Translation Attempt: Le Vampire

You who, like a knife’s thrust,
entered my plaintive heart;
You who, strong as a herd
of demons, came on crazy & all dolled up

to take control & make your bed
in my humiliated brain—
Bitch I'm tied to
like a criminal to cuffs,

like gamblers to their games,
like a bottle to a drunk,
like maggots to flesh—
Fuck you.

I prayed to a quick blade
for freedom
& I asked poison
to consummate my cowardice.

No use. Poison & blade
both spat back:
“You're not even worth
saving. Fuck off,

Idiot. Even if we did
untie her knots,
your kisses would only revive
your vampire's corpse.”



Baudelaire's original poem and some other translations available here.

John Keats,

like onions and depression, goes well with most alcohols.

Höpöhöpö Böks

You must listen to this poem by Icelandic poet Eiríkur Örn. Its only vowel is ö. (Found via languagehat's post on MetaFilter.)

Sonnets & Time

A while back I was re-reading Shakespeare's sonnets at the same time as I was reading Anthony Hawley's "p(r)etty sonnets" in Forget Reading. This was kind of interesting because it made me think even more than I might have otherwise about the relationship of Anthony's poems to the sonnet tradition, but I was particularly struck by the way each set of poems engages with time. So for example here's Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And here's a p(r)etty sonnet from Forget Reading:

no poem works
but may try and be some
may try and dig a ditch
may try and rig a memorable tall thing
called city, called obelisk
or president's head
what an error what a dumb rational
gig when poem is better off
jobless everywhere
even with shovel with drill
poem cannot build so useful
a drawer
poem is no tomb
but loiters and makes new time

Sonnet 18 almost literally becomes a kind of shrine or tomb for the object of the speaker's affection, whereas Anthony's poem leans insolently against the front of the local drugstore. (Also the "makes new time" bit at the end sort of gives me chills.)

So then right after reading those two books together, I read Laynie Browne's Daily Sonnets, which also tangle with time:

I'm a poet with no preparation
Only invented moments
My husband is in France
Baby-sitter is ill
Husband returns to work
Children are ill
I've prepared this
without time
and yet like Charlie Buckets
I expect to enter
a place of no hunger
a realm of pure imagination
This makes me angry
Dear, poetic deficit

Laynie Browne's sonnets aren't the kind that stand monumental once and for all. They happen daily. You fit them in around working out or doing your job or taking care of your kids whatever it is you do. Similarly, I want to think the "forget" in Forget Reading is an adjective. This is the kind of reading you forget as you go along. It's not a thing to remember so much as a way to behave. Maybe this is something like what Adorno calls "mimetic comportment."*

Nearly unrelated note: I'd like to know what it is about sonnets (if it is something about sonnets) that makes them amenable to thinking about time. Is it just because Shakespeare did it? Because sonnets are short and often come in a series?


*Or maybe not, but I never pass up an opportunity to say "mimetic comportment." It makes me dance on the inside.

One Way No Exit

One Way No Exit
G. C. Waldrep
Tarpaulin Sky Press

Whenever I start trying to write about this chapbook I just end up quoting it. I think that's a good sign. When I got done reading it the first time, I wanted to start over again.

These poems are concerned with responsibility--if that's the right word--to place & community. They are animated by a palpable ethical (or maybe even religious) impulse. They draw from a wide variety of sources, most noticeably an exhibition by German photographer Peter Rathmann called One Way: Fotografien (according to the acknowledgments, the titles of the 41 poems in the chapbook reproduce the titles of the 41 photographs in the exhibition). These might be ekphrastic poems, but they aren't what I normally think of when I think of ekphrastic poems.

These poems are about the mundane and the everyday. They do not, however, allow the mundane to crystallize into any image that might be considered transcendental or sacramental. They employ the structure of logical discourse, but only to send it in a-logical directions. Part of what makes these poems interesting is what they refuse to do:

Rathmann captures this scenario in a style which could be classified as
"aesthetic documentation." Rathmann believes the details are exciting.
According to received wisdom God is in the details.
God is therefore exciting. Rathmann's photographs constitute a documentary of God.
These are definitely not edifices created by masters of a metier.
These are definitely not edifices. Technical perfection lends these scenes
an almost charming quality. Rathmann believes
it is exciting to capture, it is exciting to qualify, it is exciting to lend.
Rathmann may or may not be a master of his metier.
Technical perfection lends charming scenes to God.

These poems are relentless in their refusal to accept an easy way out. They are also more than that refusal. They are a way of being (cliched as that phrase has become) relentlessly in the world (thus the book's title, I think). They are concerned with transportation (buicks are a recurring image), but they are less concerned with where they (or maybe we) are going than with how they (or we) are getting there:

This poem might be mistaken for a slown tool that releases--dormitory
allen wrench--this poem represents an earnest attempt to secure full funding for Amtrak
but is not hopeful. No poem is hopeful, it is not in the nature of poems to hope
just as it is not in the nature of photographs to correspond,
any correspondence in a photograph is provisional
and therefore suspect, one cannot live or make love in a photograph
(the idea of making love in a photograph is both mistaken and essentially French).
For hope as for correspondence one must turn to prose.
For long-distance stamina one looks past the photograph to the poem.

These poems are concerned with nationality ("The Welsh, ever generous, have extra vowels. they are a sweet, dark people / They would give us some if we asked"). They have spectacular one-liners, like "God is an American torso." They are, in short, pretty damn amazing. You should read them.

P.S. I can't get the line breaks to display properly. Imagine they are better.

All Typos Are Sick

that’s why, as distasteful as it is
they assigned your function to another person
that person also owns your function as well
for a particular workload
whether they are assigned the “function” or not
please be sure to include a note
for their reference
to have issues accumulated
many are on hold because of other issues
who will address things or bump them up
re: ownership of services
If you could synopsize what you’ve been experiencing
we have to figure out what impact
you’ll assist in this process. It will provide
confusion on my part
with other team members.
because I haven’t been instructed
to make sure the proper amount of revenue is being recognized
to test the functionality between departments
Can you instruct me on how to do that?

Poetry for the Coming Community

I’ve been thinking about blogging for some time now, but I was finally inspired to do something about it by a couple of links on Ron Silliman’s blog the other day. One was to a lovely little essay-manifesto on the emerging intellectual underclass (hey, that’s me!) at Notes for the Coming Community.

The other was a call for submissions from Wig and a brief response to it from Thom Donovan. (You can read both here.)

Here’s the money quote (from Kristen Gallagher and Tim Shaner, who edit Wig): “In terms of poetry, we hear complaints from some poets that it’s wrong that poets can’t make a living off of their poetry. We have come to think that fact is not only a given but a gift, of sorts. It is poetry’s strength that it exists somewhat beyond the logic of market forces, as a form of what Bataille calls ‘non-productive expenditure.’” They go on to suggest that because you can’t make a living with poetry, it’s a waste of time—in a good way. Just by existing, poetry offers a critique of the “laboring society” (Hannah Arendt’s term) in which we all live—a society in which all time is company time and every moment is devoted to labor/the social/bare life in one way or another.

Here’s the conclusion: “Our dilemma is common: we all need our time back. Our labor should create that surplus of time, not erase it.”

This is all very tidy, and I certainly wouldn’t say no to a three-day work week. But I’m always a little bit wary when someone describes poetry primarily as a kind of critique. Not only because I think that ends up being reductive (though I do), but also because I don't think it works.

I think it’s obvious that poetry has traditionally been what Arendt would call work rather than labor, a part of political rather than social life. As it happens, I’ve recently been reading Agamben’s Means Without End, which deals at some length with this same distinction:

Classical politics used to distinguish clearly between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between human beings as simply living beings, whose place is in the home, and human beings as political subjects, whose place was in the polis. Well, we no longer have any idea of any of this . . . our private biological body has become indistinguishable from our body politic . . . We have had to grow used to thinking and writing in such a confusion of bodies and places, of outside and inside, of what is enslaved and what is free, of what is need and what is desire. This has meant—why not admit it?—experiencing absolute impotence, bumping against solitude and speechlessness over and over again precisely there where we were expecting company and words. (138–139)

I think it’s overly optimistic to think that poetry can mount an effective critique against this state of affairs just by existing. The space in which such a critique could occur is exactly the same space in which poetry used to exist—the public space of the polis. And that space is no longer available.

There’s no reason to think we’re ever going to get our time back.* The question is what poetry can make of the time and space we have.

This is not at all a way of saying that we should capitulate to the way things are. Here’s how Agamben ends that paragraph I quoted from above:

But it is by starting from this uncertain terrain and from this opaque zone of indistinction that today we must once again find the path of another politics, of another body, of another word. I would not feel up to forgoing this indistinction of public and private, of biological body and body politic, of zoe and bios, for any reason whatsoever. It is here that I must find my space once again—here or nowhere else. Only a politics that starts from such an awareness can interest me.

I’m deeply interested in finding space and time for poetry (I, too, have a day job). But I’m not very interested in what poetry can critique. I want to know what it can produce.

*Besides, only rich people had it in the first place.