John Pistelli
author of The Ecstasy of Michaela
"He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all."
Outside, the orchard and a piece of moon
Are islands, he an island as he walks,
Brushing against weed stalks.
By hook and plume
The seeds gathering on his trouser legs
Are archipelagoes, like nests he sees
Shadowed in branching, ramifying trees,
Each with unique expressions in its eggs.
Different islands conjure
Different beings; different beings call
From different isles. And after all
His scrutiny of Nature
All he can see
Is how it will grow small, fade, disappear,
A coastline fading from a traveler
Aboard a survey ship. Slowly,
As coasts depart,
Nature had left behind a naturalist
Bound for a place where species don’t exist,
Where no emergence has a counterpart.
When an Indian visitor asked the poet in 1937 if he had a message for the sub-continent Yeats grasped a Japanese sword—perhaps he was thinking of the Greater Asia—and said, ‘Conflict. More conflict.’
TO VERNON LEE
On Bellosguardo, when the year was young,
We wandered, seeking for the daffodil
And dark anemone, whose purples fill
The peasant’s plot, between the corn-shoots sprung.
Over the gray, low wall the olive flung
Her deeper grayness; far off, hill on hill
Sloped to the sky, which, pearly-pale and still,
Above the large and luminous landscape hung.
A snowy blackthorn flowered beyond my reach;
You broke a branch and gave it to me there;
I found for you a scarlet blossom rare.
Thereby ran on of Art and Life our speech;
And of the gifts the gods had given to each—
Hope unto you, and unto me Despair.
RIVER ROSES
BY the Isar, in the twilight
We were wandering and singing,
By the Isar, in the evening
We climbed the huntsman’s ladder and sat swinging
In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes,
While river met with river, and the ringing
Of their pale-green glacier water filled the evening.By the Isar, in the twilight
We found the dark wild roses
Hanging red at the river; and simmering
Frogs were singing, and over the river closes
Was savour of ice and of roses; and glimmering
Fear was abroad. We whispered: “No one knows us.
Let it be as the snake disposes
Here in this simmering marsh.”
An afternoon of strolling though fields leads her to wonder: “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?/ Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” One of the things I plan to do is pass up, inasmuch as possible, reading more poems like this one.
we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented… . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
“The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson”
(I won’t violate Carson’s exquisite tact and reserve here by discussing the time I once met her, even though, as a would-be parvenu, I’m a disgustingly incorrigible name-dropper. [It’s going to be awful if I ever really do “make it”—I’ll be worse than Hitchens, who apparently told everyone he ever met that story about the time he read Kipling to Borges.] Anyway, I’m mainly just charmed to learn from this bewildered and thus compensatorily condescending profile that Carson is obsessed with volcanoes and makes paintings of them, as these two things are also true of my wife.)
Socrates says
Don’t touch that boy!
St Paul says
Don’t touch that girl!
And we obviously
think they’re right
to warn us that what
we want is not the skin
but the light that seems
to shine within it
because we voluntarily
leave ourselves
with a rod of glass
in our hot hand.
The droning overhead
and the hum in the ascetic air
tell us all we have built is
just the world’s
cold
pulsating
lonely
desire
to be
touched.
My favorite of English love lyrics:
Westron wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
Best to keep it short and sweet in matters of Eros, I think, or else your beloved will think you’d rather be embracing the dictionary. (I know somebody else once said something to this effect, but I can’t remember who, and in any case I’ve shortened it.)
On that note, tonight furnishes the latest episode in my irresistible rise, as I will be appearing at the Walker Art Center to read a 20-second erotic verse (LOL) in the company of many other distinguished members of the Twin Cities literary community on this last free Thursday of the acclaimed Cindy Sherman exhibit. So if you’re a local, come join us; if not, watch this space for my “erotic” poem.
Go here for more details.
I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these
States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.
—Walt Whitman, “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me”
—Anne Carson, The Glass Essay
(Mina Loy edition)
LOVE of others is the appreciation of one’s self.
MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.
—“Aphorisms on Futurism”
The worst kind of sex maniac is the censor…
—“Censor Morals Sex.”
The pattern of a work of art is interposed between the artist’s creation and the observer in the mode of a screen formed by the directing lines or maps of the artist’s genius.
This is the essential factor in a work of art.
The old masters presented the esoteric plan of their individuality superimposed upon a “subject.”
The moderns present the map of their individuality without the secondary reconstruction of the pictorial coherence of our customary vision.
Every time we recgonise the work of any given master it is by the singularity of this map of his aesthetic system. Never by the subject.
It would be a reductio ad absurdum—the ability to judge a work of art by the subject it represents.
If the pictorial aspect were the fundamental entity of a work of art, a new subject by a known master would be unattributable; “So and so” paints girls in sunlight——tomorrow he paints a man in a subway. By what law do we recognise the individuality of the master?
By the identity of this metaphysical pattern with his personal aesthetic. This knocks mere subject out of the reckoning as an indispensable element in art.
—“The Metaphysical Pattern in Aesthetics.”
Laura Kasischke on Wallace Stevens (source):
He was never told by anyone that a poem with a line that required pronouncing the name “Tehuantepec” repeatedly, followed by a line about the “slopping” sea, was stomach-churning. And no one ever asked him to explain how, exactly, a man and a woman and a blackbird can be one. No one said, “Nuncle, you must reconsider this hoo-hoo-hoo and shoo-shoo-shoo and ric-a-nic. And, of course, ‘cachinnation’ is going to require yet another footnote, you know. Maybe just say ‘loud laughter’?”
Maybe. Or maybe the point of reading a book is to think about things and (steel yourself) to learn something you didn’t know before. Such as the meanings of unfamiliar words, a topic in which you might expect a novelist and poet to take some interest. Or maybe Milton, too, should have stuck to subject-verb-object constructions and Laurence Sterne should have gotten to the point and Emily Dickinson should have straightened out her syntax and the Surrealists should have painted pictures that made some damn sense and Toni Morrison should stop all this non-linear narration stuff and, well, you see what I mean. But by all means, blow up the humanities. As if I could stop you.
by Mina Loy
The Normal Monster
sings in the Green Sahara
The voice and offal
of the image of God
make Celtic noises
in these lyrical hells
Hurricanes
of reasoned musics
reap the uncensored earth
The loquent consciousness
of living things
pours in torrential languages
The elderly colloquists
the Spirit and the Flesh
are out of tongue
The Spirit
is impaled upon the phallus
Phoenix
of Irish fires
lighten the Occident
with Ireland’s wings
flap pandemoniums
of Olympian prose
and satinize
the imperial Rose
of Gaelic perfumes—
England
the sadistic mother
embraces Erin
Master
of meteoric idiom
present
The word made flesh
and feeding upon itself
with erudite fangs
The sanguine
introspection of the womb
Don Juan
of Judea
upon a pilgrimage
to the Libido
The press
purring
its lullabies to sanity
Christ capitalized
scourging
incontrite usurers of destiny
in hole and corner temples
And hang
The soul’s advertisements
outside the ecclesiast’s Zoo
A gravid day
spawns
gutteral gargoyles
upon the Tower of Babel
Empyrean emporium
where the
rejector-recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub-rosa
(1922)
In my hands, the canon found a friend dear,
I pray; my memory-stained evening candle
fanned the fire Cervantes lit, and Shakespeare,
and Dante and Keats, all who’d manhandle
trivial fate in its fiendish sparks of life.
It was not a consumptive Mann I met
on that Magic Mountain, or in the strife
of Venice, where death was the strangest fete.
No, it was a summer shower, when Wilde
whispered in praise of my fleshy memory:
You’ll have prophesied our God-wounds, dear child,
you’ll have lost our collective victory.
Oh, count me your strong acolyte, your fan!
I’ve shadowed the lively symbol’s wing span.
If I’ve lived at all, I’ve counted my breaths,
as each day I’ve murdered my sad Macbeths.
Oswald says she’s stripped away Homer’s narrative to ‘retrieve the poem’s enargeia’, which she translates to mean ‘something like “bright unbearable reality”’. Surely the run-ons and lack of punctuation have been deployed to blind us with brilliance or, at the very least, get all up in our helmets. But these are the sort of easy, go-to solutions a poet will grab for when she’s after some violent spontaneity. They assure some fantasy of a complacent reader that what he’s supposed to be experiencing is discomfort, what with all the Brutal Hyperreal Lyricism going on.
If I call Memorial ‘Anne Carson-lite’, it is not to suggest that Carson, the Canadian poet and classicist, is especially weighty; it is to suggest, rather, that Memorial updates the classical world with but a touch of the weirdness that is often attributed to the not-very-weird poetry of Carson. Oswald, less radical than rascal, slips in references to ‘parachutes’, ‘god’s headlights’, and ‘astronauts’. Near the end, Hector is compared to a man ‘in full armour in the doorway’ who leaves ‘his motorbike running’. The problem is not just that Hector was a convertible man; it’s that there’s something predictable, even calculated, about Oswald’s choices. Of course the book is subtitled ‘An Excavation of the Iliad’; archaeology would be the appropriate metaphor for a post-Foucauldian project that seeks to recover a subjugated narrative - that ‘“bright unbearable reality”’. Of course Oswald describes her ‘approach to translation’ as ‘fairly irreverent’ and that she’s ‘aiming for translucence rather than translation’; what translator today is declaring her goal a stuffy, cautious fidelity? We’re supposed to be irreverent now, aren’t we?
Jason Guriel, “Rosy-Fingered Yawn” (review of Alice Oswald’s Memorial)
(Agreed. Read a third of this, got the point, fell asleep, threw it over. Will the age of earnestly-politicized conceptual playfulness never end? To add insult to enervation, the American edition has a dumbed down subtitle, à la Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s: A Version of Homer’s Iliad.)
