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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Ellen sent me a link to this beautiful poem, written by her old teacher Raymond Federman at the very end of his life, in the spring time:
A Matter of Enthusiasm
I am rereading Malone Dies
just to mock death a little
and boost my cancerous spirit.
I shall soon be quite dead at last
Malone tells us at the beginning
of his story.
What a superb opening
what a fabulous sentence.
With such a sentence
Malone announces his death
and at the same time delays it.
In fact all of Malone's story
is but an adjournment.
Malone even manages
to defer his death
until the end of eternity.
That
soon is such a vague word.
How much time is soon?
How does one measure soon?
Normal people say
I'll be dead in ten years
or I'll be dead before I'm eighty
or I'll be dead by the end of this week
Quite dead at last
Malone specifies.
Unlike Malone prone in bed
scribbling the story of his death
with his little pencil stub
normal standing people
like to be precise
concerning their death.
Oh how they would love
to know in advance
the exact date and time
of their death.
How relieved they would be
to know exactly when
they would depart from
the great cunt of existence
in Malone's own words
to plunge into the great lie
of the afterlife.
How happy they would be
if when they emerge into life
the good doctor
or the one responsible
for having expelled them
into existence
would tell them you will die at 15:30
on December 22, 1989.
Could Sam have written
I shall soon be quite dead at last
had he known in advance
when he would change tense?
Certainly not
because as Malone tells us
a bit further in his story
I shall die tepid
without enthusiasm.
Does that mean on the contrary
of those idiots on this bitch of an earth
who explode themselves with fervor
to reach the illusion of paradise
while taking with them other mortals
that Malone's lack of enthusiasm
towards his own death is a clever way
of delaying the act of dying?
A lack of enthusiasm for something
is always a way of postponing
the terms of that something.
The soon of Malone mocks
the permanence of death
and his lack of enthusiasm
ridicules the expression at last.
And so before he reaches the end
of the first page of his story
Malone has already succeeded
in postponing his death to
Saint John the Baptist's Day
and even the Fourteenth of July.
Malone even believes he might be able
to resist until the
Transfiguration
not to speak of the Assumption
which certainly throws some doubt
as to what really happened
on that mythical day
or what will happen to Malone
if he manages to hang on until then.
In fact Malone defies his own death
by giving himself
birth into death
as he explains at the end of his story.
All is ready. Except me. I am being
given, if I may venture the expression,
birth to into death, such is my impression.
The feet are clear already,
of the great cunt of existence.
Favorable presentation I trust.
My head will be the last to die.
Haul in your hands. I can't.
The render rents, My story ended
I'll be living yet. Promising lag.
That is the end of me. I shall say I no more.
Nothing more to add this evening.
Malone said it all for me.
I can go to sleep calmly now.
Good night everybody.
I thank Robert Archambeau of Samizdat blog for sharing this poem, and Ellen for sending it to me.
posted evening of November 18th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, May 9th, 2009
I'm very taken with this idea from "Pierre Menard" about total identification with the author. I've written before about striving for that reading fiction and essays, but haven't really thought about it in connection with poetry. But just now I had the thought (while experimenting with FB statusses), Why not try the final bit of Bolañ's "Resurección" in the first person -- substituting myself for "poetry"? I slip into the dream
like a dead diver
into the eye of God (Thanks to Jorge for the structuring of the translation.)
posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
I dreamt last night, at first, that I had made my way to Santiago and had sought out a famous poet (I cannot remember who; he was also a professor of literature) with the idea that he was going to enlighten me about Chilean poetry. We were sitting in the (oddly very noisy) university library and I was asking him, in better Spanish than I speak but still hardly fluent, to show me which books I should read to learn about poetry in Chile -- as we walked up the staircase I specified, yelling to make myself heard over the din, that I was interested in the latter half of the twentieth century. He brought me to the shelf of books on the topic; there was very little there, maybe 20 dog-eared books, half of them in translation -- it seemed very strange to me. I picked up the heavy Oxford Companion to Chilean Verse and started leafing through it. In the second half of the dream I was debugging a web server I had written to render the work of Nicanor Parra. (Highly specialized, yes.) Sylvia and her friend Giulia came in and wanted to read the poems, also they wanted to play baseball -- I gave them the computer and while swinging their bats, they read three short poems about morning -- the poems were lovely, though they did not sound much like Parra; the only one I remember is: On my birthday I arose
And drank the subtle
Health of morning.
posted morning of April 21st, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, April 9th, 2009
The 14th, untitled poem in The Romantic Dogs is only three lines: I dreamt of frozen detectives in the great
refrigerator of Los Angeles
in the great refrigerator of Mexico City.
This introduces a series of five poems about "lost detectives" and "frozen detectives" and "crushed detectives" -- they moan desperately, they stare at their open palms, they are "intent on keeping their eyes open/ in the middle of the dream." These poems -- which are all about dreams -- make me think of Raymond Chandler; there is no stylistic similarity to speak of but I read "detectives" and "Los Angeles" and that is where my mind goes -- and they make me want to read Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives to find out what his dream-detectives do when they are fleshed out into characters...The fourth poem in this sequence, "The Frozen Detectives," has another painting reference in it: I dreamt of detectives lost
In the convex mirror of the Arnolfinis:
Our generation, our perspectives,
Our models of Fear. I had to look this up -- turns out to be a painting I've seen many times and read a bit about at some point lost to my memory, "The Betrothal of the Arnolfinis," by Jan van Eyck:
An amazing, incredible picture; I don't have much to say about it here but that mirror seems like a fine place for dream-detectives to get lost. Anyway Sylvia was looking over my shoulder as I looked this up and she immediately recognized it as appearing in her book Dog's Night, which is the story of the dogs in all the paintings in an art gallery getting loose after hours one night -- it's a fine book and I recommend it if you are looking for a present for a young kid -- as I recall it's best suited for about a five- or six-year-old.
posted evening of April 9th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Bolaño's poem "El Mono Exterior", "The Monkey Outside", starts out by asking, "Do you remember the Triumph of Alexander the Great, by Gustave Moreau?" -- I did not -- never seen it, I'm pretty sure, and did not recognize the painter's name. Here is an image of it: The poem is difficult to make much sense of, either by itself or in the context of the painting, but it's an attractive jumble of images. He seems to be addressing somebody who is blasé about the purported power of this painting (I can't see it; but then I am just looking at a little jpg of it), who "walked like a tireless ape among the gods,/ For you knew -- or maybe not -- that the Triumph was unfurling/ its weapons inside Plato's cavern: images,/ shadows without substance, sovereignty of emptiness." I'm not sure if he's reproaching the person he's talking to -- and indeed he might be talking to himself.
 Update: This poetry course from Aula de Poesia de Barcelona (PDF format, Spanish language) has some questions for writing about "El Mono Exterior", on page 5. Also featured: Borges, José Jorge Letria, Juan López de Ael, Claudia Groesman. (Why is the school's name not spelled "Aula de PoesÃa"? Is this a Catalán thing?)
Late Update: Bolaño also references Moreau in the first section of 2666.
posted evening of April 7th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, April 5th, 2009
So the first thing I am reading by Roberto Bolaño is the new book of poetry, The Romantic Dogs. The poems are delight, sparsely elegant, the author's voice clear and engaging. I find that I have not yet constructed an authorial persona to associate with this voice, so a lot of my reaction to the readings so far has been seeing who this voice reminds me of -- for instance there are some lines in the title poem that sound very distinctly like Robyn Hitchcock; "El Gusano" is reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's poetry (as I said before); the structure of "La Francesa" (especially its ending) is most similar to Ferlinghetti. I expect I'll find plenty of other referents as I continue to read, eventually they should gel into a new author for me to carry in my head... Here is a passage that's puzzling me a little. See what you think. The poem "Resurección" begins and ends as follows: La poesÃa entra en el sueño
como un buzo en un lago.
...
La poesÃa entra en el sueño
como un buzo muerto
en el ojo de Dios. Healy translates this as:Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
...
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who's dead
in the eyes of God.
But this seems to me to miss the parallelism. "Dead in the eyes of God" is a lexical unit -- it is making the phrase "en el ojo de Dios" into a modifier for "muerto" -- but what I was thinking as I read the Spanish was, the "eye of God" was what the dead diver was entering into -- it was playing the same role that the "lake" was playing in the first sentence -- so I would have translated it more like Poetry slips into the dream
like a dead man diving
into the eye of God. (Also I would have said "into a lake" in the second line.) Is this a misreading?
posted afternoon of April 5th, 2009: 2 responses
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
I was pretty young when I found out about A Coney Island of the Mind -- I bought a copy at one of the bookstores on Telegraph Ave. and it's the first book of poetry I can remember carrying around in high school. I just loved the title! And the poems themselves began gradually to sink in, too... I read them today and they are familiar like old relatives and slightly embarrassing too, like old relatives can be; but it seems to me like there is real beauty in them mixed in with the clumsyness.
I have not lain with beauty all my life
telling over to myself
its most rife charms
I have not lain with beauty all my life
and lied with it as well
telling over to myself
how beauty never dies
but lies apart
among the aborigines
of art
and far above the battlefields
of love
It is above all that
oh yes
It sits upon the choicest of
Church seats
up there where art directors meet
to choose the things for immortality
And they have lain with beauty
all their lives
And they have fed on honeydew
and drunk the wines of Paradise
so that they know exactly how
a thing of beauty is a joy
forever and forever
and how it never never
quite can fade
into a money-losing nothingness
Oh no I have not lain
on Beauty Rests like this
afraid to rise at night
for fear that I might somehow miss
some movement beauty might have made
Yet I have slept with beauty
in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
with beauty in my bed
and so spilled out another poem or two
and so spilled out another poem or two
upon the Bosch-like world
A couple of more poems below the fold.
Here is "Spirit of the Crusades," from These are my Rivers (1994). It is a concise, powerful image, it hits you with the same force as his early poems but it is, I think, much more disciplined:
Stony Wales
with its slate-grey roofs
in slate-grey Cardiff
and its greystone houses on greystone terraces
and its great high statue of
"The Spirit of the Crusades"
in the Wales National Museum
portraying a medieval knight
in grey metal armor and helmet
with visor down
on a great grey steed
with four grey foot soldiers
in close march around him
(two at the head of the horse
two behind)
wearing World War One helmets
and carrying World War One rifles
with fixed bayonets
And the Crusades are over
but they are still marching
over the sea-locked land
in a dead march
straight through the twentieth century
In 1997 he published A Far Rockaway of the Heart, which might be my favorite book of his poetry for the way it reflects back on A Coney Island of the Mind from the perspective of a much older, more mature poet. I saw Mr. Ferlinghetti reading from this book and got his signature!
Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
at the turn of the century
my father ran into my mother
on a fun-ride at Coney Island
having spied each other eating
at a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
that she was for him entirely
he followed her into
the playland of that evening
where the headlong meeting
of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
hurtled them forever together
And I now in the back seat
of their eternity
reaching out to embrace them
↻...done
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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 Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 90 years old today. What a milestone! He is one of my favorite poets -- this evening when I have some time I would like to pick out a couple of his pieces to post here. In the mean time you ought to give him a birthday present by heading over to City Lights and buying a book.
 Ooh and look at this! Nick Lowe (the Jesus of Cool) turns 60 today! And Olivia is 9 years old. A good day for birthdays.
posted morning of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness.Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet
It makes me kind of happy, as Gregorius is browsing through Simões' bookshop (in Chapter 8 of Night Train to Lisbon), to see how many of the titles and authors I recognize -- this is starting from slightly more than a year ago, when José Saramago was broadly speaking, the first Portuguese author I had ever heard of. The amount of reading I've done in this literature is still pretty sparse; but I've gotten a chance to familiarize myself with the names and identities of a lot of the important touchstones, it looks like.
I said before that I was not really identifying with Gregorius, and that's still true -- I was thinking tonight though, it's funny I don't -- some aspects of his situation have parallels to aspects of my own life, I think; seems like if I tried, I ought to be able to put myself in his shoes. And curious -- in the last book I read, Elizabeth Costello, I also found that I was not "relating" to the text that way. My feeling about this is that both Coetzee and Mercier have a very different type of voice -- at a first approximation, "more cerebral" -- than much of what I've been reading in the last few years. It could also be that I'm moving in a different direction as a reader. This is difficult to quantify; I'm just going to leave it out there for the time being.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 14th, 2009
An experience that I've had many times: I am browsing in a bookstore (usually by the shelves marked "Fiction" or as the case may be, "Classics"), pulling down titles that intrigue me, looking at quotes on the back jacket or the inside front cover, first sentences, etc. After a little while of this I get into a rhythm, the browsing is what I'm doing, I melt into the bookstore a little... and then some new book that I've never heard of before pops into my hand, and it suddenly seems like just the right thing for me to read. Today I was looking in the new bookstore in Maplewood and found a book which I had never heard of, and which seems like just the right thing. It is Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier (a Swiss author with a French name, who writes in German) -- the three epigraphes are from Jorge Manrique, Michel Montaigne, Fernando Pessoa. (The Montaigne quote is especially to my tastes -- "We are all patchwork," it begins, and ends, "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.") The initial sentence has a slightly formulaic whiff about it: "The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days." -- But it is a formula that has worked on me many times, and I have high hopes for this time.
posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: Respond
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