X
For much of my life I did most of my reading in bed. But I never read in bed any longer. I now do all my reading in my recliner, deep in the basement of my chilly house, often in the company of a cat or two.
People sometimes ask me what I'm reading. This is irksome because I'm never reading just one thing. And when they ask, the full list evades my tongue. And as I mentally grope to run down the full inventory, I see their faces begin to go out of focus after the third title anyway. What I am providing is too much information.
To accommodate this tall stack of titles, I have a small end table of blonde wood next to my recliner. Because this long since proved insufficient to hold a sufficient quantity of volumes, as well as the couple of notebooks I find it necessary to have at hand, I added a snack table, also of blonde wood, next to the end table. It is about an inch higher than the end table. But that's alright. It does the trick. The fact that it is also of blonde wood is just a happy coincidence.
So, in the event that you are one of those people with some curiosity as to what I'm reading, I'm going to provide you with the full list. Read it all, or read it not. Read some of it now and come back later to finish it. Or don't. That's the beauty of it: you choose.
So here we go:
The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami (stories)
The Book of Folly by Anne Sexton (poetry)
The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin (novel)
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy (1990)
The Ohio Review - Number Fifty-five, ed. Wayne Dodd (1996)
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (novel)
Anne Sexton - a Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames
Stories from the Sixties, ed. Stanley Elkin
And a Voice to Sing With by Joan Baez (autobiography)
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II
That's the complete list. You see what I'm up against when people ask. I've already posted notes on readings from some of these books, either here or on Facebook. And I'll be posting more. I recommend them all, by the way. That pisses you off some, doesn't it?
_______________________
Addenda: I should mention that I'm also reading The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, but I left that at work. I have Anne Sexton's The Awful Rowing Towards God at work, too. Sorry.
X
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #4
X
I chose next to read the Paris Review interview with the eminent scholar and literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom is almost bigger than life and trying to sum him up in a short introduction to a brief excerpt would be a mug’s game. Bloom is a contrarian, a hyperbolist, a dogmatist, an effective iconoclast, and probably a genius. He is not in any way predictable, which makes his many, many books highly interesting reads.
As a literary critic, his most important text is probably The Anxiety of Influence. The general reader would also profit immensely by reading The Western Canon, as well as Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (the title alone of this one should adequately explain why I called Bloom a “hyperbolist” above.)
Bloom also writes extensively on Freud, and on various aspects of religion. In this realm, his most controversial text is The Book of J, in which he maintains that the author “J” who wrote the texts which have formed the very heart of the Hebrew scriptures, was probably a woman. Another interesting read is The American Religion, in which Bloom proclaims that American religious life, and therefore the American socio-political agenda, is not founded upon a true Christianity, but rather a newly-evolved, particularly American, species of Gnosticism.
The Harold Bloom interview is very long, and incredibly dense. By the time I was half-way through it, I had already selected three excerpts as possible candidates for use here. I could have picked at least another three in the second half. I finally settled on the one that follows, because I feel that it gives an overall impression of what Bloom is all about. A young reader with any intellectual curiosity and dexterity encountering this excerpt should be launched by it into a lifetime of deep, fruitful reading. In the course of the interview, Bloom quotes his idol, Emerson, as having said “That which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” That pretty much sums up Harold Bloom for me.
Interviewer:
You teach Freud and Shakespeare.
Bloom:
Oh, yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore.
I will end by disclosing that I learned from researching this post that Harold Bloom grew up in the Bronx, where he lived on the Grand Concourse and where he exercised his love books at the Bronx Library. This is the same library to which I walked—up Bainbridge Avenue to E. Kingsbridge Road—on many an occasion during my decade-plus sojourn in that borough. Had I only known!
X
X
I chose next to read the Paris Review interview with the eminent scholar and literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom is almost bigger than life and trying to sum him up in a short introduction to a brief excerpt would be a mug’s game. Bloom is a contrarian, a hyperbolist, a dogmatist, an effective iconoclast, and probably a genius. He is not in any way predictable, which makes his many, many books highly interesting reads.
As a literary critic, his most important text is probably The Anxiety of Influence. The general reader would also profit immensely by reading The Western Canon, as well as Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (the title alone of this one should adequately explain why I called Bloom a “hyperbolist” above.)
Bloom also writes extensively on Freud, and on various aspects of religion. In this realm, his most controversial text is The Book of J, in which he maintains that the author “J” who wrote the texts which have formed the very heart of the Hebrew scriptures, was probably a woman. Another interesting read is The American Religion, in which Bloom proclaims that American religious life, and therefore the American socio-political agenda, is not founded upon a true Christianity, but rather a newly-evolved, particularly American, species of Gnosticism.
The Harold Bloom interview is very long, and incredibly dense. By the time I was half-way through it, I had already selected three excerpts as possible candidates for use here. I could have picked at least another three in the second half. I finally settled on the one that follows, because I feel that it gives an overall impression of what Bloom is all about. A young reader with any intellectual curiosity and dexterity encountering this excerpt should be launched by it into a lifetime of deep, fruitful reading. In the course of the interview, Bloom quotes his idol, Emerson, as having said “That which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” That pretty much sums up Harold Bloom for me.
Interviewer:
You teach Freud and Shakespeare.
Bloom:
Oh, yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore.
I will end by disclosing that I learned from researching this post that Harold Bloom grew up in the Bronx, where he lived on the Grand Concourse and where he exercised his love books at the Bronx Library. This is the same library to which I walked—up Bainbridge Avenue to E. Kingsbridge Road—on many an occasion during my decade-plus sojourn in that borough. Had I only known!
X
X
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #3
X
The Paris Review interview that I chose to read next was that of John Gardner, writer, medieval scholar, and teacher. Gardner was among the very first contemporary novelists whose works I collected and read in depth, beginning with the masterpiece, Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf saga.
The Gardner interview in The Paris Review is actually a composite, featuring questions posed to him by three different interviewers over the last decade of his life. It was very difficult to select one excerpt to share here. Gardner’s responses to his interviewers are detailed, thoughtful, profound, and “pithy” on every topic proposed to him. But I have established my ground rules for this feature and I must stick to them. Ergo, just one excerpt from the 27-page interview have I chosen, and just one excerpt shall I use.
I will, however, first present an excerpt from another source that I believe you will see only here. As you may know, John Gardner died tragically young, in a motorcycle accident, on September 14, 1982. I was recently privy at work to a letter written upon the occasion of Gardner’s death by his friend, the poet Dave Smith, to Smith’s former teacher and mentor, poet and novelist, Hollis Summers. The letter was written in the immediate aftermath of Smith’s having been notified of Gardner’s demise. Smith writes:
Gardner said something to me once that I care about
and l’ll stop rambling and say it. He said that the main character in
everything we write or ever would write was Death. Our task as writers
was to confront that and live with it well.
John Gardner’s œuvre is the embodiment of the “moral fiction” of which he was a strenuous and consistent advocate. On the basis of this, he has been considered a “conservative” in certain circles. In his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, Gardner accuses us all of potential bad faith in our personal confrontation with death; his aim to force us to fully examine this existential stumbling block. His message to other writers is that to possess real meaning, and ultimate value, their work must show the reader how it is possible for the individual to live according to knowable, objective, moral standards.
With these things in mind, please read the excerpt I have chosen from The Paris Review:
As I tried to make plain in On Moral Fiction, I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you’ve got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, There are the skulls; that’s your baby, Mrs. Miller. Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in.
I believe that it is precisely those “fashionable” skull-counting whiners to whom the great poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, was referring in his song, The Future:
“…and all the lousy little poets coming round / tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson…”
You may not agree with John Gardner’s philosophy. It is, undeniably, the expression of a conservative perspective on art. But whether you confront it as an artist, or as a consumer of art, you fail to give it serious consideration only at great personal risk as a moral agent.
X
The Paris Review interview that I chose to read next was that of John Gardner, writer, medieval scholar, and teacher. Gardner was among the very first contemporary novelists whose works I collected and read in depth, beginning with the masterpiece, Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf saga.
The Gardner interview in The Paris Review is actually a composite, featuring questions posed to him by three different interviewers over the last decade of his life. It was very difficult to select one excerpt to share here. Gardner’s responses to his interviewers are detailed, thoughtful, profound, and “pithy” on every topic proposed to him. But I have established my ground rules for this feature and I must stick to them. Ergo, just one excerpt from the 27-page interview have I chosen, and just one excerpt shall I use.
I will, however, first present an excerpt from another source that I believe you will see only here. As you may know, John Gardner died tragically young, in a motorcycle accident, on September 14, 1982. I was recently privy at work to a letter written upon the occasion of Gardner’s death by his friend, the poet Dave Smith, to Smith’s former teacher and mentor, poet and novelist, Hollis Summers. The letter was written in the immediate aftermath of Smith’s having been notified of Gardner’s demise. Smith writes:
Gardner said something to me once that I care about
and l’ll stop rambling and say it. He said that the main character in
everything we write or ever would write was Death. Our task as writers
was to confront that and live with it well.
John Gardner’s œuvre is the embodiment of the “moral fiction” of which he was a strenuous and consistent advocate. On the basis of this, he has been considered a “conservative” in certain circles. In his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, Gardner accuses us all of potential bad faith in our personal confrontation with death; his aim to force us to fully examine this existential stumbling block. His message to other writers is that to possess real meaning, and ultimate value, their work must show the reader how it is possible for the individual to live according to knowable, objective, moral standards.
With these things in mind, please read the excerpt I have chosen from The Paris Review:
As I tried to make plain in On Moral Fiction, I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skulls, you’ve got two main choices as an artist: You can either stare into the volcano and count the skulls for the thousandth time and tell everybody, There are the skulls; that’s your baby, Mrs. Miller. Or you can try to build walls so that fewer baby skulls go in.
I believe that it is precisely those “fashionable” skull-counting whiners to whom the great poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, was referring in his song, The Future:
“…and all the lousy little poets coming round / tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson…”
You may not agree with John Gardner’s philosophy. It is, undeniably, the expression of a conservative perspective on art. But whether you confront it as an artist, or as a consumer of art, you fail to give it serious consideration only at great personal risk as a moral agent.
X
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Rodak's Writings: T.M.I.
X
Mythology’s Message
In the beginning, God's slinky critter
left off buffing its flawless scales,
wrapped itself around the tree,
and flashed its best civil service grin.
Lonely Eve, innocent and weak-kneed
with all the attention, snatched
the gleaming proffered fruit
from the enticing dangle of its sinewy branch,
and left behind a bleeding stem...
(The Starship Monitors,
their sensitive instruments finely tuned
to earthly pain, receive the tiny scream
of that violated bough as a digital signal.)
Naked Adam, wearing the perpetual boyhood
of his immortality like a veneer of sandlot dust,
was easy meat for the jiggle that began
with the motion of Eve’s juice-sucking lips
and rippled all the way down
to her naked, turf-clutching toes.
She handed Adam that fatal harvest
and he bit into it, deep.
It was then that Adam heard
what he at first perceived as huge trees walking,
crashing across the peace of the garden.
Adam next learned that clouds can howl and roar,
that their voices are intelligible and awesome.
Clutching fast the fabulous fruit, terrified Adam ran
and he ran as the heavens flashed and rang
and fiery wheels with razor rims
assailed and seared his weeping eyes :
Oh, how immortal Adam then longed to die…
(The Starship Monitors, observing this,
now noted in the astral log: “The Subject is completely fucked.”)
And so he was.
But by the time tufted Eve had flinched her lap,
popped him out, rolled him down off of her
padded frame and growled, ‘Git a job,’
Adam was fully awake
to the fact that the fallen fruit
still clutched in his mojo’d hand
was withered, rotten, and infested
with maggots: starkly symbolic
of Adam’s career to-date…
(On the Star Ship bridge,
one Monitoring Entity interfaced with the other
to input the datum, ‘Bingo, Jack! You owe me lunch.’)
X
Mythology’s Message
In the beginning, God's slinky critter
left off buffing its flawless scales,
wrapped itself around the tree,
and flashed its best civil service grin.
Lonely Eve, innocent and weak-kneed
with all the attention, snatched
the gleaming proffered fruit
from the enticing dangle of its sinewy branch,
and left behind a bleeding stem...
(The Starship Monitors,
their sensitive instruments finely tuned
to earthly pain, receive the tiny scream
of that violated bough as a digital signal.)
Naked Adam, wearing the perpetual boyhood
of his immortality like a veneer of sandlot dust,
was easy meat for the jiggle that began
with the motion of Eve’s juice-sucking lips
and rippled all the way down
to her naked, turf-clutching toes.
She handed Adam that fatal harvest
and he bit into it, deep.
It was then that Adam heard
what he at first perceived as huge trees walking,
crashing across the peace of the garden.
Adam next learned that clouds can howl and roar,
that their voices are intelligible and awesome.
Clutching fast the fabulous fruit, terrified Adam ran
and he ran as the heavens flashed and rang
and fiery wheels with razor rims
assailed and seared his weeping eyes :
Oh, how immortal Adam then longed to die…
(The Starship Monitors, observing this,
now noted in the astral log: “The Subject is completely fucked.”)
And so he was.
But by the time tufted Eve had flinched her lap,
popped him out, rolled him down off of her
padded frame and growled, ‘Git a job,’
Adam was fully awake
to the fact that the fallen fruit
still clutched in his mojo’d hand
was withered, rotten, and infested
with maggots: starkly symbolic
of Adam’s career to-date…
(On the Star Ship bridge,
one Monitoring Entity interfaced with the other
to input the datum, ‘Bingo, Jack! You owe me lunch.’)
X
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Rodak's Writings: Some Satire
X
Thanks for Sharing!
Oh. Wow. What can I say? This one really slaps me in the face. Without getting all profound, I can say it puts the real in my reality! Your piece just grabs my dangling balls and gives them a mighty twist. It honestly puts the “anker” in wanker for me. Your words have taken my worthless existence—which had no more significance than a wretched retrovirus clinging with its teeny-tiny little micro-organistic toenails to the precipitous edge of the shitpile that was this life—and has given me the vision to go forth towards a brave new future in macro-interpersonal-communications. Or sales.
For me the lines:
xxxEvery crack in my pale pavement
xxxleads only to another square of hard cement—
xxxxxxthe sun goes down
xxxxxxand so do I
xxYou were the straw
xxxxthat stirred my drink. I thirst.
xxI thirst—
xxxxxxO, thirsty me!
are life life-changing, crucial, as fundamentally and as essentially necessary as oxygen! They punch me right in the gut! They slap my ugly mug! They scuttle my skateboard, put a dent in my Chevy, and drain the pus from my piercings. They piss in my Cheerios and gob in my Dr. Pepper. They put the helz in my belz! You’ve really flipped me the bird this time! You can bet that I’ll be back again and again for more of the same! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
x
Thanks for Sharing!
Oh. Wow. What can I say? This one really slaps me in the face. Without getting all profound, I can say it puts the real in my reality! Your piece just grabs my dangling balls and gives them a mighty twist. It honestly puts the “anker” in wanker for me. Your words have taken my worthless existence—which had no more significance than a wretched retrovirus clinging with its teeny-tiny little micro-organistic toenails to the precipitous edge of the shitpile that was this life—and has given me the vision to go forth towards a brave new future in macro-interpersonal-communications. Or sales.
For me the lines:
xxxEvery crack in my pale pavement
xxxleads only to another square of hard cement—
xxxxxxthe sun goes down
xxxxxxand so do I
xxYou were the straw
xxxxthat stirred my drink. I thirst.
xxI thirst—
xxxxxxO, thirsty me!
are life life-changing, crucial, as fundamentally and as essentially necessary as oxygen! They punch me right in the gut! They slap my ugly mug! They scuttle my skateboard, put a dent in my Chevy, and drain the pus from my piercings. They piss in my Cheerios and gob in my Dr. Pepper. They put the helz in my belz! You’ve really flipped me the bird this time! You can bet that I’ll be back again and again for more of the same! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
x
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Remembrances: Once Again, Boxing Backwards
X
Back in my bedroom closet, once again boxing backwards, I pulled out of my files an early collection of poems which I had given the title Grassfires. I've been posting some of the poems from this collection on Facebook and elsewhere, but for some reason, I felt it appropriate to also post this one here. I probably should wait a few years, until it would be an even four decades old. But who knows if I'll make it to that juncture? So I post it now:
Song for Rimbaud (on my 29th birthday)
Rimbaud! you exiled your art, your world a crystal
phrase which you banished to a coolie’s share of
blood-sweat, bland rice, a hermitage of dark women,
strange money – a slave trader’s greed – your Abyssinian
revenge knew no charity but the charity of death, a
pitiless bourgeois vengeance: cancerous malediction.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! you were righteous – I drank your words
and my fingers hemorrhaged, coiling into claws of
silver, clutching the olive sprig, grasping white
lightning – and my pen froze, searing a runic brand
onto my retinal affectations: my wooden chair became
Merlin’s tower of stone.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! I mouthed your incantations of desire, and
there came hopping, one-legged, a hairy demon, howling
into the corners of my dark cell evil abuses in a dozen
foreign tongues, words that fell on my soul like the
firebrands of an inquisitional Pentecost: writing in the
mercy of the flames I found a tender courage.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! I have reached my thirtieth year and have
fouled myself with imagined sufferings – yet in my
vision I saw you aflame and dying into an age that I
have yet to imagine – consumed, almost human, grinning
with the dogs that wait amongst lepers, beyond the
gates of the steel-bound metropolis: impatient already.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! the years behind me are a single day, all
memories one – dozens of women with but one flavor –
the colors are with me now, not yet more brilliant –
history but a dog-eared tome studied in preparation for
examination to gain entrance to a monstrous bureaucracy:
all true souls fail, condemned to springtime visions.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! conquerors glare in two-dimensional facsimile
of plaster, marble, bronze – only the sainted dead spring
moist from the pits to dance your deadly dance of dream –
the portrait you drew of Christ: sneering hipster, blue
eyes of pure acid guarded behind Italian shades, double-
sexed, against the temple pillars slouched: triumphant!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! have peace: the Rose will open – She will conceive
and bear prodigies into the future – I see your new incarnation,
a generation that lifts Her gaudy skirts - the apocalyptic underbelly –
but the stars in Her pupils, the pulsing planets
of Her estrous tears are singing harmonies
known to Pythagoras: genies are sewing the banners!
X
Back in my bedroom closet, once again boxing backwards, I pulled out of my files an early collection of poems which I had given the title Grassfires. I've been posting some of the poems from this collection on Facebook and elsewhere, but for some reason, I felt it appropriate to also post this one here. I probably should wait a few years, until it would be an even four decades old. But who knows if I'll make it to that juncture? So I post it now:
Song for Rimbaud (on my 29th birthday)
Rimbaud! you exiled your art, your world a crystal
phrase which you banished to a coolie’s share of
blood-sweat, bland rice, a hermitage of dark women,
strange money – a slave trader’s greed – your Abyssinian
revenge knew no charity but the charity of death, a
pitiless bourgeois vengeance: cancerous malediction.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! you were righteous – I drank your words
and my fingers hemorrhaged, coiling into claws of
silver, clutching the olive sprig, grasping white
lightning – and my pen froze, searing a runic brand
onto my retinal affectations: my wooden chair became
Merlin’s tower of stone.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! I mouthed your incantations of desire, and
there came hopping, one-legged, a hairy demon, howling
into the corners of my dark cell evil abuses in a dozen
foreign tongues, words that fell on my soul like the
firebrands of an inquisitional Pentecost: writing in the
mercy of the flames I found a tender courage.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! I have reached my thirtieth year and have
fouled myself with imagined sufferings – yet in my
vision I saw you aflame and dying into an age that I
have yet to imagine – consumed, almost human, grinning
with the dogs that wait amongst lepers, beyond the
gates of the steel-bound metropolis: impatient already.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! the years behind me are a single day, all
memories one – dozens of women with but one flavor –
the colors are with me now, not yet more brilliant –
history but a dog-eared tome studied in preparation for
examination to gain entrance to a monstrous bureaucracy:
all true souls fail, condemned to springtime visions.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! conquerors glare in two-dimensional facsimile
of plaster, marble, bronze – only the sainted dead spring
moist from the pits to dance your deadly dance of dream –
the portrait you drew of Christ: sneering hipster, blue
eyes of pure acid guarded behind Italian shades, double-
sexed, against the temple pillars slouched: triumphant!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx*** ***
Rimbaud! have peace: the Rose will open – She will conceive
and bear prodigies into the future – I see your new incarnation,
a generation that lifts Her gaudy skirts - the apocalyptic underbelly –
but the stars in Her pupils, the pulsing planets
of Her estrous tears are singing harmonies
known to Pythagoras: genies are sewing the banners!
X
Readings: The Paris Review Interviews #2
X
I chose, for some reason, to next read the interview with Evelyn Waugh. I suppose the fact that Waugh is so often cited by Catholics on blogs as being among their favorite "Catholic" novelists, was the impetus. The Waugh interview is extremely short. It is, in fact, so short that the interviewer, a person improbably named "Julian Jebb," is rather apologetic about it in his introduction.
Unfortunately, Waugh does not get into his Catholicism very much. Nor does he get very deeply into much of anything else. This being the case, I've decided upon the following quote, which is a response to the question, "Do you think it just to describe you as a reactionary?":
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.
Of Americans Waugh had earlier opined, "I don't think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?" Just a bit after the central quote above, when asked why his novels contain so very few working class characters, Waugh replied, "I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them." Evelyn Waugh: Catholic to the bone.
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I chose, for some reason, to next read the interview with Evelyn Waugh. I suppose the fact that Waugh is so often cited by Catholics on blogs as being among their favorite "Catholic" novelists, was the impetus. The Waugh interview is extremely short. It is, in fact, so short that the interviewer, a person improbably named "Julian Jebb," is rather apologetic about it in his introduction.
Unfortunately, Waugh does not get into his Catholicism very much. Nor does he get very deeply into much of anything else. This being the case, I've decided upon the following quote, which is a response to the question, "Do you think it just to describe you as a reactionary?":
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.
Of Americans Waugh had earlier opined, "I don't think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?" Just a bit after the central quote above, when asked why his novels contain so very few working class characters, Waugh replied, "I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them." Evelyn Waugh: Catholic to the bone.
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