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• 29 Oct 2009 20:35

  Roy DeCarava

  October 29, 2009 Roy DeCarava 1919-2009 _______________________ As language. . . As language. . .Silence is also a language. When there is no order in heaven we make what we make by luck, or strength, or the composition of desire. Power grows like vegetation, and there are no preferences under heaven. I do not know why a leaf should be of less worth than a Vatican, or why builders care. The mathematical stones recite their logic of cruelty and despair­­ we arose to gratify some searchless reason shaping the empty air. Louis Dudek (1918 - 2001) _______________________ The Relics 1899 Gaston La Touche October 29, 1854 - July 12, 1913 _______________________ Tangled Reliquary Ann Lauterbach Tangled reliquary under all surfaces. Nothing moonlike occurs there Only partial coves And entrances. How cool it must have been the vat of the previous Before these habits ordained the real. Some of us must have seen each other Naked in opulent dawn, our nerves Drawn up as from an ancient well Mossy, slick, unstuck at every seam So we enter the sleeve of history Out of which the magician pulls His lawn ornaments: Dancer, Prancer, Our Lady of Provocations, flags, targets, The bluebird's house. On the adjacent field A swarm of butterflies alights On a bald tree. This is the Tree of Changes Mentioned in the lost book of A. Her auspice was a riddle, Sphinx or no sphinx, Whose meanings we can piece together From her journals which were torn into bandages To wrap the wounds of the dying. Such wanton songs Paginate empirical trust And the ruse of the first place. Not that story again, what we cannot say To the sun as it dispenses its sheen Out over the harbor, but only How can you perform your agile sway Without shelter and without us? So the riddle of the disembodied name Sets in motion its primal mischief Sanctioned and forbidden in the vastly gone. ...(more) Ann Lauterbach at PennSound and The Poetry Foundation _______________________ Hellebore for Georg Trakl R.B. Kitaj b. Oct. 29, 1932 ..................................................... Psalm Georg Trakl It is a light, which the wind has extinguished. It is a village inn, which a drunkard abandons in the afternoon. It is a vineyard, burned and black with holes full of spiders. It is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk. The lunatic is dead. It is an island of the South Pacific, To receive the sun god. One beats the drums. The men perform warlike dances. The women sway the hips between climbing plants and fire flowers When the sea sings. O our lost paradise. The nymphs have left the golden forests. One buries the stranger. Then a glimmering rain begins. The son of Pan appears in the guise of an excavator, Who sleeps away the midday near the glowing asphalt. There are small girls in a courtyard in little dresses full of heartbreaking poverty! There are rooms fulfilled with chords and sonatas. There are shadows that embrace before a blind mirror. By the windows of the hospital convalescents warm themselves. A white steamboat in the canal bears bloody epidemics along. The strange sister appears again in someone's evil dreams. Resting in the hazel bush, she plays with his stars. The student, possibly a double, looks long after her from the window. His dead brother stands behind him, or he descends the old spiral staircase. In the darkness of brown chestnuts the figure of the young novice grows pale. The garden is in evening. In the cloister the bats flutter about. The children of the caretaker stop to play and search the gold of heaven. Closing chords of a quartet. The small blind girl runs trembling through the avenue, And later her shadow gropes along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends. It is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal in the evening. In the somberness of the old asylum human ruins decay. The dead orphans lie by the garden wall. From gray rooms angels step with excrement-splattered wings. Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids. The plaza before the church is gloomy and taciturn, like in the days of childhood. On silver soles former lives glide past And the shadows of the damned descend to the sighing waters. In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes. Taciturnly over the place of skulls God's golden eyes open. Georg Trakl: Poems (published in 1913 by the Kurt Wolff publishing house, Leipzig) Translated by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt, unless otherwise indicated. _______________________ Roy DeCarava _______________________ The Iron Cheer of Empire Joe Bageant It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste for toil, but from here America looks like one big workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled by commodities and kept in motion by the edict, "produce or die." Where employment and a job dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of which spells the loss of everything.(....) But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness. Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of life monitored by an employer, a credit rating bureau or the media's projection of the world, and mediated by the financialization of life's every aspect.(....) ... the truth is that we are all very commonly issued products of a profit driven workhouse where no human commons is allowable, lest the workers find meaning and joy in each other as human beings, and perhaps become less work driven, less productive and less profitable. Best that their live remain mediated, disembodied from the great commons of the human spirit, unmoored from the great natural commons binding all living things called Earth --...(more) _______________________ Roy DeCarava _______________________ Slaves of Fashion Ann Lauterbach Bad poetry, I would submit, asks questions, raises issues, makes complaints, marks territories. Bad poetry does not take on the more difficult task, where the question and its answer are as one. Good poems absorb into their formal and imaginative resources new questions which are as "difficult" to answer as they are to raise. Or put it this way: the poem is an answer to a question or questions no one, including the poet, had thought to ask. These questions are always in temporal, historical flux, responding to myriad collisions of information from every possible-and they seem to multiply by the day-domain. The poem as answer to an unasked question puts pressure on the poet to be alert, vigilant, receptive, not just to the past, but to the weathers, internal and external, which characterize the day- poems of our climate, indeed. The burden of knowledge is immense, but it is also messy and malleable; each time you reread "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a new fiction will arise and the nature of it supremacy (its bestness) will alter. It is the critic's job to ask the question or questions which the poem elicits in its answering. As long as editors and critics are blind-sided by the myopia of their pre-existing conditions for good, better and best (the latter a test only time can take), as long as they mistake subject for content, content for meaning, an form for that which is what was, much of the best of the best will remain invisible, and the real questions to their answers will go, as Shelley foretold, unacknowledged. A rose, after all, is still only a rose, but it smells sweeter when there are three of them....(more) _______________________ Signals Edward Wadsworth b. Oct. 29, 1889 permanent link

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