poet. no, this is a poetry that scatters the mind, invisible, into discollected fragments, small anecdotes of the mind's ceaseless theatre.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)