My sirens
Ain't never stopped screamin'
My searchlights
Ain't got to no sky
My pistol
Ain't hung up for dreamin'
My tear gas
Ain't made nobody cry.
Come on, cops.
Ain't but one way
To live and to die.
-James A. Emanuel
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
Identity of Images by Robert Desnos
Identity of Images
by Robert Desnos Translated by Louis Simpson
I am fighting furiously with animals and bottles
In a short time perhaps ten hours have passed one
after another
The beautiful swimmer who was afraid of coral wakes
this morning
Coral crowned with holly knocks on her door
Ah! coal again always coal
I conjure you coal tutelary genius of dreams and my
solitude let me let me speak again of the beautiful
swimmer who was afraid of coral
No longer tyrannize this seductive subject of my
dreams
The beautiful swimmer was reposing in a bed of lace
and birds
The clothes on a chair at the foot of the bed were
illuminated by gleams the last gleams of coal
The one that had come from the depths of the sky and
earth and sea was proud of its coral beak and great
wings of crape
All night long it had followed divergent funerals toward
suburban cemeteries
It had been to embassy balls marked white satin gowns with
its imprint a fern leaf
It had risen terribly before ships and the ships had not
returned
Now crouched in the chimney it was watching for the
waking of foam and singing of kettles
Its resounding step had disturbed the silence of nights
in streets with sonorous pavements
Sonorous coal coal master of dreams coal
Ah tell me where is that beautiful swimmer the swimmer
who was afraid of coral?
But the swimmer herself has gone back to sleep
And I remain face to face with the fire and shall remain
through the night interrogating the coal with wings of
darkness that persists in projecting on my monotonous
road the shadow of its smoke and the terrible
reflections of its embers
Sonorous coal coal pitiless coal
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------
...But none could embroider his dreams like Desnos! He would go off into a transport, his protuberant eyes taking on a strange light, while the account of his marvelous chimeras gushed from his lips. There were the pursuers and the possessors; visions of the Apocalypse and the procession of its prophets; scenes of mythical violence filled with anguished cries; and "wizards" who now assumed the shape of "Fantomas" (as in the serial thriller of the movies) or now that of Nicholas Flamel, the thirteenth-century alchemist. How like an acrobat, with the greatest of ease, Desnos swung from one millennium to another, or from one continent to another. (Someone in the room was taking it all down stenographically, so that these dreams could be printed afterward.) Whereas the dream recitals of others were mostly boring, Desnos' seemed to come out of a real trance, and were narrated In reality, he had no need of the mesmerist or the turning table in a dark room, for he had other means of stimulating himself to a condition of autohypnosis and uninhibited improvisation. A regular dosage of opium--and an audience of at least one--was all this highly narcissistic personality required in order to function. (The truth about his drug addiction came out some years later, in 1929, on the occasion of a resounding public quarrel between him and his once-beloved master, Breton, to whom he had confessed his private vices.) For all his vices and his periodic outburts of violence, Desnos was one of the most lovable and entertaining of men.
by Robert Desnos Translated by Louis Simpson
I am fighting furiously with animals and bottles
In a short time perhaps ten hours have passed one
after another
The beautiful swimmer who was afraid of coral wakes
this morning
Coral crowned with holly knocks on her door
Ah! coal again always coal
I conjure you coal tutelary genius of dreams and my
solitude let me let me speak again of the beautiful
swimmer who was afraid of coral
No longer tyrannize this seductive subject of my
dreams
The beautiful swimmer was reposing in a bed of lace
and birds
The clothes on a chair at the foot of the bed were
illuminated by gleams the last gleams of coal
The one that had come from the depths of the sky and
earth and sea was proud of its coral beak and great
wings of crape
All night long it had followed divergent funerals toward
suburban cemeteries
It had been to embassy balls marked white satin gowns with
its imprint a fern leaf
It had risen terribly before ships and the ships had not
returned
Now crouched in the chimney it was watching for the
waking of foam and singing of kettles
Its resounding step had disturbed the silence of nights
in streets with sonorous pavements
Sonorous coal coal master of dreams coal
Ah tell me where is that beautiful swimmer the swimmer
who was afraid of coral?
But the swimmer herself has gone back to sleep
And I remain face to face with the fire and shall remain
through the night interrogating the coal with wings of
darkness that persists in projecting on my monotonous
road the shadow of its smoke and the terrible
reflections of its embers
Sonorous coal coal pitiless coal
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------
...But none could embroider his dreams like Desnos! He would go off into a transport, his protuberant eyes taking on a strange light, while the account of his marvelous chimeras gushed from his lips. There were the pursuers and the possessors; visions of the Apocalypse and the procession of its prophets; scenes of mythical violence filled with anguished cries; and "wizards" who now assumed the shape of "Fantomas" (as in the serial thriller of the movies) or now that of Nicholas Flamel, the thirteenth-century alchemist. How like an acrobat, with the greatest of ease, Desnos swung from one millennium to another, or from one continent to another. (Someone in the room was taking it all down stenographically, so that these dreams could be printed afterward.) Whereas the dream recitals of others were mostly boring, Desnos' seemed to come out of a real trance, and were narrated In reality, he had no need of the mesmerist or the turning table in a dark room, for he had other means of stimulating himself to a condition of autohypnosis and uninhibited improvisation. A regular dosage of opium--and an audience of at least one--was all this highly narcissistic personality required in order to function. (The truth about his drug addiction came out some years later, in 1929, on the occasion of a resounding public quarrel between him and his once-beloved master, Breton, to whom he had confessed his private vices.) For all his vices and his periodic outburts of violence, Desnos was one of the most lovable and entertaining of men.
Life Among the Surrealists: Mathew Josephson
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
West Hollywood
Mire and heat so oppressive
Disgruntled, thick, chapped lips
To beat, Jazz from Germany
Post t.v. or precinematography
Malibu or the new Hollyweird homography
With a Russian tinge--Moscow is
Tinsel town upside down
This is what the blacklister didn't ask for.
Disgruntled, thick, chapped lips
To beat, Jazz from Germany
Post t.v. or precinematography
Malibu or the new Hollyweird homography
With a Russian tinge--Moscow is
Tinsel town upside down
This is what the blacklister didn't ask for.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
The Intersection of Poetry and Politics
December 25, 2008
The Intersection of Poetry and Politics
By DWIGHT GARNER
Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Those are pleasant thoughts, but awful poetry — probably the worst three lines Robert Frost ever put to paper. Tellingly it was work for hire: the opening lines of “Dedication,” the poem Frost composed for John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.
Famously, and perhaps blessedly, Frost never had the chance to declaim them. The high wind and strong sun that day conspired to make his typescript unreadable. Unruffled, he pulled a mighty poem from memory, his own “Gift Outright,” with its ringing first line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”
Frost was the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration, and there have been only two others in the almost five decades since: Maya Angelou, at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, and Miller Williams, at Mr. Clinton’s second, in 1997. (Some would include, with an asterisk, James Dickey, who composed a poem that he read at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural gala but not at the inauguration itself.) Now America is about to meet its fourth inaugural poet, a 46-year-old Yale professor named Elizabeth Alexander.
Thus far America’s inaugural poems have been a mixed, motley bunch. Frost’s “Dedication” was stiff and dutiful. (Another sample rhyme: “Heroic deeds were done./Elizabeth the First and England won.”) Ms. Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” was touchy-feely, multi-culti and crammed with shout-outs:
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew The African, the Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The Privileged, the Homeless, the Teacher.
Miller Williams seemed to get it about right. His inaugural poem, “Of History and Hope,” was dignified, with a weather-beaten resonance. It began:
We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs.
(Music fans could not have heard that last line without recalling that Mr. Williams is the father of Lucinda Williams, the venerated singer and songwriter.)
“To have great poetry there must be great audiences, too,” Walt Whitman said. He was talking about the quality of a poet’s readers. But there is little doubt, given the intense global interest in President-elect Barack Obama, that Ms. Alexander’s verse will be broadcast to more people at one time than any poem ever composed. This may not be American poetry’s Academy Award moment. But it is, for Ms. Alexander, an outsize platform.
What the world will hear at Mr. Obama’s inauguration is the work of a woman whose verse makes a sharply different kind of music from that of any of the inaugural poets who have preceded her. The principal obsessions in her four books of verse — race and history, love and family — are played out in poems that can buzz with an electric and angular ellipticity, as in “Emancipation,” printed here in its entirety:
Corncob constellation, oyster shell, drawstring pouch, dry bones. Gris gris in the rafters. Hoodoo in the sleeping nook. Mojo in Linda Brent’s crawlspace. Nineteenth century corncob cosmogram set on the dirt floor, beneath the slant roof, left intact the afternoon that someone came and told those slaves “We’re free.”
At other times her voice is calm and plain-spoken, as in this snippet from the poem “Smile”:
When I see a black man smiling like that, nodding and smiling with both hands visible, mouthing “Yes, Officer,” across the street, I think of my father, who taught us the words “cooperate,” “officer,” to memorize badge numbers, who has seen black men shot at from behind in the warm months north.
Ms. Alexander, who was born in Harlem and raised in Washington, has been on fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Over a recent lunch of shrimp and grits on a snowy day in downtown Cambridge, Mass., she talked about how surprised and flattered she was to be asked to compose a poem, particularly by this president-elect.
“His own use of language, and his respect for it, is so evident,” she said. “He is aware of the kind of power language has, and aware of the kind of care with which we ought to try to speak to each other with as we move forward.”
She is going about making a poem for Mr. Obama, she said, by casting an eye back. “I have read the previous inaugural poems, as well as many others,” she said. “The ones that appeal to me have a sense of focus and a kind of gravitas, an ability to appeal to larger issues without getting corny.” One thing Ms. Alexander wants to do, she said, is speak clearly but artfully. “I don’t want the poem to talk down to some imagined audience,” she said. Among the poets she has been reading for guidance are Virgil, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Is she prepared, I asked, for a Robert Frost moment? What if her manuscript catches fire or blows away? “I am going to have many copies of the poem tucked away,” she replied, laughing. “I really am. In a boot. I’m serious. I will have backups. I’m a mom.”
(Mr. Williams, who knew Frost toward the end of his life, said in an e-mail message: “Some time after he returned from Washington, Frost said to me as we were chatting in Vermont, ‘Miller, if you’re ever asked to read an inaugural poem, be sure and paste it down.’ ”)
Ms. Alexander is not a stranger to politics. Her father, Clifford, was a presidential civil rights adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and secretary of the Army during the Carter administration. Her mother, Adele, teaches African-American women’s history at George Washington University.
Ms. Alexander became friendly with Barack and Michelle Obama when both she and Mr. Obama were teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. Her younger brother, Mark, was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and is working on the Obama transition team.
Ms. Alexander’s first book of poems, “The Venus Hottentot,” was published in 1990. Her other books of poetry are “Body of Life” (1996), “Antebellum Dream Book” (2001) and “American Sublime” (2005), one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also published two books of essays, “The Black Interior” (2003) and “Power & Possibility” (2007).
If there is anything critics and readers get wrong about her poetry, and that of her African-American contemporaries, it is that they “focus on content but forget about form and craft,” Ms. Alexander said. “And to a certain extent that’s O.K. I’m happy if people find something of interest contained in my poems. But they are not just documentaries. It’s been a problem through the ages. African-American poetry has been read sociologically.”
Ms. Alexander is not overly nervous, she said, about performing her inaugural poem. She enjoys reading her work. “By the time you are reading a poem, the real work has been done,” she said. “If I ever get nervous before getting up to read, I look at the poem and say: ‘You’re done. All I have to do is let you out.’ ”
The poetry world will be listening intently. “After eight years of mangled and manipulated language, and the palpable effects of that in the real world, it seems like any gesture toward clarity of expression and dignity of life is welcome,” Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, said in an e-mail message.
“In a way, the poem itself is not the point,” Mr. Wiman added. “I would guess that a president-elect decides to have an inaugural poem in the first place not in the hope of commissioning some eternal work of art, but in order to acknowledge that there is an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture’s language and its political life. That Obama wants to make such a gesture seems to me a pure good — for poetry, yes, but also for the country.”
Republican presidents-elect, it might be worth noting, have thus far been poet-phobic.
A few years after Frost recited “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration, the president had the chance to speak some public words about Frost, who died in 1963 at 88. Less than a month before his own death Kennedy appeared at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.
“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” Kennedy said. “When power leads man towards his arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.”
A little corny? Definitely. But like the best public oration genuine truth and beauty are packed in there as well.
The Intersection of Poetry and Politics
By DWIGHT GARNER
Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Those are pleasant thoughts, but awful poetry — probably the worst three lines Robert Frost ever put to paper. Tellingly it was work for hire: the opening lines of “Dedication,” the poem Frost composed for John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.
Famously, and perhaps blessedly, Frost never had the chance to declaim them. The high wind and strong sun that day conspired to make his typescript unreadable. Unruffled, he pulled a mighty poem from memory, his own “Gift Outright,” with its ringing first line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”
Frost was the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration, and there have been only two others in the almost five decades since: Maya Angelou, at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, and Miller Williams, at Mr. Clinton’s second, in 1997. (Some would include, with an asterisk, James Dickey, who composed a poem that he read at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural gala but not at the inauguration itself.) Now America is about to meet its fourth inaugural poet, a 46-year-old Yale professor named Elizabeth Alexander.
Thus far America’s inaugural poems have been a mixed, motley bunch. Frost’s “Dedication” was stiff and dutiful. (Another sample rhyme: “Heroic deeds were done./Elizabeth the First and England won.”) Ms. Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” was touchy-feely, multi-culti and crammed with shout-outs:
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew The African, the Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The Privileged, the Homeless, the Teacher.
Miller Williams seemed to get it about right. His inaugural poem, “Of History and Hope,” was dignified, with a weather-beaten resonance. It began:
We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs.
(Music fans could not have heard that last line without recalling that Mr. Williams is the father of Lucinda Williams, the venerated singer and songwriter.)
“To have great poetry there must be great audiences, too,” Walt Whitman said. He was talking about the quality of a poet’s readers. But there is little doubt, given the intense global interest in President-elect Barack Obama, that Ms. Alexander’s verse will be broadcast to more people at one time than any poem ever composed. This may not be American poetry’s Academy Award moment. But it is, for Ms. Alexander, an outsize platform.
What the world will hear at Mr. Obama’s inauguration is the work of a woman whose verse makes a sharply different kind of music from that of any of the inaugural poets who have preceded her. The principal obsessions in her four books of verse — race and history, love and family — are played out in poems that can buzz with an electric and angular ellipticity, as in “Emancipation,” printed here in its entirety:
Corncob constellation, oyster shell, drawstring pouch, dry bones. Gris gris in the rafters. Hoodoo in the sleeping nook. Mojo in Linda Brent’s crawlspace. Nineteenth century corncob cosmogram set on the dirt floor, beneath the slant roof, left intact the afternoon that someone came and told those slaves “We’re free.”
At other times her voice is calm and plain-spoken, as in this snippet from the poem “Smile”:
When I see a black man smiling like that, nodding and smiling with both hands visible, mouthing “Yes, Officer,” across the street, I think of my father, who taught us the words “cooperate,” “officer,” to memorize badge numbers, who has seen black men shot at from behind in the warm months north.
Ms. Alexander, who was born in Harlem and raised in Washington, has been on fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Over a recent lunch of shrimp and grits on a snowy day in downtown Cambridge, Mass., she talked about how surprised and flattered she was to be asked to compose a poem, particularly by this president-elect.
“His own use of language, and his respect for it, is so evident,” she said. “He is aware of the kind of power language has, and aware of the kind of care with which we ought to try to speak to each other with as we move forward.”
She is going about making a poem for Mr. Obama, she said, by casting an eye back. “I have read the previous inaugural poems, as well as many others,” she said. “The ones that appeal to me have a sense of focus and a kind of gravitas, an ability to appeal to larger issues without getting corny.” One thing Ms. Alexander wants to do, she said, is speak clearly but artfully. “I don’t want the poem to talk down to some imagined audience,” she said. Among the poets she has been reading for guidance are Virgil, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Is she prepared, I asked, for a Robert Frost moment? What if her manuscript catches fire or blows away? “I am going to have many copies of the poem tucked away,” she replied, laughing. “I really am. In a boot. I’m serious. I will have backups. I’m a mom.”
(Mr. Williams, who knew Frost toward the end of his life, said in an e-mail message: “Some time after he returned from Washington, Frost said to me as we were chatting in Vermont, ‘Miller, if you’re ever asked to read an inaugural poem, be sure and paste it down.’ ”)
Ms. Alexander is not a stranger to politics. Her father, Clifford, was a presidential civil rights adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and secretary of the Army during the Carter administration. Her mother, Adele, teaches African-American women’s history at George Washington University.
Ms. Alexander became friendly with Barack and Michelle Obama when both she and Mr. Obama were teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. Her younger brother, Mark, was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and is working on the Obama transition team.
Ms. Alexander’s first book of poems, “The Venus Hottentot,” was published in 1990. Her other books of poetry are “Body of Life” (1996), “Antebellum Dream Book” (2001) and “American Sublime” (2005), one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also published two books of essays, “The Black Interior” (2003) and “Power & Possibility” (2007).
If there is anything critics and readers get wrong about her poetry, and that of her African-American contemporaries, it is that they “focus on content but forget about form and craft,” Ms. Alexander said. “And to a certain extent that’s O.K. I’m happy if people find something of interest contained in my poems. But they are not just documentaries. It’s been a problem through the ages. African-American poetry has been read sociologically.”
Ms. Alexander is not overly nervous, she said, about performing her inaugural poem. She enjoys reading her work. “By the time you are reading a poem, the real work has been done,” she said. “If I ever get nervous before getting up to read, I look at the poem and say: ‘You’re done. All I have to do is let you out.’ ”
The poetry world will be listening intently. “After eight years of mangled and manipulated language, and the palpable effects of that in the real world, it seems like any gesture toward clarity of expression and dignity of life is welcome,” Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, said in an e-mail message.
“In a way, the poem itself is not the point,” Mr. Wiman added. “I would guess that a president-elect decides to have an inaugural poem in the first place not in the hope of commissioning some eternal work of art, but in order to acknowledge that there is an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture’s language and its political life. That Obama wants to make such a gesture seems to me a pure good — for poetry, yes, but also for the country.”
Republican presidents-elect, it might be worth noting, have thus far been poet-phobic.
A few years after Frost recited “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration, the president had the chance to speak some public words about Frost, who died in 1963 at 88. Less than a month before his own death Kennedy appeared at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.
“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” Kennedy said. “When power leads man towards his arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.”
A little corny? Definitely. But like the best public oration genuine truth and beauty are packed in there as well.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
What is was like.
Jack Spicer, second from left, with members of the staff of
the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College in 1957:
Ida Hodes, Ruth Witt-Diamant and Robert Duncan.
Photo by Harry Redl. Dig the K. Patchen photo in the
Photo by Harry Redl. Dig the K. Patchen photo in the
back. Are Ida and Ruth twins?
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
MEA CULPA
And then the sun exploded
in my soul
and burned it.
I absorbed the flood of grief of mankind and
they thought I cried.
-Katherine L. Cuestas
in my soul
and burned it.
I absorbed the flood of grief of mankind and
they thought I cried.
-Katherine L. Cuestas
Friday, December 19, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
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