Reminder: Our Alphabetical Listing of Poets

From time to time I remind readers of PIP POETRY that there is an alphabetical listing of poets posted to this site here: http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2008/12/alphabetic-listing-of-poets-included.html

I also would like once again to invite poets and readers to submit poets with a major national or world reputation for inclusion. Poets are invited to compile their own entries. Please include a small researched biography, a complete bibliography of the poet's collections (poetry only, including city of publication, publisher name, and year of publication), and a list of books of poetry translated into English. I also invite translators to send me new translations of poems. Although this is an open invitation, I cannot post all poets, so I do encourage you to query me before you compile such an entry.

I also invite cogent critical commentary on poets already represented.

My contact information is: douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Douglas Messerli

Katrine Marie Guldager

Katrine Marie Guldager [Denmark]
1966

Born December 29th, 1966 in Ordrup, Denmark, she moved at the age of 3 with her family—her father working in forestry and her mother in charity—to Zambia, where started what she describes as “an old-fashioned school with British discipline.” When she returned to Denmark she lived in a housing community in Hillerød, where 27 families lived a communal life. She notes that she attended a left-wing school which she disliked.


When her parents divorced when Guldager was just 13, she began writing, and at Copenhagen’s University she studied literature. She has remained in Copenhagen since that time, and attended the famed Copenhagen School of Creative Writing.

Her debut collection of poems was Dagene skifter hænder (The Days Change Hands), which combined the ordinary with a strong sense of irony, and, along with her second collection Styrt of 1995, brought her major attention. That book also was translated into English as Crash.


In 1996 she published another volume of poetry, Blank, and more recently she published Ankomst Husumgade (Arrival at Husumgade, 2001), a comical long poem in prose. Guldager has also written dramas, collections of short stories (København, 2004 and Kilimanjaro, 2005), and a novel, Det grønne øje (The Green Eye, 1998). She won The Critics’ Prize in 2004.


Critic Lars Bukdahl wrote in the Kristelight Dagblad of Crash: “Whereas her first book was convincing but also somewhat hesitant, here in Crash there is not the slightest slip. This book of 37 prose poems is almost frighteningly assured and original, with not a single weak text to be found—a little ‘already-a-classic.’”


BOOKS OF POETRY

Dagene skifter hænder (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994); Styrt (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995); Blank (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1996); Ankomst Husumgade (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2001).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Crash, trans. by Anne Mette Lundtofte (Brownsville, Vermont: Goats + Compasses, 1999).


Crash

It can happen, of course, that you get a flat, that you have to borrow a bike, that you end up on one that’s too high: You can barely reach the pedals and there are cars and yield right of way and crosswalks: There are asphalt and unfamiliar reflexes in your hands, accidents looming in the air like seconds someone has painted over with complete, total hush: There are the scraping and the asphalt, asphalt the bike slams against, asphalt you go plowing down through, small stones you hide under your skin, and glass, and there’s no way around it or down through it: There is only asphalt on top of asphalt, there’s a city on top of the asphalt, and nothing underneath but earth: There are earth and asphalt and a city: There’s a city that’s on top of the earth: there is a city on top of a city, there is asphalt on top of asphalt, earth on top of earth, and there’s no way down through it or around it, that’s how it’s always been: Like when you’re riding a bike—much too high up—and can’t reach the pedals.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Yes

You have to say YES every time: Every other time and maybe aren’t enough, and I just have to take care of 47 things. If you want to pet the cat there’s no use chasing it under the bed, you can see that much, if you want to open your letters and read them there’s no use slicing them up, ripping and kicking and hitting: You can see that much too and the logic between 47 and 17 is clear, what’s clear is what you see through and cut yourself on, and it hurts, your skin hurts far too much, scratches, wounds, and there’s nothing else to do: You just have to keep going, without watching every step and until you can hear it, totally clear: YES.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Position

It’s something you get roped in by, a surplus of foreign exchange and places you’re allowed to be: Movie premiers stream over your face like a fall wind that lifts your hair. It’s strings of stones that go skipping across each other, doors within other doors that open and close like quick chances in a labyrinth you suddenly escape from: It’s the glances of passersby and a happiness that winds out into the blue like the coastline, clusters of plants spread around the balcony, fragrances and a new trend in bathing suits. It’s what you turn on its head: Thickets you’ve gone and crept into among the thorns, one Sunday on a deserted mountain train, when you enter a dark house: It’s him standing in the corner casting about with his eyes.


—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Tracks

I’m so totally miserably sick and tired of the man who for the second day in a row is standing outside my front door and claiming that he lives here, and that I love him. He won’t go away, and he’s a pain in my mornings, the nighttime, my dreams. I dream I’m giving a lecture at Hillerød Station. I dream I can be in two places at once, on one track that crosses and one that topples and becomes metal rain over a hope, a handbag. I dream that I’m dreaming, and that inside that dream I’m awake: As awake as a ripple, a hint, a door slightly ajar.


—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Window

I recognize only half of what was going to be my life: The weeks cut into my skin like a net I can see through only at times. I get up and stagger out into the streets ecstatic, stumble over a gull’s cry and call it my own. I fling out my arms and let 7 equal 5: My memory is like window frames in the spring, which keep flaking; what I remember, like the rotting wood that’s slowly crumbling.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)


Public Pool

I take a child or something else by the hand and go down the street, go down to the public pool and rinse off, spray myself, shower between porous concrete and drunken tiles: I stand in the stall and grow as heavy as all the storeys of the building while the water runs from stall to stall and back again: The drain is about to overflow with shampoo and sweat, it rises and ebbs, rises and ebbs, belches like whole pub I walk past: I walk and walk through the streets, right between baby carriages and winos and hold beer crunching in the corners of their mouths, in their bones, drunks spit out between traffic circles and one-way streets: I walk and walk through the streets, with the faint scent of perfume trailing me.


—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Tea Party

As at a tea party, the rattling and could you please pass: We keep talking, long after the last cup is drained we keep talking, keep talking and talking. The radio chatters with announcers who keep talking, radio news in Greenlandic and re-runs from last summer: we keep talking, no matter what we keep talking, as in the courtyard where people are talking in the apartments: Each window hides someone who keeps talking, talking and talking, even if the sun goes down, calmly and quietly, while the talking goes on.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)


City

They can’t help it, the bookshelves, but it’s them there’s something wrong with, TV, stairs, and should we go left or right are the last straw: Maybe what lies outside resembles a city, but it isn’t, city isn’t just city, city isn’t just a way of piling a whole lot of building together, city isn’t just roads, subways and buses, city isn’t just church towers and happy hours, restaurants and kiss my ass: City isn’t just city, and especially not here, buildings aren’t just buildings, city isn’t just city, it can’t be done, there are far too many things that can’t be done, be solved, there are piles of things, piles of city, used city, far too much used city, buildings, bookshelves and TV sets, for example in the courtyard, where it’s completely still.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Excerpt

You have to answer back, fast and with tempered steel, that you don’t have to go along with anything, from either God or everyman: You have to answer back, if need be in the middle of traffic, in the midst of colliding details, a collision of consideration, surfaces and I want to go home, all the way home, be safe at home as the saying goes, even if it’s impossible: You just have to answer back, and of course that’s why you stand there, in the middle of the traffic, paralyzed at the red light that just gets redder and redder, redder and redder, until it begins to overflow, down onto the asphalt, the asphalt that resembles itself.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)


Blackbird

So now everything’s fine, just fine, in its place, and the potted plants have been dusted: So everything’s completely OKAY, scoured and scrubbed, and there’s nothing to trip over on the way to the phone or out to the bathroom: Except maybe that blackbird, quite dead and with glass eyes, except maybe a sprouting apple tree under the mail slot, totally riotous: Except maybe the ladder someone’s propped in the entranceway, or that it’s so shiny.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Gravestone

There’s always something you have to take care of, a distraction you can get drawn into when the kitchen window swings and keeps slamming, and the flowers that you can only sense are having their petals torn off one by one: My eyes give birth to glass eyes that rattle in my sink when I drop them, drop them like the light that rotates on its titled axis in a labyrinth of shoes and footsteps: There’s always something you have to take care of, a grid that rumbles past under the asphalt, a toppled gravestone you can trip over: If for example you cross the cemetery without knowing whether you’re looking for shade or sun.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Red

Here’s what it’s like to be born: You’re never off, you don’t get a minute to yourself, not an instant when you can look the other way or a second when you can turn your back: Here’s what it’s like to be born, you can’t do anything about it, the whole time you’ve simply been born, you can’t get off, get away, be unborn again: There’s nothing to be done, you’re born, born in fluttering redness, in a wail that stays in your body as an echo, and sleep, sleep makes no difference, it can only be exchanged for something else that fits right into where the sleep was, there’s nothing to be done, it’s here the whole time, the whole think, yourself.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)






Traffic Accident

It’s impossible to say if there is anything outside the window, but a chronic curiosity forces you to sort of sniff—wind, people. It’s impossible to say how it happens, but you lean back in again, into the shade, and right away all your senses have clicked DELETE: suddenly you can’t remember why you leaned either out or back in, or what you really wanted, more than anything you feel like 17 kitchen appliances that are neither bought nor paid for, like a tired plastic bag from the supermarket that you’ve put aside and forgotten: It’s impossible to say how to do it, how to find your way back between everything you can’t revive: yourself, the kitchen table and a single traffic accident you’ve hidden under your breast.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Beach

Suddenly you’re a year older, and a number is added to others, but the day doesn’t change colors on that account: sooner or later you’ll have to admit that the congratulations too become less and less like themselves, that the summer is endless and a complete whole, wrapped up and sold: Nonetheless the sun is red, dazzlingly red, as above a beach you wish you could be washing up on, and it can certainly be night if someone remembers to hang the stars up with thread and stick the moon on with tape: For perhaps you could wake up, later, as three minutes to midnight, or as a flock of birds taking off.

—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)



Intersection

There is ground, there’s an army of ants and one that is eating its way into the darkness: Slow blind breathing. There is ground, there’s an army of ants and one that’s rummaging around behind the paneling: There are blades of grass that are creaking in the courtyard under a tree, a frog that slides in the mud on a boulevard and pulls in one hind leg: There is ground, there’s an army of ants, and one that’s making noise under a pedestrian crossing: There are wires spilling out of a seam in the asphalt, a word that has burst out in the middle of a sentence: Poems that force their way out through your skin like tropical fish.


—Translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald

(from Styrt, 1995)


______


PERMISSIONS

“Crash,” “Yes,” “Posisition,” “Tracks,” “Window,” “Public Pool,” “Tea Party,” “City,” “Excerpt,” “Blackbird,” “Gravestone,” “Red,” “Traffic Accident,” “Beach,” and “Intersection”
Translated from Styrt (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995). English language translation copyright ©2006 by Roger Greenwald. Reprinted by permission of Gyldendal.

Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen (USA)
1953

Born in Florence, Alabama, Harryette Mullen spent most of her childhood in Fort Worth, Texas. She earned her degrees in English and in Literature from the University of Texas, Austin and the University of California, Santa Cruz. For several years she worked in the Artists in Schools program sponsored by the Texas Commission on the Arts, and for another six years she taught African-American and other US ethnic literatures at Cornell University before becoming a professor at the University of California Los Angeles, where she teaches African-American literature and creative writing.

Her first book was Tree Tall Woman in 1981, but it was her second and third titles, Trimmings in 1991 and S*PeRM**K*T in 1992 that brought her national attention as a poet. Muse & Drudge followed in 1995, and in 2002 she gained further fame as a finalist for the National Book Award for her collection Sleeping with the Dictionary. A volume of her earlier work, Blues Baby was published in the same year.

Mullen has received several major grants and awards, including artist grants from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester.

Mullen’s poetry is highly charged with the love of language, and often deals with issues of race, class, and gender. But, as she herself has explained, they do not represent “the sum of her poetry.” “I can be a black woman while chewing gum and thinking about Disneyland or supermarkets, while reading Stein or Shakespeare, just as I can be a black woman contemplating conventional representations of black women in literature, media, and popular culture. Living in California, where white people are a minority, I’m not so sure that my identity or experience is “marginal.” As a woman and as a person of color, I belong to two global majorities, but I’m also aware that throughout most of history, it is not the majority that rules, but a privileged minority.”

BOOKS OF POETRY

Tree Tall Women (City & Publisher, 1981); Trimmings (New York: Tender Buttons, 1991); S&PeRM**K*T (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1992); Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995); Blues Baby: Early Poems (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2002); Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)


from Trimmings


What’s holding her up. Straps, laces. Garters, corsets, belts
with laces. What’s holding them up. If not straps, then laces.
Buttons and bows, ribbons and laces set off their faces. Girls
In white sat in with blues-saddened slashers. Laced up, frilled
To the bone. Semi-automatic ruffle on a semi-formal gown.


*

Her feathers, her pages. She ripples in breezes. Rim and
fringe are hers. Who fancies frills. Whose finery is a summer
frock, light in the wind, riffling her pages, lifting her skirt,
peeking at edges. The wind blows her words away. Who can
hear her voice, so gentle, every ruffle made smooth. Gathering
her fluttered pages, her feathers, her wings.

*

Clip, screw, or pierce. Take your pick. Fried or doctor, needle
or gun. A dab of alcohol pats that little hurt hole. Hardly a
dimple is soon forgotten brief sting. Stud, precious metal.
Pure, possessive ring. Antibody testifying with immunity to gold,
Rare thing. So malleable and lovable, wearing such wounds,
Such ornaments.

*

Body on fire, spangles. Light to sequin stars burn out at both ends.


(from Trimmings, 1991)


from S*PeR**K*T

What’s brewing when a guy pops the top off a bottle or can talk
with another man after a real good sweat. It opens, pours a cold
stream of the great outdoors. Hunting a wild six-pack reminds
him of football and women and other blood spoors. Frequent
channels keep high volume foamy liquids overflowing, not to be
contained. Champs, heroes, hard workers all back-lit with ornate
gold of cowboy sunset lift dashing white heads, those burly mugs.

*

Off the pig, ya dig? He squeals, grease the sucker. Hack that fatback,
pour the pork. Pig out, rib the fellas. Ham it up, hype the tripe. Save
your bacon, bring home some. Sweet dreams pigmeat. Port belly
futures, larded accounts, hog heaven. Little piggish to market.
Tub of guts hog wilding. A pig of yourself, high on swine, cries
all the way home. Streak a lean gets away cleaner than Safeway
chitlings. That all, folks.

*

Well bread ain’t refined of coarse dark textures never enriched a
doughty peasant. The rich finely powdered with soft white flours.
Then poor got pasty pale and pure blands ingrained inbred. Roll
out dough we need so what bread fortifies their minimum daily
sandwich. Here’s a dry wry toast for the new age when darker
richer upper crust, flourishing, outpriced the staff with moral
fiber. Brown and serve, a slice of life whose side’s your butter on.


*

A dream of eggplant or zucchini may produce fresh desires. Some
fruits are vegetables. The way we bruise and wilt, all perishable.


(from S*PeRM**K*T, 1992)

Between

My ass acts bad
Devil your ears Charybdis
Good engagements deep blue sea
Heaven my eyes your elbow
Last night jobs hard place
Now his legs hell
Rock the lines me
Scylla her breast shinola
Shit the sheets then
Yesterday my thighs this morning
You your toes today

(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)

Bilingual Instructions

Californians say No
to bilingual instruction in schools

Californians say No
To blingual instructions on ballots

Californians say Yes
To bilingual instructions on curbside waste receptacles:

Coloque el recipiente con las flechas hacia la calle
Place container with arrow facing street

No rude el recipiente con la tapa abierta
Do not tilt or roll container with lid open

Recortes de jardin solamente
Yard clippings only

(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)


Bleeding Hearts

Crenshaw is a juicy melon. Don’t spit, and when you’re finished,
wash your neck. Tonight we lead with bleeding hearts, slice raw
or scooped with a spoon. I’ll show my shank. I’d rend your cares
with my shears. If I can’t scare cash from the ashen crew, this
monkey wrench has scratch to back my business. This ramshackle
stack of shotguns I’m holding in my scope. I’m beady-eyes as a bug.
Slippery as a sardine. Salty as a kipper. You could rehash me for
breakfast. Find my shrinking awe, or share your wink. I’ll get a
rash wench. We’ll cash a shower of cranes. I’m making bird seed to
stick in a hen’s craw. Where I live’s a wren shack. Pull back.
Show wreck. Black fade.

(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)



Coals to Newscastle, Panama Hats from Ecuador

Waching television in Los Angeles. This scene performed in real
time. In real life, a pretty picture walking and sitting still. It’s
still life with fried span, lite poundcake, nondairy crème. It’s
death by chocolate. It’s corporate warfare as we know it. I’m
stuck on the fourth step. There’s no statue of stature of lim-
itations. I’ll be emotional disturbed for as long as it takes. You
can give a man a rock or you can teach him to rock. Access your
higher power. Fax back the map of your spiritual path. Take
twenty drops tincture of worry wort. Who’s paying for this if
you’re not covered? You’re too simple to be so difficult.
Malicious postmodernism. Petroleum jelly donut dunked in
elbow grease. You look better going than coming. You look like
death eating microwave popcorn. Now that I live alone, I’m
much less introspective. Now you sound more like yourself.

(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)


Eurydice

Can’t wait to be spring from shadow,
to be known from a hole in the ground.
Scarcely silent though often unheard.
Winding, wound. Wounded wind.
She turned, and turns. She opens.
Keep the keys, that devil told her.
Guess the question. Dream the answer.
Tore down almost level.
A silence hardly likely.
Juicy voices. Pour them on.
Music sways her, she concedes,
as darker she goes deeper.


(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)


Sleeping with the Dictionary

I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready
to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed
in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the
curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is
a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic
trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the
beside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged
bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers,
smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises
in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while
turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures,
groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission.
Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions
In the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of
the work. Any exist from the logic of language might be an entry in a
symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of
knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside
the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words.
In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can
be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.


(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)


Wipe that Simile Off Your Aphasia

as horses as for
as purple as we go
as heartbeat as if
as silverware as it were
as onion as I can
as cherries as feared
as combustion as want
as dog collar as expected
as oboes as anyone
as umbrella as catch can
as penmanship as it gets
as narcosis as could be
as hit parade as all that
as icebox as far as I know
as fax machine as one can imagine
as cyclones as hoped
as dictionary as you like
as shadow as promised
as drinking fountain as well
as grassfire as myself
as mirror as is
as never as this


(from Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)


____
PERMISSIONS

from Trimmings
Reprinted from Trimmings (New York: Tender Buttons, 1991). Copyright ©1991 by Harryette Mullen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

from S*PeRM**K*T
Reprinted from S*PeRM**K*T (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1993). Copyright ©1992 by Harryette Mulle, Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Between,” “Bilingual Instructions,” “Bleeding Hearts,” “Coals to Newcastle, Panama Hats from Ecuador,” “Eurydice,” “Sleeping with the Dictionary,” and “Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia”
Reprinted from Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Copyright ©2002 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

Deborah Meadows

Deborah Meadows [USA]
1956

Born in Buffalo, New York, Deborah Meadows' father—and others in her family—were ironworkers, and she grew up in a working class neighborhood. But Buffalo is also hope to notable cultural institutions such as the Albright-Knox Art gallery, where she spent many hours as a young girl. In high school she traveled to Stratford, Canada for the Shakespeare festival and attended concerts of the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, while working at the Buffalo Paper Stock factory. Meadows attended the State University of New York, Buffalo, where she studied literature under figures such as the postmodern critic and novelist Raymond Federman and professor Myles Slatin.

Leaving Buffalo, Meadows continued her education at the California State University in Los Angeles, where she studied philosophy and literature, graduating in 1986. Soon after, she began teaching at California Polytechnic University in Pomona. Her first book of poetry, The 60’s and 70’s from “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick,” was published by Tinfish Press in 2003. Green Integer published her Representing Absence in 2004; in the same year Krupskaya press published her Itinerant Men.

In recent years, Meadows has been active in international cultural affairs, traveling twice to Cuba to work to work with Cuban writers such as Reina María Rodríguez and Antonio José Ponte and she has traveled to and worked with poets in Buenos Aires. She has also been active with her faculty union and various issues involving access and equity in public higher education.

With her lover, Howard Stover, Meadows lives in the Los Angeles area. They spend part of each year in a house they built in the Piute Mountains.

BOOKS OF POETRY

The 60’s and 70’s from “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (Kāne’ohe, Hawaii: Tinfish Press, 2003); Representing Absence (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004); Itinerant Men (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2004); Thin Gloves (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006); The Draped Universe (New York: Belladonna Books, 2007); Involutia (Exeter, United Kingdom: Shearsman Books, 2007); Goodbye Tisssues (Exeter, United Kingdom: Shearsman Books); Depleted Burden Down (New York: Factory School, 2009)


Chapter 61

Sightings, basis for portent specimen.

My body. The power to sway
in playfulness upon a vacant sea.

A sore of voices come back to life,
[touted regularly as carved
[by invisible, gracious water:
[the body, itself.

A match, only start her, assault
the female fish, obliquely.
In place of an enormous head,
[raise the buried taken.

Turns were taken, it jetted up
[and passed round that point
wherein the event rushed a steady finger.

The process:
—red tide
—“slanting sun… sent back its reflection
[into every face, so that they all glowed
[to each other like red men”

The ideological slip:
—killed or killers, the Pequod/Pequod again

The poetic process:
—each puff from whale spout matched
puff from Stubb’s pipe
—penetrating in search of gold watch,
“His heart had burst.”

The slip in Time
—expense of moral capital to acquire it

The process of exposé:
—death agony, a witnessed
tragedy of corporeal Body

The national slip:
—casual equation, large death
and small goods use us up


(from The 60’s and 70’s, 2003)



Chapter 2

Reaching
inhaled reaching, followed by or tucked
in as most stop at this place.

A place of departure where headrests, sleep,
originals are required: cement
banisters merge public and private lives,
how can order disguise the bows, bowsprits, etc.

Frost lay. I said to myself, as towards
identity and self-naming, lower your bag
and cover the darkness toward
expensive pavements and pumice the
secret inwardness. It’s all self, all
society, dreary streets and buses on from
here and hereafter. Moving
absorbs many of the works in public, so
encased in ashes, in poor boxes.

A common place. I muttered bathetic
entertainment by the weeping negro church.
I suppose I might look enough, seem
sufficient that tenting indoors, that judgment
more than ever divides. Matchless
is the miracle on the outside where the
window frosts only one-way. Northern
lights raise the dead man within, silken his
pillow lengthwise.
Now fiery, more of this scrape and plenty.


(from Representing Absence, 2004)



We’ve held subject positions


We’ve held subject positions beyond
the grave, experts claim.
A breakwall against sea surge
and psychological reduction, somebody
[or other coined it spectacular.

Too busy participating, we had no idea
how it resolved into a “scene,” and
we had no idea, and we had.

Official declarations that this
is the time for it were many places,
yet few of us felt implicated or even addressed,

[so we admired defacers:
This is the time for the foibles of logic
meant, alone, a long sentence
without appeal.
[The absurdities
of our shared rhetoric
omit how the body knows
[to do body things.

To bring out the shine, as a goal,
meant parental jingles extracting loyalty
[on whose behalves Our nation
[engages in it.

Sometimes you need a rock
to weigh something down.


(from Representing Absence, 2004)


Faux translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “To the Reader”

The sot, his error or fishing lens
lives in our spirits, works in our bodies,
so we eliminate our friendly notes
like mendicants nourishing our vermin.

Our fish are heady, our repentance milky.
We do ourselves gross injustice by what we have
and lease happiness in a scarlet shirt.
Known for its dye that runs when washed, we touch it.

On the topic of bad birds, there’s thirteen
who longs for our impress, our service,
whose baton will vaporize all our freedom
like a suave atomic scientist.

It’s the bull who has our reconstructed son!
About the repulsive objects we work on, we joke
about the day the flames of our descendants are not about here
we joke without bleakness in order to cross the sills that leak.

The poor debauched sot who lowers his mouth and eats
the martyred river from an antique cupboard
we go together along a passage of pleasure and secrecy
that is hard pressed like our agent’s orange.

Zig-zag yet still being formed by millions of hemoglobin donors
is the cut womb of the townspeople
and when we breathe death itself into our lungs,
we breathe the invisible flowers very deeply of our sad songs.

If Viola, poison, flowery painters, and revolutionaries
are not brooding again and again over their demented pleasures,
then the everyday canvas of our pitiful destiny
is our friend like a hell that can’t be hardy.

But the old images in the canyons, the mountain lions and bugs,
the chanters, scorpions, and biting snakes
are all monstrous exaggerations of those that are merchandized
at ramparts of our notorious zoo of cruelty and vice.

It is more laid, more sold, more unworldly
than anything else that can be a large gesture or big cry.
It volunteers the garbage of the land
and lowers all our attempts in this world.

The eye of the bored person involuntarily blinks
because it dreams of the sot high from smoking.
You know it’s true, that monstrous delicacy,
that drug of hypocrisy, like me, like you.



(from Representing Absence, 2004)


____

“Chapter 61,” reprinted from
The 60’s and 70’s from “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick"(Kāne’ohe, Hawaii: Tinfish Press, 2003). ©2003 by Deborah Meadows. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Chapter 2,” “We’ve Held Subject Positions,” and “Faux Translation of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘To the Reader’” reprinted from
Representing Absence (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004). ©2004 by Deborah Meadows. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Guy Bennett

Guy Bennet [USA]
1960

Guy Bennett was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in the suburb of Gardena. As a young child, his father left the family, and Bennett and his younger brother—a sickly child who died at the early age of 29—were raised by his mother and grandmother, both of whom spoke a dialect of Italian, the grandmother’s native language. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bennett attended the University of California and received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. In 1993, he graduated from that institution, with a PhD in French literature. His interest in Futurism also led him to master Russian and Italian.

Soon after graduation, Bennett met Douglas Messerli at an Italian Futurist conference, and—after showing the publisher some translations he had done of Marinetti, for which he had recreated the original typefaces—came to work as typographer for Sun & Moon Press.

Simultaneously, Bennett taught French language and literature at UCLA and other local community colleges. He also began to translate books from French and other languuages, many of which were published by Sun & Moon and Green Integer. Previous to the publication of his own first book of poetry, Last Words, Bennett began his own press, Seeing Eye Books (in 1997) which continues to publish four books, available by subscription, annually.

In 1999 he became Associate Professor of Liberal Studies and Communication at Otis College of Art & Design. The year before he married French scholar and writer Béatrice Mousli, and together they now split their time between Los Angeles and her native Paris.

In 2000, Bennett published The Row, and in 2001 his chapbook 100 Famous Views was published by 108.93 press. The Italian publishing house ML & NLF published a bilingual collection of his poems, Drive to Cluster (with art by Ron Giffin), in 2003.

Bennett has continued to translate and to typeset books for several local and national publishers. With Standard Schaefer, Bruno Franklin and Chris Reiner, he organized a poetry reading series at a local café. And he has been active in several poetic ventures throughout the city. With his wife, Bennett organized an exhibit and conference on “French and American Poetry in Translation” at the University of Southern California, the Autry Museum, and Otis College of Art & Design in 2003.

Bennett’s writing, like his personality, is witty, urbane, and highly focused. His writing often has formal systems quietly embedded in it, but the poetry itself in influenced by a wide range of interests: music (for several years he played bass in a local musical group), photography, film, architecture, and, as one might expect, the languages and literatures of other countries.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Last Words (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998); The Row (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 2000); One Hundred Famous Views (Atlanta: 108.93, 2001); Drive to Cluster (Piacenza, Italy: ML & NLF, 2003)

Jean-Pierre Rosnay

Jean-Pierre Rosnay [France]

1926

Two Poems
Translated from the French by J. Kates


Les pirogues

Je lève les yeux
et je vois le ciel sur les toits
Alors je m'aperçois que je n'ai pas levé les yeux
et que j'ai vu le ciel
Je le jurerais sur ma vie
J'écris tout haut
ce que je pense tout bas
J'écris qu'un Irlandais sourit dans le brouillard
et qu'il a l'air d'un ange
rasé de frais
Je me souviens très exactement
de ma première demeure
du lait renversé
de Madame Barquet
de la longue vue
et du matin de lin
où disparut ma mère
Je parle avec des soldats
qui sont morts dans des batailles
dont nul ne connaît le nom
Je me baigne dans des rivières que je n'ai
jamais vues
Des filles de quinze ans traversent le soleil
sur des pirogues rouges
Je lève les yeux et je vois le ciel sur les arbres
Alors je m'aperçois que je n'ai pas levé les yeux
et que j'ai vu le ciel
Je le jurerais sur ma vie



The Canoes

I lift up my eyes
and I see sky on the rooftops
Then I notice I haven't lifted my eyes
and I have seen the sky
I would swear it on my life
I write out loud
what I think under my breath
I write that an Irishman is smiling in the fog
and that he seems like an angel
freshly barbered
I remember quite exactly
my first address
spilt milk
far sighted
Madame Barquet
and the flaxen morning
my mother disappeared
I talk with soldiers
who died in battles
everyone's forgotten
I swim in rivers I have
never seen
Fifteen-year-old girls cross the sun
in red canoes
I lift up my eyes and see the sky in the trees
Then I notice I haven't lifted my eyes
and I have seen the sky
I would swear it on my life

La maison sans moi


Penché sur le bord de la page
Je crie des sottises
Je voudrais gober une étoile
Casser la figure
[à un ange
Ou faire de la vespa
Sur les plaines vernies de
[la lune
Je voudrais
danser
sur l'échine d'un paléothérium
Tandis que naîtrait un bel arbre
flexible et rationnel
[dans le creux de ma main
Bref
Je voudrais gober une étoile
Casser la figure à un ange
Ou faire de la vespa
Sur les plaines vernies
[de la lune



The House Without Me

Leaning on the edge of the page
I shout out stupidities
I would like to swallow a star
Bust out the lights
[of an angel
Or take a leak
On the lacquered plains of
[the moon
I would like
to dance
on the backbone of a paleotherium
while it gave birth to a fine and flexible
tree of reason
[in the palm of my hand
In short
I would like to swallow a star
Bust out the lights of an angel
Or take a leak
On the lacquered plains
[of the moon

____

French copyright c by Jean-Pierre Rosnay. English language copyright c2009 by J. Kates. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Jean-Pierre Rosnay was born in Lyon in 1926. At the age of sixteen he joined the Resistance under the code-name "Bébé." He has published six collections of poetry since the 1960s: Diagonales, Comme un bâteau prend la mer, Le treizième apôtre, La foire aux ludions, Rafales, and, most recently, Fragment et Relief (1994). He also is the author of novels, the proprietor of Club des Poètes in Paris, a host of radio and television poetry programs, editor of an anthology of poems of the Resistance and of the quarterly Vivre en Poésie, and the initiator of dial-a-poem and poetry computer networks in France.

J. Kates is a poet and translator living in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. His translations from French and Russian have been published in England, Ireland, and New Zealand, as well as in the United States. With Stephen A. Sadow, he translated, We, the Generation in the Wilderness (Ford-Brown, 1989) by Argentine poet Ricardo Feierstein.

You may now purchase Rosnay's new book, When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, translated from the French by J. Kates, from Green Integer for the price of $12.95 plus $2.00 for shipping. Order from Paypal.com or send a check with your address to Green Integer (6022 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 202C, Los Angeles, CA 90036).

Jóhann Hjálmarsson

Jóhann Hjálmarsson [Iceland]
1939

Jóhann Hjálmarsson is the author of 22 books of poetry, three chapbooks, six books of translations, and two volumes of critical essays on Icelandic literature.

Hjálmarsson published his first book of poems when he 17 years old and working as a printer’s apprentice. Critics recognized the talent of this young poet, and he was encouraged by Jón úr Vör, one of Iceland’s foremost Modernist poets, to go abroad to study. Hjalmarsson applied and was accepted at the University of Barcelona, where he studied Romance languages. At this time he also began to translate Federico Garcia Lorca into Icelandic. His reading led him subsequently to translate the French and Latin American surrealists and the French Symbolists.

By his third, and seminal, book, Malbikud hjortu (Heart of Asphalt), he was recognized as being one of the leading avant-garde writers in Iceland. At this time he was also hired by Iceland’s largest newspaper, Morgunblaðið, as a literary and art reviewer as well as a travel writer. In this job, he traveled around the world—more than any other poet of his generation in Iceland. Wherever he traveled he sought out the leading poets of the country and translated their work into Icelandic. This discipline honed Hjálmarsson’s own poetry, while also introducing new literary influences to young Icelandic writers.

In the early 1970s, Hjálmarsson turned his attention toward reading and translating contemporary American poetry. Hjálmarsson was looking to mine the stories of his family, and by doing so exploring the socialist/communist influences in Icelandic culture from pre-World War II through to Iceland as a modern society, and many American poets inspired him. Here, Hjálmarsson did what no Icelandic poet had done before—use a “confessional” voice to speak directly of the privacies of mind—something no other poet within Icelandic literature had ever expressed through prosody. This American influence led Hjálmarsson to write two book-length poems: Myndinn af langafa (Portrait of Great Grandfather) and Fra Umsvolum (Daybook from Umsvali). No other Icelandic poet had ever written such ambitious and controversial works.

Hjálmarsson has received numerous awards for his work. He was awarded the 2000 Nordic Literary Prize for his third book of a trilogy of poems, Hljóðleikar (Sound Play), based on Eyrbyggja Saga, whose events take place in the region of Iceland where his ancestors settled. He was presented with the 2003 Icelandic Parliament Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Icelandic literature as a poet and translator. Now semi-retired, Hjálmarsson lives with his wife in a townhouse overlooking the Smoky Bay.

--Christopher Burawa

BOOKS OF POERY

Aungull í tímanum (1956); Undarlegir fiskar (Heimskringla 1958); Malbikuð hjörtu (Bókaverslun Sigfúsar Eymundssonar, 1961); Fljúgandi næturlest (Reykjavík: Birtingur, 1961); Mig hefur dreymt þetta áður (Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið, 1965); Ný lauf, nýtt myrkur (Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið, 1967); Athvarf í himingeimnum (Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið, 1973); Myndin af langafa (Reykjavík: Hörpuútgáfan, 1975); Dagbók borgaralegs skálds (Reykjavík: Hörpuútgáfan, 1976); Frá Umsvölum (Reykjavík: Hörpuútgáfan, 1977); Lífið er skáldlegt (Reykjavík: Iðunn, 1978); Sjö skáld í mynd (Reykjavík: Svart á hvítu, 1983); Ákvörðunarstaður myrkrið (Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið, 1985); Gluggar hafsins (Kópavogi: Örlagið, 1989); Blá mjólk (1990); Skuggar (Kópavogi: Örlagið, 1992); Rödd í speglunum (Reykjavík: Hörpuútgáfan, 1994); Marlíðendur (Reykjavík: Hörpuútgáfan, 1998); Anímónur til Ragnheiðar (Kópavogi: Örlagið, 1999); Hljóðleikar (Reykjavík: Hörpuútgáfan, 2000); Með sverð í gegnum varir: úrval ljóða 1956-2000 (Reykjavík: JPV, 2001); Vetrarmegin (Reykjavík: JPV, 2003)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Of the Same Mind, trans. by C. M. Burawa (Claremont, California: Toad Press, 2005)


Forest Wind

The wind drops
like a green sail on a skiff
crossing the smiles of women—
who can summon the sea?
It always returns
out of each tree, brake
and out of itself
from a great height.

The men threaten it with hammered knives.
The women shelter it,
shutting it away
in the idle cloud.
These women drink of its physics
and await the result,
which fills them with currants and flame—
enough to ignite a forest.

The men can only look at the ground
and say:
I believe it is gathering into a fresh storm.
The women groan
or become silent
out of anger and stroke
the wind’s brow
as if it was an old lover.

The men stand.
The forest wind drops the sail,
changes to dew
so the squirrel in the mast
can, at last, spell out its name.

—Translated from the Icelandic by Chris Burawa

The Forest

The forest avoids my certainty
gives me assurances
The forest shuns my quiet mind
gives me the wakefulness of trees
I fill the forest with my breath
I fill the forest with song and heartbeat
The birds jubilantly sing like the sky does
The forest’s sky that intrudes into my dreams

—Translated from the Icelandic by Chris Burawa

On the Death of a Poet

The summer sunsets only give off red and here I extend
my hands that cannot even lift a bayonet

It would be better if I had some power over them
like a daring soldier over his metal snap-together weapons

But I’ve inherited an inadequate vocabulary
and most of the words I’ve lost
on my walks around the block

The sunsets are red and my sorrow and joy
are laid up in them

Blue is the color of distances
that the sunsets rust along the way

—Translated from the Icelandic by Chris Burawa


Evening in Barcelona

Here come the shadows
with their truth of green trees
Antonio reflects on their sadness
while in his refuge of palm trees

Wheat bread on the table
and red wine in the bottle
are flesh and blood
of Antonio of Granada

The ants set off
communicating a thousand messages
that are found deep in Spanish earth
the genius of expectation

In the city square, Plaza de Cataluña
I rejoice at the complaints of the pigeons
and refuse to think in this late light
about your sad shadows

—Translated from the Icelandic by Chris Burawa

Squalls

1.
We are fishermen of death. We’ve never imagined ourselves hauling up polished cod on cold mornings or in the small dimensions of night, bringing our catch back to land. We never make land. But we won’t give up. Catch yourself a man. The warm-blooded fish. Newly laid out. We want the hands to poke out of the sleeves. We trawl for death. No one gives us a thought until it’s too late. The cheeky moon drawing men to its light. Little Agna is willing, out of hate and love. She sings all the songs she dances to, in hopes of changing the situation. The music that creates the fullness of this moment, it worries that she knows the source. A tremble on the hook. So we drink purple wine. Set a table on the sea’s bottom. There are more of us than barbs on all the snow crabs. Let the crabs live in the carcasses, help themselves to a bloodless body. Leopard seals look into the eyes of the drowned, weep at the calm. The buoyed seaweed is a good, proposes play. We are the fishermen of death. We arrive on the scene just as you seize.

2.
The blessings of life turn into two rounded stones. They visit the sea with the same joy as you engage breasts and their blooms. Your hand gropes for God’s hand, and finds God. The breath finds the hand of God. But God is smaller than you can account for. He is a period to which all lines attach. Shout, illuminating your sorrow or joy. You tremble as you touch each new emotion with your fingertips. How you love. I know that love is lonely. A beggar who patiently waits, collects sugar cubes knocked to the floor. I’ve overheard conversations about the blessings of life. I can only understand this concept as something interpreted by the self. I cannot perceive of God, because I am a reflection of God’s imagination. The blessings of life become two worn stones. Some day a mob may bash your skull in with them. You will lie in your own blood. Maybe then you will find the blessings of life.

3.
The dead call on us. Death is everywhere. On the coffee table. In the green eyes that I love. Death is like the bay I now row over. The years go by without my noticing them. I aim for a spit of land. The dead have lined up like torches along the pebbled shoreline. There hands direct me. I see no face. The front door of the house is open. Fingers strum a dusty guitar. The blue moon acts as a lookout? Life is like the song of the red flounder, found only at great depths. The dead come to us saved through the eye of a needle.

4.
All at once the universe has new stars. The darkness crowded out, comes back. The lights were simply embers from the crematorium. In town there are more tombstones than villagers. The carpenters don’t have it in them to build coffins anymore. The priests asphyxiate on the flat bed of eulogy. You say that the world is suddenly alive. But then a heavy darkness collapses at the window. The optimists lead their old dogs around the cemetery. These house pets lift their left back legs and strain. Mankind’s fall is no longer pure madness. It’s nature’s work. We are thirsty, brother. The cocktails almost always change. Again, the universe fills with the lawns swallowing their tongues.

5.
Poison collects along the curbs, runoff of our anger that includes our children. The cafés, the troughs of the city, document it. The women and men expect it to glow from fingertips. Life could be more charming. We have forgotten about the nobility of scarred mountains and the innocence of flat lakes, say the minor poets. But the poison has come to our aid. We cannot decide among ourselves why happiness has turned in on itself and now cares more about contentment than about childhood. We wait around with sunglasses in the rain. Really, life should be a captivating drama.

6.
Certainty makes up only a small fraction of our lives. Clown-like fedoras strewn about. The coliseum is reserved for something more enticing. What’s true must be a component of laughter. Distort this, and you discover a brute. And the brute won’t have sex with the simpletons. He sits on the cat and tries to groom its tail. Truth won’t talk about trips it’s taken abroad. You might as well set up a playpen, cram it full of toys and gewgaws. It’s comforting to be able to glimpse it as you emerge from the tub. Be sure you dry your back. Have you lost your own scent? Certainty doesn’t answer disagreeable questions. You and delusion skip through the house. Go ahead, you can watch the acrobat, the man in the ape costume, spinning around a rope. To this day your wife still hangs the keys from black sewing thread. You’d better scoot down to the basement. The rats at their folk dances dance across the floor. You chase after them with a twig. You shoot straight for a place by the least likely means of transportation available. Truth lifts you up as a monument, erects you in the town square. The people are in favor of you. Certainty drowns in your tub. You love it so tightly you can’t perceive of it in yourself. You take a bath in the bath. Then, something tragic happens.

7.
Why I was a witness to their fall, I cannot say. They set off at once. A fire burned through their eyes. Stones creased at their steps. A rainbow aureoled in support of their courage. Mountains were in agreement, but had been before this. So they hoofed it to the seashore. Why they wanted to walk into the sea I still don’t know. Ships stood idly in the bay. They didn’t know this place. Went directly ahead. The water was calm after the rain, and the shore smelled of seaweed. I watched them high-step through the shallows. All at once they changed color. I was watching myself. You hesitated. I saw nothing more. The sea swallowed then. I couldn’t do anything but laugh. Their look of dread reminded me of something very funny. Later, I pursued the algae dream of shrimp. It was wonderful to find them climbing up an arm, clustering around a left breast. That night, I lied down in the marooned seaweed, watched the bodies drifting one by one out to sea, enjoying myself.

8.
Through the dead silence, the nights observe the domestic lives of birds. Earthworm songs cut the air. Shred at the feet of lovers. Their blood-driven hopes drift in the storm. The gallows is plumb. Your ships neatly in a row. Where is the executioner? He’s always the first to cheer up the vultures. There on the gibbet floor he speaks of the victory of humanity. Two ancient boulders can no longer keep their peace. They trick themselves into a promenade around the corpse. The river began grieving when blood streamed down the inside of the window and door. Through the dead silence, you witness the nights of the birds’ domesticity.

9.
Cats lay fearlessly by your feet. The blade that terrorizes the autumn hay relishes their blood. What really frightens them is a freelance demon. But they can’t be subdued, and instead smoke their pipes out of resignation. My pen disappears there where I know two doves have taken cover under a rock, just like children who dive for flasks at the bottom of a lake. They make their grandparents ill with this water. These patients remember their own children whenever they drink from the flat bottles. Resigned, we recall our own children because what we choose to keep is long and tiring. Darning needles knit our lips together so that we cannot speak or kiss, let alone find out what’s wonderful about each other’s lips. As the smoke from our brave pipes sketch the likeness of heaven.

10.
The morning light plays a monotonous sonata about the merits of suicide. The world’s cowl must be night. You see something in the silence that drinks from the wakes of ships. A poem dies suddenly of doubt. A bus continues on its way without knowing any of this. The quiet retracts at the hawking of the newspaper boy. The wine has altered. Doesn’t trust you to provide a proper memory of God. Perceives of your suffering, and believes in this memory. I don’t believe in you. You should find another ear. The answer is nowhere to be found, yet you insist on frying an egg in the same pan. Eyes like slugs climbing a ladder. Absolve me of manifold truths so that I may join the abandon of the squall. My nights linger there. A knife slicing songs of praise in half. An eel thrashes about in a puddle. The fishermen of death sail into the bay.

—Translated from the Icelandic by Chris Burawa


_______
English language copyright ©2009 by Christopher Burawa. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

Matt Robinson

Matt Robinson [Canada]
1974

Matt Robinson is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, who currently works in Residential Life at The University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB. His most recent collection of poetry is no cage contains a stare that well (ECW, 2005), a full-length volume of hockey poems.

A two time National Magazine Award finalist, robinson’s poetry has received numerous awards, including The Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize and Grain’s Prose Poem Prize. A recipient of The NB Foundation for the Arts’ Emerging Artist of the Year Award, his poems have appeared on radio and television, in numerous Canadian, American, British, and Australian publications, as well as in anthologies such as The New Canon (Vehicule, 2005), Breathing Fire 2 (Nightwood, 2004), Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Pearson, 2004), Literature: A Pocket Anthology (Pearson, 2004), Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada (Goose Lane, 2002), Exact Fare Only 2 (Anvil, 2004), and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land (Acorn Press, 2001).

A poetry editor at The Fiddlehead, Robinson has also served as NB / PEI Regional Representative and President of The League of Canadian Poets. He holds a BA and a BSc from Saint Mary’s University, a B.Ed. from Mount Saint Vincent University, and a M.A. in Creative Writing from The University of New Brunswick.

Robinson's previous books of poetry include the letter-pressed, limited edition chapbook of hockey poems, tracery & interplay (Frog Hollow Press, 2004), as well as the full-length collections how we play at it: a list (ECW, 2002), and A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking (Insomniac, 2000), which was short listed for both the Gerald Lampert Memorial and ReLit Poetry Awards.


BOOKS OF POETRY

A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000); how we play at it: list (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002); tracery & interplay (Victoria, British Columbia: Frog Hollow Press, 2004); no cage contains a stare that well (Toronto: ECW Press, 2005)

Recent Books of Poetry

Recent Books of Poetry

Bachand, Thérèse. luce a cavallo (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009). $12.95
To order pay $14.95 ($12.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer, c/o Paypal (Paypal.com)
or contact douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Bracho, Coral. Firefly Under the Tongue, trans. from the Spanish by Forrest Gander (New York: New Directions, 2008) $16.95

Cole, Norma. Natural Light (New York: Libellum, 2009)

DiPalma, Ray. The Ancient Use of Stone: Journals and Daybooks 1998-2008 (Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2009) $14.95

Dubois, Caroline. You Are the Business, trans. from the French by Cole Swensen (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2008) $14.00

Edwards, Ken. Red & Green (Old Hunstanton, Norfolk, UK: Oystercatcher Press, 2009) n.p.

Engonopoulos, Nikos. Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978, trans. from the Greek by Martin McKinsey (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2008) $13.95
To order pay $15.95 ($13.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer, c/o Paypal (Paypal.com)
or contact douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Howe, Susan. Souls of the Labadie Tract (New York: New Directions, 2007) $16.95

Garron, Isabelle. Face Before Against, trans. from the French by Sarah Riggs (Brooklyn: Litmus Press, 2008) $15.00

Gizzi, Michael. New Depths of Deadpan (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2009) $14.00

Jamme, Franck André. New Exercises, trans. from the French by Charles Borkhuis (Seattle:
Wave Books, 2008) $14.00

Kinsella, John. Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008) $34.95

Ko Un. Songs for Tomorrow: A Collection of Poems 1960-2002, trans. from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2008) $15.95
To order pay $17.95 ($15.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer, c/o Paypal (Paypal.com)
or contact douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Lease, Joseph. Broken Word (Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2007) $15.00

Loydell, Rupert M. Ex Catalogue (Carnforth, Lancaster, UK: Shadow Train Books, 2006) £6.95

Lubasch, Lisa. Twenty-One After Days (Penngrove, California: Avec Books, 2006) $14.00
MacAfee, Norman. One Class: Selected Poems 1965-2008 (Brownsville, Vermont: Harbor Mountain Press, 2008) $14.00

Meadows, Deborah. Goodbye Tissues (Exeter, United Kingdom: Shearsman Books, 2009). n.p.

Meadows, Deborah. involutia (Exeter, United Kingdom: Shearsman Books, 2007) n.p.

Mikhail, Dunya. Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, trans. from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow and Dunya Mikhail (New York: New Directions, 2009) $16.95

Nakayasu, Sawako. Hurry Home Honey: Love Poems 1994-2004 (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2009) $14.00

Olson, Toby. Darklight (Exeter, United Kingdom, 2007) n.p.

O'Sullivan, Maggie. Windows Opening (Brooklyn: Belladonna #108, 2007) $4.00

Rojas, Gonzalo. From the Lightning: Selected Poems, trans. from the Spanish by John Oliver Simon, 2008) $14.95
To order pay $16.95 ($14.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer, c/o Paypal (Paypal.com)
or contact douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Rosnay, Jean-Pierre. When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, trans. from the French by J. Kates (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009) $12.95
To order pay $14.95 ($12.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer, c/o Paypal (Paypal.com)
or contact douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Ross, Joe. Strata (Zürich: Dusie Books, 2008) $13.00

Sanguinetti, Hélène. Hence This Cradle, trans. from the French by Ann Cefola (Los Angeles:
Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2007) $12.95

Seed, Ian. Anonymous Intruder (Exeter, United Kingdom: Shearsman Books, 2009) n.p.

Spatola, Adriano. The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992, trans. from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2008) $15.95
To order pay $17.95 ($15.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer, c/o Paypal (Paypal.com)
or contact douglasmesserli@gmail.com

Spatola, Adriano. Toward Total Poetry, trans. from the Italian by Brendan W. Hennessey and Guy Bennett (Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2008) $12.95

Stolterfoht, Ulf. Lingos I-IX, trans. from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2006) $14.00

Templeton, Fiona. Medea in Aia: Part I of The Medead (Brooklyn: Belladonna #111, 2007)
$4.00

Tranströmer, Tomas. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, trans. from the Norwegian by Robin Fulton (New York: New Directions, 2006) $16.95

Vangelisti, Paul. Caper (Castelvetro Piacentino [Piacenza], Italy: ML &NLF, 2006) n.p.

Ward, Diane. Flim-Yoked Scrim (San Diego: Factory School, 2006) n.p.

Wieners, John. A Book of Prophecies (Lowell, Massachusetts: Bookstrap Press, 2007) $15.00

Young, Geoffrey. The Riot Act (Lowell, Massachusetts: Bookstrap Press, 2008) $15.00


Please send books for listing and possible review to:
Douglas Messerli c/o Green Integer
6022 Wilshire Boulevard #202C
Los Angeles, California 90036

Elaine Equi

Elaine Equi [USA]
1953

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Elaine Equi grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. She received a B.A. and M.A. in English from Columbia College, and after graduating, went on to teach a poetry workshop there for several years. Along with her husband, poet Jerome Sala, she helped create a lively performance poetry scene. In 1988, they moved to New York City where she currently teaches creative writing in the M.F.A. programs at The New School and City College.

Equi’s early books are Federal Woman (1978), Shrewcrazy (1981), and The Corners of the Mouth (1986). In 1989, she published Surface Tension, the first of many books with Coffee House Press—firmly establishing herself as a poet of national reputation. It was followed by Decoy (1994), Voice-Over (1998) (chosen by Thom Gunn for the San Francisco State Poetry Award), and The Cloud of Knowable Things (2003). Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems was published by Coffee House in 2007.

Equi’s work is often praised for its lucid simplicity. Wayne Koestenbaum characterizes it as “clean, clear, cool, quick,” adding that, “she is at once an entertainer and an oracle….” Of her own work she writes: “I like the fact that for the most part, my poems are pretty accessible. I don’t consciously aim for that, but I do know that my sense of audience is always a mix of literary and non-literary types. On the other hand, I like to keep things (especially in terms of language) interesting. Over the years, my work has been informed by a wide range of styles including surrealist, concrete, and classical Chinese poetry, so it’s not unsophisticated—just willfully direct in a minimalist sort of way.”

BOOKS OF POETRY

Federal Woman (Chicago: Danaides Press, 1978); Shrewcrazy (Los Angeles: Little Cesar Press, 1981); The Corners of the Mouth (Los Angeles: Iridescence Press, 1986); Accessories (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1988); Views without Rooms (New York: Hanuman Press, 1989); Surface Tension (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press); Decoy (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994); Friendship with Things (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1998); Voice-Over (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998); The Cloud of Knowable Things (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2003); Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2007)

Rod Smith

Rod Smith [USA]
1962

Rod Smith was born in Gallipolis, Ohio in 1962 and grew up in Northern Virginia where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. His first publication of poetry was a Ferlinghetti imitation which ap-peared in the Baltimore Sun in 1982. In the early 1980s Smith was a rural carrier for the US Postal Service in the vicinity of the Manassas Battlefield, during which time he studied Pound, Stein, Williams, Ashbery, O'Hara, Oppen, and others.

He began the journal Aerial with Wayne Kline in 1984 and published the first Edge Book in 1989. He moved to the District of Columbia in 1987 and became part of the DC poetry community which included the writers Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, P. Inman, Doug Lang, Douglas Messerli, Joan Retallack, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and others. This group expanded over the years to include such writers as Leslie Bumstead, Jean Donnelly, Buck Downs, Heather Fuller, Mark McMorris, Carol Mirakove, Tom Orange, and Mark Wallace.

He met John Cage in Rockville, Maryland in 1987 and saw him regularly, playing chess (usually losing), in Washington and New York until Cage's death in 1992. Aerial published a selection of Cage's writing in 1991.

The playful title of Smith's first book, In Memory of My Theories, published by O Books in 1996, unequivocally locates his work in the New American and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry traditions. Additional full-length collections, Protective Immediacy and Music or Honesty were published by Roof in 1999 and 2003. A long poem, The Good House, was published by Spectacular Books in 2000. A selection of poems entitled Poèmes de l'araignée was published in France in 2002 by Un bureau sur l'atlantique.

Smith manages the independent bookstore Bridge Street Books in DC and continues his editorial work with Edge Books, which has published award winning volumes by Joan Retallack and Kevin Davies. He is currently working on Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian with the poet Jen Hofer. Smith is also editing, with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley for The University of California Press.


BOOKS OF POETRY

The Boy Poems (Washington, D.C.: Buck Downs Books, 1994); A Grammar Manikan [Object 5, featuring Rod Smith] (New York: Object, 1995); In Memory of My Theories (Oakland, California: O Books, 1996); The Lack (love poems, targets, flags...) (Elmwood, Connecticut: Abacus, 1997); Protective Immediacy (New York: Roof, 1999); The New Mannerist Tricycle [with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma] (Philadelphia: Beautiful Simmer, 2000); The Good House (New York: Spectacular Books, 2001); Poèmes de l'araignée (Bordeaux, France: Un bureau sur l'atlantique, 2003); Music or Honesty (New York: Roof Books, 2003)

Simon Vinkenoog Dies

On July 12, 2009, Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog died in Amsterdam after suffering a seizure. Green Integer published a large selection of his poetry in its PIP Anthology, No. 6, subtitled,

Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers, edited by Peter Glassgold and Douglas Messerli. To visit the PIP listing of Vinkenoog, with a selection of his poems, go here: http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2009/04/simon-vinkenoog-netherlands-1928-born.html

Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge [France]
1899-1988

Francis Ponge was born in Montpellier, France in 1899. His work became known in French literary circles in the early 1920s, primarily through publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française, at the time Ponge worked for Gallimard publishing house as a production manager. Ponge, who had joined the Socialist Party in 1919, had a brief association with the Surrealists in the 1930s, which, in turn, led him to join the Communist Party.

During the same period, he worked for the book distributor Hachette until he was drafted into the army in 1938. In 1942, he published his great masterpiece Parti pris de choses. In the same year Ponge joined the Resistance.

After World War II, Ponge left the Communist Party, and the period from 1947-1951 was a lean time, interruped by a trip to Algeria in 1947-1948 with Henri Calet and Michel Leiris. From 1952 to 1964 he taught for the Alliance Française in Paris. In 1956 the Nouvelle Revue Française devoted a special issue to Ponge, in which Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre both wrote in his praise. And throughout the 1960s, Ponges work was highly praised by the Tel Quel group, Philippe Sollers, Jean Thibaudeau and Marcelin Pleynet, in particular. In 1965 Ponge traveled to the United States, lecturing in over sixty venues at various universities; the following year he spent a term as Visiting Professor at Barnard College and Columbia University. In 1972 he was awarded an international prize by The Ingram Merrill Fondation, and two years later Ponge was awarded the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Douze petits écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1926); Le parti pris des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); Le guêpe (Paris: Seghers, 1945); L'œillet, La guêpe, Le mimosa (Lausanne: Mermod, 1946); Le carnet du bois de pins (Lausanne: Mermod, 1947); Liasse: Vingt-et-un Textes suivis d'une bibliographie (Lyons: Écrivains Réunis, 1948); Proêmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); La Crevette dans tous ses états (Paris: Vrille, 1948); La Seine (Lausanne: La Guilde du Livre, 1950); L'Araignée (Paris: Aubier, 1952); Le Rage de l'expression (Lausanne: Mermod, 1952); Des Cristaux naturels (Saint-Maurice-d'Ételan: Bettencourt, 1952); Ponges [selection, edited by Philippe Sollers] (Paris: Seghers, 1963); Le grand recueil: I. Lyres; II. Méthodes; III. Pièces (Paris: Gallimard, 1961); Tome premier (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); Pour un Malherbe (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); Le savon (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); Nouveau Recueil (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); La Fabrique du pré (Geneva: Skira, 1971)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Two Prose Poems, trans. by Peter Hoy (Leicester: Black Knight Press, 1968); Rain: A Prose Poem, trans. by Peter Hoy (London: Poet and Painter, 1969); Soap, trans. by Lane Dunlop (New York: Grossman, 1969); Things, trans by Cid Corman (New York: Grossman, 1971); The Voice of Things, trans. by Beth Archer (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972); The Sun Placed in the Abyss and Other Texts, trans. by Serge Gavronsky (New York: Sun, 1977); Vegetation, trans. by Lee Fahnestock (New York: Red Dust, 1987); The Power of Language: Texts and Translations, edited and translated by Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); The Making of the "Pré" (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979); Selected Poems (Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1994)


The Oyster

The oyster, the size of an average pebble, has a coarser appearance, a less even color, brilliantly whitish. It is a stubbornly closed world. It can be opened however: you have to hold it in the hollow of a rag, use a chipped, rather dull knife and go at it several times. Curious fingers are cut, nails broken: it's a rough job. Nicking it, we mark its casing with white circles, sorts of halos.
Inside we find an entire world, to eat and drink: under a pearly firmament (strickly speaking), the skies above merge with the skies below, forming a single pool, a viscous, greenish sachet that flows back and forth to both smell and sight, and that is fringed with a blackish lace.
On very rare occasions a little form beads in their pearly throats, with which we quickly adorn ourselves.

─Translated from the French by Guy Bennett

(from Le parti pris des choses, 1942)

The Nuptial Habits of Dogs

The nuptial habits of dogs are really something! In a village in Bress, in 1946...(I want to be precise because, considering the celebrated evolution of the species, if it were to hasten...or if there were to be an abrupt mutation: one can never tell)...

What a curious ballet! What tension!
It's beautiful! This movement engendered by a specific passion. Dramatic! And how lovely are those curves! With critical moments, paroxystic, and drawn-out patience, perserverance of a maniacal immobility, circumlocutions in very slow revolutions, circumvolutions, pursuits, strolling in a special way...
Oh! And what music! What a variety!
All those individuals like spermatozoa who come together after unbelievable detours.
But that music!
That hunted female; cruelly importuned; and thos male hunters, grumblers, musicians.
This lasts a good week...(more perhaps: I'll correct it when it's over).
What maniacs those dogs. What stubbornness. What heavy brutes. What chumps! Sad. Narrow-minded. A pain in the ass!
Ridiculously stubborn. Plaintive. Ears cocked, on the scent. Busy. Scenting. Raising and knitting their brows, sadly, comically. Everything strained: ears, backs, legs. Growling. Plaintive. Blind and dumb to everything else but their specific determinations.
(Compare this to the grace and the violence of cats. To the grace of horses also).

But she wasn't my bitch. She belonged to my neighbor, Féaux the postman: I was unable to get close enough, to observe the organs of the lady, her smell, her trails, her loss of seed.
I was unable to determine if she had begun by being provocative, or if it had only come to her (her condition, first of all, then her discharges, her smell, then the males and their attention, so long, so importunate), if it had only been for her a surprise, only a timid groan, with calculated and consenting movements.
What a sad story, after all! How life, revealed to her at that moment, must have appeared harassing, bothersome, absurd!
And there she is, wounded for life,─mortally, too! But she will have her pretty little puppies... Alone to herself, for a little while... Then those males will stop hanging around, and what joy with her little ones, even what fun, what fullness,─despite an occasional traffic jame between her paws and under her belly, and a lot of fatigue.
The fact is, we didn't sleep much for a week... But that's of no importance: you can't always have everything,─sleep and something like a series of nocturnal performances at the Classic Theater.

The moon there above (above the passions) also seemed to me to have played a major role.

─Translated from the French by Serge Gavronsky

(from Le grand recueil, III, 1961)

Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, Painting No. 47

Marsden Hartley [USA]
1877-1943

Born in Lewison, Maine, Marsden Hartley grew up in a family of poverty. At 14 Hartley dropped out of school and went to work in a shoe factory, joining his family the next year in Cleveland, where they had moved. There he was able to study art, and won a scholarship to study of the Cleveland School (now Institute) of Art. In 1898 he moved to New York City, continuing his art studies at the William Merritt Chase School, but grew frustrated with the Chase methods of painting and teaching. He left the school in 1900 to attend the National Academy of Design. During these early years of 1908 and 1909 Hartley returned often to Maine, painting its landscape and writing poetry.

In 1909 Alfred Stieglitz gave Hartley his first one-man exhibition and took him on at his famed 291 Gallery. Stieglitz also introduced Hartley to the works of European modernisn, including Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne, whose influences began to appear in his still-lives of 1912. Between 1912 and 1916, and continuing in the years 1922 to 1929, Harley lived in both New York and in Europe, traveling, painting and writing.

While in Europe he became fascinated with the works of the Blaue Reiter group, particularly Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, influences that would remain in Hartley’s paintings for several years. He exhibited with the Blaue Reiter group in the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin.

Hartley was a witty conversationalist and noted for his often straight-forward but elegantly expressed statements. But, as a closeted homosexual—at least in the US—Hartley could also be aloof and, at times, distant. Soon after the outbreak of World War I, Hartley lost his dear friend and reputed lover, Karl von Freyburg, who died in battle. He began a series of paintings paying tribute to Freyburg and other German friends who inhabited Berlin’s vibrant homosexual world.

In 1919, having returned to the United States, he began to publish poetry and essays in many of the important small journals and presses of the day, including Poetry, The Dial, The Little Review, and Others. In the early 1920s he came briefly under the influence of Dadaism. He also became close friends with the artists of Stieglitz’s group—Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O’Keefe and Paul Strand—as well as writers such as Arthur Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes (her wrote of him in a couple of her journalistic pieces on “Greenwich Village” life), William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and others.. It was he who first introduced Williams to Robert McAlmon, resulting ultimately in the Contact publications. McAlmon published Hartley’s own book of poetry, Twenty-five Poems in 1925. In Paris Hartley had also become a close friend of Gertrude Stein’s.

As a result of the war, Hartley increasingly moved in a new direction both in his painting and writing to a more regional approach. Influenced by Whitman and others, he centered his writing in more of the plain speech of common people and in his art depicting the fishermen and workers, often in homoerotic images, of his beloved home state. Whereas his earlier poetry had often been experimental, in his later work he often returned some rhyme and meter and to more narrative forms. Yet, Hartley wrote with no particular programme, and it would be difficult to characterize his poetry as following any one trend. As he wrote in his 1919 essay (reproduced in the Documents section of this book), “Personal handling counts for more than personal expression. We can learn to use hackneyed words like ‘rose’ and ‘lily,’ relieving them of Swinburnian encrustations.”

In 1930 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, traveling to Mexico and them to Germany. Returning to the United States in 1934, he continued to express the language and images of Maine. He died in Corea, Maine in 1943.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Twenty-Five Poems (Paris: Contact Editions, 1923); Androscoggin (1940); Sea Burial (Portland, Maine: Leon Tebetts Editions, 1941); Selected Poems, ed. by Henry Wells (New York: Viking Press, 1945); Eight Poems and One Essay (Lewiston, Maine: Treat Gallery, Bates College, 1976); The Collected Poems of Marsden Hatley 1904-1943, ed. by Gail R. Scott (Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1987)


Local Boys and Girls Small Town Stuff

A panther sprang at the feet
Of the young deer in the grey wood.
It was the lady who had sworn
To love him,
That rose, wraithlike
From the flow of his blood.
He swooned with her devotions.

There was never one
More jolly and boyish
than he was, in the great beginning.
Once his slippers were fastened
With domesticity,
He settled down
Like a worn jaguar
Weary with staring through bars.
The caresses that were poured
Over his person
Staled on him.
Love had grown rancid.
Have you emptied the garbage
John?

(Others, 1919)




To C——

I

If a clear delight visits you
Of an uncertain afternoon,
When you thought the time
For new delights was over for that day,
Say to yourself, who rule many a lost
Moment in this shadowy domain,
Saving it from its dusty grey perdition,
Say to yourself that is a flash
Of lightning from a so affectionate west,
Where the clear sky, that you know, resides.
The rainbow has crossed the desert once again,
I took the blade of bliss and notched it
In a roseate place.
It shed a crimson stream—
That was our flush of joy.

II

They will come
In the way they always come,
Swinging gilded fancies round your head.
So it is with surfaces.

They will walk around you
Adoringly,
Strip branches of their blooms for you—
Young carpets for young ways.

With me it is different.

Stars, when they strike
Edge to edge,
Make fierce resplendent fire.
I have lived with bright stone,
Burned like carnelian in the sun,
Myself;
Myself seen braches wither.

Carbon is a diamond—
It cuts the very crystal from the globe.

You are so beautiful
To listen.


(Poetry, 1920)

Rapture

Is the confession of the leaf—at the brave moment of trembling. The white virginal ones run long thin fingers through the mystic’s fiery hair. It gives a slight twinge to the gelid existence of the virgin, about to perish. This virgin is male. Is the spiral eligible, when it comes too late? Take me with you, upward fire of the man—swirl me away from ethical ethers. Swirl me from this arteio-sclerosis of the soul. I am not known here. I am not known there. I am not in reality known outside myself. God does not covet originality. the virgin twirled a bit of pointed lace that festooned his illicit mind, and settled down to more opinionating at the rusty gate. The university whispers—the mind is carried in another bag, and weighs too heavily with mystic themes on hands not made for work. The lunchroom notes the bookworm fattening its lean body with flesh of other minds. The lunchroom notes the pity of faggot gathering brains. The classroom loves its back and worm as arums love the sickly tropic shade. The white hands turn the leaves of other minds and wander whitely in the world of other men’s appraisals. They never redden with their own incisions in the flesh of proud experience.

A gathering of words of other fondled words begotten is called investigation, and this in turn is called cerebral rapture.

Asceticism is a virtue in itself, the boyish virgin says. It saves a lot of trouble.

(Contact, 1920)

Martin Camaj

Martin Camaj [Albania]
1925-1992

Martin Camaj was born in Temali in the Dukagjin region of the northern Albanian alps. He is an émigré writer of significance both for Albanian literature and for Albanian scholarship. He received a classical education at the Jesuit Saverian college in Shkodër and studied at the University of Belgrade. From there he went on to do postgraduate research in Italy, where he taught Albanian and finished his studies in linguistics at the University of Rome in 1960. From 1970 to 1990 he served as professor of Albanian studies at the University of Munich and lived in the mountain village of Lenggries in Upper Bavaria until his death on 12 March 1992. Camaj's academic research has concentrated on the Albanian language and its dialects, in particular those of southern Italy.

His literary activities over a period of forty-five years cover several phases of development. He began with poetry, a genre to which he remained faithful throughout his life, but in later years also devoted himself increasingly to prose. His first volumes of classical verse Nji fyell ndër male, Prishtina, 1953 (A flute in the mountains), and Kânga e vërrinit, Prishtina 1954 (Song of the lowland pastures), were inspired by his native northern Albanian mountains for which he never lost his attachment, despite long years of exile and the impossibility of return. These were followed by Djella, Rome 1958 (Djella), a novel interspersed with verse about the love of a teacher for a young girl of the lowlands. His verse collections Legjenda, Rome 1964 (Legends) and Lirika mes dy moteve, Munich 1967 (Lyrics between two ages), which contained revised versions of a number of poems from Kânga e vërrinit, were reprinted in Poezi 1953-1967, Munich 1981 (Poetry 1953-1967).

Camaj's mature verse reflects the influence of the hermetic movement of Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970). The metaphoric and symbolic character of his language increases with time as does the range of his poetic themes. A selection of his poetry has been translated into English by Leonard Fox in the volumes Selected Poetry, New York 1990, and Palimpsest, Munich & New York 1991.

-Robert Elsie

BOOKS OF POETRY

Nji fyell ndë male (Prishtinë: 1953); Kanga e vërrinit (Prishtinë: 1954); Lirika mes dy moteve (Munich: 1967); Njeriu më vete e me tjerë (Munich: 1978); Dranja (Munich: 1981); Poezi (1953-1967) (Munich: 1981).

POEMS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Selected Poems, trans. by Leonard Fox (New York: New York University Press, 1990); Palimpsest (Munich and New York, 1991)



My Land

When I die, may I turn into grass

On my mountains in spring,

In autumn I will turn to seed.

When I die, may I turn into water,

My misty breath

Will fall onto the meadows as rain.

When I die, may I turn into stone,

On the confines of my land

May I be a landmark.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Lirika midis dy moteve, 1967)


Moutain Feast

Blood was avenged today.

Two bullets felled a man.

Blood was avenged today.

Under the axe-head

The ox's skull bursts by the stream.

(Today there will be great feasting!)

Blood was avenged today.

The wailing of men gone wild

Mingles with the smell of meat on the fires.

And the autumn foliage falls

Scorched on the white caps

At the tables, outside.

Night. At the graves on the hill

Fresh earth, new moon.

The wolves have descended from the mountains

And drink blood at the stream.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Lirika midis dy moteve, 1967)

A Bird Languishes

The Canon of Birds says:

Every bird shall stretch its wings and perish on the grass,

Punishment for having plied the forbidden border

Between heaven and earth.

A bird languishes upon the lawn, at death's door,

The leaves in the trees are

Unreachable birds and companions

Frolicking in the sunlight.

In the distance are two millstones pounding

At one another, as is their wont,

Silently.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Njeriu më vete e me tjerë, 1978)


Death - Crackling

Death - the crackling

Of a dry leaf,

Wait for me at the end of the earth

With no chrysanthemum in your hand.

Wait, benumbed swallow,

With wings o'er the waves, for my breath

To soar to the heavens,

Feathered like a white raven.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Njeriu më vete e me tjerë, 1978)


Unexpected Guest in Berisha

When the guest entered the house at dusk,

Seven brothers looked askance

As if he were walking over their heads and not

Over the dry floorboards.

Nor did they, as ancient custom demands,

Greet and speak with him, but stared at the ground.

The youngest of them broke the silence,

Removed the lahuta from its place

And laid it in the guest's lap for him to play.

When he held the lute's body,

Gently stroking its side

With his rough fingers,

And plucked its foal-hair string with his thumb,

The brothers and the old man, head of the household,

Understood that the stranger was a singer

Like no other among them.

The beginning holds the heart in sway,

Not the end of the song.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Njeriu më vete e me tjerë, 1978)


To a modern poet

Your road is good:

The Parcae are the ugliest faces

Of classical myths. You did not write of them,

But of stone slabs and of human brows

Covered in wrinkles, and of love.

Your verses are to be read in silence

And not before the microphone

Like those of other poets,

The heart

Though under seven layers of skin

Is ice,

Ice

Though under seven layers of skin.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Njeriu më vete e me tjerë, 1978)



The Old Deer

The shepherds abandoned the alpine pastures

For the warmth of the lowland valleys,

Sauntering down the trails, talking loudly

About women and laughing

Beside the water of the stream bubbling forth

From well to well.

The old deer raised its head from the scorched earth

And observed the pale foliage. Then

It departed to join its sons,

They too with their minds on the does.

Broken, it too abandoned the alpine pastures and followed

The merry murmur of the stream below, a fiery arrow,

The wanderer in search of warmer pastures and winter grass

Which it will never touch!

When they slew it, the shepherds pried its eyes open

And saw in the pupils

The reflection of many deer drinking water from the stream.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Njeriu më vete e me tjerë, 1978)


Fragile Land

(To the tribes below the Drin)

Between Molç Mountain and Qerret

There opens a gorge leading down to the river,

Formed as if it had been a lake,

And we were out there alone, on it, still,

In dugouts of maple.

We used to know by heart

The names of choice fish and not

Of preying birds and wild

Foliage.

Even the sheen in our eyes

Would be blue and not black.

We would float in the water

Not in the clouds.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

(from Njeriu më vete e me tjerë, 1978)

Simon Vinkenoog

Simon Vinkenoog [Netherlands]
1928-2009

Born in 1928, Simon Vinkenoog, like others of this volume, experienced as a teenager World War II and the German occupation. Like many of his generation he was drawn to Paris after the war, in the days when writing appeared as a subversive act. He worked in Paris for several years, keeping in close contact with artists such as Karel Appel, at whose exhibitions he recited his poems and prose. Here also he published a journal Blurb, in which he explained his ideas for a new order of the arts. His important anthology of poetry, Atonaal, became a major influence for experimental Dutch poets and others.

Returning the The Netherlands, Vinkenoog became involved with the Dutch Fiftiers, sharing their radical sense of poetic structure and subject. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, Vinkenoog embraced many of the socially and artistically radical groups, including the Beats, becoming a sort of “guru” for many younger Dutch authors.

He died on July 12, 2009.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Wondkoorts (Amsterdam: U. M. Holland, 1950); Land zonder nacht (1952); Heren Zeventien (Amsterdam: De Beuk, 1953); Tweesprakk (with Hans Andreus) (s’-Gravenhage: Stols, 1955); Spiegelschrift-Gebruikslyriek (Amsterdam; De Bizige Bij, 1962); Gesproken woord (Jazz & Poetry) (1964); Eerste Gedicthe 1949-1964 (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1966); Wonder boven wonder (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1972); Mij best (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1976); Het huiswerk van de dichter (Massbree: Corrie Zelen, 1978); Made in Limburg (Massbree: Corrie Zelen, 1979); Poolschoogte/Approximations [bilingual] (Heerlen: Uitgerverij 261, 1981); Voeten in de aarde en berge verzetten (Amsterdam: Guus Bauer, 1982); Op het eerste gehoor (Amsterdam: De Beuk, 1988); Vreugdevuur (Groningen: Passage, 1998); De ware Adam (Groningen: Passage, 2000); Goede raad is vuur (Groningen: Passage, 2004)

BOOKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

And the Eye Became a Rainbow, trans. by Cornelis Vleeskens (Melbourne: Fling Poetry, 1990)

For a reading by Simon Vinkenoog of his poetry go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqHsLlmUEeA

ik ken de woorden van de taal niet die ik spreek
en verwonderd zie ik mijn gedachten na,
het zijn de handen van de liefste niet
het zijn geen zwanen in het water
het is geen hulpkreet
die de muur doorbreekt,
het is ook de wereld niet
waarin ik verga.


(from Podium, 1950; collected in Eerste Gedichte 1949-1964, 1966)



I don’t know the words
of the language I speak

and in amazement
I follow my thoughts,

they aren’t the hands of the beloved
they aren’t swans on the water

it is not a cry for help
that breaks down the walls

it is not even the world
in which I perish.


—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens


Machteloosheid

een brandende schemer hangt al jaren
over deze voorstad van de dood
de vonkende straten zijn verlated
de schaduwloze huizen lege gaten
maar in de ramen spiegelt kinderleven

vermoeden: het ongerijpt verlangen
vaaraan als natte vlaggen
bloeiende vogellijken hangen—
dit wordt het weten

ik heb gezichsloos deze buurt doorkruist
en heb me zoeklmoede ogen
die de mijne niet waren
stervende drempels overschreden

—ik ben verloren en hervonden
verward geraakt
en verbannen geworden—

nu volgt een uitgebluste nacht
op deze schemer op de regen
en op de tijdloze dagen
die van mijn dwalen de
verlamde getuigen waren
want dit is het eeuwige nodeloze
wanhopige groeiende verdergaan

(from Wondkoorts, 1950)


Powerlessness

for years a scorching dusk has hung
over this suburb of death
the sparkling streets are deserted
the shadowless houses empty holes
but the windows mirror childplay

suspicion: the immature longing
on which birdcarcasses blossom
like wet banners—
this becomes the knowing

faceless I have crisscrossed the district
and world-weary eyes
that were no longer mine
I stumbled over dying doorsteps

—I was lost and found
confused and was banished—

now an estinguished night
follows on dusk on this rain
and on these timeless days
that were the lame witnesses
to my wanderings

for this is the eternal needless
desperate growing hanging in

—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens

Jeugd

ik heb verwonderd naar
dat eerste gedicht geluisterd:
verwanzing
waarvan wellust is gebleven
ik was als kind
bij moeder thuis
de haren in mijn ogen
de voeten in het lauwe
water
en het eerste gedicht
als een bromvlieg om mijn hoofd

verleden—
verwondering
also grijze haren uitgevallen
een deernis-tweemansbed
woordenvergadering
en het laatste woord
door haar belet

(from Wondkoorts, 1950)



Youth

I listened in wonder
to that first poem:
infatuation
that led to well-being
childlike
at home
hair in my eyes
feet in the tepid
water
and that first poem
like a blowfly around my head

the past—
wonder shed
like gray hairs
a pathetic double bed
a meetingplace for words
the last word
silenced by her


—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens


Bliksem

dit is het handschrift van een ziek genie:
prikkeldraad
vergaan aan de hemel
ik ben het brandende water
getroffen, torens
en de roes der elementen

ik ben het ontvluchten gespaard gebleven
laaghangende wolken
een stromentrekkende regen
en de dorst der goden

ik ben de huilende bomen
en het nadersluipen van de herfst
ik ben de regen
de donder wn de wrakk der stormen—
de nacht het niet geloven aan de zon

het blijft deze weg zonder hizen
de bomen de gedroomde glimmende keien
en het onweer de regen

nu in de plassen gaan liggen
languit wachten
tot mij de bliksem raakt


(from Wondkoorts, 1950)




Lightning

this is the handwriting of a sick spirit:
barbedwire
perished under heaven
I am the burning water
that’s been hit, towers
and the drunken stupor of the elements

I have been spared the desperate escape
lowhanging clouds
floodrains
and the thrist of gods

I am the crying trees
and the slow approach of autumn
I am the rain
the hunder and the revenge of storms—
the night the not believing in the sun

it remains this road without houses
the trees the imagined shining rocks
and the storm the rain

now lay me down in puddles
and wait spreadeagled
for the lightning to hit me


—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens




Karel Appel

Was hij van vuur?
Stamde hij niet van de aarde af?
Hij was geen engel
en speelde niet voor Satanas.

Branden zou hij,
hongeren en begeren,
tranen kokende olie storten
en schateren: Messias in Texas.

Opraken zou hij, vlugger den aderen,
zuurstof, stikstof, een zucht
van goddelijke verlichting;
kortleven, branden en as.

Het wataer is gebroken,
de koude heeft schipbreuk geleden,
onder de adem woont het ijs,

het bloed van beulen versteent,
fossielen tieren welig
in dit landschap.

(from Spiegelschrift-Gebruikslyriek, 1962)



Karel Appel

Was he made of fire?
Wasn’t he from this earth?
He was no angel
and didn’t play the Stanic role.

He would have to burn,
to hunger and go wanting,
to exude tears of boiling oil
and rorar: The Messiah in Texas.

He would use up, faster than others,
oxygen, nitrogen, a sigh
of godly enlightenment;
shorliving, burning and ashes.

The waters are broken,
cold has suffered a shipwreck
beneath the breath lives the ice,

the blood of the executioner turns to stone,
fossils thrive and luxuriate
in this landscape.

—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens




Tenzij de dingen uit zichzelf gaan spreken

een kraan het hoog geluid van liefde fluit
een waterstraal die onoverslapte aandacht trikt
een dronken boodschap in de brievenbus
een onverwacht bezoek aan de deur gevonden

de zee die door de straten weifelt
de zon een onbeholpen minnaaar op mijn huid
en de doofstomme takken van de bomen
in mijn ogen etcetera

Tenzij ik jaren op je wachten wil
en op je mond het stempel ongepend druk

als met een zegelring die woorden bloed
en vlijt in de nagels drijft

de handen die niets meer weten
van het feest dat morgen
in de cijfers van het heden
wijdbeens staat geplant


(from Eerste gedichten, 1966)



Unless the Things Start to Speak for Themselves

a tap whistling the high notes of love
a waterstream holding your unswerving attention
a drunken message in the letterbox
an unexpected visitor found on the doorstep

the sea wandering the streets
the sun an univited lover on my skin
and the deafdumb branches of trees
in my eyes etcetera

Unless I want to wait years for you
and press unanswered on your mouth
a seal that bleeds the words
and puts dirt under your fingernails

the hands no longer aware
of the feast that in the morning
stands with legs spread
over the symbols of today


—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens


Topografisch


1

Wij wonen in een kleine stad schandalen
Uitbesteed,
vandalen
rukkend aan de pas-toe
wind in de zeilen gesmeten

Reeds 15 jaren schettert en ment men het paard der geliefde,
knelt men de zweep in een dijbeenbreuk
waarvan overal dezelfde adem spreekt,

dankend voor de brieven van destjds
Voetvenvegend in het paradijs,
op de thuisreis—om nooit te vergeten
Een vlucht gepenseeld in de ogen


2

Zij tasten mij
en andere stenen
tasten andere dieren

Men wacht op mij,
Ik wacht op u,
het slaphangend volksdeel in de handen
in een stadscentrum,
op de rand van een trottoir
dat naar de voorstelling leidt—

En barend in de morgen
de kinderen van de nacht
met een handvol dromen spoedend through tunnels of love

(from Eerste gedichten, 1966)

from Topographic


1

We live in a small town
with scandals laid bare
vandals ripping in formation
with the wind in their sails

for 15 years we’ve yelled
and driven love’s horses
cracked the whop on their thighs
with everywhere the same breath blowing

thank you for your letter from whenever
wiping our feet on paradise
we’re going home—and won’t forget

A flight brushed on the eyes


2

They touch me
and other rocks—
touch other beasts

They wait for me
I wait for you
the slack community under control
on the city square
on the endge of the pavement
waiting for the show—

And bearing in the morning
night’s children
with a handful of dreams
racing through tunnels of love

—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens


Zuster

Er woont een zachte zuster in mijn huid
een vrijbuiter die in mijn lichaam bijt
ensoms haar handen op mijn zijde legt,
‘s nachts stelten loopt, of danst of rust.

Dan dringt zij ook haar dromen aan mij op
en ik leg mij huiverend naast haar:
een dode, een schamel geraamte,
knikkend en stamelend.


(from Eerste gedichten, 1966)



Sister

A soft sister lives in my skin
a freeloader who bites into my body
and sometimes lays her hands on my side,
at night walks on stilts, or dances or rests.

And then she offers her dreams to me
and I lay shuddering next to her:
a corpse, a frail skeleton,
nodding and stuttering.


Oosterpark

Weet je nog hoe fris het gras was?
Weet je nog hoe de bladeren ruiken,
die van de bomen vallen, als het najaar wordt?
Ruik mee: er is een wereld, achter je neus gelegen,
waar de zon zich, ook als het regent, toegang verschaft
met de geur van een roos, of een kus uitdelend,
want al wat geurt, geurt naar leven:
geboorte orgasme dood en weerom.

Weet je nog toen je wist:
ja, zó is het,
dit zal het altijd zijn
en nooit is het anders
geweest...
Weet je nog?
Weet je nog wel?
Weet je nog, helder?
Weet je nog:
al wat je ooit hebt meegemaakt?
Sta je nog op scherp,
aan de rand van de afrond
die leven van dood scheidt
en niet vergeten: dit is mijn weg,
en elke weg is een ander?

Doe je nog wat?
Doe je nog maar wat mee?
Laaat je je nog leven,
of heb je allen macht al in handen,
onderweg zijnd: jezelf zijn,
in je eigen leven?
Heb je al gevonden?
Weet je nog,
alles—
alles dat pijn deed
alles dat je liever vergeet
al wat je ooit is te binnen geschoten?

Klaar. Duidelijk. Vatstaand. Zeker,
heb je het vast kunnen houden?
Ben je het al vergeten?
Zoek je nog?
En ik, ik babbel maar wat,
vraag me wat af, op het gras,
in het Oosterpark,
tussen slapende Marokannen,
kaartende, dammende bejaarden,
vrijende paartjes
en een jongen, die de eendjes voert...

Ik zit hier maar wat,
ik open het gehoor,
ik ruik het frisse gras
en de geur van de eerste vallende bladeren.

Zacht maar wat,
rust maar wat,
doe maaar wat,
maar doe het:
met overgave,
want er is niets anders
dan wat je nu doet,
niet wat je gisteren deed, telt—
niet wat je morgen doet,
maaar hoe je je nu, hier, voelt
ontroerd, bewogen, of zo maar wat dromend,
van de wind de in de boomtoppen ruist,
een hond die opgesloten, onophoudelijk blaft,
een rustig ogenblik in het Oosterpark,
mijn fiets die omvalt
en een vliegtuig dat een kijk- en geluids-spoor trekt...

En ik, die dit gedict achterlaat,
beschreven blaadjes, waarom het gaat,
wie wil not de wereld veranderen,
als alles verandert?
Wie wil nog zijn buurman te lijf,
als die eend al zó luid kwaakt?

KWAAK KWAAK KWAAK KWAAK KWAAK

KWAAK
KWAAK
KWAAK


(from Mij best, 1976)




City Gardens (Oosterpark)

Do you still know how fresh the grass was?
Do you still know how the leaves smell,
that fall from the trees, as autumn approaches?
Smell with me: there is a world behind your nose
where the sun, even when it’s raining, provides entry
with the smell of a rose, or blowing a kiss,
because all that smells, smells of life:
Gestation Orgasm Death and around again.

Do you still know when you knew:
yes, that’s how it is,
this will always be
and never has it been
different...
Do you still know?
Do you still know it?
Do you still know, clearly?
Do you still know:
all you have ever experienced?
Are you still finely tuned,
on the edge of the abyss
that separates life from death,
and not to forget: this is my way,
and each way is different?

Are you still doing?
Are you still just playing along?
Do you let yourself be lived,
or have you taken all power in your hands,
being on the way: being yourself,
in your own life?
Have you found it?
Do you still know,
everything—
everything that cuased pain
everything you’d rather forget
everything you ever thought of?

Clear. Obvious. Fixed. Certain,
have you been able to hold onto it?
Have you forgotten it already?
Are you still searching?
And me, I just babble on,
question myself, on the grass,
in the City Gardens,
between sleeping Morroccans,
cardplaying, chessplaying old people,
courting ocuples
and a boy, who’s feeding the ducks...

I’m just sitting here,
I’m opening the conversation.
I smell the fresh grass
and the smell of the first falling leaves.

Easing a bit
resting a bit,
doing a bit,
but doing it:
with conviction,
because there is nothing else
but what you’re doing now,
not what you did yesterday, counts—
not what you’ll do tomorrow,
but how you feel her and now,
touched, moved, or just dreaming a bit,
about the wind whispering in the treetops,
a locked-up dog, continuously barking,
a peaceful moment in the City Gardens,
my bike which falls over
and a plane that makes a sight and sound-track...

And me, leaving behind the poem,
written leaves, what it’s all about:
Who still wants to change the world,
if everything is changing?
Who still wants to attack his neighbor
if that duck is already quacking that loud?

QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK

QUACK
QUACK
QUACK


—Translated from the Dutch by Cornelis Vleeskens





PERMISSIONS

“[I don’t know the words],” “Powerlessness,” “Youth,” “Lightning,” “Karel Appel,” “Unless the Things Start Speaking for Themselves,” “from Topographic,” “Sister,” and “City Gardens (Oosterpark)
Reprinted from And the Eye Became a Rainbow, translated by Cornelis Vleeskens (Melboure: Fling Press, 1990). ©1988, 1989 by Cornelis Vleeskens. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

Antonio Porta [Leo Paolazzi]

Antonio Porta [Leo Paolazzi] (Italy) [1935-1989]

Antonio Porta (Leo Paolazzi) was born in Vicenza in 1935, lived most of his life in Milan, and died on a business trip to Rome in 1989.

In the early 60s he was one of the youngest members of the editorial staff of Il Verri and, with Corrado Costa and Adriano Spatola, also edited the poetry magazine Malebolge from 1964-1966.
In 1961 his poetry was included in the revolutionary Italian anthology, I Novissimi. He participated in the various manifestations of "Gruppo 63," as a linear and visual poet, and was one of the founding editors of Quindici in 1967. For many years he worked as an editor in the publishing industry, with such houses as Bompiani, Sonzogno and Feltrinelli, and was also the literary critic for the daily Il Corriere della Sera and a regular contributor to the weekly book review Tuttolibri.

In 1979 he edited the well-known anthology Poesia degli anni settanta, and, from its inception, was on the editorial board of the influential cultural tabloid Alfabeta.

Among his publications as a poet are: La palpebra rovesciata (1960), Aprire (1963), Cara (1969), Metropolis (1971), Week-end (1974), Quanto ho da dirvi (1977), Passi passagi (1980), Melusina (1987) and Il giardiniere contro il becchino (1988).

As a novelist his published work includes Partita (1967), Il re del magazzino (1978) and Se fosse tutto un tradimento (1981), while as a playwright he published La presa di potere di Ivan lo sciocco (1975) and La stangata persiana (1985).

BOOKS OF POETRY

La palpebra rovesciata (Milan: Azimuth, 1960); Zero: Poesie visive (Milan, 1963); Aprire (Milan: All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro, 1964); I rapporti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1967); Cara (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969); Metropolis (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971); Week-end (Rome: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1974); Quanto ho da dirvi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977); Passi passaggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1980); Melusina: Una ballata e un diario (Milan: Crocetti, 1987); Il giardiniere contro il becchino (Milan: Mondadori, 1988).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

As If It Were a Rhythm, trans. by Paul Vangelisti (San Francisco: Red Hill, 1978); Passenger, trans. by Pasquale Verdicchio (Montreal: Guernica, 1986); Invasions and Other Poems, trans. by Paul Vangelisti and others (San Francisco: Red Hill, 1986); Melusine, trans. by Pasquale Verdicchio (Montreal: Guernica, 1992); Metropolis, trans. by Pasquale Verdicchio (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999); Kisses, Dreams and Other Infidelities, trans. by Anthony Molino (Las Cruces, New Mexico: Xenos Books, 2004).



from Metropolis

3

that orgasm is the basis of happiness
that happiness is necessary in order to achieve orgasm
that the number of things in our way are infinite
that once a block is removed everything goes smoothly
that cynicism is a way of survival
that desperation is the fruit of cynicism
that broken families produce delinquents
that he couldn't have died any other way than murdered
that when one thinks of a dead person one things of him living
that he was naked as he moved on the couch really naked
that freedom complicates everything


that there is no philosophy to support the exit from the womb
one who scandalizes an innocent person cannot be innocent
one who believes in sin is not christian
everything is sinful except obedience
it's easy to be tempted by rape
joy is mimetic
no one knows who's happy
everything can be traced back to superstructures
that instinct wins out
that words corrupt
that instincts are constructive
that if you don't believe in something you're lost

PERMISSIONS

Reprinted from Metropolis (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999). (c) copyright 1999 by Pasquale Verdicchio.

Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore with poet Langston Hughes

Marianne Moore [USA]
1887-1972

Born near St. Louis, Missouri, Mariane Moore grew up in the house of her Presbyterian minister grandfather, John Riddle Warner. Moore’s father, Milton, was an engineer-inventor who had suffered a mental breakdown before her birth; he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, and Moore’s mother left him, returning to her own father’s home in Kirkwood. Moore never met her father.

At age seven, Moore’s mother moved the family to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she was to teach English at the Metzger Institute, a preparatory school for girls, and it there that Marianne received her education. In 1905, Moore began college at Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia. Denied entry into the English program, Moore majored in Law, History, and Politics, and minored in Biology—an aspect that would be represented in her knowledge and love of animals, often represented in her poetry. Although she was not in English, she continued to write, becoming the editor of the college literary magazine.

After graduation, Moore returned to Carlisle, where she took a course in education at Carlisle Commercial College, and after which, she taught stenography and typewriting at the Carlisle Indian School. During the same period she worked for women’s suffrage, while beginning to publish poems in various magazines such as Others, Poetry, and The Egoist. When, in 1916, she and her mother moved to Chatham, New Jersey, she began regular trips to New York, developing friendships with H. D. and William Carlos Williams. In 1918 she and her mother moved to New York, and Marianne began working at a branch of the New York Public Library.

Moore’s poetry, particularly, her earliest work, which was collected without her knowledge by H.D. and Bryher in Poems (1921), was highly modernist, embodying methods of collage and bringing together various quotations and typological experimentation. In 1924 she published a longer book, Observations, which won The Dial Award and led to her being appointed, in 1925, as acting editor of that journal.

In 1935 she published Selected Poems, but in this volume readers begin to see the results of her severe revisions and rediting of her works. The poem “Poetry,” for example was cut transformed from a poem of 31 lines, was republished as a three-line statement-like work, and other poems, such as “The Fish” were utterly changed in with regard to typography, spellings and line-breaks. Indeed, her constant reworking of her poetry has led, over the years, to an outcry from several editors and critics (including this one) as over the years she winnowed down the complexity of her early works into brief, easily assimilated writings. Her popularity, however, only increased with the years, and she won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize for her Collected Poems, published in 1951.

In the poems selected below, I have tried to return to the earliest printed versions to demonstrate the nature of the work in its original, more experimental form. Two of these poems did not make it into her own Complete Poems of 1967.



BOOKS OF POETRY

Poems (London: The Egoist Press, 1921); Observations (New York: The Dial Press, 1924); Selected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1935/London: Faber and Faber, 1955); The Pangolin and Other Verse (London: The Brendin Publishing Company, 1936); What Are Years (New York: Macmillan, 1941); Nevertheless (New York: Macmillan, 1944); Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951/London: Faber and Faber, 1951); Like a Bulwark (New York: Viking, 1956); O to Be a Dragon (New York: Viking, 1959); The Arctic Ox (London: Faber and Faber, 1964); Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (New York: Viking, 1967); Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan and Viking, 1967/London: Faber and Faber, 1968); Unfinished Poems by Marianne Moore (Philadelpia: The Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1972)

[Please note: because of the restrictions of blog formating, line breaks in these poems
follow the left margin, while in the originals they appear in several indented formats.]

To a Steam Roller

The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not '”impersonal judgment in aesthetic
matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you

might fairly achieve
it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one's attending upon you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

(1915/from Poems, 1921)


Black Earth

Openly, yes
With the naturalness
Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it combs out on the bank to experience the

Sun, I do these
Things which I do, which please
No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am
sub-
Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the
object

In view was a
Renaissance; shall I say
The contrary? The sediment of the river which
Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am
used

To it, it may
Remain there; do away
With it and I am myself done away with, for the
Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

There to begin
With. This elephant skin
Which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of
This coco-nut, this piece of black glass through
which no light

Can filter—cut
Into checkers by rut
Upon rut of unpreventable experience—
It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the

Hairy toed. Black
But beautiful, my back
Is full of the history of power. Of power?
What
Is power and what is not? My soul shall
never

Be cut into
By a wooden spear; though-
Out childhood to the present time, the unity of
Life and death has been expressed by the circum
ference


Described by my
Trunk; nevertheless, I
Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it

Has its centre
Well nurtured—we know
Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its
centre where?
My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of

The wind. I see
And I hear, unlike the
Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which
was made
To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear,

That tree trunk without
Roots, accustomed to shout
Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained
intact
By who knows what strange pressure of the at-
mosphere; that

Spiritual
Brother to the coral
Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire
light
Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to

The I of each,
A kind of fretful speech
Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?
Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that

Phenomenon
The above formation,
Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex
merely
That on which darts cannot strike decisively the
first

Time, a substance
Needful as an instance
Of the indestructibility of matter; it
Has looked at the electricity and at the earth-

Quake and is still
Here; the name means thick. Will
Depth be depth, thick skin to be thick, to one who
can see no
Beautiful element of unreason under it?


(1918/from Poems, 1921)



The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow blue mussel shells, one
keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the
side
of the wave, cannot hide
there; for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swift-
ness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a
wedge
of iron into the edge
of the cliff, whereupon the stars


pink
rice grains, ink
bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like
green
lilies and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on
this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns
and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm side is

dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can
live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.


(1918/from Poems, 1921)



Dock Rats

There are human beings who seem to regard the place
as craftily as we do—who seem to feel that it is a
good place to come home to. On what river;
wide—twinkling like a chopped sea under some
of the finest shipping in the

world; the square-rigged four-master, the liner, the
battleship like the two-thirds submerged section of
an iceberg; the tug—strong-moving thing, dip-
ping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes; the
steam yacht, lying like a new made arrow on the

stream; the ferry-boat—a head assigned, one to
each compartment, making a row of chessmen set
for play. When the wind is from the east, the
smell is of apples; of hay, the aroma increased and
decreased suddenly as the wind changes;

of rope; of mountain leaves for florists. When it is
from the west, it is an elixir. There is oc-
casionally a parakeet
arrived from Brazil, clasping and clawing; or a
monkey—tail and feet in readiness for an over-

ture. All palms and tail; how delightful! There is
the sea, moving the bulkhead with its horse
strength; and the multiplicity of rudders and pro-
pellors; the signals, shrill, questioning, per-
emptory, diverse; the wharf cats and the barge
dogs—it

is easy to overestimate the value of such things.
One does not live in such a place from motives of
expediency but because to one who has been ac-
customed to it, shipping is the most congenial
thing in the world.

(printed in Others, 1920)



Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they became so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat
holding on upside down or in quest of some-
thing to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse, that feels a flea,
the base-
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; not it is valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets the result is not poetry,
nor tell the autocrats among use can be
“literalists of
the imagination:—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

(1919/from Poems, 1921)

Alfred Kreymborg

An issue of Others dedicated to The Spectric School

Alfred Kreymborg [USA]
1883-1966

Alfred Kreymborg was born in 1883 in New York City, the son of a cigar-store owner. The last of five children, Alfred was educated in public schools on the east side of Manhattan. By the age of ten Kreymborg had become a master chess player and by teenage was competing in state tournaments, ultimately tieing the world champion José Capablanca. He also played the mandolin and, upon graduation and a series of clerical jobs, he found position as a salesman for a maker of music rolls for player pianos. Learning to play the piano, he became interested in the classics, and desired to compose. However, without formal training, he could not compose a symphony, and determined to write a symphony in words instead.

“The Symphony of Love” was written when he was eighteen, and over the next years Kreymborg wrote numerous fictions and prose poems. In 1905 Guido Bruno published Kreymborg’s first literary work, Edna: The Girl of the Street, a fictional account of an experience with a prostitute. The publisher was taken to court on charges of obscenity, and the book gained the attention of figures such as Bernard Shaw and Frank Norris; ultimately, Bruno was acquitted.

During the following decade, Kreymborg wrote another short novel, Erna Bitek, and continued to write poetry, meeting several of the village “Bohemians” and, through the artist Marsden Hartley, coming into contact with the art work through the group connected with Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” galley. In 1913 he gained acquaintance with several figures of that group, including Charles Demuth, Edward Steichen, and Man Ray, as well as the brothers Albert and Charles Boni, who were about to launch a new publishing house from their Washington Square Book Shop. Ray suggested to Kreymborg that the two of them begin their own journal in order to introduce several of their friends to a wide audience.

Financed by the Bonis, Glebe was first published in September 1913, including figures such as James Joyce, H.D., Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams.

Meanwhile, Kreymborg published his first book of poetry, Love and Life, and Other Studies in 1908, and, experimenting with new techniques, published two poetic sequences, “Mushrooms” and “To My Mother” in the Bruno Chap Books in 1915. The following year, John Marshall published both sequences as Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms in hardback. Moreover, with the financial assistance of Walter Arensberg, Kreymborg began a new literary magazine in 1915, Others, which caused a stir in the literary world for its experimental writing. Meeting with the poets of the pages, Kreymborg introduced numerous American and European writers to each other, including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson.

Word of these literary activities spread, luring writers such as Maxwell Bodenheim (who lived in Chicago) to New York.

In 1916, the Provincetown Players, at John Reed’s insistence, produced one of Kreymborg’s verse plays, Lima Beans. His second book of poetry, even more experimental in nature, was published as Blood of Things in 1920. His own Others Players, produced another of his plays, Manikin and Minikin which played on the same bill with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Jack’s House. The company soon disbanded, but Kreymborg published a collection of short plays, Plays for Poem-Mimes.

Others ceased publication in 1919, but he brought out a third Others Anthology in 1920, the year when the wealthy Princeton figure, Harold Loeb, invited him to edit Broom, a magazine of arts published in Rome. In 1921, the Kreymborgs sailed to Europe. In Paris, he met with Pound, Jean Cocteau, Constantin Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, and Gertrude Stein. Richard McAlmon arranged for him to briefly meet James Joyce. In 1921, the first issue of Broom appeared with various American and European authors. But Kreymborg quit the journal after only four issues, arguing with Loeb over to what extent of European authors should be featured. He and his wife toured Italy, and Kreymborg returned to writing, this time composing various blank narratives and experiments in the sonnet form. The couple continued to travel throughout Europe throughout the 1920s, and by the latter half of the decade, Kreymborg had published two more volumes of poetry, The Lost Sail (1928) and Manhattan Men (1929), as well as a history of American poetry running from the colonial times to Hart Crane. With Paul Rosefeld, Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis Mumford, he began a series of five anthologies, The American Caravan, which was highly influential for poets through the next few decades.

The stock market crash of 1929 and a series of poems titled “The Economic Muse” reveal Kreymborg’s growing persuasion that the poet had to speak out politically on contemporary issues. For much the rest of his life, Kreymborg did so, in works such as the radio play The Planets and his patriotic and pacifist poem series “Arms and the Armageddon,” published in his Selected Poems of 1945. His last work of poetry, No More War, and Other Poems, was published in 1950.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Love and Life, and Other Studies (New York: Grafton Press, 1908); Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms (New York: John Marshall, 1916); Blood of Things: A Second Book of Free Forms (New York: N. L. Brown, 1920); Less Lovely (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923); Scarlet and Mellow (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926); The Lost Sail, A Cape Cod Diary (New York: Coward-McCann, 1928); Manhattan Men (Poems and Epitaphs) (New York, Coward-McCann, 1929); The Selected Poems, 1912-1944 (New York: Dutton, 1945); Man and Shadow: An Allegory (New York: Dutton, 1946); No More War, and Other Poems (New York: Bookman Associates, 1950)


To M. L.

Purple iris in the green bowl:
You ought to be brown.
Flecked with three or four
dizzy yellow midges.
And not quite so stately—
dance a moment, purple iris.
Now
you and the green bowl
are more like her.


(from Mushrooms, 1916)



Broom

Tiny boy,
staring at me
with eyes like toy balloons:
That broom is much bigger than you.
Put it down.
You wont?
Then don’t put it down.

(from Mushrooms, 1916)



Hen Being / from Zoology

Being cooped in a crate,
cooped in a crate,
as one is cooped in crates
on West South Water Street
of the filthy, stinking Chicago River—
being cooped in a crate
with more hens than a crate can hold,
is not an existence
even for hens,
but it gives one a sense of safety,
monotony, warmth and interest
I don’t deplore.
What I deplore
is this being yanked by the neck,
yanked by the neck,
yanked by the neck,
and being flung,
crammed and damned
by a common, filthy, stinking
West South Water Street poultryman
of the filthy, stinking Chicago River,
from one crate to another
one crate to another,
one crate to another.
It’s enough to make
an old hen squawk,
and I’m an old hen, if you please,
a roosterless, eggless, chickenless hen!
There’s ever the hope in a hen like me
that the next crate
will be one’s last,
so that this being slammed
from one crate to another,
one crate to another,
one crate to another,
will reach a cadence.
I’m an old hen, if you please,
a roosterless, eggless, chickenless,
and I can endure
filthy, stinking West South water Street
of the filthy, stinking Chicago River
of the filthy, stinking Loop of Chicago, Illinois,
but wring my neck ere my time
if I don’t squawk for all hens
when I affirm that this
one crate to another,
one crate to another,
one crate to another,
is no lop forward
but a hop backward from
being cooped in a crate.
Being cooped in a crate,
a hen might find something to scratch,
though it’s only one’s neighbor,
and one is sans claws,
sans even a feather,
to scratch her with!
Oh, Poultry Man,
you are truly
the God of hens!

(from Blood of Things, 1920)



Coins

I. Copper

Some bodies chase pennies,
and live penny lives,
by hoarding three pennies,
in fear of just two;
then hoarding two pennies,
in fear of just one;
then hoarding one penny,
in fear of the zero,
as round in its emptiness,
perfectly round,
as bodies are all
which chase pennies.


II. Silver

Whether winds chase the clouds,
or clouds chase the winds;
whether shadows the grasses,
or grasses the shadows;
which part of the circle
starts chasing the rest’s
unimportant; important
that bodies chase bodies
with undulating,
mystic caresses
of unseen wings:
wings brushing wings.


III. Gold

Something flipped somebody
into the air, and he fell,
head over tail over head over tail,
a moth blind with stars,
clutching light, clutching dark:
here—where—
hand of man, feet of bug:
fail not to turn him, if
you would have both of him,
undermost, equal to, if not
as cleanly as uppermost:
see?


(from Blood of Things, 1920)



Eyes / from Physiology

We are not his eyes.
We do not see.
We do not see grain,
we see people;
we do not see people,
we see people gathering grain;
we do not see people gathering grain,
we see people loading freight cars;
we do not see people loading freight cars,
we see freight cars en route;
we do not see cars,
we see endless eels,
eels of white tape;
we do not see tape,
we see figures;
we do not see figures—
gold is what we see.
We are his eyes.
We tell him,
buy wheat at par!

(from Blood of Things, 1920)


Heliotrope

“O, ah, ee….
I want a man with leopard’s eyes and the neck of
a, neck of a swan,
I could hang him to the hottest, saddest tree in Hell,
and dance to the, dance to the tune of his writhing legs!
O, ah, ee…
I’d crawl up beside him through the bark turn to, bark
turn to thistles and thorns,
and strange me with his wild, wild beard till my dead
body be his dead body, and his dead body be, his
dead body be….”

The lady wears the mildest of blue eyes.
Receives every Friday at five.
Sips tea as you or I sip tea….
But her cheek bones are high,
after the Polish fashion,
and of late,
she has been reading
Przybyszewski,
bound in heliotrope.


(from Blood of Things, 1920)


To Whitman

Monster!
You would take me,
tiny me,
in your huge paws
and scrunch me?
Child!
I can take you,
tiny you,
between my thumbs
and love you.
Come on!

(from Blood of Things, 1920)

Another reminder about the complete alphabetical listings of poets included on this blog

Another reminder that our complete alphabetical index with links can be found here:
http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2008/12/alphabetic-listing-of-poets-included.html

Stephen Crane

Crane (in white suit) as a reporter in the American attack of Puerto Rico

Stephen Crane [USA]
1871-1900

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871, Stephen Crane was the fourteenth child of Reverend Jonathan Crane. Both of his parents were highly religious leaders in the Methodist Church, and over the years one of Crane’s most noted traits was his rebellion against his religious upbringing.
As a teenager he worked at a news agency run by his brother, and later left for college with the goal of becoming a reporter. He published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in a private printing and under a pseudonym in 1893. The novel attracted the attention of critics such as William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, who later championed his novel The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895.

The same year, Crane published his first book of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines, again privately printed. The typography of this book was unusual, in that the poems appeared entirely in capital letters without titles or punctuation. Reviewers of the time—and some later critics—heaped abuse on his poetry, describing them as “garbage,” “rot,” and “lunatic.” But the success of his novel of the same year, along with the reaction, made him internationally famous.

Personally, Crane claimed to like his poetry much better than The Red Badge of Courage. Over the next years, Crane devoted himself to journalism and wrote numerous short stories, including the brilliant tale, “The Open Boat.” His work as a reporter during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, however, led to ill health, and in 1899 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The same year he moved with his common-law wife, Cora Taylor, to an unheated English manor-house outside of Rye. Most of his time he spent feverously writing, but Crane did develop literary friendships with figures such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and H. G. Wells. While in England, he published his second collection of poetry, War Is Kind. His tuberculosis, however, had worsened, and in 1900, at the age of 28, he died in a German sanatorium.

BOOKS OF POETRY

The Black Riders and Other Lines (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1895); War Is Kind (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1899); Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930).


From The Black Riders

I

BLACK RIDERS CAME FROM THE SEA.
THERE WAS CLANG AND CLANG OF SPEAR AND SHIELD,
AND CLASH AND CLASH OF HOOF AND HEEL,
WILD SHUTS AND THE WAVE OF HAIR
IN THE RUSH UPON THE WIND:
THUS THE RIDE OF SIN.


XXIV

I SAW A MAN PURSUING THE HORIZON
ROUND AND ROUND THEY SPED.
I WAS DISTURBED AT THIS;
I ACCOSTED THE MAN.
“IT IS FUTILE,” I SAID,
“YOU CAN NEVER ———“
“YOU LIE,” HE CRIED,
AND RAN ON.




XXXVI

I MET A SEER.
HE HELD IN HIS HANDS
THE BOOK OF WISDOM.
“SIR,” I ADDRESSED HIM,
“LET ME READ.”
“CHILD——“ HE BEGAN.
“SIR,” I SAID,
“THINK NOT THAT I AM A CHILD,
“FOR ALREADY I NOW MUCH
“OF WHAT WHICH YOU HOLD.
“AYE, MUCH.”

HE SMILED.
THEN HE OPENED THE BOOK.
AND HELD IT BEFORE ME.—
STRANGE THAT I SHOULD HAVE GROWN SO SUDDENLY BLIND.


XLII

I WALKED IN A DESERT.
AND I CRIED,
“AH, GOD, TAKEN ME FROM THIS PLACE!”
A VOICE SAID, “IT IS NO DESERT.”
I CRIED, “WELL, BUT——
“THE SAND, THE HEAT, THE VACANT HORIZON.”
A VOICE SAID, “IT IS NO DESERT.”


(from Black Riders and Other Lines, 1895)



from War Is Kind


[I]

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
and the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die
The unexplained glory flies above them
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom———
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Swift, blazing flag of the regiment
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die
Point for them the virtue of slaughter
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

(from War Is Kind, 1899)



[VI]


I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night,
The sweep of each sad lost wave,
The dwindling boom of the steel ting’s striving,
The little cry of a man to a man,
A shadow falling across the greyer night,
And the sinking of the small star;
Then the waste, the far waste of waters,
And the soft lashing of black waves
For long and in loneliness.

Remember, thou, O ship of love,
Thou leavest a far waste of waters,
And the soft lashing of black waves
For long and in loneliness.


(from War Is Kind, 1899)


[XI]

On the desert
A silence from the moon’s deepest valley.
Fire rays fall athwart the robes
Of hooded men, squat and dumb.
Before them, a woman
Moves to the blowing of shrill whistles
And distant thunder of drums,
While mystic things, sinuous, dull with terrible color,
Sleepily fondle her body
Or move at her will, swishing stealthily over the sand.
The snakes whisper softly;
The whispering, whispering snakes,
Dreaming and swaying and staring,
But always whispering, softly whispering.
The wind streams from the lone reaches
Of Arabia, solemn with night,
And the wild fire makes shimmer of blood
Over the robes of the hooded men
Squat and dumb.
Bands of moving bronze, emerald, yellow,
Circle the throat and the arms of her,
And over the sands serpents move warily
Slow, menacing and submissive,
Swinging to the whistle and drums,
The whispering, whispering snakes,
Dreaming and swaying and staring,
But always whispering, softly whispering.
The dignity of the accursed;
The glory of slavery, despair, death,
Is in the dance of the whispering snakes.

(from War Is Kind, 1899)



[XXI]

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”


(from War Is Kind, 1899)




A man adrift on a slim spar

A man adrift on a slim spar
A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle
Tented waves rearing lashy dark points
The near whine of froth in circles.

God is cold.

The incessant raise and swing of the sea
And growl after growl of crest
The sinkings, green, seething, endless
The upheaval half-completed
God is cold.

The seas are in the hollow of The Hand;
Oceans may be turned to a spray
Raining down through the stars
Because of a gesture of pit toward a babe.
Oceans may become grey ashes,
Die with a long moan and a roar
Amid the tumult of the fishes
And the cries of the ships,
Because The Hand beckons the mice.

The horizon smaller than a doomed assassin’s cap,
Inky, surging tumults
A reeling, drunken sky and no sky
A pale hand sliding from a polished spar.

God is cold.

The puff of a coat imprisoning air.
A face kissing the water-death
A weary slow sway of a lost hand
And the sea, the moving sea, the sea.

God is cold.

(from Collected Poems, 1930)

Laura (Riding) Jackson

Laura (Riding) Jackson [USA]
1901-1991

Laura Riding was born in New York City in 1901, the daughter of an immigrant from Austria-Hungary and a mother who had lost her health from years of work in sweatshop labor. Her father, a socialist and labor organizer, treated his daughter almost as a peer, involving her in lively debates on politics and other issues. In 1918, after winning three scholarships, began college at Cornell University. There she encountered the history instructor, Louis Gottschalk, who she married two years later.

After several years of traveling from college to college for her husband’s career, and being unable to finish her own education, Riding divorced Gottshalk. She had, however, begun to write her own work, submitting poems to The Fugitive, a magazine dedicated to the works of a conservative group of Southern poets, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, among them. They published her work in several issues of the magazine, embracing her for her irony and formal constructions. But by 1925 she had already moved away from their viewpoints, herself championing a poetry that embraced ideas of the poet as prophet (see “A Prophecy or a Plea”). Disgusted with American culture, and the New York literary world, she sailed to England in 1926, joining the British poet Robert Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson.

She soon began Graves’s lover and collaborator, for fourteen years working closely with him on numerous projects of prose, poetry and fiction. He helped her to publish her first collection of poetry The Close Chaplet. She and Graves co-wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry in 1927, and from 1935 to 1938 they edited Epilogue, a journal of textual analysis that would influence critics of the New Criticism. In 1927 she published her second collection, Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy. During this period she also wrote other prose works such as Contemporaries and Snobs and works of fiction and prose combined, Anarchism is not Enough. A third book of poetry, Love as Death, Death as Death appeared in 1928. Sales of her books were limited, and Riding began to look beyond Graves to find intellectual stimulation. She helped to edit transition and, after discovering the work of Gertrude Stein, published in 1930 three further books, Poems: A Joking Word, Twenty Poems Less, and Though Gently, writing influenced in part by the great American experimentalist.

The same year she published another work of fiction, Experts Are Puzzled. She also drew the Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs into the Graves circle, falling in love with him. When he rejected her, she leaped from a window, breaking her spine. Her demands upon her lovers, accordingly became almost legendary. A fictional account of her attempt a suicide, 14A: A Novel Told in Dramatic Form was published in 1934, and the following year she published her major collection of tales, Progress of Stories. The novel, A Trojan Ending, appeared in 1937 and her remarkable work, Lives of Wives appeared two years later.

Throughout much of the early 1930s, Graves and Riding had lived on Mallorca, but when the Fascists came to power, they returned to England, moving on to Switzerland and Britanny. In April 1939, the couple visited friends in the United States, Schuyler Brickerhoff Jackson and his wife. While Graves attempted to sexual engage the wife the former poetry editor of Time magazine, Riding appropriated Jackson himself. Ultimately, they married and, in 1943, moved to Florida, where they became involved with citrus farming. During this later period Riding ceased to write poetry, but worked instead, with her husband, on A Dictionary of Related Meanings. They also worked together on a large philosophical work, Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, which she completed six years after Jackson’s death in 1974.

In 1971 she was awarded the Martk Rothko Appreciation Award, and in 1973 a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1991, the year of her death, she received Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for poetry.

BOOKS OF POETRY

The Close Chaplet (London: Hogarth Press, 1926/New York: Adelphi, 1926); Love as Death, Death as Death (London: Seizin Press, 1928); Poems: A Joking Word (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930); Though Gently (Deyá, Majorca: Seizin Press, 1930); Twenty Poems Less (Paris: Hours Press, 1930); Laura and Francisca ((Deyá, Majorca: Seizin Press, 1931); The Life of the Dead (London: Arthur Barker, 1933); Poet: A Lying Word (London: Arthur Brker, 1933); Americans (Los Angeles: Primavera, 1934); Collected Poems (London: Cassell, 1938/New York: Random House, 1938); Selected Poems: In Five Sets (London: Faber and Faber, 1970/New York: W. W. Norton, 1973/reprinted by New York: Persea Books, 1993); The Poems of Laura Riding: A New Edition of the 1938 Collection (Manchester, England: Carcanet/New York: Persea Books, 1980); First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding (Manchester, England: Carcanet/New York: Persea Books, 1992); A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding (Manchester, England/Carcanet, 1994/New York: Persea Books, 1996); The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection (New York: Persea Books, 2001)

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]
USA

Carl Sandburg was born, one of seven children of Swedish immigrants, in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6th, 1878. His father, August, had helped to build the first cross-continental railroad. But life in the Sandburg home was often difficult, with the two youngest sons dying of diphtheria in 1892.

Leaving school at the age of thirteen, Carl went to work at various odd jobs to help in the support of his family. At eighteen, with his father’s railroad pass, he traveled to Chicago, and in 1897 traveled as a hobo for three and a half months through much of the Midwest, working on farms, steamboats and railroads. The following year he volunteered for service in the Spanish-American war, serving in Puerto Rico. Free tuition to soldiers allowed him, after the war, to attend Lombard College in his hometown.

At Lombard, Sandburg was a student of the economist and poet, Philip Green Wright, who encouraged the young Carl to write and published his first small books on his Asgard Press, Incidentals, The Plaint of a Rose, and Joseffy. The first two books represent the young Sandburg as a poet of no great talent, influenced by various writers of the time, including Emerson and Whitman.

With his idealist sentiments, Sandburg joined the Social Democratic party in Wisconsin in 1907, remaining in the party until 1912. During this period the young poet published occasional poems, supporting himself, once again, through various jobs, including as salesman for Underwood stereopticon equipment. In 1908 he married Lilian Steichen, the sister of American photographer Edward Steichen, and her and her brother’s influences, along with his former teacher Wright, were recognized by Sandburg as the most important of his life.

During the years of 1910 through 1912, the Sandburgs lived in Milwaukee, where the poet helped the Milwaukee Socialists’ win an election. At the age of 32, Sandburg was appointed secretary to Emil Sseidel, Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor. In 1911, Carl left his position to write for the Social Democratic Herald, and the following year, the family moved to Chicago, where he joined the staff of the Socialist newspaper, the Chicago Evening News. When that paper closed, he found work writing for various periodicals owned by W. E. Scripps.

Finding places to publish his poetry, however, eluded him until 1914, when Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry published six of his poems. That publication brought him into contact with the Chicago literary circle, which included Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, Floyd Dell and others. Ezra Pound, the journal’s foreign correspondent, also took note of Sandburg’s contributions. Dreiser and Masters encouraged Sandburg to put together a book, and presented it to Alfred Harcourt, editor at Henry Holt and Company, which published the book, Chicago Poems, in 1916.

Cornhuskers of the following year was a celebration of agrarian life, but also contained a number of Sandburg’s war poems, which gained him further attention. By the time the book was published, however, Sandburg was in Sweden for a visit, continuing on in Europe as Eastern European correspondent for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Returning to the United States, he went to work for the Chicago Daily News, writing on the city’s racial tensions, which went on to influence his views of the working man and woman in his next poetry publication, Smoke and Steel of 1920, which led to him to win the Poetry Society of America Award in 1921.

Despite the epilepsy plaguing his wife, Sandburg continued during this period writing as a journalist and working on his short fables composed for his children, The Rootabaga Stories, the first volume of which was published in 1922. His fourth volume of poetry, Slabs of the Sunburnt West, was published the same year to highly mixed reviews.

Soon after Sandburg began his major biographical venture, immersing himself in the life of his subject, Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years was published in two volumes in 1926, and the second installment, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, was published in four volumes in 1939. For the second volume, Sandburg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

During the latter years of the 1920s and into the 1930s, he occasionally produced volumes of poetry—Good Morning, America (1928) and The People, Yes (1936), but his focus remained nonfiction works, including a study of his brother-in-law, Steichen, The Photographer, on Mary Lincoln, and other subjects. During this same period, Sandburg developed a close friendship with poet Archibald MacLeish, and the men began a dialogue about the poet and his social roles. Sandburg’s Complete Poems were published in 1953, and throughout the 1950s he worked also on his autobiography. His last book of poetry was Honey and Salt of 1963. He died in Flat Rock, North Carolina at the age of eighty-nine.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Incidentals (Galesburg, Illinois: Asgard Press, 1907); The Plaint of a Rose (Galesburg, Illinois: Asgard Press, 1908); Chicago Poems (New York: Holt, 1916); Cornhuskers (New York: Holt, 1918); Smoke and Steel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920); Slabs of the Sunburnt West (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922); Selected Poems, edited by Rebecca West (London: Cape, 1926; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926); Good Morning, America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928); The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936); Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950; revised and expanded, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960); Honey and Salt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963).


Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true
I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces
of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer
at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud
to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job,
here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities:
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse,
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laugher of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

(from Chicago Poems, 1916)



Becker

Becker sat in a chair and they killed him; I don’t care.
Becker sat in a chair talking to God about his immortal soul
and calling, “Jesus, save my soul”; I don’t care.
Becker hired pimps and dope-fiends to shoot a squealing gambler
at noon on a crowded street; I don’t care.
Becker told the pimps and dope-fiends he’d keep the coopers
pinching them for croaking Rosenthal; I don’t care.

A lot of girls driven onto the night streets, driven into saloon
back rooms, driven to hangouts of thieves,
Tired of the coin paid ‘em in stores and factories, peddled
their bodies and legs and breasts to men for a dollar
and two dollars
And some of them died of the syph, some of them turned dips
and boosters, some of them took to coke and whiskey
and went bugs—
And Becker, well, he went fifty-fifty with pimps, dicks,
landlords and politicians—God-damn Becker and all higher-ups
and go-betweens to wash blood off blood-money before it
gets to them.

(from Chicago Poems, 1916)


Handfuls

Blossoms of babies
Blinking their stories
Come soft
On the dusk and the babble;
Little red gamblers,
Handfuls that slept in the dust.

Summers of rain,
Winters of drift,
Tell off the years;
And they go back
Who came soft—
Back to the sod,
To silence and dust;
Gray gamblers,
Handfuls again.


(from Cornhuskers, 1918)



Cool Tombs

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot
the copperheads and the assassin…in the dust, in the cool tombs.

When Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street,
cash and collateral turned ashes…in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November
or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember?
…in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering
a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns…tell me if
the lovers are losers…tell me if any get more than the lovers
…in the dust…in the cool tombs.

(from Cornhuskers, 1918)

Martin Nakell

Martin Nakell [USA]
1945

Martin Nakell was born, the son of a CPA (Certified Public Accountant), in Alpena, Michigan—a small town on the shores of Lake Huron. His family moved to Southern California when he was 15, and he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1971 from the California State University, Northridge, near Los Angeles. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing in 1974 from California State University in San Francisco and his Doctor of Arts from the State University of New York at Albany in 1983. Upon graduating from Albany, Nakell became a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Chapman University in Orange, California, where he continues today.

Nakell begin writing in the 1960s, publishing in numerous journals, but was dissatisfied with his own writing until much later. His first book, The Myth of Creation, was published by Parentheses Writing Series in 1993. In 1997 Sun & Moon Press published his short fiction, The Library of Thomas Rivka, and in 2001 Green Integer/EL-E-PHANT books published his long novel, Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other, to literary acclaim. A new book of poetry, Form, will be published in 2004.

Nakell’s work is philosophically-based and ruminative in its structures. Often, his poems flow in prose-poetry forms, and commonly, his poems function in a series of sequential writings that consider abstract issues such as “sequence,” “dialogue” and other such concerns.


In Los Angeles, where he lives, Nakell is also known for organizing poetry events and for the publications, particularly that of Leland Hickman, of his Jahbone Press. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Blue Mountain Center, and from Writers and Books in Rochester, New York. He has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chapman University, and the University of California.

BOOKS OF POETRY

The Myth of Creation (San Diego: Parentheses Writing Series, 1993); Form (New York: Spuytin Dyvil Press, 2004)


ubiquitous

ubiquitous.
two very decent gentlemen
in a sun chessboard
object born of a mind
first one sighs
the other sighs
a chessboard in a sun struggles
each has a thought which he struggles with
and of course wins, conquers
or that they are on the same side, team,
work together for the sake of

oars
in the same sun molecules
on a salt body of water
salt as
some ubiquitous.

notion or idea holds them together
or something much stronger in a good life
imagined by a greek in a strong no a good chess

but these two are italians
no, actually puerto ricans, shopkeepers
with good shops so there’s no going home

the chessboard of course has long since resolved its
struggle
fingers curl over the absence of oars and water, water in
each country

some ubiquitous
but these two russian gentlemen
had never known such sunlight quite like this though
you’d think molecules
and never imagined such pleasures
as portable as

the molecular structure of the act of change is a
constant

sunlight falling through the translucent chessboard
leaving the hands of the gentlemen placed upon the
dissolving notion,
historically, of the city-state, of the country-state
of the state

except that one yawns, a deficit of oxygen
and the dictatorship of boredom
and the return of a thought not to be conquered:

ubiquitous:

I tried to imagine her thoughts. I imagined her
thoughts. I crossed
that imperial boundary among the bombardments,
ubiquitous,
of a real world. I came home with my bounty: the
absence of an ideal self.
ever present but not omniscient: the water.
omniscient but absent: an adam and an eve, or certain
figures and a motif, recurrent throughout musics

The park was like a garden in an old country. We played chess there
each afternoon meeting each other. When the war came we persisted,
although, of course, then we had to stay inside. My companion was a
brilliant interior carpenter who had built himself an excellent library, and
so we played chez toi. I love it when I know even one phrase from another
language, as though language were something ubiquitous, falling
from a sky like rainwater into my old mouth. He is more intelligent than I,
who am only a shopkeeper. Though I read through some of his books, now
that I’m alone, and I beat him often at chess not because I’m more bold,
and actually I don’t know why. Since we left Lebanon, a Paris of the Middle
East older than Paris if you want to know

to have been a seaman
to have sat at the oars of the longboat
to have seen the waters evaporate
to have continued, at your oar
to have looked around
to have had the idea to call some thing by its name
to have known that you were one of the symbols


(from The Myth of Creation, 1993)



Questions from the Gates

in that one is return
two is familiarity

Where were you today?

At the gates.

Did you go in?

Some.

Some?

Yes, some.

What were they talking about
at the gates today?

The weather. And waiting.

Where were their hands?

In their pockets.

Where were their eyes?

In their hands.

What did you see?

Cumulus clouds, though the sky
was temptingly pale, transparent blue
in the open spaces between

What else did you see?

I saw the gates, those iron
vertical bars open
and close.

Did they stay open for long?

I don’t think
they were open at all.

But you said you went in?

I thought I went in; there were
times I thought I was on
the other side, and someone
kept calling me to come out.

Who?

Someone with eyes
like my own: startled, that is,
brown eyes.

Were they in his hands
in his pockets?

No. He kept looking at me.
He kept saying to me,
come bout before those gates
close.

Why didn’t you stay?

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m a coward.

What was happening inside
the gates?

Many things. A man…

What?

…legs, he was digging for something
inside his legs.

Did you go in far?

Yes, I went in
very far.

Did you see me there?

You were there!


Yes, with my eyes
in my hands, holding them up
so they could see.

Were you actually inside the gates?

Yes. Some.

Did you put your eyes
back in your pockets
like the rest of them?

No. I put them back
where eyes come from.

Why?

Because I had to come back here
to see you, to talk to you
about things.

Would you go back?

You mean inside those gates, where we both have been?

Yes. Back, inside.

What gates?

(from Form, 2004)




Sequence of Forms Six


is idea
plus essence or

So rich in that part of that city.
Idleness to approximate sensual
sloth’s seaside argument.

Two sparrows in a pepper tree,
Hawk-eyed, hung light-footed, hungriness,
indulge in the dearth of indifference.

Aesthetic’s muscular labor
The voice of that vendor: Potatoes!

Or that most days after work they come home,
then walk by the uneven shore
so that much later they might sleep well
under open windows.
Or if not, she would say,
Bring me down into sleep with you,
and he would say,
abandon to other shapes, insolid also.

That corruption causes individual consequence.
The exercise even of small power.
It’s not an aphrodisiac,
but arises from a mark of ordinary fear, causes a sense of safety.

Cause and effect, cause and effect, cause, and effect.
Light-footed the sparrows’ fine claws find grooves in the bark

Or the shape of an aesthetic labor taking shape


(from Form, 2004)



PERMISSIONS

“ubiquitous”
Reprinted from The Myth of Creation (San Diego: Parentheses Writing Series, 1993). Copyright ©1993 by Martin Nakell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Questions from the Gates,” and “Sequence of Forms Six”
Reprinted from Form (New York: Spuytin Dyvil Press, 2004). Copyright ©2004 by Martin Nakell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Crosson

Robert Crosson [USA]
1929-2001

Born in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania in 1929, Robert Crosson remained in the East until his family moved to Pomona, California in 1944. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and received his B.A. in English in 1951, briefly joining the Communist Party during his college years. After college he began working as an actor in television and film, in 1954 landing a small role in White Christmas. The following year he appeared as the character Danny Marlowe in I Cover the Underworld. But Crosson grew increasingly dissatisfied with the Hollywood scene, which, combined with his brief political activities, dimmed his prospects for further Hollywood employment. In 1959 he traveled to Europe, working his way through various countries as a piano player, a black-marketer, and pimp.

In 1960 he returned to the United States, enrolling in Library Science at the graduate level at the University of California, Los Angeles. Eventually he dropped out, taking night jobs and attempting by day to write his first novel. Jobs as a painter and carpenter, another movie role (in Mike’s Murder in 1984), and a 1989 Poetry Fellowship from the California Arts Council, allowed him to survive during these lean years; however, as he grew older Crosson grew increasingly dependent on “the kindness of strangers” and friends, particularly Los Angeles poet Paul Vangelisti, who–when Crosson was evicted from the Laurel Canyon house where he was caretaker–took him in. Crosson lived with Vangelisti from 1993 until his death in 2001.

From the early 1980s to his death, he had several books of poetry published. He 1981, his first book, Geographies, was published by Vangelisti’s and John McBride’s Red Hill Press. They also published his poetry (along with the works of two other poets) in Abandoned Latitudes in 1983. Calliope was published the following year by the Los Angeles publisher Illuminati. In 1994 the Italian publisher Michele Lombardelli published Crosson’s The Blue Soprano; and Guy Bennett’s Seeing Eye Books published In the Aethers of the Amazon: Poems 1984-1997 in 1998; But most of Crosson’s writing remained unpublished at the time of his death–the result of a heart attack brought on, doubtlessly, by years of heavy smoking and drinking. Luigi Ballerini’s Agincourt press published The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train, a selected poetry, in 2004.

During the last years of his life, Crosson was beloved by Los Angeles innovative writers for his eccentric behavior–he was gay and often described in some detail his sexual encounters and experiences to both his gay and straight friends–his unusual sense of humor, and his poetry, which came to be recognized as some of the most original writing of his peers.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Geographies (San Francisco: Red Hill Press, 1981); Wet Check in Abandoned Latitudes: New Writing by 3 Los Angeles Poets–John Thomas, Robert Crosson and Paul Vangelisti (San Francisco and Los Angeles: Invisible City, no. 3, 1983); Calliope (Los Angeles: Illuminati Press, 1988); The Blue Soprano (Castelvetro Piacentino, Italy: Michele Lombardelli editore, 1994); In the Aethers of the Amazon: Poems 1984-1997 (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1997); The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train (New York: Agincourt, 2004)

Letter

The christian name makes impossible
any face-front exchange of plain talk.
The remedy (as I’ve sd before) runs
amok the chittering squirrels on roof-
tops & owls (tail-balanced) hung from
trees. Adjectives kill, or stultify
and, in any case, belabor the room
we so carefully establish. Privacy
hs everything to do with it–topical–
and them day-old sausages brought (un-
wanted) to the door we eat anyway,
threshold and lintel.

You tell me we have five years to
change the language. I wonder what
you mean. Me? Us? Why? And what’s
to change? Maybe you didn’t say
‘change the language’ but we hd 5
years. My overalls will be washed
fifteen times by then, some shredded
for lawn chairs; the rest abused &
at least one pair given my dentist
as collateral...Poetic endowments
(? To be sure) get me in fistfights
at parking lots.

(from Wet Check, 1983)


The Hartford

–can’t remember his name: a distinguished
writer; friend of a Friend who’d once played
tennis with his daughter–his house, a splendid
quarters off Doheny... I was invited guest.
His wife, my younger, went out for a swim.
We share drinks.

“Trouble at The Foundation,” he informed me,
was “Too many ‘pansies’–; glanced at the
manuscript it had taken four years to write–
read the fist page. “Well,” he said, “at
least you’re literate.”
They had a dog–

Just down the street from Stravinsky

(who’d already left.


(from The Blue Soprano, 1994)


Coffee Table

–meant read the right magazines.
Made prominent.
Didn’t matter if you had one.
That was protocol.

Somebodys-wife who wrote for The New York Review–
Special reservations held party,
before bed.

____

He sat atop me.

I was thinking of the organist
in Allentown.

(from The Blue Soprano, 1994)


Brecht

Boomie wrote me letters–
he kept copies

He had a sister and a brother-in-law.
His step-sister was a film star whom
I never met. She was mistress of Howard Hughes.
Nights, she would sometime visit the family.

His father (deceased) had once played the violin.
_____

Very camp-gossipy letters
I have lost them.

Boomie was a director.
He knew Elsa: we once spent weekend at the
Laughton peacock-Farm in Palos Verdes.

Elsa (intimitably) maintained that spices should
be put with the pasta, not the suace.
She like watching car-races on TV.

(from The Blue Soprano, 1994)


Lemon

The lover I never dreamed of wouldn’t speak
When I was at the ocean too.
Seaweed and salt and wind
Blew every list away.

Words that would make me laugh now
Snorted bulls and boardwalks
Me. Me. Coins with the head of Ceasar.
Flapping seagulls.
And.

Under a log, left worms and white.
White–until I’m blue in the face
The mirror lit.

Candles. Or stars
Cut to the bone.

Toenails and chairs and elevators.
Faces in back seats. Wet skin.
A corked bottle. Salt
And seaweed.

The bare word he said
Needed dead men.


A green car.
Gone to the moon.
All thumbs and fingers.


(from The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train, 2004)


The Red Onion

A charley-horse was not an erection, but a cramp
in the leg. Men whistled walking by the house. I
didn’t much notice it needed painting.

It was a red house, barn red. One side of it was boarded up, I never went in there. I
imagined it ghostly. I sometimes thought the men were whistling at me. But it was not the
case. The house was wooden, a very old house. I lived with my aunt, who rented the
upstairs. Nights, I tried to imagine what it would look like, but I could not do much with
it. The yard was a mud shambles: nothing could grown there. I could not imagine it a new
house, nor did I want to. It was not in the right place.

The reason it was called The Red Onion was not what I thought. I though it was
called that because it was red–though a red onion is not red, it is purple. I did not like
the men whistling when they walked by. I pretended I didn’t live there.

(from The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train, 2004)

The Man in the Moon

In this bright-red-paper wading boots,
His well-worn thumbs–:
‘You must be drunker than I thought!’
And dove into the lake.
–Patchen

The way the water shows the hills.
A milky rim–an edge
To this naked guy:
Head-first.

A husky fellow, read–
No sound of splashing; nor
Penetration

Moon.
A still-like–

Rock-reflection of
What’s plummeted.

(from The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train, 2004)


Pythagoras

Evil resounds like water.

Water is a way to think.
Thoughts drink well at noon.

Four is tonic and more fertile.
Five is sometimes marriage–
Sacred to Aphrodite.

Stark failures of the drowned.
Misery like success is infantile–
Feminine, wanting both yes and no.

Seven is the mind–virgin, musical–
Associated with the birth of heroes.
Eight seeks eros, ultimate friendship.
Unburnished.

Water reads like skin–
Numbers sound like dance running.

What comes next, a question in the mind.
Half dozen of the other–
The first perfect number.

Moons incarnate.

Hand in a pale of rum so far from June
it makes one want to dance–
June, an alibi

For myopia & romance.

(from The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train, 2004)


The Collar

I feel like I’m wearing a watch:
The hand to the cuff–the Ballpark–
Colorful folk stealing each others’ cars
And suits of clothes they live in (after
Retrieval) or bets on the races:
A world of bookies and fast laughs.

The sacred, sacred.

How to nail your hand to a board and drive
Timber to Emergency: how to lose a finger
And (again) pick up the guitar or piano.
How to walk crossroads against the light
And make it fine kettle of fish, having
Lost the sportspage or pooltable left
the backdoor open, or the wife
At her embroidery.

A round-trip to Aussie-land where babies
Are borne to pouches and eat Kiwi–
Aborigines prowling in the bush
This side marbled architecture they
Haven’t shoes to fit: the fix of a smile.
Celebrating.

A child hugging his mother’s skirts.
Where sea is that and stone is a place
Of choirs.

(previously unpublished)

PERMISSIONS

“The Hartford,” “Coffee Table,” and “Brecht”
Reprinted from The Blue Soprano (Castelvetro Piacentino: Michele Lombardelli editore, 1994). Copyright ©1994 by Robert Crosson. Reprinted by permission of Michele Lombardelli editore..

“Lemon,” “The Red Onion,” “The Man in the Moon,” and “Pythagoras”
Reprinted from The Day Sam Goldwyn Stepped off the Train (New York: Agincourt, 2004). Copyright ®2004 Estate of Robert Crosson. Reprinted by permission of Paul Vangelisti.

“The Collar”Previously unpublished. Copyright ©2004 Estate of Robert Crosson. Reprinted by permission of Paul Vangelisti

Joe Ross

Joe Ross (USA/lives France)
1960

Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joe Ross attended Temple University in Philadelphia, where he had intended to study to become a doctor. There he met the poet and fiction writer, Toby Olson, who, in turn, introduced him to fellow professor Douglas Messerli. Over the next few months, a close friendship developed between Ross and Messerli, and Ross focused more and more on writing.

His first book, Guards of the Heart, consisting of four plays written in poetic form was written during this period; and over the next few years Ross continued writing poetry. He graduated from Temple, Magna Cum Laude in Psychology in 1983, and moved soon thereafter with his first wife to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. In Washington, he continued his friendship with Messerli while working as a ticket supervisor at The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Ross was extraordinarily active in the cultural scene of Washington, serving as President of the Poetry Committee of The Folger Shakespeare Library Board from 1994-1997 and as the literary editor of the arts bi-monthly The Washington Review. He also founded and directed a reading series, In Your Ear, for the District of Columbia Arts Center.

In 1997 he and his second wife, Laura Wilbur, moved to San Diego, where Ross became the Development Coordinator for The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. In 1999, he left that position to serve as Chief of Policy for The City of San Diego Council District Five, and a year later became The Senior Policy Advisor for District One. He was also active in the San Diego cultural scene, serving as a board member of the San Diego Art Institute and co-founding a reading series in that city.

In 1997 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for his poetry. He lives in Paris with his wife and two children.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Guards of the Heart: Four Plays (Los Angeles: Blue Corner Books, 1990); How to Write; or, I used to be in love with my jailer (Norman, Oklahoma: Texture Press, 1992); An American Voyage (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993); Push (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994); De-flections (Elmwood, Connecticut, 1994); Full Silence (Los Angeles: Upper Limit Music, 1995); The Wood Series (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1997); EQUATIONS=equals (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004); Strata (Zürich, Switzerland: Dusie Books, 2008)


from Guards of the Heart


SEMOSA: [Thinking to herself as she sees the old woman in the distance]

The years, bring little pain, yet they add.
Everything builds, somewhere, and takes a toll—
not at crossing or borders or bridges, but
rather, the outside coming in and staying—
too close to the beat, but by the river, pumping
echoes to shore washing upon the ears, ringing—
what the mind reflects through eyes before water—
at a time yet called and stalled, somewhere
in the actions yet to take place
yet remembered, somehow.
Though, not yet—
and was already.
As though time stopped, I look
there me, after befores.
And now.
How? I circle or turn or watch or am
involved.
She, there, yes, I remember, not
but feel or rehearse.
All too often, again, yes
there goes I
through time past, colliding forward
never moving
but yet a place, to watch
and call to companions, to look
and fill spaces—
not with bodies or lies or even plans,
but with the simplest of smiles—
arching a plain back to what connects
before we moved in, before we moved
before we.
And she know, not on the edge—
but where it gathers.


( from Guards of the Heart: Four Plays, 1990)


from An American Voyage

The world green blue in ambivalent sound.
The heat pressing down against.
The will of current.
Strings of palm.
Adagio of fish.
A light step into swim
recovering artifice from extinction.
Even the breath blue.
A tongue held in coconut bite,
the skin peeled back.
Raw fruit.
Rare exclamation.
A single purpose.
A lame excuse
limping for the night.
Stars suspended in inverted light.
Something is not right.
Something refuses to listen –
Speak or tell.

( from An American Voyage, 1993)



from An American Voyage


Leaning begins.
A slight sway in iron thought.
The nails painted brittle.
An elegant stretch of hand.
You awake to your own wake.
A memory of miles upon a sandy beach.
The sun so warm upon a naked back.
Each step a print into presence.
A single vision upon an exposed thigh.
The lips red, parted.
Each line, moisture for a searching tongue.
This held in mouth –
savored in wide blue’s spread light.
A tension on the tip of taut.
You freeze –
Let go.


*

A single lost walk to the edge of dune.
Each foot.
A step into coconut.
Wild wanderings in the wild of stars.
You make a head-spinning turn and stare
Wide open to a density of tropical hope.
Some where a front approaches.


(from An American Voyage, 1993)



White deck sandal and chisel –
A face, from the back, drinking darkness
Each blow is within us –
A spark, a chip to fly.
This easy night, a hammer without repetition.
Its maleness gone.
Bursting upon the ears, each chop.
If ice knew fluid. Blueness let in.
Hands.
Outlines.
Veins of time.
The callused, colossal, coliseum – no dictionary.
Then stillness.
Emerge[d].


(from The Wood Series, 1997)



Symmetry in sticks found.
Intransitive as to be.
Each climb. A series.
Parallel to harmony contained.
An open.
One runs with another.
Forested upon a wall.


(from The Wood Series, 1997)


The bark taken off.
Green wood. Buffer.
Shaved. Before sanding.
Back straight.
Perfect shoulders. Muscles diamond between.
Hand callused. Fingers, knots.
The chisel in teeth. Between breasts.
Let free.
In rhythm.
Blows.
Chips flew. The evidence of process is dance.
This dance. That dance.
Forearms sinewed to the triceps armed.
Ready for en[counter].
Here.
Peace.


(from The Wood Series, 1997)


Wood now to sound settles.
Slight the split opens.
Crack. [Im]perfect.
Creek.
Musing sap. To speak.
Not of nature apart.
A part
Of.



You.


(from The Wood Series, 1997)



MIDDLE: excluded


Plain said and said so. Page down Tuesday.
Oil wells and green field splinters, this year.
Old world poetry and the wasted paper leans upon the in us.
Dance rapid and tight, enough to notice and not care.
But to do and get done, already spent and not providing.
Your pension is our poison. Flowers & bombs at thank you.
Ten performances & awards, medals, honor – your substance, abuse.
We are grafted, held, and fought. Precious and few, on the mend –
torn, tattered, and made to mod. This rising retroaction
upon the spin, uneven, clean & shaven
This is dirty and obscene. A sight of laser light.
Pour that man a beer, shake the top down. Yo
mother fucker, new order hope.


[from EQUATIONS=equals, 2004]




ADVOCATE: don’t wear black


My muse these days is a lit spoon. Impossible morning blindness. Cream.
I want to scrape your insides out, add butter, add salt, pull your poles and maybe
Paralyze your Polaroids. Expose your snap shot stops of this life.
Dried time. Only dried time dear. Your make-up make believe, mold pressed vision.
The mundane fission of coming between. Coming between yourself, these sheets.
Like going North to get South. Or funning to the East to fill up your West. Quest on
my hero. Lance me a dragon. Slay me a wizard.

How far out can you go to get in? Go on, try out. Tire out. The little train that could
had a secret about knowing the right track. They never tell you that.
Screw it. I just want to razor cut this rope wound round your neck, sorry.
Sorry for the facts. Sorry for the fate. Sorry the way the cards got dealt.
So, no real big deal. We are we – used to it. Welcome to us.
Post-hype, post-post generation – raised on division. Schooled on revision.
A multi-media blitz of fractured mind. Sample and re-recorded.
We’ll re-write the inside out.

[from EQUATIONS=equals, 2004]


NOSTALGIA: report

A line that comes undone. Here honey your gun.
So sweet, so soft, so stiff. You’re malleable in form.
I ask for butter but will accept lead. Take head.
Your sex excites my mind. Your cheese runs my dog.
For you a thought must be inside out. And act – a divine
scream. Your center hot and melting rage.
I know thinly concealed – welcome to your world.
Now February, think of snow even if your not.
Try to cover in white, recover the not lost. I slip,
hold tight to this shoot.

There are tears in my body. Tears in you.
Tears in your lake. Tears in the world.
Tears on the take. Tears all over and really not a single
drop. Know what I mean? I feel has fell from the inside.
There stays the shell – take aim and launch. A site-on
Your cross hairs in my mouth. My weapon at your brain.
This kind act so.

[from EQUATIONS=equals, 2004]



ADDICTION: bliss

With you all things are possible. Possessed taken and sure.
I cut across the day light and write this. A thank you. A belief
round around the other side. Come with me past mythology.
Beyond the shipwrecks I stick my hand into ashes. Wet earth,
Face fire to cool down. I want to wrap my breath around you.
Your love poem. A flagwave to the ahead. Branded and coming to.
The other half is words. Just words. Silence and full.


[from EQUATIONS=equals, 2004]



Is it on Earth? Reached.
My piano monks out to this lived played touch.
The wreck of us here. Religion does equal out.
Interchangeable with each other.
The anguish of being: Is Alone. A wish,
I go through. Human divine.
Help yourself, to our hour here.
Burnt ends crisp, the waiting
Us naïve and analysis, an amazing error.
Worship in the trees, spirit speak –
a place warm and strong leaves
several changes of mind: Food, home.
That’s all – we can hope, for a simple peace.
You watch, this listen –
The way the heat builds.
Pick out the left overs. Credible, sure.

[from EQUATIONS=equals, 2004]



All equations equal
equal.
Together this
Equation equals equals.
One left
out, out still.
Our us, another.
You equate
You You.


[from EQUATIONS=equals, 2004]


PERMISSIONS

[‘The years, bring little pain, yet they add.”]
Reprinted from Guards of the Heart: Four Plays (Los Angeles: Blue Corner Books, 1990). ©1990 by Joe Ross. Reprinted by permission of Joe Ross.

[“The world green blue in ambivalent sound.’] and [“Leaning begins.’]
Reprinted from An American Voyage (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993). ©1993 by Joe Ross. Reprinted by permission of Joe Ross.

[“White deck sandal and chisel –“], [“Symmetry in sticks found.’], [“The bark taken off.”] and [“Wood now to sound settles.”]
Reprinted from The Wood Series (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1997). ©1997 by Joe Ross. Reprinted by permission of Joe Ross.

“MIDDLE: excluded,” “ADVOCATE: don’t wear black,” “NOSTALGIA: report,” “ADDICTION: bliss,” [“IS it on Earth? Reached.”]
Reprinted from EQUATIONS=equals (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004). ©2004 by Joe Ross. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Jorge Teillier

Jorge Teillier [Chile]
1935-1996

Teillier was born in southern Chile of French ancestry, and grew up preparing to be a professor of history. The writer Teófilo Cid (1914-1964) introduced him to surrealism, and the student abandoned history for poetry. Although his father was a militant communist, Teiller himself preferred to forego ideology in his work, focusing instead on the formal. However, he sympthazied with the Popular Front, and his daughter was exiled.

He died on April 23, 1996, just two months short of his sixtieth birthday. The critic Carlos Olivárez described him as "unarguably the first poet of the nation" and spoke of the pilgrimages young poets would make to the ranch outside of Santiago de Chile, where Teillier spent his last years. His books of poems include Para ángeles y gorriones (For Angels and Sparrows; 1956), El cielo cae con las hojas (The Sky Falls with the Leaves; 1958); El árbol de la memoria (The Tree of Memory; 1961), Poemas del país de nunca jamás (1963, From the Country of Nevermore, 1990); Los trenes de la noche y otros poems (The Trains of Night and Other Poems; 1964), Poemas secretos (Seceret Poems; 1965), Crónica del forastero (Foreigner's chronicle; 1968), Muertes y maravillas (Deaths and Marvels; 1971), Para un pueblo fantasma (For a Phantom People; 1978), Cartas para rinas de otras primaveras (Letters for Queens of Other Springtimes; 1985), El molino y la higuera (The Mill and the Fig Tree; 1992); and Hotel Nube (Hotel Cloud; 1996), as well as several collections published in Mexico, Peru, and El Salvador.

Teillier's distinctive voice and style are apparent even in his earliest works. Critics have described how he created a new poetic myth, an emotional language that infused images with a metarealism or secret realism within subjective time. Teillier's invented world is a place of silent movies, old songs, books from other countries, foreign places; it is a world viewed with a nostalgia of mythic dimensions.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Para ángeles y gorriones (1956); El cielo cae con las hojas (1958); El árbol de la memoria (1961); Poemas del país de nunca jamás (1963); Los trenes de la noche y otros poemas (1964); Poemas secretos (1965); Crónica del forastero (1968); Muertes y maravillas (Editorial Universitaria, 1971); Para un pueblo fantasma (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparíso, 1978); Cartas para reinas de otras primaveras (Edictiones Manieristas, 1985); El molino y la higuera (1992); Hotel Nube (1996).


ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

From the Country of Nevermore: Selected Poems of Jorge Teillier, trans. by Mary Crow (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1990);In Order to Talk with the Dead, trans. by Carolyne Wright (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

Yannis Ritsos

Yannis Ritsos [Greece]
1909-1990

Recognized as the foremost poet of the Greek political left, Yannis Ritsos is also one of the most productive poets of the 20th century, with nearly 100 collections of poetry, as well as plays, essays and other works, by the time of his death. He was also an accomplished painter.

The youngest of four children, Ritsos was born in Monemasiá, on the southwestern tip of Pelopennesos. Despite his prolific output, his personal life was filled with tragedy. At the age of twelve, his older brother Dimitri died of tuberculosis; within three months, his mother also died of the same disease, and he was striken with the disease and suffered throughout his life. His father was sent the asylum in Daphni for the mentally insane, and Ritsos's sister, Loula, suffered from mental problems and was institutionalized in 1936.

From his late teens to his mid-twenties, Ritsos spent his time in and out of sanatoriums, working when he was well as a dancer, a professional actor, and a poet. With outbreak of World War II, he joined the Greek Democratic Left, and followed its guerilla arm into retreat before the Britsh troops in Northern Greece. In 1945 he headed the Popular Theatre of Macedonia, a theater that exalted the actions of the partisans. During the Greek civil wars, Ritsos was incarcerated as a prisoner in a number of concentration camps, and it was only during the years from 1953 to 1967 that he was free to work full time on his great body of writing.

With the coup of Papadopoulous in 1967, and the junta attack on Greek liberties, Ritsos was again arrested, imprisoned, and exiled on various islands, where he spent much of his time in military hospitals fighting tuberculosis. Freed, he remained under house arrest until the student revolt of 1974 which brought down the junta.

The last years of his life were spent between his home in Athens and his house on the island of Samos, where his wife practiced medicine. He died in 1990.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Trakert (Athens: Govostis, 1934); Pyramides (Athens: Govostis, 1935); Epitafios (Athens: Rizospastis, 1936); To tragoudi tes adelfis mou (Athens: Govostis, 1937); Earini Symfonia (Athens: Govostis, 1938); To emvatiro tou okeanou (Athens: Govostis, 1940); Palia Mazurka se rythmo vrohis (Athens: Govostis, 1943); Dokimasia (Athens: Govostis, 1943); O syntrofos (Athens: Govostis, 1945); A anthropos me to garyfallo (Bucharest: Ekdotiko Nea Ellada, 1952); Agrypnia (Athens: Pyxida, 1954); Proino astro (Athens, 1955); He sonata tou selenofotos (Athens: Kedros, 1956); Chroniko (Athens: Kedros, 1957); Hydria (Athens: 1957); Apoheretismos (Athens: Kedros, 1957); Cheimerine diavgeia (Athens: Kedros, 1957); Petrinos Chronos (Burcharest: Politikes Ke Logotechnikes Ekdoseis, 1957); Otan erchetai ho xenox (Athens: Kedros, 1958); Any potachti Politeia (Bucharest: Politikes Ke Logotechnikes Ekdoseis, 1958); He architectoniki ton dentron (Bucharest: Politikes Ke Logotechnikes Ekdoseis, 1958); Hoi gerontisses k 'he thalassa (Athens: Kedros, 1959); To parathyro (Athens: Kedros, 1960); He gefyra (Athens: Kedros, 1960); Ho mavros Hagios (Athens: Kedros, 1961); Poiemata [4 vols] (Athens: Kedros, 1961-75); To nekro spiti (Athens: Kedros, 1962); Kato ap'ton iskio tou vounou (Athens: Kedros, 1962); To dentro tis fylakis kai he gynaikes (Athens: Kedros, 1963); Martyries [2 vols] (Athens: Kedros, 1963-66); Dodeka poiemata gia ton Kavafe (Athens: Kedros, 1963); Paichnidia t'ouranou kai tou nerou (Athens: Kedros, 1964); Philoctetes (Athens: Kedros, 1965); Orestes (Athens: Kedros, 1966); Ostrava (Athens: Kedros, 1967); Petres, Epanalepseis, Kinglidoma (Athens: Kedros, 1972); He epistrofe tes Iphigeneias (Athens: Kedros, 1972); He Helene (Athens: Kedros, 1972); Cheironomies (Athens: Kedros, 1972); Tetarte diastase (Athens: Kedros, 1972); Chrysothemis (Athens: Kedros, 1972); Ismene (Athens: Kedros, 1972); Dekaochto lianotragouda tes pikres patridas (Athens: Kedros, 1973); Diadromos kai skala (Athens: Kedros, 1973); Graganda (Athens: Kedros, 1973); Ho afanismos tis milos (Athens: Kedros, 1974); Hymnos kai threnos gia tin Kypro (Athens: Kedros, 1974); Kapnismeno tsoukali (Athens: Kedros, 1974); Kodonostasio (Athens: Kedros, 1974); Ho tikhos mesa ston kathrefti [The Wall in the Mirror] (Athens: Kedros, 1974); Chartina (Athens: Kedros, 1974); He Kyra ton Ambelion (Athens: Kedros, 1975); Ta Epikairika 1945-1969 (Athens: Kedros, 1975); He teleftea pro Anthropou Hekatontaetia (Athens: Kedros, 1975); Hemerologhia exorias (Athens: Kedros, 1975); To hysterografo tis doxas (Athens: Kedros, 1975); Mantatoforos (Athens: Kedros, 1975); To thyroreio (Athens: Kedros, 1976); To makrino (Athens: Kedros, 1977); Gignesthai (Athens: Kedros, 1977); Epitome [selection of poems] (Athens: Kedros, 1977); Loipon? (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Volidoskopos (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Toichokolletes (Athens: Kedros, 1978); To soma kai to haima (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Trochonomos (Athens: Kedros, 1978); He pyle (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Monemavassiotisses (Athens: Kedros, 1978); To teratodes aristourhima (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Phaedra (Athens: Kedros, 1978; To roptro (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Mia pygolampida fotizei ti nychta (Athens: Kedros, 1978); Grafe tyflou (Athens: Kedros, 1979); 'Oneiro kalokerinou messimeriou (Athens: Kedros, 1980); Diafaneia (Athens: Kedros, 1980); Monochorda (Athens: Kedros, 1980); Ta erotica (Athens: Kedros, 1981); Syntrofica tragoudia (Athens: Synchroni Epochi, 1981); Hypokofa (Athens: Kedros, 1982); Italiko triptycho (Athens: Kedros, 1982); Moyovassia (Athens: Kedros, 1982); To choriko ton sfougarhadon (Athens: Kedros, 1983); Teiresias (Athens: Kedros, 1983); Arga, poli argá mésa sti nihta (Athens: Eri Ritsou and Kedros, 1991).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Romiossini: The Story of the Greeks (Paradise, California: Dustbooks, 1969); Poems, trans. by Alan Page (Oxford: Oxonian Press, 1969); Romiossini and Other Poems (Madison, Wisconsin: Quixote Press, 1969); Gestures and Other Poems 1968-1970, trans. by Nikos Stangos (London: Cape Goliard Press/New York: Grossman, 1971); Contradictions, trans. by John Stathatos (Rushden, Northamptonshire: Sceptre Press, 1973); Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Motherland, trans.by Amy Mims (St. Paul, Minnesota: North Central, 1974); The Moonlight Sonata, trans. by John Stathatos (New Maiden, Surrey: Tangent, 1975); The Corridor and Stairs, trans. by Nikos Germanacos (Curragh, Ireland: Goldsmith Press, 1976); The Fourth Dimension: Selected Poems, trans. by Rae Dalven (Boston: Godine, 1976); Chronicle of Exile, trans. by Minas Savvas (San Francisco: Wire Press, 1977); Ritsos in Parenthesis, trans. by Kimon Friar (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979); Scripture of the Blind, trans. by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979); Subterranean Horses, trans. by Minas Savvas (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980); The Lady of the Vineyards, trans. by Apostolos N. Athanassakis (New York: Pella, 1981); Erotica: Small Suite in Red Major, Naked Body, Carnal Word, trans. by Kimon Frair (Old Chatham, New York: Sachem Press, 1982); Selected Poems, trans. by Edmund Keeley (New York: Ecco Press, 1983); The House Vacated, trans. by Minas Savvas (La Jolla, California: Parentheses Writing Series, 1989); Selected Poems 1938-1988, edited and trans. by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades (Brockport, New York: BOA Editions, 1989); The Fourth Dimension, trans. by Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993); Late Into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos, trans. by Martin McKinsey (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press/Field Translation Series, 1995)

A Small Invitation

Come to the luminous beaches─he murmured to himself
here where the colors are celebrating─look─
here where the royal family never once passed
with its closed carriages and its official envoys.

Come, it won't do for you to be see─he used to say─
I am the deserter from the night
I am the breacher of darkness
and my shirt and pockets are crammed with sun.

Come─it's burning my hands and my chest.
Come, let me give it to you.

And I have something to tell you
which not even I must hear.

Athens, 1938

─Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar



from Romiosini

VI

Thus with the sun breasting the sea that whitewashes the opposite
shore of day,
the latching and pangs of thirst are reckoned twice and three times over,
the world wound is reckoned from the beginning,
and the heart is roasted dry by the heat like Cytherian onions left by
the door.

As time passes, their hands begin to resemble the earth more,
as time goes by, their eyes resemble the sky more and more.

The oil jar has emptied. A few lees on the bottom. And the dead mouse.
The mother's courage has emptied together with the clay pitcher and
the cistern.
The gums of the wilderness are acrid with gunpoweder.

Where can oil be found now for St. Barbara's oil-wick,
where is there mint now to incense the golden icon of the twilight,
where is there a bit of bread for the night-beggar to play her
star-couplets for you on her lyre?

In the upper fortress of the island the barbery figs and the asphodels
have gorwn rank.
The earth is ploughed up by cannon fire and graves.
The bombed-out Headquarters gapes, patched by sky. There is not the
slightest room
for more dead. There is no room for sorrow to stand in and braid her hair.

Burnt houses that with eyes gouged out scan the enmarbled sea
and bullets wedged in the walls
like knives in the ribcate of the saint tied to a cypress tree.

All day long the dead bask on their backs in the sun,
and only when ight falls do soldiers drag themselves on their bellies
over smoked stones,
and with their nostrils search for the air beyond death,
search for the shoes of the moon as they chew a pieace of bootleather,
strike at a rock with thier fists in hopes a knot of water will flow,
but the wall is hollow on the other side
and once again they hear the shell twisting and turning as it strikes
and falls into the sea
and once again they hear the screams of the wounded before the gate.

Where can one go now? Your brother is calling you.
The night is built everywhere with the shadows of alien ships.
The streets are barricaded with rafters.
There are ways open only for the high mountains.
And they curse the ships and bite their tongues
to hear their pain that as yet has not turned to bone.

On the parapets the slain captains stand guard at the fortress;
their flesh is melting away under their clothing. Eh, brother, haven't
you tired?
The bullet in your heart has budded,
five hyacinths have poked out their heads in the armpit of the day
rock
breath by breath the musk-fragrance tells you the legend─don't you
remember?
tooth by tooth the would speaks to you of life,
the cammomile planted in the filthy of your large toe
speaks to you of the beauty of the world.

You take hold of the land. It is yours. Damp with brine.
Yours is the sea. When you uproot a hair from the head of silence
the fig tree drips with bitter milk. Wherever you may be, the sun sees you.

The Evening Star twists your soul in its fingers like a cigarette,
as it is, you smoke your soul lying on your back.
wetting your left hand in the starlight,
your gun glued to your right hand like your betrothed
to remember that the sun has never forgotten you
when you take out your old letter from your inner pocket
as you unfold the moon with your burned fingers you will read of
gallantry and glory.

Then you will climb to the highest outpost of your island
and using the star as a percussion cap, you will fire in the air
above the walls and the masts
above the mountains that stoop like wounded infantrmen
only that you may boo at ghosts until they scurry under the blanket's
shadow.

You will fire a shot into the bosom of the sky to find the asure mark
somewhat as though you were trying the find the ripped of a woman
somewhere on her blouse, and who tomorrow will suckle your child,
somehow as though you were finding, after many years, the knob on the
outer door of your ancestral home.

─Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar


Summer Noon at Karlovasi

Melted iron, noon, stone shadows.
Cicadas and cicada. Hammer blows at the blacksmith's.
Veins of water lurking under the stones.
The cupola of the closed church glitters.
Insufficient fullness─he said. And there is no one to speak,
there is no one to hear. The passing of a seagull:
a sudden burst of semen. And immediately after,
that unaccountablje, inexplicable repentence. Under the mulberry tree
a very significant thud was heard as the donkey
flipped one of its ears to chase away a fly.

Athens, Dhiminió, Sámos, 1953-1957

─Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar

The Same Meaning

Experienced words, dense, defined,
indefinite, insistent, simple, mistrustful─
useless memories, pretexts, pretexts,
the stress on modesty─stones supposedly,
dwellings supposedly, weapons supposedly─the handle of the door,
handle of the pitcher, table with a vase,
tidy bed─smoke. Words─
you beath them on air, on wood, on marble,
you beat them on paper─nothing; death.

Knot your tie more tightly. Like that.
Be silent. Wait. Like that. Like that.
Easy, easy, in the narrow niche, there
behind the stairs, flat against the wall.

─Translated from the Greek by N. C. Germanacos


The Stairs

He ascended and descended the stairs. Little by little
the going up and the coming down blurred in his tiredness,
took on the same meaning─no meaning at all─the same point
on a revolving wheel. And he, motionless,
tied to the wheel, with the illusion he was traveling,
feeling the wind combing his hair back,
observing hiscompanions, successfully disguised
as busy sailors, pulling nonexistent oars,
plugging their ears with wax, though the Sirens
had died at least three thousand years before.

January-June, 1970

─Translated from the Greek by N. C. Germanacos


Dangers

The dead nailed to the walls, next to the advertisements
of state bonds; the dead propped on the pavements,
on the wooden platforms of the notables, with flags, with helmets,
carboard masks.
The dead
have nowhere to hide anymore, they can't command
their dry bones (negotiable deaths, boxes
liften by winches, yellow paper with pins). The dead
are more endangered.
And he, prudent, with his umbrella,
walking high on the electric wires, a tightrope walker
above the parade, with a handkerchief tied over his eyes,
as the first raindrops began to fall.
The the storm burst.
The trumpeters were shouting to the women to wring the flags dry,
but they had locked themselves in the basements and had swallowed
their keys.


March-October 1971

─Translated from the Greek by Andonis Decavalles



The Uncompromising

Streets, avenues, signs, doors,
dust, smoke, a tree, self-interest. It was I
who threw the ring into the plate. Every night the beer pubs
open and close with calculated noise. The windows
are opaque with golden letters. The waiters have gone
to the toilets for a smoke. The other man is tired,
gazes at the floor or the wall, avoids seeing,
avoids showing, avoids naming. Every word
is a betrayal. On the billboard table
the flabby woman is lying naked, hinding
her eaten face in her scant hair
as large flies with cut wings walk on her breasts.

Athens, April 27, 1971

─Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar


Naked Face

Cut the lemon and let two drops fall into the glass;
look there, the knives beside the fish on the table─
the fish are red, the knives are black.
All with a knife between their teeth or up their sleeves, thrust in
their books or their breeches.
The two women have gone crazy, they want to eat the men,
they have large black fingernails, they comb their unwashed hair
high up, high up like towers, froom which the five boys
plunge down one by one. Afterward they come down the stairs,
draw water from the well, wash themselves, spread out their thighs,
thrust in pine cones, thrust in stones. And we
nod our heads with a "yes" and a "yes"─we look down
at an ant, a locust, or on the statue of Victory─
pine tree caterpillars saunter on her wings.
The lack of holiness─someone said─is the final, the worst kind of
knowledge;
it's exactly such knowledge that now reamins to be called holy.

Athens, September 30, 1972

─Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades


The Distant

O distant, distant; deep unapproachable; receive always
the silent ones in their absence, in the absence of the others
when the danger from the near ones, from the near itself, burdens
during nights of promise, with many colored lights in the gardens,
when the half-closed eyes of lions and tigers scintillate
with flashing green omissions in their cages
and the old jester in front of the dark mirror
washes off his painted tears so that he can weep─
O quiet ungrantable, you with the long, damp hand,
quiet invisible, without borrowing and lending, without obligations,
nailing nails on the air, shoring up the world
in that deep inaction where music reigns.

January-February, 1975

─Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley


from Carnal Word

XII

The day is mad. Mad is the house. Mad the bedsheets.
You are also mad; you dance with the white curtain in your arms;
you beat on a saucepan above my papers as on a tambourine;
the poems run through the rooms; the burnt milk smells;
a crystal horse looks out of the window. Wait─I say─
we've forgotten Phymonóis' tripod in the woodcutters' guild hall;
the oracles are turned upside down. We've forgotten yesterday's
bleeding moon,
the newdug earth. A carriage passes by laden with oleanders.
Your fingernails are rose petals. Do not justify yourself. In you closet
you have placed
tulle bags filled with lavender. The sun's umbrellas have gone mad,
they've become entangled with the wings of angels. You wave your
handkerchief;
whom are you greeting? What people are you greeting? ─ The whole world.
A brown water-turtle has comfortably settled on your knees;
wet seaweed stirs on its sculptured shell. And you dance.
A hoop from a barrel of olden times rools down the hill,
falls into the stream, tossing off drops that wet your feet,
and also wet your chin. Stop that I may wipe you.
But in your dancing, you do not hear me. Well then, duration
is a whirlwind, life is cyclical, it has no ending. Last night
the horsement passed by. Naked girls on the horses' rumps;
perhaps that is why the wild geese were screaming in the bellow tower.
We did not hear them
as the horses' hoofs sank in our sleep. Today before your door
you found a silver horseshow. You hung it above the lintel. My luck─
you shout─
my luck─you shout, and dance. Beside you the tall mirror is also dancing,
glittering with a thousand bodies and the statue of Hippólytos crowned with
poppies.
My parrot has gone─you say as you dance─and no one imitates my voice any
more; aye, aye─
this voice from within me comes out of the forest of Dodóna.
Clear lakes rise in the air with all their white waterlilies,
with all their underwater vegetation. We cut reeds,
build a golden hut. You clamber up the roof.
I grasp you by the ankles with both hands. You don't come down.
You fly. You fly into the blue. You drag me with you
as I hold you by the ankles. From your shoulder
the large blue towel falls on the water; for a while it floats
and then with wide folds sinks, leaving on the surface
a trembling pentagram. Don't go higher─I shout─. No higher.
And suddenly
with a mute thump we both land on the mythical bed. And listen─
in the street below strikers are passing by with placards and flags.
Do you hear? We're late. Take the handkerchief you dance with, too.
Let's go. Thank you, my love.


Athens, February 15-18, 1981

─Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar



Closing Words

The unhappy girl gnaws at her collar.
So long ago. Our mothers are dead.
A hen cackles in the rubble.
We hand no answers. Later,
we stopped asking. Night was falling,
wind blowing. A straw hat tumbled
out of the stands of the empty Stadium. Below,
in the river,
waternsakes and turtles roamed at will.
And maybe this would serve as closure
for a story already remoted from us, strange.

Karlóvasi, 7-6-87

─Translated from the Greek by Martin McKinsey


PERMISSIONS

"A Small Invitation," VI from "Romiossini," "Summer Noon at Karlovaski," "The Same Meaning," "The Stairs," "Dangers," "The Uncompromising," "Naked Face," "The Distant," and X from "Carnal Word,"
Reprinted from Selected Poems: 1938-1988, trans. by Kimon Frair and Kostas Myrsiades (Brockport, New York: BOA Editions, 1989. Copright ©1989 by BOA Editions. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions.

"Closing Words"
Reprinted from Late into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos, trans. by Martin McKinsey. Copyright ©1995 by Oberlin College. Reprinted by permission of Martin McKinsey.

Vítĕzslav Nezval

Cover for Karneval

Vítĕzslav Nezval [Czechoslavakia / now Czech Republic]
1900-1958

Vítĕzslav Nezval was born on May 16, 1900 into a family of a village teacher in Šamikovice in Southern Moravia. His father had cultivated an interest in the arts and had traveled long distances to see important exhibitions. He was especially involved with music and his teacher was the composer Leoš Janáček. Nezval's grand-uncle was an eccentric toolmaker and telegraph clerk, a man who knew the world and spoke several languages—"half scientist, half poet," Nezval would later describe him. The young boy's life was profoundly marked by these two men but also by the village culture, close to nature and the vocabulary of those who worked the soil. In 1911 Nezval entered the gymnasium in Trebic, where he also learned piano and began composing music. From 1916 on he was systematically reading and writing his first poetry. In March of 1918 he as drafted into the first world war, but he was sent home soon thereafter for partly real and partly simulated illnesses.

With the war over, in the fall of 1919 Nezval moved to Prague and started studying philosophy at Charles University. This was the time when a newly formed Czechoslovakia (under its philosopher-president Thomas Masaryk) was emerging as the first real and socially oriented democracy in central Europe, and the question of its further political and economic direction was in contention. Like most other Czech artists and intellectuals, Nezval veered toward the left and in 1924 became a member of the Communist Party. As with others also—not only in Prague but throughout Europe—political revolution had its artistic counterpart, and from 1922 on, Nezval allied himself with the "Nine Powers" (Devetsil), a collective of poets and artists that included among its core figures Jindrich Styrsky, Jaroslav Seifert, Karel Teige, Frantisek Halas, and Toyen (Marie Germinova). Written before his twenty-second birthday, Nezval's long poem, The Remarakble Magician, was included in the group's "Revolutionary Collections," a series of books of essays, poems, and manifestos, that accompanied the founding of a new "poetism" as the principal Czech avant-garde movement.

Nezval dated his own "discovery of Poetism" from 1923. As a program and a poetics—developed by Nezval and Teige in the latter's 1924 Poetist Manifesto (contemporary with André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism)—Poetism set itself against "literary poetry" and proposed "a new art which will cease to be art." In a tension shared by other movements of the time and later, their "poetism" tilted between a rejection of "art" in the named of "a pure poetry...[within] a life [turned] into a magnificent entertainment" (Tiege) and a commitment to political and social struggle taking shape around a nascent and, for them, a still admired Soviet Union. Nezval would later rename the movement "realism" and later still would ally it for several years with the Surrealists of Paris.

In this way Nezval's public career moved between political and literary commitments and alliances. With the onset of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s he engaged directly in labor struggles—those in particular of striking Czech coal miners. In 1932 he attended the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow, and in the same year he made an extensive and for him a transformative trip to Italy and to France, where he met with the leaders of the French avant-garde: Breton, Eluard, Péret, Aragon. At the same time his recognition as a poet—the central figure of the new Czech poetry—continued to grow. He received the prestigious State Prize for poetry in 1934 and donated the entire sum to a fund for helping refugees from Nazi Germany.
Nezval's meeting with the French poets and his continuing involvement with Surrealism had a kind of inevitability about it. As early as 1924 the event and content of Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of that year (along with that of Yvan Goll) had been disseminated in Prague. From the early 1920s on, Nezval's connection as writer and dramaturge with Jinrich Honzl's Liberated Theater involved him in the presentation and translation of works by Apollinaire, Jarry, Soupault, and Breton, among others. The painters Syrsky and Toyen, both close to him, emigrated to France and entered actively into the Paris art scene. From 1928 to 1931 Styrsky, along with Karel Tiege, published a number of key articles concerning French Surrealism, and in 1931 three important shows of French avant-garde painting were organized in Prage (an internationally based Poetry '32 exhibition came shortly thereafter), with Nezval intimately involved in their planning and presentation.

It was only after Nezval's 1932 meeting with Breton, however, that a more formal collaboration was set in motion. Nezval came to the Surrealists' defense against attacks by the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and in 1934 eleven writers, poets and painters in Prague, published a manifesto, written largely by Nezval and Teige, in which they presented themselves as part of the international surrealist movement and a proclamation of a decision to form a Czech Surrealist group.

The alliance between Prague and Paris led to a period of heightened activity on the Czech side: new books and magazines, art exhibitions, visits from Breton and Eluard and others, the establishment of the Surrealist-oriented New Theater with its productions of Breton and Aargon's The Treasury of Jesuits and Nezval's The Oracle of Delphi. With its balancing act of poety and political absolutes, however, the Czech group, much like is Parisian prototype, began quickly to come apart. In 1938, while Europe was heading into new war, Nezval issues a proclamation dissolving the movement, which for a year or so continued existence under Teige and a group of interested young intellectuals and artists.

For Nezval the war period was a time of withdrawal and holding back. When the Germans took control of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, he was not persuaded to leave the country, although arrangements had been made for him to do so. Most of his books were forbidden as "degenerate art," and he turned his attention to painting and to the writing of plays, most notably Manon Lescaut, based on Prévost's famous eighteenth century novel. In 1944 Nezval was arrested by Germans but was released soon thereafter.

After the liberation in 1945, Nezval returned to poetry and to increasingly recognized publication, though rarely with the avant-garde thrust of his earlier work. For a while he was the director of the film section of the Information and Culture Ministry in Prague, and after the Communist takeover in 1948 he received a number of official prizes and considerable governmental support. His political affinities and international stature made him a prominent member of that network of tolerated avant-gardists/poet-heroes that included Neruda, Brecht, Picasso, Hikmet, Eluard, and Tzara, some of whom he shared pro-forma hymns to Stalin in the early postwar years. In 1945 he again traveled to France, this time to meet Picasso and to see the French premier of his play Today the Sun Is Setting on Atlantis. But by then he had experienced his first heart attack and he had the sense that death was closing in on him.
The last years of Nezval's life were a time of frenetic activity—publish poems, essays, and copious translations of world literature. Nezval died on April 6, 1958.

—Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak


BOOKS OF POETRY

Most (Brno: Bedřich Kočí, 1922); Pantomina (Prague: Ústřední studentské knihkupectví nakladatelství, 1924); Diabolo (Prague: Vaněk & Votava, 1926); Karneval (Prague: Jan Fromek, 1926); Menší ružová zahrada (Prague: Jan Fromek, 1926); Akrobat (Prague: Rudolf Škeřík, 1927); Blíženci (Prague: Rozmach, 1927); Edison (Prague: Rudolf Škeřík, 1928); Hra v Kostky (Prague: Rudolf Škeřík, 1929); Básně noci (Prague: Aventinum, 1930); Jan ve smutku (Prague: Bohumil Janda, 1930); Posedlost (Prague: Bohumil Janda, 1930); Snídaně v trávě (Prague:
1930); Skleněný havelok (Prague: František Borový, 1932); Zpátecní lístek (Prague: František Borový, 1933); Sbohem a šáteček (Prague: František Borový, 1934); Žena v množném čísle (Prague: František Borový, 1936); Praha s prsty deště (Prague: František Borový, 1936); Absolutní hrobař. Básně 1937 (Prague: František Borový, 1937); Historický obraz (Prague: František F. Müller, 1939; expanded edition, Prague: Melantrich, 1945); Pět minut za městem (Prague: František Borový, 1940); Stalin (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1949); Zpěv míru (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1950); Chrpy a měta (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1955); Dílo Vítezslava Nezvala, (30 vols.) (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1950-1990)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSATIONS

Song of Peace, trans. by Jack Lindsay and Stephen Jolly (London: Fore, 1951); in Three Czech Poets: Vítĕzslav Nezval, Antonín Bartušek, Josef Hanzlík (Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1971); Antilyrik and Other Poems, trans. by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000);


Novel

It's on the gazes of the women
that it flickers in the length of mirrors
an indigo adventure
mixes with the midday sleep of soda water breaking free
extinguishing the evening

A cigarette draws off a day that's past
a memory in a box with the geraniums of summer
fragrance fading as the garbage truck rolls past

So when I paint these eyes
it's an enormous still life these eyelashes brushing
the down comforter on which the setting sun
projects a green to pas a cypress idyll

Farewell the grimace from the far side of the lawn
where some great game bird starts up the evening show
but stops short sobbing into her black pearls
in the backwash of a kiss that strips you bare

And now I see her standing naked
where the cafe mirrors multiply her image
until it lets me fall asleep
and I forget my indigo deception

An exchange of gazes
buzzes now like poisons
above the ranunculus's sweet inebriations
united by an icy chandelier

Then there's a letter slipped into a magazine
and later taken out
that I'm now burning in this ash tray

Or there's a handkerchief that some one dropped
and that a waiter picked up eyes fixed on his shoes

And the next day footsteps marking time
were entering the trolley an exchange of greetings
our first rendezvous

What rotten luck
a rainy day three hours talking on the bathhouse colonnade
the indigo dissolved is dying out
in the thin blue opening between the little clouds

Loud ticking of a watch a sash that rustles like a snake's tongue
ironic crunch of chocolates a cry emitted where the makeup doesn't take
a frayed bouquet of peonies small boudoirs of the sun

Pieces of luggage left on desolation highway
deprived of combs and handkerchiefs and photographs and letters
an offhanded wave adieu
out on the platform reading destination: moon
damp and disenchanted

Until one day in an elevator without memories
a meeting with a flash of ostrich feathers on a little blonde
sparks a renewal of the poet's chess board
and oh the games I play on it oh darkest night

—Translated from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak


Shirt

[PREAMBLE]

How do they seize me these strange beings with no names
All their history as simple as Gibraltar
Bastards of reality and air who wander over Africa
The angelus clangs out
......


On one of those steamy nights the end of June in 1935
I walked past the Luxembourg Garden
It was just striking midnight
And the streets were empty
With the emptiness of moving vans
Deserted like Ash Wednesday
And I thought of nothing
Had no wishes
No I wished for nothing rushed to nowhere
Nothing weighed on me
Like a man sans memory I walked and walked
A many yes like a box
The way old men walk who no longer need to sleep

I still don't know what caught me maybe my own sigh
The trees out in the garden filling with white bandages
I looked back at those paper bindings
Over an iron hedge
Could I have been singing as I walked?
Just singing
And Paris sold off like a slave
Convulsed and crazy
Paris with your bridges made into your chains
Prague, Paris, Leningrad and all the cities
I have ever walked thru
Now I see a herd of women bound with ropes
The glow in drowning them the sky still free
Like bracelets that a crowd is rushing over
Oh you gates you bridges
Of the one and only city that I see
A cith cut thru by the Seine and Neva
by the Moldau
And a brook where peasant women wash their clothes
The brook I live by

And windows
Thru the first a statue comes in from the Place du Pantheon
The next looks over the Charles Bridge
Thru the third I'm staring down the Nevsky Prospect
And still more windows

How I love the grocer's paper cones
With secrets that lie too deep
That they remind me of an empty changer
With its heaps and heaps of shirts
A shaft that holds the common grave of nameless women
I know a forest with its broadleafed burdock
under which a girl's breasts' hidden
And a tin cross to and these white hands
A sofa stuffed with gauze that reeks of antiseptic

Who are you woman like a sewing machine I stare at
Like the Boulevard Montparnasse that self-same evening
When I was sitting down outside the Cafe Dome
And studying the frieze on that one building thirty
five storeys up
I thought that it was snowing
In my mind I took part in the final new year's eve
of the 19th century before it ended
Under a tree filled up with songs a carriage waited
In vain I tried to find the house the sewing machine inside
its shuttle that held a thread I longed to have
Then walked back to the Luxembourg again
The wonder of those gardeners who care so for their trees
they wrap the fruit in little sacks
Like you who cover up your bare breasts with a shirt
As beautiful as a water pail turned over in a house of mourning
As beautiful as a needle in a birch bark with the year and date stitched in
As beautiful as a poppy head that's shaken by a bell
As beautiful as a shoe out in a flood floats past a window with an oil lamp
As beautiful as a wooden stake on which a butterfly is resting
As beautiful as a baked apple in the snow
As beautiful as a bedboard struck by lightning
As beautiful as a wet rag in a fire
As beautiful as a loaf of bread at midnight on the pavement
As beautiful as a button on a cloister wall
As beautiful as a treasure in a pot of flowers
As beautiful as a psychic's table and the words writ on the gate
As beautiful as a garland in a shooting gallery
AS beautiful as a scissors snipping off a candlewick
As beautiful as a tear inside the eye
As beautiful as a the hairwheel of a clock inside a mare's ear
As beautiful as a diamond in a condotierre's rifle
As beautiful as teeth marks on an apple
As beautiful as the trees in the Luxembourg Garden
the trees wrapped in white linen
stiff with starch

—Translated from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak



A Duel

When she sent forth her fingers like a swarm of birds
Into the beard hairs of a man bowed down like barley
Her back started to pour down like rain
Over her buttocks flowed like a bidet
An uneven fight it was
Old man and statue slugged it out
Ending with three swipes and a bloody dagger
But the killer
Falling to earth before his victim did
Eyes shut tight could see wild poppies
Which would scorch his beard with fire
Of a never gratified desire

—Translated from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak



___________________________________________________

PERMISSIONS

Novel," "Shirt," and Duel"
Reprinted from Antilyrik and Other Poems, trans. by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000). Copyright ©2000 by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Susana Thenon

Susana Thénon [Argentina]
1937-1990

Born in 1937, Argentine poet Susana Thénon was also a translator and artistic photographer. Her early collections, Edad sin tregua (1958), Habitante de la nada (1959), and De lugares extraños, contained references to Biblical and classical themes.

Influenced by the Italian I Novissmi poets and by figures such as the Brazilian poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira, as well as others, Thénon broke with her previous work in her 1984 collection, distancias. In this work Thénon pushed her spare and terse style further than previously, and explored a work, as she put it, in which she "entered a strange zone from which it would be difficult to return." In 1987 she continued that work in ova completa, and in other works, Ensayo general and papyrus, incomplete at the time of her 1990 death.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Edad sin tregua (Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Impresora y Distribuidora, 1958); Habitante de la nada (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Thiriel, 1959); De lugares extraños (Buenos Aires: Carmina, 1967); distancias (Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero Editor, 1984); ova completa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1987)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

distancias / distances, trans. by Renata Treitel (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994)


from distancias

1


the wheel has stopped stop-
two three two three two the wheel
has stopped broken inside
only wood eyes enter
only memory conic
only memory face to the sky it is not possible
that she should still burn more should burn still more
burn alone eternal as if the wind (something)
would not scatter her crumbs her clothes undone
desired body light of the night birds
homicides under the bridge go away cold
(something) in cadence sea
and it whistled and said creature mud
said and laughed trumpet of vein
laughed aimed trembled flesh
and fired bundle
shoes
flesh
ethereal (something)
and sun (a woman)
hatchets of sun (before the locked door)
scratch the door (looks for her key) it clears
her chest (says in a loud voice) her eye (open to me i) her hand
(calls calls) the edge (no) of the river (no) of blood
(no) of blood that runs away wild thread black with fear
between threshold and door meeting her steps
the wheel has stopped stop-
two three two three two the wheel
has stopped

─Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel

4

there's a country (but not mine)
where night is only in the afternoon
(but not ours)
and thus sings a star its free time

throughout death i will think
since dying is not mine
and I still shine with dazzled blood
(there's a country) the dream of falling
(there's a country)
and i with myself (and always)
with love unmoved

─Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel


6

the great snake that embraces the world
sleeps you too sleep
i sleep pure of sound
we smile against the desperate and alone
among the flowers no
(you can) no (you cannot) and of the day
it rains shadow dawned you tremble with
death prior to death
i sleep a stranger to the map of the seas here i read
your dream no longer here i read
your wolf-laughter white language i decipher
no (you cannot on)
and now
the drop falls (drink love)
with a whole sky of packed madness

─Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel

12

oedipus


the embrace the embrace in the afternoon
how immortal i have been
and how little the alien future hurts
this stone without rest you were eternal still
you were the last the first the nothing
and nothing but sun your glance my blindness
sun forever yesterday and we turned night
and the embrace was the sea

─Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel


13

the night


i shelter unsheltered
i shelter day blind
delicate flammable
i shelter this old shell
among so many other shells
that bursts with stinking fires
child-gunpowder
and pure reason exalted vertebrates

and the eye grows
ejects fires the hands
and the eye suddenly flesh
goes to meet the unseeing
distills in bars not tears but
iron sharks venereal soup
and the eye of sudden city
gets lost in the museum of wrath
body without funeral
the son rolls like a moon

like that other time
in my creak-filled horror
in my suitcase of bird
the futureless girl
drinks her foolish name

i brood
my light tongue
on this crack
bitter accomplice
of the dayless awakening
i feed on eyelid shine of dead lark

─Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel


38

and the words

and the
words

and the patios that burn
long after the sun
no longer crossed by any evil no
steps embraced

and the patios and the words

─Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel


(from distancias, 1984)


Stroos

stroos
one of the great evils
that affect wominhood
before they called it stress
and before that strass
or Strauss
it's like a waltz
the shadowless woman stumbled through
there's no drama she's drunk
drunk the bitch

stross

(from ova completa, 1987)

—Translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel

Permissions

Selections from distancias
Reprinted from distancias/distances, trans. by Renata Treitel (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994). Copyright ©1994 by Renata Treitel. Reprinted by permission of Sun & Moon Press.

"Stroos"
©2002 by Renata Treitel. Reprinted by permission of Renata Treitel.

Albert-Paris Gutersloh

Egon Schiele, portrait of Albert-Paris Guterlsoh

Albert Paris Gütersloh [Austria]
1887-1973

Born as Albert Conrad Kiehtreiber, Albert Paris Gütersloh was born in Vienna in 1887. He began his career as a artist, working for a while under the famed stage designer Max Reinhardt. At 27 years of age, from 1914-18, during the First World War, Gütersloh worked in the official Press Head Quarters in Vienna.

After the war, continuing his interest in art, he became a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschue, living for a time as a roommate with the later famed Austrian novelist, Heimito von Doderer. Forced out of office in 1938, Gütersloh joined the faculty of the Vienna Akademie der Bildenden Künste and contributed to the magazine Die Aktion.

During these years, Gütersloh had also begun writing fiction, publishing Die tanzende Törin in 1910 (revised in 1913), Innozenz oder der Sinn und Fluch der Unschuld and Der Lügner under Bügern, both in 1922, winning the Fontane prize in 1923. Gütersloh's major novel, however, Sonne und Mond. Ein historischer Roman aus der Gegewart was not published until 1962. It was followed by Die Fabel von der Freundschaft. Ein sokratischer Roman in 1969, and several collections of short fiction. His only volume of poetry, Treppe ohen Haus oder Seele ohne Leib. Späte Gediche, was published posthumously in 1974.

Gütersloh is seen today as a somewhat eccentric writer, whose style was richly ornate, often described as having a kinship with the Baroque.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Treppe ohen Haus oder Seele ohne Leib (Eisenstadt: Edition Roetzer, 1974)

Jan G. Elburg

Jan G. Elburg [Netherlands]
1919-1992

Born in Wemeldinge on November 30, 1919, Jan Elburg, for much of his life, was a lecturer on spatial planning at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. His earliest poetry was rather traditional in form and content. But after World War II, as an editor of the avant-garde literary magazine Het Woord (The Word), Elburg helped prepare the way—along with fellow poets Gerard Diels, Bert Schierbeek, and Koos Schuur—for the postwar experimentalist movement in the Low Countries. In the 1950s, he continued his association with the literary underground as an editor of Podium and a contributor to such periodicals as Reflex, Braak (Fallow), and Blurb, while beginning to exhibit in own visual art.

Elburg conceives his poetry from a Marxist standpoint, in keeping with his belief that art has a social task to perform: “With poetry I want to lay some lines of contact from person to person. And renew myself and others; learn to see more and feel more….make something clear, give some warnings, set some examples.” His poetic technique is essentially one of montage—the juxtaposition of previous jottings and fragments. “I mount my poems,” he explains, “more than modeling them.”

BOOKS OF POETRY

Serenade voor Lena (Amsterdam: W. L. Salm, 1941); De distelbloem (Amsterdam: 1944); Laag tibet (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1952); De vlag van de werkelijkheid (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1956); Hebben en zijn (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1956); De gedachte mijn echo (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1964); Streep door de rekening (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1965); De quark en de grootsmurf (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1971); Gedichten, 1950-1975 (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1975); De kijkers van Potter (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1981); Haaks op de uitvlucht (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1988)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

selected poems in The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century, Volume 6: Living Space--Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005).

Remco Campert

Remco Campert [Netherlands]
1929

Remco Campert has been the least inclined of the Dutch Fiftiers to lend himself to spectacular experimental expression: all his writing displays his characteristic resentment of pomposity and profundity. This has led him generally to wrap the serious, even angry nucleus of his work in easily absorbable, seemingly carefree language. Campert couples a talent for registering the most minute changes in the life around him with an obstinate integrity, a refusal to be led astray by any illusion whatsoever, which has manifested itself in a noticeable development toward great and greater directness and economy.

Born in the Hague in 1929, Campert’s youth was spent—as translator James Brockway has expressed it—“amid the wreckage of war and enemy occupation, a physical and mental landscape reflected in the mood—a subdued, laconic anger—of his poetry….” Campert began by publishing broadsides until he was accepted by the De Bezige Bij (Busy Bee) publishing house, a press that grew up as an underground organ of the Dutch Resistance.

Campert has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, and has also written numerous short stories and works for the theater. His novels include Het leven is verrukkulluk (1962, Life Is Lovely), a book still popular in the Netherlands, and, in English translation, No Holds Barred (1963) and The Gangster Girl (1968). He has also translated numerous books, including the French novel Zazie dans le Metro by Raymond Queneau. In 1979 he was awarded the Dutch State Prize for Literature.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Vierendelen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1951); Vogels vliegen toch (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1951); Een standbeeld opwinden (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1952); Berchtesgaden (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1953); Met man en muis (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1955); Het huis waarin ik woonde (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1955); Bij hoog en bij laag (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1959); Dit gebeurde overal (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1962); Hoera, hoera (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1965); Mijn leven’s liederen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1968); Betere tijden (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1970); Alle bundles gedichten (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1976); Theater (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1979); Collega’s (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1986); Rechterschoenen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1992); Staatfotografie (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1994); Verspreide gedichten: 1950-1994 (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1994); Dichter (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1995)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

In the Year of the Strike, translated by John Scott and Graham Martin (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1968/Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968); This Happened Everywhere: The Selected Poems of Remco Campert, trans. by Manfred Wolf (San Francisco: Androgyne Books, 1997); selected poems in The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century, Volume 6: Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers, ed. by Peter Glassgold, revised and expanded by Douglas Messerli

Arnaldo Antunes

Arnaldo Antunes [Brazil]
1960

Born in São Paulo in 1960, Arnaldo Antunes attended the University of São Paulo, but did not complete his degree. He edited several poetry magazines: Almanak 80 (1980), Kataloki (1981), and Atlas (1988). Among his published books are Ou E, a bookd of visual poems (1983), Psia (1986), Tudos (1990) and As Cosias (1992). Almost all of his books have gone through several editions.

Also a musician and visual artist, Antunes participated in several exhibitions of visual poetry both in Brazil and abroad during the period from 1983 to 1994. He put together the rock group Titãs with which he released several albums between 1982 and 1992. In 1993, Nome (in video, book form, and CD) was released. This work is a multimedia project including poetry, music and computer animation in partnership with Celia Catunda, Kiko Mistrorigo and Zaba Moreau. It was exhibited at shows and festivals worldwide and received honors at the First Annual New York Video Festival. As a musician, Antunes has released a number of recordings in recent years. In 1999 he wrote a sound track for the dance company O Corpo. And in 2000, Antunes published a book about pop music and poetry titled Quenta Escritos (São Paulo: Iluminuras).

BOOKS OF POETRY

Ou E (1983); Psia (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1986); Tudos (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1990); As Coisas (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1992); Nome (with Celia Catunda, Kiko Mistrorigo, and Zaba Moreau) (São Paulo: BMG Ariola Discos, 1993); ONLY 2 ou mais corpos no mesmo espaço (São Paulo: Editorial Perspectiva, 1997).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Nome [no translator listed] (São Paulo: Arnaldo Antunes and Zaba Moreau, 1993); selected poems in The PIP Anthology of 20th Century Poetry; Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain--20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets. ed. by Regis Bonvicino, Michael Palmer and Nelson Ascher; revised by Douglas Messerli.

Robert Gluck

Robert Glück [USA]
1947

Robert Glück was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1947. His family moved to the West Valley of Los Angeles when he was eleven. In Los Angeles he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and later, The University of Edinburgh, the College of Art in Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his BA in 1969.

For a while he lived on a commune in the Sierras before moving to New York, where he attended Ted Berrigan’s writing workshops. He moved to San Francisco and earned an MA degree from San Francisco State University.

Glück worked as a housepainter in the Feminist House Painting Collective, as a carpenter, and then as the Co-Director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center. He led workshops at the Center which were a sort of laboratory for New Narrative writing. Glück has written: “We were
thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaborator, the self as disintegration, the gaps, the inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history, and language.

Glück was involved in anti-nuclear and anti-interventionist politics, and was arrested many times in non-violent protests. He was an Associate Editor at Lapis Press and Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, where he continues to teach.

He is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. His most recent work, Denny Smith, a collection of stories, was published by Clear Cut Press in 2004. Glück’s two novels are Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe. Another book of stories was titled Elements of a Coffee Service.

Among his works of poetry are Reader (which also includes short prose) and La Fontaine, rewritings of that author with Bruce Boone. Glück’s work has been highly anthologized in books such as New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction (of 1988 and 1996), Best American Erotic (1996 and 2005), and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction.
His critical writings have appeared widely, including a long essay on the work of Kathy Acker in Lust for Life. Along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, he edits Narrativity, a website on narrative theory (www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issueone.html). An anthology based on the website, Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative, was published by Coach
House Press in 2005.

Glück observes of his work included in this volume: “This long poem is composed of all my misreadings. It is a kind of autobiography organized by my unconscious, because each misreading is a small dream, a dream that occurs on the page.”

BOOKS OF POETRY

Andy (Los Angeles and San Francisco: Panjandrum Press, 1973); Marsha Poems (San Francisco: Hoddypoll Press, 1973); Metaphysics (San Francisco: Hoddypoll Press, 1978); Family Poems [poems and short prose] (San Francisco: Black Star Series, 1979); La Fontaine [with Bruce Boone] (San Francisco: Black Star Series, 1982); Reader [poems and short prose] (Santa Monica, California: Lapis Press, 1989)

Christopher Davis

Christopher Davis [USA]
1960

Born in Whittier, California, Christopher Davis attended Humboldt State University in northern
California from 1979–1981. He received a B.A .in English from Syracuse University in 1983, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, in 1985. Since 1989, he has taught creative writing and contemporary poetry in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

His book, The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, won the 1988 Associated Writing Programs award, and was published by Texas Tech University Press. His second book, The Patriot, was published in the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series in 1998. A History of the Only War, his third collection, was published in 2005 by Four Way Books. His poems have appeared in numerous periodicals such as American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review,Volt, and in many anthologies, including Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, The Best American Poetry 1990 and Red, White and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America.

Stylistically Davis’s poetry is more “modernist” in spirit than “post-modernist.”The early influences of the modernists and of anthologies such as Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers have remained vital to him. A love of “New York School” poetry, what his work echoes from it is, primarily, its tonal richness. He attempts to respond to the issues in poetics articulated by critics (Perloff, Altieri,etc.) and critical theorists with a visceral, dramatic, emotionally-complex poetry: stung, in his conscience, by the attack on “narcissism” suggested by ideas of a “poetics of indeterminacy,” for example, he is more interested in portraying the “embodiment” of his reaction than in simply following the prescribed guidelines
for “new writing.”

BOOKS OF POETRY

The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1989); Independence News (Charlotte, North Carolina: Sandstone Press, 1993); The Patriot (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998); A History of the Only War (New York: Four Way Books, 2005)

Elio Pagliarani

Elio Pagliarani [Italy]
1927

Born in Viserba in 1927, the son of a persecuted socialist, who worked as a coachman for summering tourists on the Rimini coast. Pagliarani's inability to make friendships with the children of the wealthy, instilled him a hatred of the rich. An exception was Giovanna Bemporad, the child a wealthy publishing family, who herself wrote poetry and encourged the young Elio to write as well. The loss of an eye in childhood, and his witnessing of the death of a young man in the hands of Germans in World War II, along with the injustices he observed in Milan, where he worked for an import-export firm, led him further away from bourgeois culture. Soon after graduation in 1951, he joined the editorial staff of Avanti!, the socialist party daily newspaper.

Unable to relate to the neorealist "partisan poetry" and neorealism in its many other forms, Pagliarani turned instead to T. S. Eliot─whose "The Waste Land" stuck him deeply with its linguistic complexity─and to the Italians Cesare Pavese and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Accordingly, Pagliarani developed what he described as a "critical" realism, in order to create a dialetic for new social values and for creating a new poetics. Ultimately, he expressed many of these views in "Intervento" of 1959, collected in the Gruppo '63 anthology of 1966. In 1961, he joined poets Alfredo Giuliani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, and Antonio Porta in the highly influential I Novissimi anthology, a work which helped to change the course of Italian poetry.

Among Pagliarani's major works are Cronache e altre poesie, his first book published in 1954, Inventario privato (1959), La Ragazza Carla e Altre Poesie (1962), Lezione de fisic e Fecalaro (1968), and Rosso, corpo, lingua (1977). Increasingly, over the years his poetry has grown more and more hermetic and linguistically complex.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Cronache ed altre poesie (Milan: Schwartz, 1954); Inventario privato (Milan: Veronelli, 1959); I Novissmi. Poesie per gli anni '60 [selections], ed. by Alfredo Giuliani (Rome: Rusconi e Paolazzi Editore, 1961); La ragazza Carla e altre poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 1962; enlarged, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa, Mondadori, 1978); Lezione di fisica (Milan: All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro, 1964; enlarged as Lezione di fisica e fecalaro [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968]); Rosso corpo lingua oro pope-papa scienza (Rome: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1977); Poesie da recita, edited by Alessandra Briganti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1985); La ballata de Rudi (Venice: Marsilio, 1995); La pietà oggetiva (Poesie 1947-1997) (Rome: Fondazione Piazzolla, 1997).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Selections in The New Italian Poetry: 1945 to the Present, edited and translated by Lawrence R. Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); I Novissimi, edited with a new preface by Alfredo Giuliani (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995); and The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975, edited by Luigi Ballerini, Beppe Cavatorta, Elena Coda and Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1999).



Love Song

You had the legs of a pregnant mare
and tringy hair, your forms
made by a carpenter I struggled
sure of remaking them, imagining
a turgid richness if I took you nipples
in my teeth. You looked good
dressed like a sailor, white and blue.

I wrestled ont he sand to open you up
and resolve a dobut for you, underwear
with popular flounces.
Lord Knows what
I thought I'd see, in her restless
eyes.
If this were sin!, come on,
illusion of age, what leaves its mark
is the lie: life having been declared
grand, here I am to bend my back
and say: it's strange it's strange, as a goose.

I realize that instead of drowning
I used you as a life-preserver.

Here where there's a break in the sea, no memory
remains, and if treachery seizes me
from the depths, it's the night the clearness
marriage sea moon in these low
lands, it's Villa Serena so empty,
silence, dismay at the threats
of the dawn.

—Translated from the Italian by Lawrence R. Smith


(from La ragazza Carla e altre poesie, 1962)



Narcissus Pseudonarcissus

It's somehow like saying there's not much left to burn, by now,
the blimp's defeated, the skeleton so bare
it's frightening
I had what it takes to turn out badly,
wicked love, talent plus a modest ambition
and if need be a hole in my pants
to slip two fingers through
and so we shall burn iron posts
our up-to-date country, the dredge the crane the seaplane harbor

But if:
cowardly and unyieding I struggled
meal after meal, and I will not let go

I have no idea how the cortex responds
but I plan to go on






__________________________________________________________________
With great self-irony the author celebrates the indistinct, unseemly
ambitions of adolescence. Narcissus pseudonarcissus is commonly called
"Poetic narcissus."
The reference to the zeppelin is deliberately old-fashioned; the diri-
gible whose canvas balloon has deflated remailns a bare, hulking, iron
skeleton. So let us then put our irons in the fire and update the land-







my baggage is not heavy
my back is not too bulky
I got conneactive tissue that permits
some metamorphosis

after the rain with toads in the streets
I trust you will find me.

O, we are the race most tenancious, praised be its creator,
man's the only animal to winter at pole and equator
lord of all latitudes accustomed to all habits,
thus my confidence is fierce
no matter how I say it—ah the endless range of tones
equal only to throngs of sensitive souls to earth's stenches
my confidence is fierce, no matter hwat, you can find me in the storm
and later, when the trolley tracks are up in the air.



_______________________________________________________________
scape with sttely "objects": yet those, we would do well to note, are
objects that imiply movements of approach, landings, transport.
The "cortex" is obvijously that of the brain. In asserting his own possi-
bility of metamorphosis the author has recourse to a southern idiom-
atic construction ("I got" for I have), which conveys the idea of the moral
"transformism" that the southern population is socially subjected to.






No? What happened, an accident? Glory be to you, if your turn hasn't come
I anyway delivered a note—it says I don't give up:
amen to me, the time my turn will come.




______________________________________________________
The praise of powers of adaptation and resistance typical of mankind
bears with it a polemical attitude toward sensitivity (and here it is
primarily the sensitivity of the reader accustomed to the refinements of
poetry): the possible "tones" of experience are endless, so that the author
combines violence with trust and assumes a certain stylistic casu-
alness ("no matter how I say it")—the very coaseness he needs if he is
consciously to shoulder his baggage.
And if an accident occurs? Lucky you, whoever you are, if you manage
to escape the "storm"; meanwhile the poets don't give up their work.


-Translated from the Italian by Luigi Ballerini and Paul Vangelisti


(from La ragazza Carla e altre poesie, 1962; as it appeared with notes
in I Novissimi)



At the Beach There Are No Colors


At the beach there are no colors
when the light is stront it equals
its absence
thus each presence is forgetful and without trauma
it acquires solitude
Words share their destiny with colors
lying
on the sand another speaks
stretched out on the sand with hands
under his head the words go upward
who can follow them
face down hands under his chin
the words fall scare
who can connect them
it seems better to listen
in two
your body and you
but sound without interruption is magma and sea
it makes no sense to listen



The sea is discreet the sun
makes no noise
the horizontal world
is without quality
Sustance
is indifferent substance
preceding
the quality of inequality.



—Translated from the Italian by Luigi Ballerini and Paul Vangelisti

(from La ballata di Rudi, 1995)



Talk to Sagredo

Talk to Sagredo: so much per kilo we sell and these people cost
it's the phrase that gives him away, tomorrow at the harbor beach. I found him
in friar's sandals and a long white meerschaum in his mouth
I'm sending false signals, he said, and greatly praised the chastity of woman

Mixture of gunpowder according to Roger Bacon
chalk, cheese, sand from the Tago and philosophical eggs

Here it is siimpler silnce there is no reason, the motive is existence, and I decided to
kill Sagredo.
Who sent you he asked me when there were the black women and Pierraccini, I told
the first lie that came to mind
he said it's a lie I don't give a damn don't tell me you believe in a secret life, and the
girls laughed when he pulled down his pants. Pieraccini
was immediately out of key, first he pretended to leave then he too began to undress
but Peggy called him an asshole and Molly said you're disgusting in so manywords.
In effect he was as disgusting
as Sagredo was clean
and I dediced to kill Sagredo.


—Translated from the Italian by Luigi Ballerini and Paul Vangelisti

(from La ballata di Rudi, 1995)


Nandi's Blues

(a): let's try again with red

let's try again with red: red, a circle around it, then red on red: Nandi if there were
with red a circle of red seven degrees of red if there were
a spot straddling the circles, red that drips in a corner, fickle red on tighter
circles choked with red, that follows the edge of the corner, overflowing the read
corner,
it spreads over the time of red, red down to the marrow of the bone of time, red of
the wind
red that wind in the time of red, red the breath of the wind in the red of time
red the forest if the red wind blows through the forest red flowers
on red stalk with red petals in the red forest of time where the wind
is red: too much red Nandi or too many words of red or red dismayed by red?
ostrich feathers colored an easy red ostrich red
let's try again with red: red, a circle around it, then red on red: Nandi, if there were

(b)

let's try again with the body: body, a circle around it, then body on body: Nandi, if
we had
on the body a bundle of bodies a degree seven degress of body if they had
a spot straddling the body, that makres the triangle, fickle spot on bodies
caught in the bundle of bodies, that follows the edge of the triange, overflowing
the body
in time, it spreads over the time of body, over the body hollowed by time
down to the bone marrow
time of the body in the tangle of plexus, having, Nandi, body and body's breath in
the course of time
in the breath of wind, body in the body, flower of body on the stalk of body in the
forest
of body on the beach of bodies where the wind smells only of body
too much body Nandi or too many words on the body or body dismayed by the
body?

let's try again with the body, why circle? no circle around it, body on body
there is acircle: body, body


(c)

tongue: tongue of red on the red of the body, tongue red canal of the body
between being and having, tongue for Nandi
red tongue of the body of red, tongue of the circle created by tongue and broken
by tongue
mystical tongue of red mystical tongue of body mystical tongue of cock
(if it is mystical it is private, it's no good to Nandi,
if it's encoded it's already screwed, Nandi you've been had)
but your red tongue
of
your body


—Translated from the Italian by Luigi Ballerini and Paul Vangelisti


Among the Finales of Rudy's Ballad

Drugs weren't enough, now there's this anorexia, or bulemia whatever
No, not the same thing? the opposite? one kills the other fills you up
Anorexia doesn't mean not being hungry but saying you're not hungry
hvaing so much in your gut, and goose bumps of envy for not being
like others, but like the Nibelungs in fact the Niebelungesses because
it especially strikes
girls and how many have learned diligently from the gorgers of ancient Rome
the art of vomitting to destroy yourself: this is like drugs, the rich
with money and effort more often get off, the poor don't fare so well.
(In parenthesis?: at the start of this tale if there were a strange
girl without apparent reason it had to do with reducing almost
always the concetration
camps, from what camps come the reducing now?)

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti

(from La ballata de Rudi, 1995)

Okot p'Bitek

Okot p'Bitek [Uganda]
1931-1982

Born in Gulu, Uganda, Okot p'Bitek was guided from childhood on by his mother, a singer and composer and the head of her clan. From the rich lore of songs and folktales with which he grew up, he absorbed the oral traditions of the Luo people. Educated in a Christian secondary school, he attended King's College in Budo. As a soccer team member, he traveled abroad to represent Uganda, and stayed on in Great Britian, continuing his education in Bristol. He took a law degree at Aberystwyth and a degree in social anthropology at Oxford.

Returning to Uganda, he became lecturer at the University College in Makerer, later becoming the director the National Cultural Center in Kampala. However, political events, triggered in part by his criticisms of the Zambian government, forced him to leave that position, and he emigrated to Kenya. However, he continued there as a senior research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, and wrote several major works on African culture, including African Religions and Western Scholarship (1970), Religion of the Central Luo (1971), and Africa's Cultural Revolution (1973).

In 1953, he wrote his first major literary work, Lak tar miyo kinyero wi lobo, a novel written in the Acholi dialect of Luo. It was a decade later, however, before he published his acclaimed Song of Lawino: A Lament (1966). In 1970, he followed that success with Song of the Ocol. Song of a Prisoner, perhaps his best known work, was published a year later, followed by a collection of that work and Song of Malaya (1971). The songs of Lawino and a Prisoner are both poems of defense, but the latter work is also a statement on African politics and reveals the anguish of the people. The Song of Ocol and Song of Malaya are poems of attack.

p'Bitek died in 1982.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Song of Lawino, A Lament (Nairobi and London: East African Publishing House, 1966; Cleveland, Ohio: World-Meridian Books, 1969); Song of the Ocol (Nairobi and London: East African Publishing House, 1970); The Song of the Prisoner (Nairobi and London: East African Publishing House, 1970; published as Song of a Prisoner [New York: The Third Press, 1971]);
Two Songs: the Song of the Prisoner and the Song of Malaya (Nairobi and London: East African Publishing House, 1971); Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol (Nairobi and London: East African Publishing House, 1971).

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini [Italy]
1922-1975

Pasolini's youth was spent in northern Italy, his father's military career necessitating several moves throughout the region. In 1937, he returned to his native city of Bologna, where he enrolled at the University, studying literature and art history. It was at this time that he began to write poetry in Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romanic dialect. His first book of poetry, Poesie a Casarsa, was published at his own expense in 1942.

The next year, the family moved to Casarsa, the subject of his previous book and the birthplace of Pasolini's mother. There Pasolini's interest in poetry grew, and he continued writing, both in Friulian and in Italian. In 1949 his mother and he moved to Rome, where he remained the rest of his life.

Pasolini's poetry reflects his personal interests and concerns: his work is particularly infused with a sense of the poverty and joy of the working classes and his love for them. The protaganists of poetry and fiction─and often of his films─are Rome's uneducated youths, forced to live apart from and alienated by the bourgeois.

However, Pasolini's Marxist positions were highly personalized, primarily because of his homosexuality, expressed openly in much of his work. At the same time, his life, particularly when he began making motion pictures in the 1960s, pulled him further away from the poor, with whom he so identified. Pasolini explored these issues intensely in his films and his works of poetry and fiction such as L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (1958; The Nightingale of the Catholic Church), Ragazzi di vita (1955, The Ragazzi) and Una vita violenta (1959; A Difficult Life).

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s Pasolini directed films of international renown, most notably Accattone (1961), Uccellacci e uccellini (1964, Hawks and Sparrows), Teorema (1968), Medea (1970) and Salò; o, le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975).

In 1975 Pasolini was murdered by a young man, whom he had evidently picked up for a homosexual encounter. The incident was internationally reported, with some parties suggesting that Pasolini had been murdered for political reasons.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Poesie a Casarsa (1942); Le ceneri di Gramsci (Milan: Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1957); L'usignolo della chiesa cattolica (Milan: Longanesi, 1958); La religione del mio tempo (Milan: Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1961); Poesia in forma di rosa (Milan: Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1964); Trasumanar e organizzar (Milan: Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1971); Le poesie (Milan: Aldo Garzanti Editore, 1975); La nuova gioventù: poesie friulane 1941-1974 (Torino: Einaudi, 1975).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems, trans. by Norman MacAfee with Luciana Martinengo (New York: Random House, 1982); Roman Poems, trans. by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986).

For a reading in Italian with Pasolini and Ezra Pound, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YJSG1C3sF8&feature=related

from A Desperate Vitality

I

(Draft, in progress, in current slang, of
what's gone before: Fiumicino, the old
castle, and a first true idea of death.)

As in a film by Godard: alone
in a car moving along the highways
of Latin neocapitalism─returning from the airport─
[where Moravia remained, pure among his luggage]
alone, "piloting his Alfa Romeo,"
in a sun inexpressible in rhymes
that aren't elegiac, because it's celestial
─the most beautiful sun of the year─
as in a film by Godard:
under that sole still sun slitting
its veins,
the canal of the port of Fiumicino
─a motorboat returning unobserved
─Neapolitan sailors in their wool rags
─an auto accident, with a little crowd around it...

─as in a film by Godard─rediscovery
of romanticism in the seat of
neocapitalistic cynicism and cruelty─
at the wheel
on the road from Fiumicino,

and there's the castle (what sweet
mystery for the French screenwriters
in the troubled, endless, centuries-old sun,

this papal monster, with its crenelations
above the hedges and vine rows of the ugly
countryside of peasant serfs)...

─I'm like a cat burned alive,
crushed by a truck's tires,
hanged by boys to a fig tree,

but still with at least eight
of its nine lives, like
a snake reduced to a bloody pulp,
an eel half-eaten

─sunken cheeks under dejected eyes,
hair horribly thinned on skull,
arms skinny as a child's,
─a cat that doesn't die, Belmondo
who "at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo"
within the logic of the narcissistic montage
detaches himself from time, and inserts in it
himself,
in images that have nothing to do with
the boredom of the hours in a line,
the slow splendid death of the afternoon...

Death is not
in not being able to communicate
but in no longer being able to be understood.

And this papal monster, not devoid
of grace─reminder of
the rustic condescensions of patronage,
which were innocent, in the end, as the serfs'
submissiveness was innocent─
in the sun that was,
through the centuries,
for thousands of afternoons,
here, the only guest,

this papal monster, crenelated,
crouched among poplar groves and marshes,
fields of watermelons, embankments,
this papal monster, armored
by buttresses the sweet orange color
of Rome, cracking
like Etruscan or Roman buildings,
is at the point of no longer being understood.

II

(Without a dissolve, in a sharp cut, I portray myself
in an act─without historical precedents─of "cultural
industry.")

I, voluntarily martyred...and
she in front of me, on the couch:
shot and countershot in rapid flashes,
"You"─I know what she's thinking, looking at me,
in a more domestic-Italian Masculine-Feminine,
always à la Godard─"you, sort of a Tennessee!"
the cobra in the light wool sweater
(and the subordinate cobra
gliding in magnesium silence).
Then aloud: "Tell me what you're writing?"

"Poems, poems, I'm writing! Poems!
(stupid idiot,
poems she wouldn't understand, lacking as she is
in metric knowledge! Poems!)
poems no longer in tercets!

Do you understand?
This is what's important: no longer in tercets!
I have gone back, plain and simple, to the magma!
Neocapitalism won, I've
been kicked out on the street
as a poet [boo-hoo]
and citizen [another boo-hoo]."
And the cobra with the ballpoint:
"The title of your work?" "I don't know...
[He speaks softly now, as though intimidated, assuming
the role the interview, once accepted, imposes
on him: how little it takes
for his sinister mug
to fade into
the face of a mama's boy condemned to death]
─perhaps...'The Persecution'
or...'A New Prehistory' (or Prehistory)
or...
[And here he rears up, regaining
the dignity of civil hate]
'Monologue on the Jews'..."
[The discourse
flounders like the weak unaccented beat
of a jumbled octosyllable: magmatic!]
"And what's it about?"
"Well, my...your, death.
It is not in not communicating [death],
but in not being understood...

(If she only knew, the cobra,
that this is a tired idea
concocted coming back from Fiumicino!)
They're almost all lyrics, whose composition
in time and space
consists (strangely enough!) of an automobile ride...
meditations from forty to eighty miles per hour...
with quick pans (and dollies
following or preceding them),
over significant monuments, or groups
of people, inducing
an objective love...by the citizen
(or user of the road)..."

"Ha, ha─[it's the cobress with the ballpoint, laughing] and...
who is it that doesn't understand?"
"Those no longer among us."


III

Those no longer among us!
Lifted, with their innocent youth,
by a new breath of history, to other lives!

I remember it was...because of a love
that invaded my brown eyes and honest trousers,
the house and countryside, morning sun

and evening sun...on the good Saturdays
of Friuli, on the...Sundays...Ah, I can't
even utter that word of virgin

passions, of my death (seen in a dry
ditch swarming with primroses, between
vine rows stunned by gold, next to

dark farmhouses against a sublime blue sky).

I remember that in that monstrous love
I nearly screamed in pain
for the Sundays when the sun must shine

"above the sons of the sons!"

I was crying, in my narrow bed, in Casarsa,
in the room that smelled of urine and laundry
on those Sundays with their dying glow...

Incredible tears! Not only
for what I was losing, in that moment
of heatrending immobility of splendor,

but for what I would lose! When new
young me─of whom I couldn't conceive,
so like those dressing now

in heavy white trousers and tight English jackets,
with a flower in the buttonhole, or in dark
cloth, for weddings, cared for with filial kindness

─would populate the Casarsa of future lives,
unchanged, with its stones, and its sunlight
covering it in golden water...

Through an epileptic impulse of homicidal
grief, I was protesting
like someone sentenced to life imprisonment, locking myself
in my room,
without anybody else knowing,
to scream, mouth stuffed with
the blankets darkened by
the burns of the irons,
the dear blankets of the family,
on which I was brooding over the flowers of my youth.

And one afternoon, or one evening, I ran,
screaming,
through the streets of Sunday, after the game,
to the old cemetery, there, beyond the railroad tracks,
and performed, and repeated, till I bled,
the sweetest act of life,
I alone, on the little pile of earth,
the graves of two or three
Italian or German soldiers,
no names on the wood-plank crosses
─buried there since the other war.

And that night, amid my dry tears, the bleeding
bodies of those poor unknowns
dressed in olive drab

appeared in a cluster above my bed
where I was sleeping, naked and emptied,
to smear me with blood till the sun rose.

I was twenty, no, less─eighteen,
nineteen...and a century had already passed
since my birth, an entire lifetime

consumed in the pain of the idea
that I would never be able to give my love
except to my hand, or the grassy ditches,

or perhaps the earth of an unguarded grave...
Twenty years, and, with its human history, and its cycle
of poetry, a life had ended.

─Translated from the Italian by Norman MacAfee

(from Poesia in forma di rosa, 1964)

Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Leger Leger)

Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Léger Léger) [b. Guadelopue/France]
1887-1975

Born in Saint-Léger-les-Feuilles, Guadelopue, Saint-John Perse spent his adolescence in France and his training at the University of Bordeau, where he received his degree in law in 1910. His earliest poems are from that period.

In 1916, he entered the Foreign Service, and was sent to China, remaining there until 1921. Upon his return to France, he continued to rise in rank in the Service, eventually serving as Secretary General for Foreign Affairs. Throughout this period, he continued to write, without publishing. With the rise of the Nazi-run Vichy government, Saint-John Perse was dismissed from service, and several of his poetic manuscripts were confiscated by the German government. In Washington, D.C., where he took up residence, he continued writing. In 1960 he received the Nobel Prize for literature, and seven years later he returned to France.

His earliest poems, Éloges, were published in 1911 and revised in 1925. These works celebrate his childhood in the Antilles and events in West Indies history. The earliest of these poems, "Images à Crusoé," was written when he was just seventeen years of age. Anabase (1924, Anabasis, 1930) contain some of the few poems written during his diplomatic service period. These works contain the hallmark qualities of Saint-John Perse's writing: radical elippis, an almost biblical quality of language, and compressed use of language underlying a highly rhapsodic narrative.

His other major works include Exil (1942), Poème à l'étrangére (1943), Pluies (1944), Neiges (1945), Vents (1946), and Amers (1957).

BOOKS OF POETRY

Éloges (Paris, 1911; revised, 1925); Anabase (Paris, 1924; revised, 1948); Exil (with "Pluies" and "Neiges") in Quatre poèmes, 1941-1944 (Buenos Aires, 1944); Vents (Paris, 1946); Amers (Paris, 1957); Chronique (Marseilles, 1959; Paris, 1960); Oiseaux (Paris, 1962, 1963): Sécheresse (Paris, 1974); Nocturne (Paris, 1972).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Anabasis, trans. by T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938); Éloges and Other Poems, trans. by Louise Varèse (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1944); Selected Poems, edited by Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982).

Gunnar Ekelof

Gunnar Ekelöf [Sweden]
1907-1968

Born of a well to do Swedish family, Gunnar Ekelöf grew up feeling himself to be an outsider, in part because of his father's mental illness. As a young adult, he studied in London, Uppsala, and Paris, concentrating in music and Oriental culture. Upon returning from Paris, he published his first collection, Sent på jorden (Late on the Earth) in 1932, a work influenced by Parisian culture, most particularly Stravinsky's music. Today that work is considered the first truly modernist work of Swedish poetry, and is recognized internationally.

The following volumes continued were infused with Ekelöf's love of music, his own deep attraction to and speculation on death, and his interest. Non serviam of 1945 is one of the most significant of the works of these years, comparing the intellectual world with the metaphysical. And over the next decades, he continued to draw on these sources for poetry, Om hösten (In Fall) (1951), Strountes (Rubbish) (1955), and Opus incertum (Uncertain Work) (1959). He also wrote a long autobiographical poem En Mölna-elegi (1960).

In 1958, after having won most Scandinavian literary prizes, Ekelöf became a member of the Swedish Royal Academy.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Sent på jorden (Stockholm: Spekstrum, 1932); Dedikation (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1934); Sorgen och stjärnan (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1936); Köp den blindes sång (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1938); Färjesång (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1941); Non serviam (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1945); Om hösten (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1951); Strountes (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1955); Dikter 1932-1951 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1956); Opus incertum (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1959); En Mölna-elegi (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1960); En natt i Otocac (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1961); Sent på jorden, med Appendix 1962, och En natt vid horisonten (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1962); Diwan över Fursten av Emgión (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1965); Dikter (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1965); Sagan om Fatumeh (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1966); Vägvisare till underjorden (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1967); Lägga patience (1969); Urval: Dikter 1928-1968 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1968); Partitur (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1969); En sjävlbiografi (prose and poetry) (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1971); En röst (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1973); Dikter 1965-1968 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag: 1976); Variationer (Lund: Ellerströms, 1986).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Late Arrival on Earth, trans. by Robert Bly and Christina Paulston (London: Rapp & Carroll, 1967; Washington: D.C.: The Charioteer Press, 1968); Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf, trans. by Muriel Rukeyser and Leif Sjöberg (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967); Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf, trans. by W.H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); reprinted as Gunnar Ekelöf: Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971); A Mölna Elegy, trans. by Muriel Rukeseyser and Leif Sjöberg (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979; Greensboro, N.C.: Unicorn Press, 1984); Guide to the Underworld, trans. by Rika Lesser (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); Songs of Something Else, trans. by Leonard Nathan and James Larson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982); Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Martinson, Ekelöf, and Tranströmer. Selected Poetry, trans. by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).


Sonata Form Denatured Prose

crush the alphabet between your teeth yawn vowels, the fire is burning in hell vomit and spit now or never I and dizziness you or never dizziness now or never.
we will begin over
crush the alphabet macadam and your teeth yawn vowels, the sweat runs in hell I am dying in the convolutions of my brain vomit now or never dizziness I and you. i and he she it. we will begin over. i and he she and it. we will begin over. i and he she it. we will begin over. i and he she it. scream and cry: it goes fast what tremendous speed in the sky and hell in my convolutions like madness in the sky dizziness. scream and cry: he is falling he has fallen. it was fine it went fast what tremendous speed in the sky and hell in my convolutions vomit now or never dizziness i and you. i and he she it. we will begin over. i and he she it. we will begin over. i and he she it. we will begin over. i and he she it.
we will begin over.
crush the alphabet between your teeth yawn vowels the fire is burning in hell vomit and split now or never i and dizziness you or never dizziness now or never.

─Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly and Christina Paulston

(from Sent på jorden, 1932)

Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado [Spain]
1875-1939

One of the great Spanish poets of the 20th century, Machado—along with international figures such as Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén (PIP volumes 1 and 2), and Vicente Aleixandre (PIP volume 4)—is particularly revered in his homeland.

Born in 1875 in the Palacio de las Dueñas near Seville, Machado grew up in the lush Spanish landscape of Andalusia which would become a major subject of his poetry. His grandfather, Antonio Machado Núñez, was a doctor, science professor, and had been the governor of Seville. His father, a lawyer, was particularly interested in Spanish folk songs associated with the flamenco. His grandmother read to Machado and his siblings (which included Manuel, who also would grow to become a noted poet) ballads of Spanish history and legends.

In 1883 the family moved to Madrid, and Antonio was enrolled in the Instituto Libre, an institution noted for its freedom from the doctrine of church and state. As the two boys, Antonio and Manuel grew older, they began to pursue bohemian lives, involving themselves in various cultural endeavors. But in 1893, their father suddenly died, and two years later their grandfather. The family was suddenly near poverty, and the brothers were forced to work, working with Eduardo Benot on developing a dictionary of synonyms.

Both brothers traveled to Paris in the late 1890s and early 1900s to work as translators. The travel also helped to expand Antonio’s poetic interests, as he met the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (PIP volume 1), Oscar Wilde, Jean Moréas and others. He began writing poetry with a volume of folk-related work, and then, in 1903, published what would become one of his major volumes of poetry, Soldades. Soldades, galerías y otros poems followed in 1907. In this work Machado presented the short, intimate lyric that would be typical of writing. The themes were issues of memory and past time, relating to issues of Romanticism.

His friendship with Miguel de Unamuno led Machado to give up the semi-bohemian aspects of his life, and in 1906 finally secured a position in northern Spain as a French teacher. In Soria, the town where he taught, Machado made friends with local intellectuals and began courting his landlord’s daughter, Leonor Izquierdo, whom he married in 1909, when she was just sixteen.

In 1911 he received a fellowship for study in Paris. But in Paris, his wife, suffering from tuberculosis, began hemorrhaging. When she had partially recovered, they returned to Spain, where she died in 1912. Unable to emotional bear the memories of her death in Soria, Machado asked to be transferred to the Instituto in Baeza, near his native Andalusia.

The same year, he composed and published Campos de Castilla, which was highly successful, and brought him in contact with the poets who would later be described as the Generation of ’98, writers who transformed Spanish literature in the early 20th century. Indeed his book made him a major force in that group, and characterized many of the themes centering around the problems and goals of contemporary Spain.

Machado spent seven years in Baeza, years not altogether pleasant because of his loneliness and grief. But he did continue to develop his poetry, reading heavily in philosophy, and ultimately attending the college at the University of Madrid, graduating in 1918. In 1919 he grained a teaching position in Segovia, a town not dissimilar to Baeza, but which was closer to Madrid. And throughout the next decade he would travel between the two cities. With his brother, he adapted a play of Golden Age by Tirso de Molina and began to write other plays, the best of which, La Loa se va a los puertos was moderately successful. His poetic create also further demonstrated the his philosophical interests, particularly his 1924 Nuevas canciones (New Songs) and De un cancioner apóocrifo (From an Apocryphal Songbook) published in 1926.
In 1927 Machado was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy, but was never active as a member. In part, Machado had moved philosophically to a position in which he valued “otherness,” and at the same time had an relationship with a mysterious woman, Guiomar, expressed in an exaltation of love in his late poetry. In the early 1930s he also felt new hope for the political future of Spain, sharing the liberal values of his Madrid café associates. Conditions, however, soon began to disintegrate, and in the summer of 1936 the country was divided by civil war, with Germany and Italy joining the Franco led Nationalists, and Russia and other international idealists fighting for the Republican side. Sharing the Republican values, Machado was set at odds with his brother, who lived in the Nationalist stronghold of Burgos. Unable to remain in Madrid, he and his family moved to the Republican center of Valencia. There he wrote newspaper articles and corresponded with various political groups.

In 1939 Machado and his family were evacuated to Barcelona, where he continue, despite serious health problems, to written political essays and poetry in defense of the Republican cause. As the war moved toward Barcelona, Machado, sick with pneumonia and his elderly mother, attempted to travel with others to the French border. He could not finish his travels to Paris, and in late February he died, his mother dying three days after.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Soledades (Madrid: Alvarez, 1903); Soledades, galerías y otros poems (Madrid: Pueyo, 1907; revised edition: (Madrid: Calpe, 1919); Campos de Castilla (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1912); Páginas escogidas (Madrid: Calleja, 1917); Poesías completas (Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 1917; revised and expanded in 1928, 1933, 1936, 1965 and 1970); Nuevas canciones (Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1924); De un cancionero apócrifo (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1926); Juan de Marena. Sentencias, donaires, apuntes y recuerdos de un professor apócrifo [prose and poetry] (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1936);La tierra de Alvar González u Canciones del Alto Duerro (Barcelona: Nuestro Pueblo, 1938); Abel Martín. Cancionero de Juan de Mairena [prose and poetry] (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1943); Obra poética (Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1944); Poesías escogidas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947); Canciones (Madrid: Aguado, 1949); Los complementarios, y otras prosas póstumas [prose and poetry] (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1957)


ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

Eighty Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. by Willis Barnstone (New York: Américas, 1959); Castilian Ilexes, trans. by Charles Tomlinson and Henry Gifford (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. by Jean Craige (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Canciones (West Branch, Iowa: Toothpaste, 1980); The Dream Below the Sun: Selected Poems, trans. by Willis Barnstone (Trumansburg, New York: Crossing, 1981); Twenty Proverbs, trans. by Robert Bly and Don Olsen (Marshall, Minnesota: Ox Head, 1981); The Castilian Camp, trans. by J. C. R. Green (Portree, Isle of Skye, U.K.: Aquila/Phaethon, 1982); The Legend of Alvar González, trans. by Denis Doyle (Harrow, Middlesex, U.K.: North Light, 1982); Times Alone, trans. by Robert Bly (Port Townsend, Washington: Graywolf, 1983); Selected Poems and Prose, edited by Dennis Maloney, trans. by Robert Bly and others (Buffalo, New York: White Pine, 1983); There Is No Road, trans. by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney (Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, 2003); Border of a Dream: Selected Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

Jean Toomer [Nathan Eugene Toomer]

Jean Toomer [Nathan Eugene Toomer] [USA]
1894-1967

Nathan Eugene Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. in a family was of racially mixed blood. His grandfather on his mother’s side was Louisiana politician P. B. S. Pinchback, who grounded his Reconstruction career on an insistence that he was black. In any event, the young Toomer, growing up in an affluent suburb of Washington, was fair skinned, and identified with what he described as a “fusion” of the racial intermingling. Toomer’s father left his mother in 1895, and in 1905 he and his mother moved to New Rochelle and Brooklyn, New York, settling with her white second husband. Upon her death in 1909, Toomer returned to his maternal grandparents, who now lived in a black neighborhood of the city. He attended a black high school.

In 1914 he began at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, determining to major in agriculture. But psychologically, he was not fit for the university, and left after one year, eventually enrolling in other universities but never obtaining a degree. In 1919, at City College of New York, he settled upon being a writer, changing his first name to Jean. His major influences during those years were the bohemian figures of Greenwich Village, particularly the novelist and critic Waldo Frank.

Over the next two years he divided his time between Washington and New York, reading a wide range of literature and writing stories, poems, review, essays and other work. This would be a time of heady experimentation, and most of his works from this period have been characterized by at least one of his anthologizers as “The Aesthetic Period” of his career. He experimented with poems that imitated Imagist work, sound poems, and, in at least one instance—in “Banking Coal”—explored imagery and a voice that came close to that of Robert Frost.

In mid-1921 Toomer accepted an offer to become principal of a black school in Sparta, Georgia. During that period Toomer came to understand his racial roots and came to recognize himself in the folk-songs and accents of rural black America. The result of this, was a new sensibility, expressed in his 1923 in his work Cane, almost a document of his lyrical experience in the South. Freely mixing poetic prose, narrative, and poems broken into lines, Cane reminds one, in some senses, of the experiment, Spring and All, published the same year by William Carlos Williams. But in the work’s free expression of African American forms such as spirituals and work songs, it became one of the most influential documents for the flowering of black writers and artists of the 1920s-1930s that would come to be described as the Harlem Renaissance.

After this period, however, Toomer did not continue with the expression of black culture, but came under the influence of the Russian founder of “Unitism,” Georgei Gurdjieff, who combined elements from philosophy, psychology, dance and eastern religious ideas. In 1924 Toomer began teaching Gurdjieff’s methods in New York and, later, in Chicago; his poetry also became infused with Gurdjieff’s ideas, continuing in that mode even after his break with the guru in 1934.

Toomer had married Margery Latimer in 1931, but after her death in childbirth, he remarried, settling into a domestic life on a farm in Pennsylvania. He continued writing until his death in 1967.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923); The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, ed. by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988)

Jayanta Mahapatra

Jayanta Mahapatra [India]
1928

Jayanta Mahapatra was born in Cuttack, India, and has spent most of his life in Orissa, where he lives. Raised among poor people, Mahapatra's life often portrays everyday events in contemporary India, and his work champions those who live in a world of hunger, greif, and injustice.

He attended Ravenshaw College and the Science College at Patna before coming a sub-editor at the Eastern Times. In later years he lectured on physics and other scientific subjects throughout India, and as his poetry became more known, was invited to be a visiting writer at the then-famed University of Iowa International Writer's Program. For his books of poetry─ which include A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start (1980), Relationship (1980), Dispossessed Nests (1986), and Selected Poems (1987)─he has won several awards: the Bisuva Milana Award for Poetry and the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Prize among them. He has also written books of poetry and juvenile works, and translated.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (Dialogue Publication, 1971); Svaymvara and Other Poems (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1971); A Rain of Rites (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976); Father's Hours (Calcutta: United Writers, 1976); Waiting (New Delhi: Samhaleen Prakashan, 1979); The False Start (Bombay: Clearing House, 1980); Relationship (New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1983); Dispossessed Nests (Nirala Publications, 1986); Selected Poems (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Burden of Waves and Fruit (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988); Temple (Dungaroo Press, 1989)

Giulia Nicolai

Giulia Nicolai [Italy]
1934

Born in Milan in 1934, Giulia Nicolai’s mother was an American and her father an Italian, and, accordingly, she grew up learning to speak both languages. Later she learned German and French.

She began her professional career as a photographer, with works in various magazines such as Life, Paris Match, and Der Spiegel. In 1966 she published her first novel, Il grande angolo (1966) and in 1969 her first book of poetry. Associated with the neo-avanat-garde Gruppo 63, she founded, with poet Adriano Spatola, the avant-garde journal Tam Tam.

Among her many books of poetry are Humpty Dumpty (1969), Greenwich (1971), Poema & Oggetto (1974), Russky Salad Ballads & Webster Poems (1977), Harry’s Bar e alter poesie 1969-1980 (1981), and Frisbees (1994). Nicolai has also been a notable translator Beatrix Potter, Gertrude Stein, and Dylan Thomas.

Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Her work, influenced by her Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism, often bridges her literary and spiritual experiences.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Humpty Dumpty (Turin: Geiger, 1969); Greenwich (Turin: Geiger, 1971); Poema & Oggetto (1974); Substitution (Los Angeles: Red Hill Press, 1975); Facsimile (Modena: Tau/ma, 1976); Russky Salad Ballads & Webster Poems (Turin: Geiger, 1977); Harry’s Bar e alter poesie 1969-1980 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981); Singsong for New Year’s Adam & Eve (Mulino di Bazzano: Tam Tam, 1982); Lettera aperta (Udine: Campanotto, 1983); Frisbees in facoltà (Bergamo: Edizioni El bagatt, 1984); Frisbees (poesie de lanciare) (Udine: Campanotto, 1994)


BOOKS IN ENGLISH

Foresta ultra Naturam, trans. by Paul Vangelisti (San Francisco: Red Hill Press, 1989).


Utah
To Gianfranco Baruchello

Strawberry strawberry
holden monroe
bountiful farmington
Minnie plateau.
Emory upton
on devils slide
washington terrace
oh enterprise!
Riverton Vernon
elmo woodsie
strawberry strawberry
lofgreen lakesize

(from Greenwich, 1971)


Rising Star

Home sweet home sugar land
richland
dripping springs of sweet water
golden acres where sudan
glen rose a sunray
cross plain and blooming grove
Laredo!
May the crystal sterling silver rising star
fall on dallasterxas.


(from Greenwich, 1971)



Positive & Negative

Anything may happen
have a meaning or not have one.

It does not propose truth
it keeps the meaning open
the sense of things comes by speaking.

The measure of a page
a communication of forms
the hypothesis of a reality in motion:
a vertigo of infinite
diverse inversion.

And that which is opposed
may be always overturned
to its opposite.

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti and the author


(from Subtitution, 1973)



The Subject Is the Language

An idea of vengeance: the retaliation
or revenge of the word which has been thought
(make the gesture of inventing language
perform the act by which you appropriate language).

Though dependent or superimposed
the individual and the word exist as separate objects:
not a mutual agreement of words and things
but the pleasure of interfering.

Things exist to be said
and language narrates. It outrages in turn
a language already violated by others
to possess language is a way of being.

The subject is therefore the language
with which to commit a capital offense.

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti and the author


(from Subtitution, 1973)





The Lockheed Ballad

The electronic brain’s “subconscious” that had
furnished Lockheed’s executives with code names
for those words, verbs, initials etc. which they
under no circumstances wanted to be discovered
writing or uttering, had, as it should, a weakness
for the great characters of tragic drama, particularly
Shakespearian. In Lockheed’s little black book
(supplement to Panorama, June 15, 1976) we can
in fact discover: Othello, Desdemona, Caesar,
Hamlet, Portia, and many others.
For his part time, Shakespeare instead
employed Rumour* (meaning, in English, chatter,
talk, spreading stories, not holding one’s tongue,
gossip-mongering) who, in Henry IV,
plays the role of the announcer (here we quote
the opening lines of the prologue to part II):


INDUCTION

Enter Rumour, painted full of tongues
Rum. Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?

…
(I think the reader might consult the
following as worth rereading in this
light). From a structural perspective, further
examining the coded terms in the little black book,
we realize they may be subdivided into three other
broad categories: names taken from Flora and Fauna
(antelope, lilac, lion, iris etc.) names with
heroic-epic connotations, (argonaut, cosmos,
gladiator etc.) and words typically anglo-saxon,
monsosyllabic and onomatopoeic which sometimes
correspond to the written sounds of American comics
such as: sob (which in English means to cry, to make
a weeping sound), jab (to knife), tap (to knock on
the door), etc.
Given the richness of the material present in
Lockheed’s little black book, it’s clear
We might obtain an infinite number of poetic

*Rumor: the name of an Italian Prime Minister involved in the Lockheed scandal


Or theatrical texts (epic, tragic, comic, etc.)
And that these texts, with a simultaneous translation
Of the cryptic word into its actual meaning
(or vice versa) offer innumerable possibilities
or wordplay in two or more voices as in a sort
of naval battle of words. But to classify and
elaborate the terms in the little black book
in all their possible combinations
another electronic brain is clearly
indispensable. The text I’ve chosen to write
is composed exclusively of words taken
(in their coded meaning) from the little black book
it uses the names of Shakespearian characters
here present and may be read as a ballad or
an epilogue to a hybrid of tragedies
and comedies.

Othello’s feline ire fobs his granite
Fingers; his vim hath sealed his willow
Goddess’ lips. The flametree’s firethorn
Doth spear the lady’s reb; Desdemona
The jonquil, the ladybird , the opal oriole
Now cold and dab like flotsam upon
The tidal ebb. Woe to Hamlet, the moonbeam
Upon his silver sword, the bleak phantom’s vox,
The prophet’s raven cloak, the hemlock
And the hammer hard. An ode to Juliet
To Portia, to the actors in the barnyard.

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti



(from Foresta ultra Naturam, 1989)



from Frisbees

for Bob McB,
messenger of the gods of Cazadero Valley

Once
Opening the refrigerator
I too happened to say
“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

*

One doesn’t play Frisbee with words alone.
It’s good to do it also with arms and legs.

*

“Beati I poveri di spirto”
ought to come out in English:
“Blessed are the half-wits.”
Instead it’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
(Yet another reason for me to drink a lot.)

*

Presidents of the United States
(even since television has been television)
when they speak to the American people,
always fix on a spot above the camera lens.
(See: horizon. See: infinite).
But do they have their feet on the ground?

*
Careful that the Frisbees
May become nauseating.
The order in which they follow each other is important.
Certainly there may be something
Still elusive in all this
Be it for you and for me!
I am becoming a socially committed poetess.
Am I becoming a socially committed poetess?

*

To be able to establish
the morning after,
serenely,
in the light of day
that even my own presumption
and stupidity
are bottomless
are limitless…
…
is a most lovely thing.

*

I suggest listening to Bach
For arthritics and rheumatics.
Unlike the cold,
And humidity
—and like ultrasounds—
it heals
as it enters your bones.
Holy Bach heals.
Holy Bach makes whole. By Joe!

*

(Relax
so as to hear the vibrations
even with the bones.)

*

Let’s think of the brain
as a shriveled prune.
Immerse it in Bach.
It swells and pulses
like a sponge.

*

Bach is beautiful to have in the blood.
The organist and clavichordist
Who plays Johann Sebastian
is called Janos Sebestyen.
What else could he do?

*

I gave myself
a facial
with Bach’s Orchestra
Toccato (in E major bmw 566).

*

The way I walk
has always made me wear down
the outside edge of the
heels of my shoes.
Playing Frisbee
I wish to begin wearing down a little
the inside too.
To even things out.
I wish also the Frisbees
Might help
Make my mind work
In a new way.
Do I ask too much?
For this purpose
it might help
to start calling them
Frisbeezen or Zen-Frisbees.

*

So what’s this?
A Frisbee of head or legs?

*

And why didn’t I write
A Frisbee of legs or head?

*

(The first steps
are always a little problematic.)
What about a Porno-frisbee?
Yeah, a dirty-minded one.

*

In any case
and here we’re on easy ground
the Frisbeezen
sound more German
than Zen-Frisbees
which in turn
sound more California
than Japanese.
(We’re still along way from satori.)


*

I wouldn’t want the Frisbees
To be my last will.
Certainly, they have something
Of the exquisite corpse about them.

*

I called my father affectionately “Rhinoceros,”
“old yellow rhinoceros.”
Years after his death
I dreamt of a Rhinoceros
Sniffing with his horn
At a poppy in a field.
And he got furious,
he got beastly
and pissed of
because with his horn (plugged up)
he couldn’t smell the perfume.
(I knew, in the dream,
that poppies have no smell
but I didn’t dare go near the Rhinoceros
to tell him.)
The rhinoceros in the distance
fussed and stamped
Then in anger with contempt,
he pissed on the poppy.
He let go on to p of it a long mighty piss.
poppy
pop pee
Ciao Sigmund!

*


Roman Polanski.
And now we have a Roman Polanski Pope.
It was Paul Vangelisti
of Los Angeles
who made me understand
that Poles and Italians resemble each other.
Petrus, where are you?
I missed you at the Pasticceria.
They make an excellent Paradise cake,
Ça va sans dire.

*

The Goethe-Frisbee.
There was on the window-sill
A can of Oranjeboom beer.
Black can I notice
looking out the window
when the pavement too
is black with rain.
I say: “How much alike
and how beautiful they are
the black of the can
and the black of the pavement.”
Then I notice the little orange tree
and register
the Dutch House of Orange.
But then
(and here I’m not sure if it’s the fault
of Marguerite Yourcenar
whom I’m reading
and who in Les yeux ouverts
speaks of Goethe),
suddenly this demented line
springs to mind:
“Kennst du das Land wo die Oranjeboom.”

*

I tell the cashier at the Scimmie
I want to pay for two reds.
“Wine?” he asks me.
(He must be very politicized).
Soon after at the bara
I see Pavese’s double
And Sanguineti’s double.
Could these be then
The cashier’s two reds?

*

And I
How many hours must I stay at the bar
how many reds must I drink
before I see
my own double?

*

(How about that!
Sex!
What liberties it takes!
What transformations!)

*

To explain to her woman friends
American and English
How little she knew Italian,
My mother would always say:
“I give tu to strangers
and lei my husband.”


PERMISSIONS


“Utah” and “Rising Star”
Reprinted from Foresta ultra naturam (Villa, Niccolai and Caruso), trans. by Paul Vangelisti (San Francisco: Invisible City 6, 1989). ©1989 by Red Hill Press. Reprinted by permission of Paul Vangelisti.

“Positive & Negative” and “The Subject Is the Language”
Reprinted from Substitution, trans. by Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Red Hill Press, 1975). Translation Copyright ©19975 by Paul Vangelisti. Reprinted by permission of Paul Vangelisti

“The Lockheed Ballad” and “from Frisbees”
Reprinted from Luigi Ballerini, Beppe Cavaatorta, Elena Coda, and Paul Vangelisti, eds. The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1999). ©1999 by Luigi Ballerini and Paul Vangelisti. Reprinted by permission of Sun & Moon Press.

Alexander Vvedensky

Alexander Vvedensky [Russia/USSR]
1904-1942

Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, Alexander Vvedensky grew with a mother who was a gynecologist and a father who was an economist. From 1917 to 1921 he attended high school, meeting Leonid Lipavsky and Iakov Drusky, who would become the major philosophers in his circle. From his teacher, L. V. Georg, the young boy learned of the latest developments in Russian poetry, including Futurism and other experimental poetries. He started at the university after high school, but soon dropped out.

His major poetic education took place at GNKhUK, the State Institute of Artistic Culture, headed by Kazimir Malevich, with researches into zaum (sound) poetry by Igor Terentiev, for whom Vvedensky worked. In 1925 he and his high school friend, Iakov Druskin, became friends with the aspiring poet Danill Kharms, who was a student of the Futurist sound poet Alexander Tufanov, himself experimenting with theories of zaum thorough narrative time. For the next year and a half, Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky and Kharms sought to establish an organization that would unite all avant-garde and left-wing artist of Leningrad. The first of their radical projects, the theater company Radix, “experimenting in the area of non-emotional and plotless art and aiming to create a pure theater not subject to literature,” fell apart while rehearsing the Kharms and Vvedensky montage My Momma’s Got Clocks All Over. They also made attempts to join forces with Malevich, but after political denunciations in the press forced the closure of GINKhUK, Malevich left for Warsaw. In late 1927, they were offered a base at the Leningrad Press Club on the condition that they assume a new name, since the word “left-wing” sounded to authorities to be to close to Trotsky’s views. Thus was born OBERIU, a neologism standing for the Union of Real Art.

The same year, children’s writer and editor Nikolai Oleinikov invited OBERIU members to write for the State Publishing House for Children (DETGIZ). Vvendensky would later confess that he was attracted to children’s literature because it was non-political, allowing him to experiment with nonsense. Neither he nor Kharms achieved greatness as writers for children, but it allowed them to work on their more serious writing.

OBERIU was unable to publish most of their writings, but the organization to provide raucous performances in Leningrad clubs and educational institutions. Transpiring under nonsensical slogans hung for the occasion, the performances united poetry, theater, film, magic tricks, juggling, and general clowning around; they culminated in debates that often turned into shouting matches. The State’s tightening control over the arts, threatened these performances, however, and audiences grew increasingly hostile to their work. After an April 30th reading at Leningrad State University, OBERIU was forced to dissolve because of newspaper accusations of counterrevolutionary activity. The press also voiced accusations against their children’s writing. Vvedensky and Kharms were detained in December of 1931 along with other members of OBERIU. Vvedensky, suffering hard imprisonment, cracked under interrogation, naming others and admitting his guilt. He was sentenced to three years of internal exile, forced to remain away from major population centers. By 1933, however, both his term and Kharms’s was reduced, and they returned to Leningrad, allowed to write children’s books but not to compose poetry. The avant-garde movement was over, and they wrote privately only for their friends.

In 1936, Vvedensky met the woman who would become his third wife, and he moved with her to Kharkov, where he spent much of the day gambling and writing frenetically at night. In 1937, his wife gave birth to a son. A month later, Nikolai Oleinikov was shot, charged with being a Trotsyite, and Nikolai Zabolotsky was seized on a terrorism charge. Soon after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Vvedensky himself was arrested and shipped via a prison train from Kharkov. He died of dystentery while being transported. Kharms, arrested a month earlier, died in a prison asylum in February 2nd the following year.

Most of Vvedensky’s work has been lost—both his poems and his novel, Murderers, You Morons. Of the pieces that survived, the majority were saved by Iakov Druskin, who was also responsible for saving much of Kharm’s writings. In 1980, Druskin’s student, Mikhail Meilakh, published Vvedensky’s collected writings in the United States in the Russian-language publishing house Ardis. Vvedensky’s work was published in his homeland during perestroika.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1980); Polnoe sobranie proizvedenii: v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Gileia, 1993).

in Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary-Discovery. Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, edited and trans. by George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1974); An Invitation for Me to Think: Poems (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009).


Snow Lies

snow lies
earth flies
lights flip
in pigments night has come
on a rug of stars it lies
is it night or a demon?
like an inane lever
sleeps the insane river
it is now aware
of the moon everywhere
animals gnash their canines
in black gold cages
animals bang their heads
animals are the ospreys of saints
the world flies around the universe
in the vicinity of stars
dashes deathless like a swallow
seeks a home a nest
there’s no nest a hole
the universe is alone
maybe rarely in flight
time will pass as poor as night
or a daughter in a bed
will grow sleeping and then dead
then a crowd of relations
will rush in and cry alas
in steel houses
will howl loudly
she’s gone and buried
hopped to paradise big-bellied
God God have pity
good God on the precipice
but God said Go play
and she entered paradise
there spun any which way
numbers houses and seas
the inessential exists
in vain, they perceived
there God languished behind bars
with no eyes no legs no arms
so that maiden in tears
sees all this in the heavens
sees various eagles
appear out of night
and fly inane
and flash insane
this is so depressing
the dead maiden will say
serenely surprised
God will say
what’s depressing what’s
depressing, God, life
what are you talking about
what O noon do you know
you press pleasure and Paris
to your breast like two pears
you swell like music
you’re swell like a statue
then the wood howled
in final despair
it spies through the tares
a meandering ribbon
little ribbon a crate
curvy Lena of fate
Mercury was in the air
spinning like a top
and the bear
sunned his coat
people also walked around
bearing fish on a platter
bearing on their hands
ten fingers on a ladder
while all this went on
that maiden rested
rose from the dead and forgot
yawned and said
you guys, I had a dream
what can it mean
dreams are worse than macaroni
they make crows double over
I was not at all dying
I was gaping and lying
undulating and crying
I was so terrifying
a fit of lethargy
was had by me among the effigies
let’s enjoy ourselves really
let’s gallop to the cinema
and sped off like an ass
to satisfy her innermost
lights glint in the heaven
is it night or a demon


January 1930

—Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky



The Meaning of the Sea

to make everything clear
live backwards
take walks in the woods
tearing hair
when you recognize fire
in a lamp a stove
say wherefore you yearn
fire ruler of the candle
what do you mean or not
where’s the cabinet the pot
demons spiral like flies
over a piece of cake
these spirits displayed
legs arms and horns
juicy breasts war
lamps contort in sleep
babes in silence blow the trumpet
women cry on a pine-tree
the universal God stands
in the cemetery of the skies
the ideal horse walks
finally the forest comes
we look on in fear
we think it’s fog
the forest growls and waves its arms
it feels discomfort boredom
it weakly whispers I’m a phantom
maybe later I’ll be
fields stand near a hillock
holding fear on a platter
people montenegrins beasts
joyfully feast
impetuous the music plays
finns have fun
shepherds shepherdesses bark
barks are rowed across tables
here and there in the barks
mark the minutes’ haloes
we are in the presence of fun
I said this right away
either the birth of a canyon
or the nuptials of cliffs
we will witness this feast
from this bench this trumpet
as the tambourines clatter
and flutters, spinning like the earth
skies will come and a battle
or we will come to be ourselves
goblets moved among mustaches
in the goblets flowers rose
and our thoughts were soaring
among curled plants
our thoughts were soaring
among curled plants
our gods our aunts
our souls our breath
our goblets in them death
but we said, and yet
this rain is meaningless
we beg, pass the sign
the sign plays on water
the wise hills throw
into the stream all those who feasted
glasses flourish in the water
water homeland of the skies
after thinking we like corpses
showed to heaven our arses
sea time sleep are one
we will mutter sinking down
we packed our instruments
souls powders feet
stationed our monuments
lighted our pots
on the floor of the deep
we the host of drowned men
in debate with the number fifteen
will shadow-box and burn up
and yet years passed
fog passed and nonsense
some of us sank on the floor
like the board of a ship
another languishes
gnashes his wisdom teeth
another on dull seaweed
hung the laundry of his muscle
and blinks like the moon
when the wave swings
another said my foot
is the same as the floor
in sum all are discontented
left the water in a huff
the waves hummed in back
starting to work
ships hopped around
horses galloped in the fields
shots were evident and tears
sleep and death in the clouds
all the drowned men came out
scratched themselves before the sunset
and rode off on a carriage beam
some were rich some not
I said I see right away
the end will come anyway
a big vase is brought this way
with a flower and a cymbal
here’s a vase that’s clever
here’s a candle snow
salt and mousetrap
for fun and pleasure
hello universal god
here I stand a bit sullied
glory be to heavens washed away
my oar memory and will

1930

—Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky


An Invitation for Me To Think


Let us think on a clear day
sitting down on stump and stone.
Us around flowers grew,
stars, people, homes.
From the mountains tall and steep,
water fell at breakneck speed.
We were sitting at the moment,
we kept our eyes on them.
Us around the day shines bright,
underneath us stump and stone.
Us around the birds fluttered,
the blue maidens puttered.
But where oh where us all around
is thunder’s now absent sound.
We perceive the river partially,
we’ll tell the stone contrarily:
Night, where are you in your absence
at this hour, on this day?
Art, what is it that you feel or sense,
being there without us?
Government, where do you stay?
Foxes and bugs are in the woods,
concepts in the sky above—
Come closer God and ask the fox:
so, fox, is it far from dawn to dusk?
will the stream run a long distance
from the word understood to the word flower?
The fox will reply to God:
it’s all a disappearing road.
You or he or I, we’ve gone but a hair,
we hadn’t even time to see that minute,
and look God, fish and sky, that part has vanished
forever, it would seem, from our planet.
We said: yes, it’s apparent,
we can’t see the hour ago.
We thought—we’re
very lonely.
In a moment our
eye covers a little only.
And our hearing, down and out,
senses only one sound.
And our soul
knows but a sad snippet of science’s whole.
We said: yes, it’s obvious,
it’s all very upsetting to us.
And that’s when we flew.
And I flew like a cuckoo
imagining my lightness.
A passerby thought: He’s coo-coo,
he’s made in a screech-owl’s likeness.
Passerby, forget your stupid gloom,
look, all around putter maidens blue,
like angels, dogs run smartly round,
why is it all boring and dark for you.
We’re tickled by what is unknown,
the inexplicable’s our friend,
we see the forest walking backward,
yesterday stands all around today.
The star changes in volume,
the world grows old, the moose grows old.
We once happened to be
in the saltwater body of the seas,
where the waves let out a squeak,
we monitored the proud fish:
the fish floated like oil
on the surface of the water,
we understood, life was burning out everywhere
from the fish to God and the star.
And the feeling of calm
caressed everybody with its arm.
But noticing music’s body
you did not burst into tears.
The passerby addresses us:
Hasn’t grief taken hold of you completely?
Yes, music’s magic beacon
burned out, evoking pity.
The ruling night was just beginning,
we cried a century.

1931-1934

—Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich



PERMISSIONS

“Snow Lies,” “The Meaning of the Sea,” and “An Invitation for Me to Think”
forthcoming from An Invitation for Me to Think, trans. by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009). English language translation ©2005 by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.

Edvard Kocbek

Edvard Kocbek [Austria-Hungary/
Yugoslavia/now Slovenia]
1904-1981

Born the son of a church organist in 1904, Edvard Kocbek grew up in the section of present-day Slovenia that was then Austria-Hungary. He studied classics and foreign languages in high school, but by the time he had finished his studies Slovenia had lost much of its independence and had become part of the new country of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. He entered a Catholic seminary in Maribor with the intention of becoming a priest. After two years, however, he left in, protesting the rigid rules of the community.

In Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, Kocbek studied Romance languages and literature at the university and edited the Catholic magazine, Cross, while also contributing to the Catholic Socialist Fire. Writing poetry, he began find a space between the provincialism of much of Slovene literature at the time and the avant-gardism of poet Srečko Kosovel.


Two trips of western Europe to Berlin and France, where he discovered German expressionism and French surrealism, highly influenced his writing, and upon his return to Slovenia, he began writing a cycle of “Autumn Poems,” which, with other such poetic cycles, would make up his first published book, Zemlija (Earth, 1934).


By the mid-1930s, as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes changed its name to Yugoslavia and became a monarchist dictatorship, Kocbek began speaking out against the Slovene support of Franco, as he moved closer to socialism. By the beginning of World War II the poet called for a new political order: [The intellectual] must opt for a new order as soon as possible, without supporting any particular ideological group in its entirety.” Throughout the war Kocbek was active in anti-Fascist groups, and he had attained the rank of general, serving, briefly, as a minister in Belgrade by the end of the war. Returning to Slovenia he became Vice President of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Slovenia.


Throughout World War II, Kocbek had continued to write, but he was not eager to publish. The rise of Yugoslavian Communism, coinciding with the new wave of Stalinism in Russia, meant that there was a high level of censorship throughout this period; and it was only when Tito broke with the Comintern in 1948 that Kocbek ventured to publish excerpts from his war time diary, Comradeship. But his next book, the collection of stories Fear and Courage, resulted his public disgrace and his being outcast as an official. For the next ten years he became a nonperson, his watched, his phone tapped, and quarantined to his neighborhood. He earned a living only through translation. Only in 1963 was he allowed to publish a new collection of poetry, Groza (Dread). In 1967 he published a second volume of war-time diaries, Document, and, in 1969 another volume of poetry, Poročilo (Report). His collected poems, Zbrane pesmi, appeared in 1971, containing three new volumes of work, Pentagram, Embers, and Bride in Black.

Late in his life, Kocbek received the acclaim that had been previously denied him, and he was welcomed to literary circles in Slovenia and traveled to several countries, including England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy, becoming a particularly close friend with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll. Upon his death in 1981, he was granted a state funeral.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Zemlja (Ljubljana, 1934); Groza (Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 1963); Poročilo (Maribor: Zalozba Obzorja, 1969); Zbrane pesmi (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zalozba, 1977).

POETRY IN ENGLISH

At the Door of Evening, trans. by Tom Lozar (Ljubljana: Aleph, 1990); Edvard Kocbek, trans. by Michael Biggins (Ljubljana: Slovene Writers’ Association, 1995); Embers in the House of Night, trans. by Sonja Kravanja (Sante Fe: Lumen Books, 1999); Nothing Is Lost, trans. by Michael Scammel and Veno Taufer (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004).





The Lippizaners

A newspaper reports:
the Lippizaners collaborated
on a historical film.
A radio explains:
a millionaire had bought the Lippizaners,
the noble animals were quiet
throughout the journey over the Atlantic.
And a text book teaches:
The Lippizaners are graceful riding horses,
Their origin is in the Karst, they are of supple hoof,
conceited trot, intelligent nature,
and obstinate fidelity.

But I have to add, my son,
that it isn’t possible to fit these
restless animals into any set pattern:
it is good, when the day shines,
the Lippizaners are black foals.
And it is good, when the night reigns,
the Lippizaners are white mares,
but the best is,
when the day comes out of the night,
then the Lippizaners are the white and black buffoons,
the court fools of its Majesty,
Slovenian history.

Others have worshipped holy cows and dragons,
thousand-year-old turtles and winged lions,
unicorns, double-headed eagles and phoenixes,
but we’ve chosen the most beautiful animal,
which proved to be excellent on battlefields, in circuses,
harnessed to princesses and the Golden Monstrance,
therefore the emperors of Vienna spoke
French with skillful diplomats,
Italian with charming actresses,
Spanish with the infinite God,
and German with uneducated servants:
but with the horses they talked Slovene.

Remember, my child, how mysteriously
nature and history are bound together,
and how different are the driving forces of the spirit
of each of the world’s peoples.
You know well that ours is the land of contests and races.
You, thus, understand why the white horses
from Noah’s ark found a refuge on our pure ground,
why they became our holy animal,
why they entered into the legend of history,
and why they bring the life pulse to our future.
They incessantly search for our promised land
and are becoming our spirit’s passionate saddle.

I endlessly sit on a black and white horse,
my beloved son,
like a Bedouin chief
I blend with my animal,
I’ve been traveling on it all my life,
I sleep on it, and I dream on it,
and I’ll die on it.
I learned all our prophesies
on the mysterious animal,
and this poem, too, I experienced
on its trembling back.

Nothing is darker than
clear speech,
and nothing more true than a poem
the intellect cannot seize,
heroes limp in the bright sun,
and sages stammer in the dark,
the buffoons, though, are changing into poets,
the winged Pegasi run faster and faster
above the caves of our old earth
jumping and pounding—
the impatient Slovenian animals
are still trying to awaken the legendary King Matjaz.

Those who don’t know how to ride a horse,
should learn quickly
how to tame the fiery animal,
how to ride freely in a light saddle,
how to catch the harmony of the trot,
and above all to persist in the premonition,
for our horses came galloping from far away,
and they still have far to go:
motors tend to break down,
elephants each too much,
our road is a long one,
and it is too far to walk.

—Translated from the Slovene by Sonja Kravanja

(from Poročilo, 1969)





PERMISSIONS





“The Lippizaners” and “Who Am I?”
Reprinted from Embers in the House of Night, trans. by Sonja Kravanja (Santa Fe: Lumen Books, 1999). Copyright ©1997 by Sonja Kravanja. Reprinted by permission of Lumen Books.

Wallace Stevens

The Wallace Stevens House, Hartford, Ct.

Wallace Stevens [USA]
1879-1955

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Wallace Stevens was the second of five children of a lawyer father and a mother who had been a former schoolteacher. Stevens’ upbringing in this middle-class, Presbyterian, bible-reading family was quite conventional. He played football, was educated in the classics, and graduated in 1897, the same year as his brother.

Stevens attended Harvard University as a special student, allowing him a reduced tuition but no degree. While there he began writing fiction and poems for the local campus magazine, and in following years he was elected president of the Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine. While at Harvard, Stevens also encountered the noted philosopher-poet George Santayana, with whom he met several times and with whom he shared some of his poetry.

Leaving Harvard in 1900, Stevens was intent to become a writer. In New York he worked briefly for the New York Tribune and then as an editor at World’s Work. His father, however, strongly disapproved of his literary aspirations, and under his pressure, Stevens entered law school in New York in 1901, from which he graduated two years later. For the next thirteen years Stevens continued living in Manhattan, working in a legal capacity and regularly attending literary salons and readings that included figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp and the composer Edgard Varèse. His career seemed to go adrift, as he moved from one law firm to another and worked at four different insurance companies. However, he continued to write poetry, composing many of the works that would make up his 1923 volume, Harmonium.

In 1909, after a long courtship, he married Elsie Viola Kachel Moll, but the relationship was tempestuous at best. In later years, they lived separate lives in their Hartford, Connecticut home.

In 1916, Stevens found himself unemployed and was forced to leave New York to take a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company in Hartford. During these years, Stevens worked his way up in the company, gaining substantial financial success, but his interchange with contemporary authors shifted as he became more isolated and reclusive.
Harmonium was not a financial success, but contained some of this most outstanding poems of any first publication by a poet. Among the works in this volume were the noted poems “The Snow Man,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

He did not publish his second volume, Ideas of Order, until twelve years later, in 1935. Over the remaining years of his life, Stevens published essays and poetry at regular intervals, and late in his life, won several prizes, including the Bollingen Prize in 1950, National Book Awards in 1951 and 1955, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. The same year as the Pulitzer, Stevens was diagnosed in incurable stomach cancer, and died August 2nd in Hartford.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Harmonium (New York: Knopf, 1923; revised and enlarged, 1931); Ideas of Order (New York: Alcestis Press, 1935; enlarged edition, New York: Knopf, 1936); Owl’s Clover (New York: Alcestis Press, 1936); The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1937); Parts of a World (New York: Knopf, 1942); Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Cummington, Massachusetts: Cummington Press, 1942); Esthétique du Mal (Cummington, Massachusetts: Cummington Press, 1945); Transport to Summer (New York: Knopf, 1947); Three Academic Pieces: The Realm of Resemblance, Someone Puts a Pineapple Together, Of Idea Time and Choice (Cummington, Massachusetts: Cumming Press, 1947); A Primitive Like an Orb (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1948); The Auroras of Autumn (New York: Knopf, 1950); Selected Poems (London: Fortune Press, 1952); Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1953); Mattino Domenicale [in English and Italian, translations by Renato Poggioli (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1954); Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (New York: Knopf, 1954); The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954; London: Faber & Faber, 1955); Opus Posthumous, edited by Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1954; London: Faber & Faber, 1959); Poems of Wallace Stevens, edited by Samuel French Morse (New York: Vintage, 1959); The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1971).

Claude McKay

Claude McKay [USA]
1889-1948

Claude McKay was born in 1889 in the rural village of Nairne Castle, Jamaica when it was still a British Crown colony. The youngest of eleven children, he was the beneficiary of his father’s successful rise from a day laborer to a commercial farmer. His brother U. Theo, a noted schoolteacher who favored Fabian socialism and was a supporter of Aldous Huxley, and Walter Jekyll, An English-born scholar who compiled a collection of Jamaican folklore, saw to it that the young Claude received a free and liberal education. As a young man, McKay read a wide variety of literary figures from Villon, Baudelaire, Pope and Bryon to the Elizabethan lyricists, Goethe, Heine and Schopenhauer. Jekyll particularly encouraged his young student’s writing, and served as audience to his poetry. Through Jekyll’s support, a newspaper in Kingston declared McKay a Jamaican “genius,” and published several of McKay’s Creole-based poems. At the same time, McKay began to work as a constable outside Kingston, but feeling uncomfortable with the position, he quit the police force and returned to Clarendon in 1911, leaving, a year later along with numerous other black islanders to the United States.

McKay stayed for brief periods in Alabama (where he attended the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas before finally settling in Manhattan in Harlem. After his lunchroom business failed along with his marriage, he worked as a head waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car; in the meantime he continued his associations with the literary communities of both Harlem and Greenwich Village, exploring both sexual and political liberation, discovering his bisexuality at the same time he explored radical political involvement. By 1917, he had begun to be published in leftist journals such as Seven Arts and the Liberator, edited by Max Eastman, who became an ally and financial backer of McKay. In 1919 he sailed for England and the Continent for two years, returning to Harlem as an editor of the Liberator. In 1922 he published his only American poetry collection, Harlem Shadows.

A trip to Moscow in 1923 to observe the Bolsehvik revolution gained him a reputation as a Communist sympathizer and began the FBI investigations into his activities which would result in extensive reports of his writing and work, which encouraged him to leave the US in 1922, and he lived for twelve years in Europe and North Africa. Throughout this period and into the 1930s, McKay wrote fiction, including Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). His short stories, Gingertown, were collected in 1932. He also continued to write essays and journalist reports on African American history and culture, including Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) and, in Russian, Trial by Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in North America.

In 1934, having denounced Stalin’s Soviet Union, he returned to the US, writing poems that reflected his religious involvement with Catholicism. He died of heart disease on May 22nd, 1948.



BOOKS OF POETRY

Songs of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Aston W. Gardner, 1912); Constab Ballads (London: Watts, 1912); Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1920); Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922); Selected Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953; reprinted in 1969); The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, edited by Wayne F. Cooper (New York: Schocken Books, 1973); Complete Poems, edited with an Introduction by William J. Maxwell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).



My Mountain Home

De mango tree in yellow bloom,
De pretty akee seed,
De mammee where de John-to-wits come
To have their daily feed,

Show you de place where I was born,
Of which I am so proud,
‘Mongst de banana-field an’ corn
On a lone mountain-road.

One Sunday marnin’ ‘fo’ fe hour
Fe service-time come on,
Ma say dat I be’n born to her
Her little las’y son.


Those early days be’n neber dull,
My heart as ebergreen;
How I did lub my little wul’
Surrounded by pingwin!

An’ growin’ up, with sweet freedom
About de yard I’d run;
An’ tired out I’d hide me from
De fierce heat of de sun.

So glad I was de fus’ day when
Ma sent me to de spring;
I was so happy feelin’ then
Dat I could do somet’ing.

De early days pass quickly ‘long,
Soon I became a man,
An’ one day found myself among
Strange folks in a strange lan’.

My little joys, my wholesome min’,
Dey taught me what was grief;
For months I travailed in de strife,
‘Fo’ I could find relief.

But I’ll return again, my Will,
An’ where my wild ferns grown
An’ weep for me on Dawkin’s Hill,
Dere, Willie, I shall go.

An’ dere is somet’ing near forgot,
Although I lub it best;
It is de loved, de hallowed spot
Where my dear mother rest.

Look good an’ find it, Willie dear,
See dat from bush ‘tis free;
Remember that my heart is near,
An’ you say you lub me.

An’ plant on it my fav’rite fern,
Which I be’n usual wear;
In days to come I shall return
To end my wand’rin’s dere.


(from Songs of Jamaica, 1912)



J’Accuse

The world in silence nods, but my heart weeps:
See, welling to its lidless blear eyes, pour
Forth heavily black drops of burning gore;
Each drop rolls on the earth’s hard face, then leaps
To heaven and fronts the idle guard that keeps
His useless watch before the august door.
My blood-tears, wrung in pain from my heart’s core,
Accuse dumb heaven and curse a world that sleeps:
For yester I saw my flesh and blood
Dragged forth by pale-faced demons from his bed
Lashed, bruised and bleeding, to a piece of wood,
Oil poured in torrents on his sinless head.
The fierce flames drove me back from where I stood;
There is no God, Earth sleeps, my heart is dead.

(1919/Complete Poems, 2004)





The White House

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
A chafing savage, down the decent street,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And fine in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh I must keep my heart inviolate,
Against the poison of your deadly hate!


(1922/Complete Poems, 2004)



The Tropics in New York

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.

My eyes great dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.


(from Harlem Shadows, 1922)



The Harlem Dancer

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watcher her perfect, half-clothed body say;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swing palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.

(from Harlem Shadows, 1922)




The Lynching

His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

(from Harlem Shadows, 1922)

Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish [USA]
1892-1982

Born in Glencoe, Illinois, Archibald MacLeish was the son of Andrew MacLeish, a dry-goods merchant, and his third wife, a college professor, Martha Hillard. The father was reserved, stern, and removed from his four children. The mother worked to develop in them a strong sense of social responsibility, which would come characterize MacLeish’s own life.

He spent his childhood on their estate on Lake Michigan, attending a private school, Hotchkiss, from 1907-1911 before attending Yale University in 1911, where he majored in English. At Yale, MacLeish wrote poetry and was involved in campus literary and social activities, as well as participating in college football. In 1915 he graduated from Yale, and entered Harvard Law School in the fall. The next year he married Ada Taylor Hitchcock, with whom he had four children, one of them dying in infancy.

Upon the U.S. entry in World War I, MacLeish enlisted as a private in Yale’s hospital unit, but soon shifted to a combat unit. At the same time Yale University Press published his first collection of poems, Tower of Ivory (1917).

MacLeish returned home from the war without his beloved younger brother, Kenneth, who had been killed in air combat. Upon completing his law degree, MacLeish taught government at Harvard briefly before joining the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall, and Stewart. He was successful as a lawyer, but found it confining since he gave him little opportunity to write. He 1923 he was offered a partnership, but MacLeish chose instead to quit the firm, his father promising to support him and his family.

Taking his family to Paris in order to live more cheaply, MacLeish remained there for five years, befriending the numerous émigré American writers already living there, including Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Cummings. In order to transform himself into a modern poet, MacLeish learned Italian and studied the history of English-language poetry. Over these years, he produced five books, including The Pot of Earth (1925), Nobodaddy (1926), Einstein (1926), and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). Several of the poems of this period— including “Memorial Rain,” “You, Andrew Marvell,” and “Ars Poetica”—would become his most famous works.

Returning to the United States in 1928, he and his family moved into a farm in Conway, Massachusetts. In New Found Land of 1930, MacLeish proclaimed his love of the United States, despite his attraction to Europe. Another long poem, Conquistador (1932), dealt with issues symbolizing the American experience. In 1933 he won a Pulitzer Prize for that work.

Soon after his return to the U.S., MacLeish began writing from Henry Luce’s magazine Fortune, contributing numerous pieces on the American and international scenes and defining his relationship between art and society. Rejecting the modernist alienation from society and emphasis on the individual, MacLeish saw the poet as inevitably involved in his society. During the later 1930s, as Americans and their culture suffered under the depression, MacLeish wrote a number of radio and stage plays that dealt with current issues, Panic (1935), The Fall of the City (1937), and Air Raid (1938) among them.

Despite his strong American sentiments, MacLeish also criticized American values, arguing that Americans had no clear vision of their national goals and potential, something which he felt poetry could offer. But he was also highly criticized for these views as well as being scorned by the modernists for attempting to write a “public” poetry. The left attacked him, accordingly, as an unconscious fascist and the right saw him as a communist sympathizer, coining the word “fellow traveler” in particular reference to him.

His rising liberalism brought him into the circle of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, and later he would write speeches for the president. In 1939 Roosevelt nominated him to become the librarian of Congress, an organization he would radical reorganize. He 1941 he also directed the information/propaganda agency, the Office of Facts and Figures, moving from there to become the assistant director of the Office of War Information from 1942-1943. These positions left him little time for poetry.

Upon Roosevelt’s death, MacLeish returned to private life, writing, in 1948, his first collection of poetry since the late 1930s, Actfive andOther Poems, a statement of his continued love his country but also his ultimate disillusionment with its actions. In 1949 Harvard offered him a position as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position he held until his retirement in 1962. During this period he continued to write, publishing Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1952), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize. His disgust with MacCarthyism resulted in the play The Trojan Horse, published the same year. In 1955, after a visit with Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths hospital, MacLeish fought for Pound’s release, which was accomplished in 1958. That same year, he finished his Broadway play, J. B., a work based on the biblical tale of Job. The play won another Pulitzer Prize.

After his retirement from Harvard, he continued to be active in writing and journalism, writing another play Herkales in 1967. He died in Boston in 1982.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Tower of Ivory (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1917); The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924); The Pot of Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925); Nobodaddy: A Play (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Dunster House, 1926); Streets of the Moon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926); The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928); Einstein (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929); New Found Land: Fourteen Poems (Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1930 /Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930); Conquistador (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932); Poems, 1924-1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933); Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City (New York: John Day, 1933); Actfive and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948); Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952); Songs for Eve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954); The Wild Old Wicked Man and Other Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968); Collected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963); The Human Season: Selected Poems, 1926-1972 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Collected Poems, 1917-1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

For other information and poetry by MacLeish, please click here: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/macleish/macleish.htm

Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay [Nicholas Vachel Lindsay] [USA]
1879-1931

Born in Springfield, Illinois the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, Vachel Lindsay was the son of a Scottish doctor in prosperity, living across the street from the governor’s mansion. His mother was a fundamentalist Christian, given to mystical visions, which would influence much of the Christian-based poetry of her son.

Lindsay studied medicine for three years at Hiram College, but dropped out in 1900 to learn drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met the famed American artist Robert Henri, who encouraged him on the route of poetry.

For most of his early years, Lindsay lived in such deep poverty that he even attempted to sell his poems door-to-door for enough money to eat. Soon after he embarked on a “tramp” journey of the South, begging for food and lodging. Returning to his Springfield family home, he was determined to embark upon what he described as a “New Localism,” a poetry that would encourage each American locality to support their local talent. Later, with Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, Lindsay would achieve a kind noted localism in what critics described as the “Middle Western School,” which found its best expression in poetry written from 1915 to 1925.

Lindsay’s first major work was solicited by Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine; the poem he sent, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” made him famous, and led him to a career at performing this poem and other later ones, collected in The Congo and Other Poems of 1914. Just as the Beats, Cowboy poets and performance artists of today, Lindsay presented his poetry as a kind of vaudevillian performance, replete with choruses and musicians. Lindsay also wrote one of the first serious books of film in 1915, The Art of the Moving Picture.

During the 1920s, continuing to live in Springfield, Lindsay briefly courted the poet Sara Teasdale before marrying, in 1925, Elizabeth Connor. By the end of that decade, however, his popularity had seriously waned. At the same time, his epilepsy, which he had previously kept secret, grew more serious. In 1931 he killed himself by drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Today much of Lindsay’s poetry seems outrageously naive, the writing seeming at times to have more to do with popular lyrics and a circus-like atmosphere than with serious modernist achievements. However, Lindsay’s incorporation of music, particularly jazz, and his interest in African-American rhythms of speech and music, alongside his incorporation of a Whitman-like populism, has continued to make his work of interest to some readers and critics.


BOOKS OF POETRY

Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread (1912); General Booth Enters Heaven and Other Poems (New York: M. Kennerley, 1913); The Congo and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1914); The Chinese Nightingale (New York: Macmillian, 1917); The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American Language (1920); The Daniel Jazz and Other Poems (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920); Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1923/revised ed., New York: Macmillan, 1925; Johnny Appleseed (New York: Macmillian, 1928); Selected Poems (New York: Macmillian, 1931); The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay (Spoon River Poets Press, 1984)

For a Vachel Lindsay website, click here: http://www.springfield.k12.il.u