The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts

a moment outside of shame

2012-01-22T21:35:00.005-05:00

all day long, snow, slowburn. a blackout night, i wake up on the floor after walking home through the city--climbed a fence, crossed the train tracks, ripped out the seat of my pants, arms abraided, acrid breath, crooked neck. shoes, shirt, jacket all soaked through, in a pile in the kitchen. new marks on my face, fingers, thighs. all vaguely memorable like in a dream.

inventory: sambuca, margaritas, marnier, four four roses. exegesis of all my tattoos. closing time, then night rolling over like the sleek back of a tidal wave.

tomorrow i have to say goodbye. my only mother. i'm tired of this fiction that has my name.

saturday morning rite

2012-01-14T06:48:00.004-05:00

predawn, fall off the couch. there's a pain in my heel that never leaves. put one coat on over the other, check each pocket twice. the bike is in the garage. have to leave for work before the sun. pedal, pedal, breathe the air. eighteenhour workday. saturday paper. slug four roses. the bar feels like home.

formalities

2012-01-06T01:16:00.000-05:00

i’ve spent thirty years at this, and ten years at another, and am so dis-spirited at both endeavors that i barely wish to utter a word in another language—except as a joke. i am at the sad position, in the middle of brodsky’s ‘piazza mattei,’ that i always come to: where the language has bowled me over. this happens every single time in my native tongue in a poem i love, but it is always impossible to respond to two tongues over. that is the sad, inebriate state i’ve spent my conscious life in. i suppose it’s blasé, and unfair, to blaim freud or marx, but i do. they are almost overwhelming paradigms…

libertine

2011-12-06T08:41:00.006-05:00

have been treating myself like shit, though am not at all hedonistical. am nearly dissolute. which is the whole point, i guess. i feel like the milkweed that's climbed up on the rose bush's back and strung his white tendrils all over her, her hips and leaves.

there is the recurring dream--i'm in gorky, at the train station with masha. she's seeing me off to irkutsk, and before i step on the train, i hand her a bottle of windex, then find my seat. she follows me from the platform and cleans the outside of my dirty window, so i'll be able to see the country on my journey. three days and four hours. alone, with a few books and a bag of bread and apples. at irkutsk, i catch the ferry boat up the angara into lake baikal, deep into the middle of the lake. i jump overboard and dive. i can see the bottom, clear water, more than a mile deep, and i go down and come apart like a clod of dirt as i go.

for twentynine years now

the body

has been trying

to outshed the soul

dead skins

attaching themselves

to even the softest wind

yet the soul

has been outmaking

post-script

2011-12-01T13:22:00.007-05:00

have been unusually haunted by mariengof's novel less the lying, and esenin's cruel transgressions. his refusals, first to know, and then even acknowledge his children by zinaida, first wife whom he never managed to divorce despite a number of later marriages. his first abandoned child, the one time he meets him, doesn't warm to esenin. the second one, years later, he sees unexpectedly at a train station with the mother. he says the kid is too dark to be his and walks away.

another anecdote from the book that broke my heart--there is a neighbor in moscow, a widower with a young son, maybe four years old. he tries placing him in a state boarding school, or an orphanage, but ultimately resorts to sitting with the boy on a train up north until he falls asleep, then slipping out and getting a ticket back to moscow alone. problem solved.

stormfist

2011-11-30T11:06:00.006-05:00

every time feels the same, as if i've never been so wet in my life--in my spine, in my bones, the wind like soap in my eyes, pushing upstream like a small black horse. warm, torrential rains came down late last night, that i waded twelve miles through on my red bicycle, its scissoring wheels. my clothes are lying in a puddle in the garage.

in the morning--pneumatic spirit rises back up, head swims. the neponset runs under the mill. the bare arms of the willow sway under the clear sky. take a ride for some eggs, cigarettes, flowers, the brakes miauling each time i squeeze.

am reading mariengof's роман без вранья, memoirs of his friendship with sergei esenin. confronted with the harsh moscow winters, bloated horses being picked apart by dogs and ravens in the gutters, the invaluable real estate of hot water pipes in the communal bathrooms (after their illegal electric heater was confiscated, esenin and mariengof built a bed out of plyboards over the bathtub and toilet in a bathroom that was shared by the whole floor, and put a padlock on the door), but also with esenin's hardness--he battered friends with beer mugs in a drunken stupor, was forcefully indifferent to his abandoned children...my hero, though, in his stovepipe hat.

for twenty-nine years now my body has been trying to outshed its soul, dead skins attaching themselves to even the softest wind, but my soul has been outmaking. the end of november and still warm enough in boston to read on a bench in the park, in a t-shirt, with a cold drink...

daybreak

2011-11-21T17:07:00.002-05:00

we now live on the other side of history (history being the possibility of change through events), seven billion and growing, in gaia’s greenhouse, and yet there is still the hysteria of the original man pressed against the sea looking out at a vessel sailing toward the idea of an island. there is no chance now of our failure, even empires know eternal life and perpetual borders.

mandelstam, in his oratorio on the unknown soldier, revealed the long landscape of the world in an apocalyptic light. now manless russia is a lubricated, deflated balloon. WWII was the last act of the century, a spasm before a cruel but unqualified success, and the atmosphere is stretching the greenflash of daybreak out across the untouched hoarfields and oilfields. he expressed the last genuine concern for the fate of mankind, and everything since has been a fabrication. history became poetry.

the first few lines are a modified translation of that poem.

mealy, arabesque sleet captured

the thousand speeds in a single ray of light

that pressed down

on my retina’s throat with its discolored heel

a mouse that failed to make the morning

curled up on the sidewalk

halfcovered in a wet jacket of first snow

i first mistook for a milkweed husk…

when the sky withdrew

they lay there in the thousands

wounded on the hill

eviscerated floss informing the wind

weightless, unwet

climbing the blue as high as they could get

first snow, first day of school

2011-10-28T09:06:00.003-04:00

put jack on the schoolbus. went inside and washed my face. climbed the walls a little, then went through the house gathering stray books from the bedside, bathroom counter, kitchen table, mudroom, from backpacks and grocery bags, and gave them all back to the bookshelves. recycled an old stack of magazines and newspaper clippings. let the dog out to piss on the hoary grass.

last night was the first snow of the season—rain to sleet to lightasair as the night fell. i passed out eggnogs at the bar, told everybody the story of how i’d cried that morning.

i try to think back to who i was, ridiculously: selfless but trying to imagine a younger self in order to prove the lie that i am now somebody. i’ve been riding my velik home from the bar latenights through three winters already, in nearly every blizzard and nor’easter. tomorrow another storm is coming, but i made arrangements to leave work early and catch the train. my self these days compensates for its lack of inner resources.

there are still scentless, red roses blooming on the bush in the yard on the corner at pleasant hill. cold sun comes up. i put my boy on the bus again.

i want to go

to the ocean

today

a ways away

though i know

i have

certain obligations

we make

a self

in the act

of looking back

i feel

i’ve lost something

of that

he himself might his quietus make

2011-10-23T20:53:00.003-04:00

the bees danced back and forth in the drunk wilderness

of your body

blades drawn, waiting to burst forth

and lick the flowers

your whole life you loved the black poppies and the slatterns

the leopards and the dandelions

as much as you could but

less than most

the price you paid—

your song, the lower lobe of your left ear

eve

2011-10-04T08:32:00.005-04:00

in the afterlife of the wind

at the edge of the city

waiting for the split second

of hesperidean light that hits the water

when day ends

euterpe, branches twisting to and fro,

leaned in

to hear the wide mouth of the river

speak low—

there, there…

drunk on counting out my eight legs

and with only the slenderest filiation

i tried to cross the ocean

my breath disrupted like milkweed

as sleek, white boeings hit the air

i'm gonna take morphine and die

2011-08-30T10:17:00.004-04:00

erin trieb, fotoconfabulist, took this shot of my ghost as it escaped to new york city for the hurricane, while i was dropping darkandstormies on copper down the block from harvard law. wind and rain frenchkissed the shingles and put a few oak trees down to sleep in my neighborhood, then tiptoed out north without tucking us in.

sometimes i live in the country

sometimes i live in the town

sometimes i have a great notion

to jump in the river and drown

irene, goodnight

goodnight, irene

i'll see you in my dreams

piss-perfect dream and book

2011-08-26T10:15:00.006-04:00

in a dream, there are people that i know, a place that seems familiar, but out of season. you and i have a conversation made up of words i keep around. because i'm getting older, there is a narrator, a god, above the scene, afraid to wake up and lose track of those he loves, barely remembers, the things that have changed form below, awaiting the judgement.

i do wake up, in a pose that seems familiar, but looking at the wrong wall, wondering if i'm laying next to...you. i am. and jack, febrile, in a restless sleep with a damp forehead.

hurricane irene is skating the coast like a fist.

i finished vladimir sorokin's DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK, a czardom in future russia that's committing today's and yesterday's same surreal atrocities. rape theater and cetera. some scenes have the disturbing quality of SPIRITED AWAY, with their gluttony and cartoonish lust, and ghostly drug-fueled sauna scenes. too light-hearted in someways to be dystopian. satire, then, but not cruel, even though drenched in cruelty. giddy adventures of gladhanding and highway robbery. public executions and streams of profanity as political protest from the russian diaspora radio. here is CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, rewritten:

'the un-fucking-believable blow of the butt-fucking axe hit the goddamn temple of the triply-gang-banged old bag, facilitated piss-perfectly by her cunt-sucking short height. she cried out cumly and suddenly collapsed on the jism-covered, shit-paneled floor, although that rotten pussy-hole of a hag had time to raise both of her ass-licking hands to her fuckin' bare-ass pimped-up head...'

here's the russian, for students:

'Охуенный удар невъебенного топора пришелся в самое темя триждыраспронаебаной старухи, чему пиздато способствовал ее мандаблядски малый рост. Она задроченно вскрикнула и вдруг вся как-то пиздапроушенно осела к непроебанному полу, хотя и успела, зассыха гниложопая, поднять обе свои злоебучие руки к хуевой, по-блядски простоволосой голове…'

a moment at my desk

2011-08-10T10:35:00.010-04:00

my dog is gone two months now, probably never to return, but the rubber plant in the back room has recovered from her interrogations and can come down from the top shelf. jackson's watching a puppet show on the telik, his mind as perfect as a smoke tree. roof troubles in the house we rent. the landlord is having a hard time making his ends meet, which i'm shamelessly unconcerned about, especially when the rain touches my good furniture.

i put on maxine kumin's paper shroud and feel like my husband just died, as he did twenty years ago, and the barely bearable immediacy of her irony. her doppelganger haunts a chekhov story in an old suit in an even older century.

which reminds me it is august, and in august klimt gives me a kiss for the whole world, a beautiful obscenity wrapped in a golden choir. i'm saving up my bottle tops for movie tickets, magazine subscriptions, and bottles. peas are blooming and birds bathing out the window. i am a nation of one, a debt with no figure, a soul less collateral. but a good day is when the bluejay sings and the dog i have left me chases after the song with murderous intent

a russian girl from the bar where i tend sent me a letter with a little poem by solovyov, and i spent the night translating a rough draft:

'бедный друг, истомил тебя путь'

poor girl, the road has run you ragged

come to me, rest your weary eyes

lay down your crumpled flowers

it’s dark and night has fallen down

where you were, which way you came

i care too much to ask now

but if and when you call my name

i’ll press you close without a sound

time and death reign the world over

but don’t call them master

while all must tumble into darkness

still the rays of love hold their ground

confidence play

2011-07-27T23:29:00.003-04:00

the walls are wet

with morning dew

maybe we were meant

to suck in the poison

too

pass it inward like a vision

conversant

in the old mendacities

out and out

time and again

so we could say

confidently

that we knew

what was

what

miasma and the spectacle in translation

2011-06-20T18:42:00.006-04:00

am considering translating the last finished novel of russian writer konstantin vaginov--bambocciata.

the title refers to a style of painting influenced by pieter van laer--small-canvas street scenes/caricatures of ordinary and low-class people in rome. van laer (see his 'the flagellants' above) was called il bamboccio (poppet) as an indication of his stature and the size of his paintings.

night thoughts, dyi milk punch, and somebody else's poems: cures for suicide

2011-06-12T23:53:00.005-04:00

halfway through june, with klimt's kiss staring at me from the calendar on the wall. twenty-seven, twenty-eight was when they all killed themselves, or tried for the first time. too tired right now to name names, and too sober to add to the list.

a second milk-punch curdling on the kitchen counter--raspberry-infused hornitos, a blacktea-mint-papaya simple, keylimes and cream. i'm learning my lesson from the first (citruspeel pisco, avocado, greentea, strawberry, pecan) that's at the bar, in the throes of clarification (it has to settle and get cloth-strained several times) and tastes like heaven, which is to say, at arm's reach.

there's still the pesk of obligation--i wish i could do it and drink it myself. but for now i have to make do with one eye over my shoulder, and then give it away.

it's got me thinking of o'hara:

'stag club' by frank o'hara

a prickly beer's like

snow on your asshole--

all the asphodels farting

through a poem by robert burns.

joys of interminable beers!

teeth green as grass, the kiss

under the table upside down

mushrooming and sweet sun

over the bitches, their pears.

notes from the back of the bar, part 5

2011-05-09T09:25:00.005-04:00

whitewall wheels

blessed by the patron saint of may

and baptized in the seine

with twenty men

she sailed the knockabout

and her hair like cinnamon

come to serena

and listen as they play

el corrido por la casa noble

a late note to the difficult one

2011-04-21T08:07:00.005-04:00

w.s. graham wrote, in a letter to his late friend, bryan wynter (see the meanders of paint above)--'this is only a note to say how sorry i am you died. you will realise what a position it puts me in...speaking to you and not knowing if you are there is not too difficult, my words are used to that.' graham's dialogue-elegies have a shakespearean intensity to them; his dark dialogues, his greenock dialogues, are educational. he knows where the answers must come from. he is trying to hear himself speak, and he gains significantly from that kind of listening. he is the ghosts of his friends. it is the key talent that distinguishes real poets.
it has been on my mind now that the flowers are growing again in the garden. tulips getting their heads torn off by anonymous visitors, grasses all ripped up by the dogs, jays and cardinals and finches and starlings skirmishing for seeds. just yesterday i planted the foxgloves that had been germinating in the fridge ('i know i make symbol of the foxglove on the wall, it is because it knows you'). it is the first time in many years that we have had a chance at a real garden, after years of apartments with trashfilled yards, toxic dirt and desert droughts, now a beautiful backyard and a box, rows, hedges, and cetera.
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what does it matter if the words
i choose, in the order i choose them in,
go out in a darkness i know
nothing about, there to be let
in and entertained and charmed
out of their master's orders? and yet
i would like to see where they go
and how without me they behave...
('approaches to how they behave')
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william, i think i am ready
if you are
to speak to you

i know enough to know
what to expect

how you will receive
my eager message--
with an air of indifference

but the wind
on my street is anything but
is almost scottish

almost april
and it whips around the naked maple
in a language you
would understand

x x x

wild animals have torn up
the lawn

how can i be certain
if they sought prey or shelter

or if ever
they got what they were after

now the days are longer
and i will try

to keep later watch
be a better master

x x x

i think you may
be trying to say something
and i want to set aside
the words

like the packet
of foxglove seeds
waiting in the icebox for
the earth

whenever i think
the last frost has passed she shuts
her doors under a shell of mist
outwaiting

the time when
i will be once more
ready for you to speak...

rome

2011-03-24T09:27:00.004-04:00

the roman walls sprawling up from the right banks of the tiber have arranged themselves, like lips: into the instruments of a language. at the crest of the hill, overlooking the rest of rome, the american academy hosted a distinct constellation of asterisks, all decorated and all implicated, in honor of joseph brodsky. adam zagajewski, derek walcott, mary jo salter, roberto calasso, boris khersonskii (?), and mark strand read joseph's poetry out loud inside the villa aurelia for the academy's fellows and distinguished guests.

adam zagajewski, on joseph's trials of soviet persecution:
he was young and beautiful, and he was a genius and he knew it.

derek walcott, on what joseph wanted out of his translators:
he wanted a meter, not pentameter, and he was changing the english language. idiots couldn't see what he was doing [in more than words].

mark strand, on legacy:
i don't think they read joseph anymore--or me, or derek, or anybody.

bar notes

2011-03-02T22:15:00.006-05:00

tonight, a compromise--comprised of: cuervo, lime, simple, bitters...inspired
in the next few days i need: kaffir lime leaves, limes, slivovitz, creme de banane, and cetera

i am on my way to rimes, drinking peroni and campari

maxim reports the home-turf beer fest--a chili hops, a barleywine, tornado bigfoot, lites, heavies

new england's mercury's on a slalom race into march

am internally disputing the legitimacy of aged ice

tia maria + bailey's + reposado +dash of mole bitters = mashenka

which celebrity is drinking conjure? our dishwashers are taking notes

we have an in for the new 4roses mariage! need to follow up

mango daquiri los angelenos is: mango rum, mango, lime, dash simple...on the rocks with an ancho/superfinesugar/garlic rim

mischief & mayhem zigzag into a translation of the godfather, the last samurai sips a prickly rieslinj, od's on agricole, brags about a red vodka pre (CCCP), the genesis of burrs makes a monastery, old vines freeze and squeeze, and is it peru that keeps the pre-phylloxera dream alive?

my beard is nearly long enough to sop up such things

implications, a marriage song

2011-02-04T00:16:00.006-05:00

you've come

to expect it of me

blood's like piss

i pass one as often

as the other

no telling where

or when

we fell into this pattern

you, with your patient expectation

my eyes full of amenity

and digression

we know each other

but not what

that might possibly mean

aftermath of the LS reading in cambridge.

2011-01-26T13:21:00.003-05:00

got to the pierre menard gallery sunday night along the snowpiled alleys--with a bag of wine and a backpack of books and egg pastries. the coldest night of the year. my fingers were purple when i stepped inside and took off my coat and fidgeted with my threebutton jacket.
despite the new pain in my left heel, i'm still that same old someone, bound and determined to find sybil when i close my eyes to read.
in all the endless precipitation this january, i'm in a dry spell, drinkthinking.
the reading was a beautiful tribute to my hero, joseph brodsky, whose shadow of a ghost reformed under the track lights, warm podium and streetcooled pinotgris wine.
all arrived, and did the unthinkable: bought books, armloads. something in their bodies, i guess, was convinced by our conviction.

little star #2 release party

2011-01-12T16:10:00.003-05:00

the asterisks line up in cambridge for a night of poetry and wine--
jan23, 7p @ pierre menard (10 arrow st, cambridge MA)--
to celebrate the second issue of little star and to honor joseph brodsky
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purchase an issue with us, or on-line here

the year in poetry, part 4: jim harrison's IN SEARCH OF SMALL GODS

2010-12-31T19:32:00.005-05:00

'friends'
by jim harrison

dogs, departed companions,
i told you that the sky would fall in
and it did.
how will we see each other again
when we're without eyes?
we'll figure it out
as we used to when you led me back
to the cabin in the forest in the dark.

the year in poetry, part 3: liam powell's A SERIES OF HYPOTHETICALS

2010-12-31T19:22:00.007-05:00

'a series of hypotheticals'
by liam powell

we are lovers, a strange conflation

of odors and burrs

without narrative

the year in poetry, part 2: ben mazer's JANUARY 2008

2010-12-31T16:42:00.004-05:00

(page 19)
by ben mazer

i hunt the houses where you left your mark
in wooden objects and paint surfaces
for him or her. the hesitating dark
unveils your love in words that never cease
illuminating rooms that we have left
or you left earlier, replaying scenes
where secrets whisper louder and arrest
the underground oblivion of our dreams.
because you put a gun to love my love
dies full of bullets under the plane tree.
you are laughing almost from above
at nothing really, what we choose to see
because you meant in doing what you did
the full extent of love before you died.

the year in poetry, part 1: aaron fagan's ECHO TRAIN

2010-12-31T16:28:00.006-05:00

'delirium's elegance'
by aaron fagan

in paris,
in a life
before
this one,
i rode a
stationary
bicycle in
the cellar
of a salon
to keep
hairdryers
running
upstairs,
through
electricity
shortages,
just after
the war,
for dior.

new year's preparations

2010-12-31T11:20:00.005-05:00

am going back out into it for the third winter in a row. predawns riding through boston on my bicycle, through the snow and sleet, to get home from work at the bar. the charles is icing over as always. it is more relaxing than i remember, getting intimate with all the seasons.

to the liquor store for madeira and blackstrap rum, for eggnog, for a party.
am considering making a little list--the year in poetry. the year in music is already on my ipod (johnny cash's last, tom petty's and josh rouse's and bettye lavette's and the national's and punch brothers' latest, martha wainwright's edith piaf revival (all french all live in NYC)). the year in poetry should be posted as one poem a piece from each collection i loved. will post in discerption over the course of the day.
we need to finishing repainting the bathroom. we need things to put on the walls...

sorry, we made a slight change in plans. for new year's eve, cheese and spumante, at home. for new year's day/night, eggnog with bacardi anejo and calvados, at friends'. the shopping is done, now my last poem of the year:
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my body is far out
being rocked by the waves
waiting for me to find it
and set it straight

the small, wild creatures
that fell under my poetry
lifeandlimb
come back now
with strange faces
that call me
brother
father
friend
say
lend a hand

well, you can have it
my name
my wife and son
my late nights
under water

i wake up and
every bone
fiber of my flesh
has its own intention
we move
a herd
through the kitchen
and the blue shadows of morning
i smoke a cigarette
i drink a glass of whiskey
i wait for a song
to come

notes towards contemplating a pivot

2010-12-29T11:47:00.013-05:00

nowadays, nothing really is unfashionable, though i think it should be said that a preponderance of our densest poetry relies on allusion and reference to cause its sinking feeling. [as readers] we've learned to hook on to words and phrases as our portals to intention, so what can we do with the naif who still insists on navigating with code and trope (which is to insist on originality, tropes being the bases of myths, and myths being the shibboleths of educations)? they are the basic remove from the vogelschreien that all our prettiest poets were once obsessed with imitating. ashbery is one such poet, building a referendum of birdcalls that have given up their sources, though he is decidedly diatonous, a song machine.
one answer is, to be the minor ashbery, meeting him halfway. pastiches with purpose. the difference here is human error, which ashbery has every-one believing he's somehow circumnavigated (that is the implicit claim that his detractors and augmentors routinely make). these qualified imitators are the preponderance of allusionists that have cut their own umbilical cords. it's a deadend, it seems to me. there's nowhere to go for the orpheus who is terrified of looking back. he can only sing the old songs, insisting on progress. he's cursed, haunted, by the thought of substance immemorial. when he finally gets torn to pieces, his head will spin in the current. and ashbery is a puny river to drown in, though time will be the better judge of that than i.
the poetry that insists on being read through is hermeneutic, wants to be known in toto. for the poet, this amounts to authority, remaking the self that is lost to time, a record of a second self suggested by the genius of the first. we should make our most fathoming thoughts mnemonic, and keep them to ourselves even as we commit them to paper and publishment. the reader, likewise, finds in the otherastext the possibility of a self.

thanksgiving songs

2010-11-26T09:24:00.008-05:00

winter songs are all premature birth and long hope for a first chance to thrive. there has been much ado lately (that is, historically) about the death/dirth of our poetic culture, which--even if it were true--of course wouldn't be a bad thing. it seems poetry is invading our culture beyond the saturation point. but it is all manufacture, none of it mnemonic, which is why when we come upon a true value in poetic terms (henri cole, jim harrison, maxine kumin all succeeded in their [spiritual] 'reminders' this season) we can gratefully let the rest go, it melts like sweetsmelling, foul ambergris in the frictive heat their thoughts make.

i know a poet who is clinging to life right now, on the cusp of finding his signature. let us give thanks to the necessary survival of the few important poets. thanksgiving is the last and best place to lay out our sins, and successes, as our overcomings. now, some poems herewith committed to [a sort of] memory:
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i am thankful for the mind that grows supple
as it walks across the volga when it is a frozen highway.
i am thankful for the distance that separates
my body from my history.
i am thankful for the ways in which i may allow myself
to forget, which are legion.
i am thankful for the thread that is committed to memory
that leads from the dark ocean to--you.
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boston in november
traipsesparrow
in a yellow coat
or
yellow coat
flung in the corner
after rain

roots like eels tying knots
in the mud
lockjaw on the river
logjam on the northtowest
in the lowlow sky
heavens' tall ghostmaples
about to drop their tired arms
of white leaves
on the day
.
.
.
two weeks into october
and still summer
according to the wind
but white buds of wings on the rain
and lights up in the trees
it was getting a little lonely
in boston

i pissed in the river
and felt like a fish
ruling the roost
i sat down with
no hand to rest my head in
i walked off down the road
until i faded like a moth
into thin air
.
.
.
of course
there is no way
to haunt
the old places
just nip
at their heels
and sing
like a herding dog
like we used to
out in the dark
of night
in the dead of
life
drunker
than the skunks
choking
on their own blood
on the shoulder
of the road
two paces
ahead of us
on the way
to what we used
to call home

salutations for david wondrich

2010-11-19T09:44:00.004-05:00

transcendalist gin
('men say they know many things
the artsandsciencesandathousandappliances')
led us to the old orsamus willard house
a road through the smoldering bodies wound
back in on itself
and there was his stone
and twenty schoolboys sweating
brandyandmadeiraandplantationrum
one chewing mint like a farmer

five fingers in the punch bowl
outside the omniparker
the still creek flowing
like the punjabi
into twenty schoolboys
and lupec blondes with tabacky sticks
rode their swizzle sticks into the daylightsavings
sunset

queer birds

2010-11-17T13:10:00.002-05:00

we're queer birds
sitting here
waiting for the snow

heads barely above
sea level
knuckles white as soap
bathing under
the kite
of the rising moon
refusing
to dry out
we stand
as straight as we can

brown grasses shoot up
out of the water
in the bay
saintlier
than we
more responsible
to the wind

last friday

2010-11-10T00:35:00.002-05:00

the owl and the pussycat on winthrop island, in their own bodies all the time. i walked down to pussy's door with a wilted newspaper in my hand like a bouquet of flowers, and we talked awhile about this year that is about to die. we should have held hands. two poems that will change the world are floating in manuscript around winthrop.
i walked back into boston with the dawn soaring up over my head, and the brown grasses on the water like matted hair, blown into frenzied peaks by the wind. landbridge, pharmacy, baygulls, a myopic look back into odyssey as jet planes crossed the boston city hairline receding in the mist.
it was always my fear to one day lose my mind, my dream to walk with a limp. hardly the former, barely the latter. or else vice-versa. there's no telling in the drift between seasons. the forecast: a wet, limp winter.

best american poetry 2010

2010-10-14T13:51:00.004-04:00

a quick note on the new best american poetry--which, like any survey is mostly a disappointment of qualities. the best two poems are the entries by the perennial john ashbery ('alcove') and budding gabriel gudding ('and what, friends, is called a road'). anyone who's been following the online literary review, THE CRITICAL FLAME, will realize how presciently it has realized the scene of the true best and reflected the truest landscape of our scene--to wit, see henry gould's review of gabriel gudding's notebook two issues back, which was well-received by many, though not by gudding himself; and my own reviews which tackle the looming spectre of ashbery over the entire american poetry. nota bene: gudding's poem was publ'd at action, yes, who's newest edition features a chunk of my translations. so, good going, folks at BAP for having your finger on the fresh journals of note.

also, in posthumities, there was a decent poem by the good poet, the late great william stanford, and a better poem by the lesser poet, the late james schuyler.

sergei esenin has been using me!

2010-10-06T16:40:00.006-04:00

check out the latest issue of AGNI, to see my translations of the late, great esenin and gumilev bookend a very fine interview with donald hall, some mediocre charles simic ('the ubiquitous'), and cetera.

i've been thinking a lot of the terrible political power of ghosts. notice how esenin has used me to channel marvell and frost, and--most touchingly--brodsky. his own poem, in my translation, is pulling them all forward through time. they are his precursors now. he is my coy mistress, he eulogises me.

summer is over and it is time to return to old, unfinished projects: the silver generation of russian poets has been so strangely defined and poorly represented in my own language and country that i am constantly revising it--first with the groundbreaking work of UDP and one eugene ostashevsky; also by the fulcrum founders, philip nikolayev and katia kapovich, and their quiet advocacy; and the peaceable philip metres. but there is still a spectral myopia after their visions are confused, and two of the poets i love are still left out. i am going back to konstantin vaginov and anatoly mariengof to see what i can do...

also, new translations of pasternak and tsvetaeva at Action, Yes

down

2010-09-30T09:53:00.006-04:00

down

we sank down beneath a dark line
and were guided by our fear into a pocket of air

we enclosed the yard
rocked the infant spiders in our arms

now my sperm swim restlessly through the ether
at all hours
in all directions

mangy, feisty boston is down
and it looks like rain

the day is like our unfinished train station's
endless, overcost erections

the sky bears down
against my spine

jackson goes to class

2010-09-28T13:07:00.005-04:00

by way of celebrating my son's first day of [pre-]school, a few of our favorite poems. these are all good'uns for littl'uns.

'the owl and the pussycat,' by edward lear

'the giraffe,' by nikolai gumilev

'weathers,' by thomas hardy

'green grow the rashes,' by robert burns
.
.
.
and, lastly, 'the skunk,' by me

the skunk barely knows how to run away
not that he's slow, just--unafraid

he can adjust his nozzles to take careful aim
or if he's chased (a rare event), cast back a spray

that has a stink no predator with a nose can bear
be it cat or wolf or hound or--bear

but the most intimidating poison nature makes
is impotent to scare off owl or snake or--car

his second defense is for man-made terrain
camouflaged as a no-passing lane

Moving Day

2010-08-18T11:39:00.002-04:00

The Last Sonnet From Peter's Hill

The black birds as they leave the world
Cry not a few names into the light--
Love, want, lack
Circle back to dress a hawthorn's hundred arms
Her flowers white
And bees suck the dew from their eyes

I no more choose when and where I fall
Than the leaves
But if I had wings I'd touch every startled bud
For a hundred miles
And these dark hills would start fire
Behind me

Now I lay down my breath
A loaf of black bread for the flies

new spring, seen from 3 a.m.

2010-04-28T17:05:00.001-04:00

march was historically precipitous, monday and tuesday nights i got off work and soaked my head, riding my bike under the cloudbursts—through harvard square, across the charles—where there’s a good place to pee on the bank under the budding catalpas—over the highway and the switchyards and into allston, past the exodus of brookline bars (or, rather, through), in and out of the village toward the emerald necklace, a dark sidepath meandering uphill to jamaica pond, and back down the forest hills and the arboretum and the T depot and home. every night nearly soaked to the bone in cold rain with a beer in my jacket pocket. all this while a hundred tributaries and rivulets overflowed and dams breached and black roads unraveled all over massachusetts.

jack and maria would make a sound and toss when i undressed on the back porch and hung my wet clothes over my bike before stepping inside.

there are times when you could read my mind off of a label, when i’m so tired i lay awake between rooms, trying to listen to each creature breathe.

we’ve been in boston almost three years, and someone reminded me the other day that all my cells have replaced themselves again. i’m no longer who i was. now the mesas, the dead dogs of my childhood, la tierra encantada, are a false memory. new england is the only home this body has ever known. i am a second husband after myself, a shadow of a father. i feel free...and old. april has been almost tender, with all the hawthorns and dandelions and cherries and crababbles in impossibly early bloom. the entrance to the park is under a bridge, where the commuter trains rumble past with hi-fi. the first thing you see coming in is the wall of bamboo off to one side, and to the other side a path to a forked birch and a willow, and the green unmown grass where possums and cardinals are known to hide. this is my first, best, definition of home. the place i was raised, the place i was born—secondary, tertiary. and my immediate family has become tangent. there are such things as weddings, a man becomes a limb of his own life, his brothers and sisters become distant constellations.

he can’t speak yet, but jack already knows certain poems by heart—the owl and the pussycat, hardy’s weathers, green grow the rashes.

i spend the afternoons walking with him, rehearsing my own rhymes, closing gate latches whenever.

it is almost may today.

a book review prevised, myself on harrison abbreviated

2010-03-10T21:54:00.004-05:00

the poet in the poems (man outside of time) is a brother to sergei esenin--but i, today, need a medium to channel a strange ghost. what does he say to me? jim harrison is esenin's trueblue kithandkin, and a living man with an entourage of chihuahua crows. and in his poems, a voice between shoulder blades invoking a space between the wars, i find a certain comfort.

i was allowed to publish a review of harrison's newest book, in search of small gods, for the critical flame. that review is here.

my interpretations of esenin and gumilev lyrics are forthcoming in the spring AGNI, like birds on the wing. there is something in a poet wants a lesser language to conquer, and waits for it...

follow-up on the gitmo blacksite 'suicides'

2010-03-01T17:16:00.005-05:00

my elegy to al-zahrani was posted below, and now harper's has written a full expose (pardon my french) of the blatant cover-up of three detainees murdered (probably tortured intentionally to death) in guantanomo bay in 2006. research teams have scoured redacted documents and officers have come forward to contradict the official narrative fabricated by the u.s. gov't.

thanks to scott horton for bringing this to light, and also to all who've been on the ball (hat-tip to andrew sullivan for first alerting me to this particular story via his 'daily dish'). it's haunted me now for months.

the article is here.

for tom, getting out of the army

2010-02-03T10:37:00.001-05:00

i have a friend
who dressed wounds
in a bad time

because he didn't know
himself

extending my apologia on intention in poetry and its translation

2010-02-01T15:32:00.004-05:00

this is supposing that poetry is about language, which is as obvious as assuming that a medium confirms a shape:

'what language is poetry about? generally, it is about the language it is in.'
--justin e. h. smith, on stefan george

(i'll overlook his misguided insistence that our 'english' is properly anglo-saxon and germanic, which he dismisses out of hand at the outset ('now i understand that from a historical-linguistic point of view, languages do not have essences') but then nevertheless argues throughout.)

treatise on the pursuit of meaning, ending in a kafkan correspondence and a lyric for jackson james

2010-01-26T10:55:00.006-05:00

i want should to be valuable
i want a goal to be noble

but want is the operative word
wanting is meaning
.
.
.
unless the house is empty, i have to read in the bathroom with the door closed and the fan on. a father is in a constant struggle to be alone, not because he deplores his family and struggles against them, but because of his struggle against his own love and his own newly loving self. the lonely man isn’t necessarily selfish, nor the family man at any risk of losing himself. rather, the family man is most at risk of losing the other, the surprise of irony that is alien w/in himself. and at home w/my family, my reading life , the life to unbecome me, is always under assault, is abused by the wife and coveted by the son. i’m not ashamed, but whether i am or no, this age has made it a special kind of perversion—of the reader, swan-man, archaic writer, modern thinker. it means being cornered, not that i’m resentful, just anal-expulsive-cum-literary mole person, anxious (as a copper mushroom cap w/my freudigris patina), and enervated by the non-events in the newspapers and television magazines.

o, to chase the images in front of you, running forward after them though they are really plummeting straight down through all atmosphere, all matter, and into the earth! we should stand under, instead, with our mouths open, like the dead, who have adopted the proper posture of wisdom, only too late. or like a sink or toilet, with the filth of the gods always somewhere above.
.
.
.
a letter from kafka to milena jesenska (tr., from the german, by p. boehm):

it's a long time since i wrote to you, frau milena, and even today i'm writing only as the result of an incident. actually, i don't have to apologize for not writing, you know after all how i hate letters. all the misfortune of my life--i don't wish to complain, but to make a generally instructive remark--derives, one could say, from letters, or from the possibility of writing letters. people have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always--and as a matter of fact not only those of other people, but my own. in my case this is a special misfortune of which i won't say more, but at the same time also a general one. the easy possibility of letter-writing must--seen merely theoretically--have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. it is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient, but also with one's own ghost, which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. how on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold--all else goes beyond human strength. writing letters, however, means to undress before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. it is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. but it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. the opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. the ghosts won't starve, but we will perish.
.
.
.
the infant scream of a fascist
who wishes he could run faster than the hound

o, the feral hounds and the well-groomed wolves
the skins he grows into

and out of to become a man
to hunt the genius of the wasps

the mimic wasps that look like winds
that wake up in the fists of flowers like thumbelinas

and break their fast chasing the perpendicular rain
and in the wake of their flight, jackson’s own genius takes form

unready for the storm, since...

2010-01-15T16:52:00.010-05:00

january's put up a weak fight so far, and the cold sides of the hills can barely hold onto their blankets of snow, yet my mother, who's spent the last four decades in highdesert-dustbowl-parkinglot-southwest towns was out of sorts while she visited to get a rare week to spend with her (fourth) grandchild. will her visit even register w/him?

jackson's favorite thing's to watch me doing certain things--plucking black leaves from the trees and crumbling them in my palm, walking backwards away from him, petting the dog, turning pages. i just passed through an invisible breakdown, and have surfaced again w/o a mark or sound, promoted, and with a new recipe to make my own orange cognac liqueur (two parts ketel, one part meukow and leftover slices of overripe valencias).

we live at the edge of boston, in a haitian neighborhood...

i pass over the frozen charles a handful of times every week, and the geese wait for me. there is an expensive bottle of bourbon on top of the fridge, and two half-empty bottles inside. i have one black leather belt, one white tie, an empty shoe box (and today i bought my first suit jacket at the goodwill in jamaica plain!)

jim harrison is in search of small gods, and while jackson naps, we two like to sit together on the porch under the storms with a nip of four roses while i try nihilate those same gods in soundless debate.
.
.
.
chain lightning winding through the sky's grey rot
you are a small god
eating your own lips
you are the genius of a snake

the earth is sprouting wings in empty lots
through salt and poison
where is my heart, tripping through the rain on bourbon winds?
my shoulders ache, heavy to the bone

waiting on a foldout chair in a flask
half-full of cigarettes--eaves holding the storm at arm's length--
for maria, in her poor wet body
melting like sugar as she races home
half a mile past the end of the line

Little Star debuts, in honor of Joseph Brodsky

2009-12-15T13:51:00.011-05:00

i'm not advertised on that [pretty long] list including most of the writers in the inaugural issue of ann kjellberg's new literary journal LITTLE STAR, because, i think i'm supposed be a secret, a newly discovered upandcomer. we'll see how that pans out.
besides the totality of living nobel poets writing in english being represented, ann's landed a double fistful of literary stalwarts that can only ironically be referred to as asterisks. a number of them were acquainted with my hero iosif brodskii, by the way, the ghost to whom the journal is dedicated.
that ann, brodsky's literary executor, has published my elegy to him, is a true honor, and is so satisfying i almost feel like i can lay down in the snow and die w/o even trying to make an angel. here's a sneak peek:

when anna died, doctors sewed her ghost into your thigh
and a faery doctored your visa so you didn't have to stand in line

i.m. yasser talal al-zahrani

2009-12-14T15:12:00.004-05:00

you are a goat
and when you are gone
the gods will cut out your throat and organs
before you are buried
without which the ghost cannot survive
without which there is no history

all that there will be is the terrible riddle
of how you died

lost oneiric

2009-11-24T13:37:00.001-05:00

i had a terrible dream--i was trying to leave a party in the dark city after some rain, and in the alley i felt lacerations on the back of my hands and milkweed started violently erupting out of the skin. it felt like being sliced with a knife and i ripped the sprouts out at the roots but soon they were making those fantastic seed pods that explode in daystar dandruff. i woke up and my eyes were crusted over. was it conjunctivitus? i recovered in a couple hours. last night i was scratching my eyes foolishly. a wonderful dream. at the party, somebody broke a coffee table and there was plenty to drink--bitters and strange secret recipes. i can imagine the piles of herbs, roots, fungi to make a monk's liquor, and the old manuscripts that can only be imagined behind lock and key.
well, the dream was very painful, and then faded away like a dream.

old classifieds were quotidian enough to surprise

2009-11-09T10:16:00.003-05:00

"ex-green beret will do anything legal for cash"
--from the san francisco chronicle, a long time ago

...

2009-10-22T02:54:00.001-04:00

all the old gods have been buried
in starkling fields of ellipses

you were born in a small boat in the middle of the ocean
and never made it to shore
no one knows which ocean

and now the seas have lost their given names
and i’ve beached myself on some northern strand

this isn’t where we were going
this isn’t even like that
i can remember when
one thing came after the other
like it was yesterday

and when i woke up this morning
i was impossibly sober

russian poets, a new everyman's pocket anthology, part 3/1

2009-10-06T15:48:00.004-04:00

'up in the hay one evening, darkling' by afanasy fet (translated by a. myers)

up in the hay one evening, darkling,
with face toward the heavens i lay,
while choirs of stars alive and sparkling
lay strewn along the milky way.

the earth, a fitful dream, insensate,
receded swiftly out of sight,
and i, of paradise first inmate [?],
there face to face beheld the night.

was i then swept through midnight's chasm,
or did the star swarm sweeep toward me?
it seemed a mighty hand in spasm [?]
had grasped and held me, dangling free.

with mind in disarray, heart-sickened,
i measured with my eye the fall
down which with every passing second
i drowned and drowned beyond recall.
.
.
.
'a field' by afanasy fet (translated by me)

upon a haystack, on a southern night
i lay down, head swimming in firmity
while a choir trembled o’er the lea
all around me, quick and light

the earth, unseeming as a dream
spinning aimless past infinity
and i, as if adam in Paradise
was first to look into the changing face of night

did the vast midnight rebates that shape the dark
with stars fall down on me or i rise up agin them?
or did He hold me in his strong hands
o’er the chasm?

i measured the unfathomable expanse
sky and abyss confused in a mortal glance
into which i am eternally, irreparably drowning
or rising, never to come down again

(note--the two strange abuses myers commits in the name of rhyme)

by way of apology, for words i'm not actually willing to take back

2009-10-01T14:05:00.002-04:00

to p.n. and k.k.

ranking poets is a dirty business, but sometimes it's necessary to a thought process. review is a thought process, not a conviction. i'm a man with many thoughts and no convictions, and sometimes things get said that don't mean anything, but that are necessary to say and can't be taken back nevertheless.

mea culpa is the sine qua non of my codex of logics.

upcoming reading in brookline, mass.

2009-09-09T10:52:00.000-04:00

narcissus of the americas

2009-09-01T13:29:00.002-04:00

the american spine twists pole to pole
a people who can't stand straight

we piss on our own knee
because we're lost
and don't know
where to turn

we spit and cum
all over ourselves
like maples
in augustan majesty

our islands are awash
in coldsweats and fire
and lepers know something
of our contiguous identity

how every knuckle
has its own insulation
every limb a foreign tongue
to interpret the single fault

pumping blood
to the extremities
the music of oil in the ligaments
and birds rushing out to sea

r.i.p.

2009-08-29T15:40:00.005-04:00

under the grey weight of various depressions
teddy's train passed through a stabile wave of black umbrellas
twisting like an expiration from the living, breathing basilica on tremont st.

there was parking on huntington
a metal detector at heaven's gates

the popular statistics:
four-fifths of the presidents remaining
a well-represented house
his thousand signatures, a little less mortal than the man
his three-hundred laws, a little more redeeming

(which is to say, not so...)

russian poets, a new everyman's pocket anthology, part 2

2009-08-24T09:37:00.007-04:00

(these are, for various reasons, my highlights from the anthology)

'echo'
by alexandr pushkin, translated by d.m. thomas

should beast's or hunter's cry astound
dumb woods, or thundercrack resound,
or a girl's voice, beyond the mound,
ring out in song--to everything
at once an answering sound
through empty air you bring.

you hearken to the stormy fall
of boulders, to the breakers' roll,
and to the rustic shepherd's call--
and send reply;
for you, though, no response at all...
and such am i.
.
.
.
'i am the last village poet'
by sergei esenin, translated by c.m. bowra

i am the last village-poet,
a plain plank-bridge of songs am i;
while leaves of the birch scatter incense,
i stand for my poor good-bye.

low from the wax of the body
in golden flames sinks the light,
and moons, the clocks of the village,
will rattle out my midnight.

soon by the blue path in the meadow
the iron guest comes on his way,
and with swarthy hand he will gather
the oat-stalk spilt by the day.

o hands unfamiliar and lifeless,
my songs cannot live without you.
only ears of corn like horses
will mourn for the master they knew.

the wind will suck the sad whinny
and dance at the funeral rite.
soon, soon the clocks of the village
will rattle out my midnight.
.
.
.
'air sucked dry, bread turning to mould'
by osip mandelstam, translated by r. tracy

air sucked dry, bread turning to mould.
hard even to doctor a sore!
joseph in egypt, after he had been sold,
could hardly have grieved more.

on horseback under the starry sky
the bedouin closes his eyes and sings
a loose rambling balladry
of the day's vague happenings.

his themes are ready to hand;
somebody bartered a steed
or lost a quiver in the sand--
the hazy events recede;

and if the song is sung truly
with a whole heart, all else disappears
and nothing remains, but only
the singer, space, the stars.
.
.
.
'russia'
by fyodr tyutchev, translated by c. tomlinson

what ratio can circumscribe,
or what the eye of reason see?--
that pattern knows no prototype,
and faith attests the mystery.
.
.
.
'some forbear of mine was a violinist'
by marina tsvetaeva, translated by d. mcduff

some forbear of mine was a violinist,
a horseman and thief, moreover.
isn't that where i got my wanderlust,
why my hair smells of wind and weather?

swarthy, guiding my hand, is it not really him
stealing apricots from the fruit-cart?
curly-haired, hook-nosed, is it not his whim
that my fate is all passion and hazard?

admiring the tiller at his plough,
in his lips he twirled a sweet-brier.
he made a perfidious friend, but how
dashing and tender a lover.

of moon, pipe and beads he was long a fan,
and of all female neighbours...
it seemed to me he was a cowardly man,
my yellow-eyed, distant forbear.

that after he'd sold the devil his life
he'd not walk through the graveyard at midnight.
it occurs to me, too, that he carried a knife
hidden inside his bootflap.

that many a time from round some fence
he'd leap, a supple feline.
and somehow it was i came to sense
he didn't play his violin.

like last year's snow in summer's days
all was child's play to him.
that's the kind of fiddler my forbear was.
that's the kind of poet i am.
.
.
.
'the lime trees by the open door'
by anna akhmatova, translated by r.m. hewitt

the lime trees by the open door
breathe sweet and rich.
forgotten on the table
a glove and riding switch.

a yellow disc of lamplight,
a rustling near at hand.
(but why did you leave me?
i do not understand.)

how beautiful the world is
in the morning cool and clear!
be patient now, be good, my heart,
the dawn will soon be here.

and oh! you must be weary,
so low you beat, and slow.
the soul is immortal--
someone told me so.
.
.
.

'what we had'
by boris pasternak, translated by a. navrozov

and then we had a loft of hay;
it smelt like cork, or wine.
august is gone, and since that day
unweeded paths untwine.

the tendrils and the lips among,
hoarse diamonds shivered, drizzling,
in their numbness to the tongue
reminiscent of riesling.

september was a small expense
the way we were spending:
it pruned our trees and rimed our fence,
it said the summer's ending.

diluting wine in puddles, broke the bread
of glaucous sand baked white,
syringed from heaven, melting into lead
the latticed glass of light.

or it would melt into sand
in flight, igniting trees and eaves,
and then our glass could not withstand
the sight of burning leaves.

for there are brands of joy--the oaths
vin gai, vin triste. have trust--
these tendrils are but slender growths,
and riesling--only rust.

thus we had night. we had the strain
of lips. hoarse diamonds sought
the eyes, where the autumn rain
resounded, unechoed in thought.

it seemed that we so loved to pray,
and kissed as though to miss
the briefest years that take a ray
to reach the glow of bliss.

like music: years spent in awe,
and song would never holler--
one tremulous, uninterrupted o!--
the trembling pith of corral.
.
.
.
'what is the use of time and rhyme?'
by vladislav khodasevich, translated by v. nabokov

what is the use of time and rhyme?
we live in peril, paupers all.
the tailors sit, the builders climb,
but coats will tear and houses fall.

and only seldom with a sob
of tenderness i hear...oh, quite
a different existence throb
through this mortality and blight.

thus does a wife, when days are dull,
place breathlessly, with loving care,
her hand upon her body, full
of the live burden swelling there.
.
.
.
'nations, years and every creature'
by velimir khlebnikov, translated by c.m. bowra

nations, years and every creature
in an endless river go,
as the passing waters flow.
in the subtle glass of nature

stars are nets, and fishes we,
gods the midnight's mystery.
.
.
.
'goodbye to friends'
by nikolai zabolotskii, translated by p. levi and r. milner-gulland

in broadbrimmed hats and long overcoats
with whole notebooks full of your poems
long, long ago you crumbled to ashes,
like leafless lilac branches.

in that country no shape is ready-made,
all is mingled, dislocated, broken,
the only sky is the heap of the grave
and the moon's orbit does not move.

and the noiseless insect assembly sings
in another and indistinct language,
and the man-beetle welcomes his friends
with a small lantern in his hand.

is it peaceful for you, old comrades?
are you easy? do you forget everything?
now your brothers are ants and grasses
and roots and heaps of dust and sighs.

your sisters are the pinks and lilac nipples,
the chickens in the woodshavings, you cannot
remember the language of your brother,
who has no place yet in the country where
light you disappeared like shadows
in broadbrimmed hats and long overcoats
with whole notebooks full of your poems

a fit

2009-08-21T14:59:00.006-04:00

castor and pollux hold polio in their arms

as she spits and foams and her eyes roll in her head

riptide rain is proofing the augustan trees

and a ravaged central park can barely hide her dead

and our apartment, braced by commuter rails

whose ghost trains whip by at breakneck speeds

was recovering from invasive surgery

when this morning she was witness to the summer hail

the road and roof are ripped in fours

while radars trace the profanation of the storm

and a little boy is frustrating himself

with a communist reading of healthcare reform

the peck, the seed

2009-08-13T14:44:00.004-04:00

a hundred daws erupting out of the oak's wide refuge
and lighting back in, ignorant of gravity
like the consecration and profanation of so many semi-colons
drifting to and fro between firmamenta

russian poets, a new everyman's library pocket anthology, part 1

2009-07-23T11:03:00.008-04:00

peter washington has put out another little anthology, and i finally bit--because it's an anthology of russian poets (though there's a stitch in my side every time i see the scottish poets--macdiarmid+burns, anyone?). i won't begrudge the everyman's library for its utterly conventional book--how could it have been otherwise?--but just note the few nagging exclusions. for an anthology of a national literature, why organize the poems by theme (and what themes! 'traumerei,' 'black earth,' 'what is the use of time?'), and then, why insist on eschewing indices and dates of composition?

nevermind, i bought it, and am glad to see a reintroduction of afanasy fet and sergei esenin as major poets (this anthology is maybe the only spot they have in print and on the book shelves) and also the braver inclusions of nikolai zabolotsky and plenty of velimir khlebnikov...even if they are implicitly folded into the typical narrative/whitewash of the progression of the russian lyric. this is a real deception, especially because of the decisions of the translators, all of whom adopt traditional lyric then/or romantic masques to dress their poems (plenty of russian poets were influenced by our EAP, but not as many or as strongly as this book might convince you, or as nabokov (whose appearance here is as a translator only) might have liked). this doesn't seem to impotentiate writers like pushkin or lermontov or akhmatova much, and is even appropriate for blok and tyutchev, but it is a serious disservice to tsvetaeva, brodsky (who actually commits this sin against himself, as his own translator+auden-wannabe), mandelstam, khlebnikov, zabolotsky, and sundry cetera. paul schmidt (rest his soul) translates khlebnikov's poems as monologues for the theater. in practical terms, that means simplification. it's disastrous (though not a bad impulse, since they arguably were theatrics originally) in half-measure--even though the product does offer its own very real, if lesser, pleasures--because khlebnikov's (like mandelstam's) themes and sounds present complications in extremis. schmidt's translations can be breezy and eccentric, but fall far short of the genius of khlebnikov.

in the last two or three decades, an alternative to the typical scholarly vision of russian poetry has been born in the criticism and new writing by the poets who claim as their precursors mandelstam, khlebnikov, zabolotsky, aleksandr vvedensky. this new view of the russian progression is driven by a focus on the cerebral, hypertonic convolutions of russian experiments, and on the abusive marriage of these strange poets to the organic syntax and morphology of the russian language. khlebnikov is as definitely canonical as his fellow futurist pasternak.

n.b., future installments will be: some of my favorite translations, and side-by-side comparisons of seven or so my own translations to the ones in the everyman's pocket.

instead of tits and millers, a wilted bouquet of ivan-kupala leftovers

2009-07-09T09:29:00.010-04:00

the ugly duckling coterie--which includes the most important living translators of russian poetry (my opinion), and whose work in translation and whose own work, influenced by the writers they translate, has revealed a shadow-half of an entire literature (that is, putting a second light on it and so erasing the shadow while putting the figure wholly in the light) and effectively confused it with english--has recently been the subject of a few book reviews, by me, for eileen tabios' review e-tablet of experimental poetics, GALATEA RESURRECTS.

here they are:
reviews of philip metres' chap-length poema, instants;
of eugene ostashevsky's morris imposternak and iterature;
and of matvei yankelevich's daniil kharms translations.

another sonnet for another season

2009-06-30T13:35:00.003-04:00

suede of meadow
and calico of birch
catalogued for greenth and warmth

back behind the hill
the midnight birds aren’t flying
they’re june-julying

where the wind
molts like a suture
dissolved into memory

by the time
the sky’s wounds intended
the night had ended

after the thaw your jacket fell to pieces--and the season
and river wouldn't come together again

the stocker's song, with variations (or, notes from the back of the bar, part 4)

2009-06-30T13:19:00.003-04:00

i.

shoo (fly)
semi (-landslide)

ii.

pomegranate
oxford rabbit

iii.

grey tremens
belle grappa lemons

wood anniversary

2009-06-24T16:58:00.007-04:00

(sans desktop, i've been writing again with pen and paper, which is almost impossible with all the convoluted revising i do and has made it doubly necessary to memorize my poems--just to compose them.
today, i'm taking this chance to bring all my notes back into the public space, to record it in the e-spherics. that is, i've come to this computer that is not my own and brought a couple poems with me, and my blog is temporarily taking on the extra responsibility of being the principle place where my poems can exist until i get up the nerve to print them out and file them.

and) tonight i celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary, 10 days after jackson's first birthday. here, then, are two occasional poems--to wit:
.
.
.
for the first year
i watched and waited

and for four times five (a score)
i ran toward and o'er the ocean

now, for five more
i've tracked back, elated

traveling both ways at once
to beat out a path

and part the jealous grass
for a certain other oneandonly

someone i can think of, like you
whenever i feel lonely
.
.
.
i learned to whisper
before my tongue first dressed
your green branches
and before i had eyes to guess
who i was whispering to
i knew
the tree was a song, and
its tonic verboten

o, stars fall through the grey spheres
to interrogate the wind
while you play in your crib
like some adamic lunatic, turning
an unnamed piece of tin
and thunder brings
sunday's mothspume and thorndrift
traffic greeting the sex of the rain

tonight, when i undress you in the sink
and comb a razor through your hair
i look out the bathroom window
at a yellow wall, and think
i've seen this all before

gospel is to stress position, as euphemism is to ____

2009-06-19T15:45:00.003-04:00

religion is a metaphor
and metaphor is a euphemism

notes from the back of the bar, part 3

2009-06-06T16:38:00.003-04:00

corzo--
after a black+blue harvest
the hills blush
silver...invisible

balvenie--
cooper and coppersmith
convene in 2 woods
to marry

chimay--
hairshirt
on a road oft
trappist traipsed:

pama--
granate blossoms
tumbling from the
big rock's sleeves

woodford--
impotent new orleans
triumphed, and a dwarf
retreated beyond the pale

larressingle--
black oak, finesse
the grace from me
let me sleep 700 yrs

blanton's--
eunuch's footrace
yields a century's
private spoils

june-july

2009-06-04T20:32:00.004-04:00

i don't believe in ghosts or telepaths, but i've no doubt mother nature does. and i do believe time and distance have their designs upon us which take all our logical and ethical energies to overcome.

leaving the house to-day, i was surprised to walk out into the noonday sun and see the linty daystars flying and the poplars june-julying (a south-african phrase for trembling (june-july is the middle of winter in s. africa)) for the first time since last year, laying their claim to jamaica plain and roslindale square. this is the true rite of summer restarting, and something i previsioned last winter when the hills were still covered in shells of shellacked snow. the poles (north+south) and the seasons (ovidian) are collapsible.

my son isn't ready yet to pattern his confusion, having just come to the borderline of his first year postpartum. but the shifting constellations of the cosmos came down around his head again to-day just like they did almost a year ago.
.
.
.
the strong calls of the robins

hawthorn, chinese elm, birch, weeping willow
straddling a trail through the poplars
all sleeping standing up now, like horses
in blankets of snow

but in another season, the poplars let loose another snow

unorthodox wedding in the sandia mountains

2009-05-31T14:09:00.004-04:00

natalie, my gemini cubed, given away

with my fingers crossed, the only way i know how to pray

rock of ages and

the 23rd psalm

refrigerated flowers

and martinize while-you-wait

new horse tracks at the indian casino

tattered grin of a hundred evening flashfloods

a long, uninterrupted view of the horizon

60 miles back along i-25

for aleksei parshchikov, again

2009-05-27T14:57:00.008-04:00

my plan was to post a few parshchikov translations, w/o authorization, by f.d. reeve from CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY and an unpublished manuscript translated by wayne chambliss. reading them, i was tempted to abuse those two poets’ work a little and retranslate. i quickly aborted that, too, feeling a little guilty. kent johnson has said that parshchikov, when he was alive, had no desire for faithful or literal translations of his work. he knew english fine (he got a diploma from Stanford), but what he wanted was that translators make something new out of his russian. he was authorizing inaccuracy and plagiary together.ultimately, what i’ve done instead is made a second elegy to aleksei (see the first one here) piecemeal from a few of his own poems, and linked to the work i’ve mentioned above, and to the one book in english i’m aware of (though i’ve never seen it): BLUE VITRIOL.
.
.
.
for alyosha

this life of mine makes its own middle, though a compass leg is pinning down the date
the divide between rivers running north and south stretches half a mile
i can sense how the molecules have lain down in tangential strata to make a tunnel
and am careening now the nadiral bowels as they churn and wheel

after more wives than fingers, through those libertine years in rotterdam
back from out of the deathgrip of the mud i was born into i’ve come
in times gone by, divining rod in hand i delivered to your liking heather and skin
and took your twilit voice as payment—those times have come again

to have no will is to act in concert with the wind

2009-05-19T09:03:00.001-04:00

just a heads up: i've added to my blogroll, for e-combing, louis proyect's communist diary. i'm in the process of reeducating myself...

to philip, in the wind

2009-05-18T21:37:00.010-04:00

a quick shoutout to philip levine, whose poetry i've loved since i was a teenager, with its cruel, industrial cosmopolitanism that was so exotic for a poor boy growing up in the southwest (his was a totally different kind of poverty, the kind that reminded me of karl marx, factories, and ethnic neighborhoods in cities bigger than i could imagine). he was also my anchor to whitman and even further back, anciently. i found levine before keats and dante, before frost, before homer and virgil.

here is the first piece of my lament for the maker:
.
.
.
i wish i was back in a time
before there was this language--
in those climes
where people only know three seasons

and not the seasons of the proletariat:
to get tired, old, then dead
but a long summer dividing two harvests
fall and petal-fall, wine and bread

a summer's day in the month of may

2009-05-15T09:07:00.006-04:00

i found a seed two summers ago on a walk through boston--half-inch in diameter, like a bundle or tangle of the beaks of sparrow chicks open for worms--and i brought it home and tied it up with floss to hang from the lamp in the livingroom. unwaxed floss.
now jackson is reaching out, about to be one year old, and that seed, which he has never touched, is one of his favorite things in the world. he sees it and he laughs. i lift him up to it, and he screams and claps.
it died (that is, it didn't find a home) and made an everlasting shape--brown, thorny, brittle, ghostweight. i can't remember what tree i was underneath when i picked it up off the ground, or what neighborhood i was passing, or else i would go back there.

it's a big-rock-candy-mtn day here: sleetless, windless, low-hanging boughs on the cigarette trees. a hill of lilacs just over my shoulder. i should take jackson for a walk...

why i'm buying a bike tomorrow

2009-05-12T10:12:00.004-04:00

the bike i ride to work was stolen from my basement. our house has seven apartments, and right next to my old rusted bike in that shared basement is a new $1000 one, and a pile of band equipment--a drum set, amps, and cetera. but only my bike was stolen.
so i dug up a junked schwinn collegiate--no back rim or chain, rusted fenders--and started to restore it yesterday. i took off the fenders and scoured them with steel wool for half an hour, then went out and got a can of yellow spray paint, rust-proof.
before the paint could dry, a gust of wind knocked one fender off the balcony into the dirt.
fuck.
i kicked the whole bike down the stairs, and left it there.

elegy for aleksei parshchikov

2009-04-22T12:57:00.012-04:00

this is a brief farewell to russian poet aleksei parshchikov, who died overnight between april second and third in kohn, germany.
.
.
.
for alyosha

who might search the slow eau de cologne
and find out that bare room above the rhein
now that he’s gone, among the obtuse angels—
might decipher in his leavings, line by line,
the disgusted nimrod of rhymes?

a black bag floating over the car tops followed him home
and clouds passed on their greased ball bearings…
faced with the threat of morning and calico tendresses d’avril
a reflection out of midnight's greek machine came down
and took him in a dream

fantine redux

2009-04-17T16:19:00.006-04:00

les miserables, in its true serpentine form as a novel, is my cornerstone as a reader--it's my favorite book and is more moral than the bible. no amount of silly broadway singing can make me cringe or change my mind. but u.k.'s flash-in-the-pan-face susan boyle reminded me of the deathbed fantine--whored out of health and beauty, conned out of her daughter and her wages, wasted by the law and toothless and consumptive.

anyway, a poem:

not just her hair

but the enameled kernels of her smile

the sad fantine came on the television screen

last morning

to interview, with clucks and rabble eyes

grotesque, ruby-throated

staggered from a karaoke bar a star it seems

stumbled out into the joke of time

to sing the half-a-song allotted her—

i dreamed a dream

.
.
.
(nb: props to les miserables the musical, in case my words above get misconstrued; it is a rare exception of broadway music written well (ignoring comparison to the source, of course).)

free and open access to yale university

2009-04-17T10:54:00.003-04:00

yale lectures for free! a whole semester's worth of milton, the american novel after 1945, or modern poetry--in video.

i'm boning up to get my massachusetts teaching license...

a quick thought on forgery and translation

2009-04-13T12:42:00.007-04:00

i'm having a hard time finding ovid's tristia in the bookstores. and the version of his metamorphoses i'm most interested in--ted hughes'--leaves out orpheus. i don't know latin...or hebrew or greek or german or french (anymore). i have no right, then, to certain texts like the ovidian ones i'm looking for now.

is it arrogant to want them, and in english? one-hundred percent yes, and yet...

i left several cambridge bookstores yesterday out into a cold and dis-covered april wind, ready to throw away all my beer money for the week on books that i might not get to for months or years or ever. but i resisted, or else surrendered (depending on how you look at it), and instead went home pockets intact and looked my baby in the eye.

then he took a nap.

the branches are still bare, with rare exceptions of leafless, blooming standaparts every mile or so sending their petals spinning down like kamikazes.

to buy a fifth of dickel's

2009-04-07T20:06:00.007-04:00

national grid parked their van in front of the house and put out orange cones. three hours of jackhammer and both lanes of traffic taking turns with the one lane left them.
rain, nervous dogs...and in the evening: a black patch of fresh asphalt, 2'x2', and a row of ghosts watching from their balconies when i come out and walk with jackson to the liquor store on the corner.

spring proof

2009-03-30T10:37:00.003-04:00

i walked down to the train station this morning, and saw all the pink worms scattered across the dewdrenched sidewalks for the first time this spring. they come out in the early, misty hours, and sometimes mingle with the maggots in intermittent windrows of filth left over from the thaw.
soon, i'm sure the buds will be on the trees, like they already are in the south.

here's housman's 'spring morning':

star and coronal and bell
april underfoot renews,
and the hope of man as well
flowers among the morning dews.

now the old come out to look,
winter past and winter's pains,
how the sky in pool and brook
glitters on the grassy plains.

easily the gentle air
wafts the turning season on;
things to comfort them are there,
though 'tis true the best are gone.

now the scorned unlucky lad
rousing from his pillow gnawn
mans his heart and deep and glad
drinks the valiant air of dawn.

half the night he longed to die,
now are sown on hill and plain
pleasures worth his while to try
ere he longs to die again.

blue the sky from east to west
arches, and the world is wide,
though the girl he loves the best
rouses from another's side.

notes from the back of the bar, part 2

2009-03-23T15:53:00.005-04:00

also, here's a link to wayne curtis' take on the italian bitter fernet branca, from the atlantic (click on the photo). we just put fernet on our wall a while ago, and it's great, but something only the cooks order for their shift drink.

notes from the back of the bar, part 1

2009-03-23T10:32:00.010-04:00

hoti--
zen patron saint/protector
of fortune tellers
and bartenders

belvedere--
warsaw
four times
polish rye

evan williams--
spirit journal's
first whiskey
single barrel

buffalo trace--
migration path
west to the kentucky
river
whiskey bible

st. germain--
alp wild blossoms
gathered in the few
fleeting spring days
elderflower and bohemian

ten cane--
virgin and molasses
rum's unachievable
redemption

hendrick's--
intelligence's
cucumbers
vapour-bathed
in a carter-head

ultimat--
potato, rye
and father
candle filter

basil hayden's--
brief and alone
through the amber
eight-year's night

patron anejo--
agave 'pineapples'
under the milling wheel
of the jalisco
mountains

pyrat--
nine lives
of the caribbean
ocean-ferry
limousines

headline in yesterday's boston globe gave me hope...for poetry

2009-03-21T11:02:00.001-04:00

on the T, i read it over someone's shoulder:

MANY MORE
VIE FOR
FAR FEWER
JOBS

hard times, come again no more

2009-03-20T16:46:00.005-04:00

he has two teeth, and by summer he'll have seen more in his first year than i did in my first 20, including a wedding, a murder trial, a lifetime of snow, of flowers, a computer screen...all imprinted in the pre-mnemonic clay that will harden soon into his soul.
today he knocked over a vase of rotting water, grabbed a dog by the leg, stared at a mango, fell asleep to stephen foster songs.

human flight: a corollary to the holistic/semiotic dynamic

2009-03-04T10:39:00.007-05:00

after a friend's wedding, i was stuck in a tennessee airport for 30 hours over the weekend, waylaid by the snowstorm along the east coast (nearly 1000 delayed and canceled flights!)--i waited it out w/o food or sleep for two entire days before giving in and renting a room at the days inn down the road.
the boredom, sleep deprivation and hunger were finally turned into gold when i caught my plane home yesterday morning and took these notes on the back side of my ticket:

part 1.

death (as religion/superstition)--our imagination's inability to incorporate/integrate a heavenly perspective--
is overcome by mechanical/industrial flight

therefore-->

the slow, syntactical death of flight (that is, syntactic demotion to idiom, from argument)

-->

allowing organic (i.e., ne cliche) integration into poetic systems

-->

promotion (through a core elision) of our prophets into poets

part 2.

this difference in flight complicates the system of metaphors
vis-a-vis the hawk, the songbird
violates the verboten status of the sky
extends the lyric mind/firmament equation
damages the auld formulations of time and space

--the extension and damage are contributions to lyric/military/telescopic, rather than to quantum/decon/microscopic, poetics (quantum/decon/micro contributions=film, microscope, zoopraxiscope, digital)
these polar poetics are the chronic elements of tension

tension=environmental or socio-poetic calibration

a nursery rhyme for unweaned bitches

2009-02-21T09:02:00.004-05:00

o, mnemosyne of the endless teats
and endless seats at the table

run the gauntlet of brats with stupid grins
and dripping chins if you're able

vivas for those who have failed

2009-02-18T09:12:00.007-05:00

last week, a few droppings (like black rice) on the stove top. today, a mouse sleeping by the water heaters on the basment floor--no poison, no trap--holding a scrap of broom straw like a poor-man's pillow...or bayonet.

blight: blake's and fet's dead flowers

2009-02-16T12:19:00.012-05:00

william blake died in 1827. afanasy fet was born in 1820, and was infected by the invisible worm.

that is to say, here is one of fet's best poems, which i've translated, preceded by blake's 'the sick rose'--it is one of the quiet miracles of inspiration and metamorphosis/translation, and i'm happy just to put them back together, one on top of the other's head, like planting a garden:
.
.
.
the sick rose

o rose, thou art sick!
the invisible worm,
that flies in the night,
in the howling storm,

has found out thy bed
of crimson joy;
and his dark secret love
does thy life destroy.
.
.
.
(and now, like spitting on my fingers and peeling back a sticky coccoon of insect warmth, the fet:)

by the fireplace

the coals grow dim. in the twilight
a transparent flame’s twisting
like a moth dusting his powder-blue wings
o’er a crimson poppy

a string of various visions
draws my drowsy easy glance
vaguely formed faces
stare out from the grey ash

and tenderly, intimately
former joy and sorrow rise together—
and the heart lies, says it doesn’t need
any regrets whatsoever

pathetic prosody

2009-02-09T18:14:00.007-05:00

finally, a thaw! and plastic cups and cigarettes, the gutterfish, are swimming by our front door. for months it's been coming down like soft brittle lime, and the sun didn't dare disturb it. thinking of henry gould, i would call this the 'canon effect,' or 'white grass on the calico grave.'

after a few latenight minutes of silence, the traffic returns like a stampede of rosy, moneygrubbing fingers, afraid to slow down (sometimes it seems like all of nature is a coward). me walking the dogs daily up the arboretum hills to shit and piss is...what? an anthology, or an elegy?

we're internal exiles, transensuals, sock poets.

gorky maxim, plagiarizing my better halves

2009-02-05T12:19:00.006-05:00

gorky maxim

in vino veritas
in kino claritas

x x x

the eye is jealous of everything that moves
the child--everything that loves

x x x

my foot is a wolf in sheep's clothing
parts miles of weeds, still knows nothing

inaugural

2009-02-04T14:14:00.005-05:00

'I find myself wondering—regarding the attacks on Elizabeth Alexander and other inaugural poets by various critics, poets, journalists—just one thing: where the hell are their inaugural poems? Of course, they do not have them. My suggestion would be, if you can write a better one, please offer it up for comment on the all-seeing, power-structure-subverting Web for us all to admire.' --Joseph Hutchison

i had some words for alexander's poem: "i feel almost certain that alexander was inspired by much more than she felt she should allow herself to say at the inauguration. and that self-censorship with which she chose to speak to us all turned the poem into a sort of nursery rhyme (that didn't rhyme) or a new earnest poet's simple pledge of allegiance.
she'll write better things (how could she not?), and even if she's always remembered as obama's inaugural poet, almost all of us will forget her praise song very soon.
there's nothing worse than when all you want is to express your simple, heartfelt congratulations to a friend and colleague, and are required by your label (poet, and a black woman (which mean more than a crowd of thousands is going to contend with, in the cold, when they all just want to cheer and celebrate and see one man's face)) to do it with a public poem. nothing wrong with alexander's poem, then...this was not the time for her to challenge us with her ambition." (this was a comment on coates' blog @ theatlantic.com, where he posted the poem for an open thread.)

and right after election tuesday, i actually did start writing my inaugural poem--though of course it would never do for an inauguration, because--first, it attacks the president; second, it's filled with personal trivia; third, it doesn't jive with the buzzwords of obama's campaign (remember, an inaugural poem is ideally a sort of stilted jingo jingle); fourth, it undermines the widespread fantasy that, this time, our votes did matter; fifth...

but it was written to capture the spirit of the times, to commemorate the election and the powerful meaning of american citizenship in a new century, and cetera, and cetera.
.
.
.
itinerary for jackson james

headed to the russian consulate in nyc—4 hrs ssw of boston
to declare jack, son of james, a dual citizen

china bus again over manhattan bridge
and brooklyn bridge over my shoulder
—a few leftover stitches from another century’s surgery—

the world conspiring to take away our luxury of debt
the sun’s a word in red, or a needle pushing
through the morning’s thigh
thigh that we were sewn inside by night

in mass., we measure out our lives in oz.
the last greyhound settles down on his thin haunches

on wall st they can’t run back the race, unring the bell
we all voted for a free lunch, took the bait
and now we’re hanging—helpless
like angels—in the air

a blind man and a black man hold the ny times hostage
by the front page—list our demands on the evening news
but neither’s brave enough to sing the blues

nobel nomination, and incidentals

2009-02-02T12:42:00.010-05:00

j.b.r. says notley is as good as le clezio, not that i would know. so i looked her up, read a few desert poems, and now can't stop thinking about the gifts my father would bring home from the roadside driving across west texas and new mexico when we were boys: after a train wreck he went out to the spilled cars and filled a tin can with industrial fiber-glass marbles, he used to find horny toads (we never saw one spit blood from its eyes, though), box turtles, tadpoles out of a flooded pothole that we put in a glass tank on the porch and watched until they grew legs and ran away.

a new chapbook of tsvetaeva translations

2009-01-26T13:56:00.006-05:00

i have finally finished my translation of tsvetaeva's new year's letter! that means i'm making a few chapbooks of all my tsvetaeva translations together.
they will eventually be published by whale and star press, along with the work of several other translators, as a selected poems, so my chapbook is homemade and unofficial/unauthorized.
if anyone wants a copy, drop me a line, i'll only charge as much as it cost me to make, and most of the copies will be sent out soon to friends and family (it's only an edition of ten!)

or, i can e-mail it as a word file, free of charge.

persephone, come back from the fall

2009-01-21T15:45:00.003-05:00

coming, on, the, souther, wind, like, a, swallow, with, a, babe, in, bunting...
o, frabjous, day, calloo, callay!!

as the war rages on...

2009-01-13T10:05:00.007-05:00

the war in gaza and israel has a lot of people reacting with horror and vitriol towards both sides of the conflict.
i've been reading philip metres' blog (behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com), and don't know how to react sometimes, except to think about the people in all different parts of the world who've never known anything but violence. evil is a rule, i notice it in myself when i'm tired and only functioning on an animal level AND when i'm most focused. most of us would never act on it, but we carry it around w/o relief, and overcoming it is the burden of being human.
anyway, i wish the war would stop, but i have my doubts, and it is only one war...

i think it is ironic, to put it as mildly as possible, that the western world explicitly and ill-advisedly planted the seed for this endless mauling and enmity by planting a zion-israel in a zealous colonial goodwill effort, and also as an attempt to pawn off our own virulent anti-semitism on the muslim world (notice how often we talk about muslim fundamentalism as the root problem of the religious non-compromise in israel, or of israel's zeal for defense, because we've doubly extracted ourselves from our own prejudice). the three religions involved are all of a piece--judao-islamo-christian beliefs, or political mantras, for a conflict that has not been resolved for thousands of years and has expanded from a power struggle in rome and the middle east to encompass all of europe, most of africa and the americas and asia.
i often contend that while we in the u.s. have enjoyed a long post-colonial pax americana, that we are complicit for more of the misery in the world than ever before (and that's saying a lot, for the country that was already the main stage for the cruelest, largest genocide in the history of the planet (remember, manifest destiny was u.s. federal policy from day one, and still is)), through market manipulation, consumer rapine, fomenting wars on foreign soil in a hundred different ways. on another not-quite-related note, the u.s. is the most tolerant nation i've ever known or known of, relatively--but we are an intolerant species.

there's no way to hope for better things from ourselves without visiting the constituent parts of our nature. the basic part of any justification of life, or the sanctity of it, has to start there.

upon being mistaken about chapman's (and pope's) homer

2009-01-06T09:38:00.005-05:00

i’m more ignorant than i have any right to be. how could i not know that pope’s homer rhymes? and in couplets? does chapman’s? yes, it does.

richmond lattimore's (the version i own) doesn’t. he used a free six-beat line for the iliad. robert fagles (rest his soul) didn't rhyme, and didn't even keep to a meter as loose as lattimore's.

For Auld Lang Syne: Part 3

2009-01-01T18:39:00.011-05:00

ot eight was all sowing and seedlings, and ended with a blanket of snow. and in the morning it was ot nine. i felt like a little boy, sitting solo-blotto in a corner with a bottle of j--- d---, singing sotto-voce 'seas between us braid hae roar'd sin auld lang syne,' and missing a good fiere who's fighting abroad.

utterly desolate, white, gravid hills stretch across the arboretum. but, i'm optimistic, and through january's backdoor they look to me like elephants. my son's away in russia, cooing at his great-grandma's fresh grave with his fresh face, and my wife's there with him, stirring the ivanovo twilight for kut'ya. tom is putting down his gun and taking the slow train out of baghdad--kuwait, kentucky, and (hopefully) home. my brother's engaged, sitting on a china bus o'er manhattan bridge. my sister has a new ring, too.

in the days of twenty and nine i'll be counting the months and eating chicken soup with rice, working hard on my first book, waiting for the mail (alec baldwin's snobby nightmare of insignificance!) by the telik, and trying to get the fuck out of dodge.

and to get whoever might be reading this out of the dodge of the closing year, here's a preface i wrote to tsvetaeva's new year's letter (see the unfinished translation here) and an elegy of my own that i've added to the orphic daisy chain...
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preface to an unfinished elegy

already january, and the fruit flies
just like me
are surviving generation by generation
in open bottles of whiskey

a sonless, sunless new year’s
and new england’s protean precipitation
has alienated the out of doors
again…and again

with squall and hoar, warm rain
vertical wind
ice and aster storm
and blind horizons

expired calendar
irresolute
half-empty bottle watered down
with dew

and this new year’s letter
to the stars—
stillborn, scattered
weatherstained endeavor
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.
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elegy for another year

as if this new year without you
made its music
in that empty aeolian tower
rising from the farthest reaches
—on the back face of beyond—
where wind whistles through
forgotten eyes,
yesterday a bag of birdcalls
—like letters sent out impossibly
to sea—
was stolen from the skies

and now silent songs
or ghosts of that extinguished longing
have flown the winter road
leading to spring
—when you delivered them
you were the seasons—
and if i believed
each year was year returning,
it was only until this new year…
january faces are doubly stranger

they captured you in a silver laugh
forever starting out at high c
but now you’re the night
with permanent fingers
you can play the distant tower
until morning light
—a center inside creation,
will within c, erection on the water,
pattern to reason—
organum silentium

For Auld Lang Syne: Part 2

2008-12-24T12:45:00.009-05:00

the fruit of my father's christmas gift to me, a couple of kafka's zurau aphorisms, follows:
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3
there are two cardinal human vices, from which all the others derive their being: impatience and carelessness. impatience got people evicted from paradise; carelessness kept them from making their way back there. or perhaps there is only one cardinal vice: impatience. impatience got people evicted, and impatience kept them from making their way back.
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32
the crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. this is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.

For Auld Lang Syne: Part 1

2008-12-18T17:04:00.007-05:00

christmas day has been bled of most of its meaning for me. i stopped believing in god before i stopped believing in santa claus, and gave it all up some twenty years ago. it's like some proxy birthday celebration, i guess.
but this christmas, my son, 6-mths-old, is leaving on an aeroplane for russia with maria--one month with that OTHER family--and i'm staying behind with the dogs.

winter is just setting in here, with protean precipitation--snow, warm rain, ice storms, hail, the alarms are going out for a weekend blizzard, yesterday i slipped on the frozen steps, the day before that i went out for a walk with the boy in a t-shirt and shorts.

i'm steeling myself for two-faced january, when my family will be on the opposite face of the earth. the season deserves an elegy, so today--a sort of half-finished translation of marina tsvetaeva's 'new year's letter' to rainer maria rilke, written almost immediately after hearing of his death in late 1926 after a losing battle with (undiagnosed at the time) leukemia. i've been working on a draft since the summer, and am going to give a good push starting next week to finish it off, when i expect to be fully in the appropriate mood.

here's what i have so far...

happy holydays,
james
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New Year’s [Letter]

Happy New Year’s, new—world—roof above—frontiers!
The first letter to you in your new—
—Not a den of vice (in the verdant, paradis-al sense)—
(Maybe you mistook thoughtful for awful?) place, all pealing and piping
As Aeolus’ deserted tower.
The first letter from yesterday’s address,
Where I’m pining away without you.
Your new birthplace now—a point
Among the stars…The laws of disengagement
By which the loved one becomes the anonym
And the never—nonexistent.
Shall I tell you how I heard the…?
No, the earth didn’t move—or avalanche.
A man came by—nobody—(the somebody is
You).—Most regrettable news.
—In the Russian Paris News and Times.—Can you write an article?
—Where?—In the mountains. (Window hung with linen sheets
and fir-view). Don’t you read the paper?
And the obit…ur, article?—No.—But…—Let’s drop it.
Aloud: it’s hard to bear. To self: no, I'm no traitor.
—In the sanitarium (a rented paradise).
—The day?—Yesterday, or the day before, I forget.
Will I see you at the Alcazar?—Probably not.
Aloud: family obligations. To self: anything, everything but a Judas.

And here’s to the coming year! (You were born the day after today!)
Did I mention how I took the…
Forget it, force of habit.
I learned long ago to put life and death in quotes
Like stale, deflated rumour.
I didn’t do a thing, but something was
Done, shadow-bereft and echoless
The doer!
What else?—How was the ride?
How’s being rent and ripped apart—How’s—
Your heart? Riding on unflagging Orlovsky trotters
(From the Russian for hawk: oreóle, (not oriole)),
Was your soul soiled, spoiled?—Or else fleeter?
Sweeter? There’s no high nor dive (up nor down) for—
Whomever’s flown on highbred Russian eagles.
The bloodline we held with the old world:
In old Rus—one world ripened on the
Other. It’s been set straight!
I utter life and death with a simper,
Sly—which yours runs tangent to!
I utter life and death with an asterisk,
Star in the sky (the sidereal side
Of your brain’s replaced the night
I was awaiting!)
Dear, keep in mind
The following: that if Russian letters
Have replaced the German—
It’s not because these things don’t matter
Anymore, or that the (destitute) dead will swallow anything—
And not bat an eye, but because this world,
Our world—at thirteen at Novodevichy Monastery
(The maiden brotherhood) I knew—isn’t nil- but hundred-tongued!

I hate to ask:
You don’t have to ask the Russian way
To say nest, now? I guess one rhyme
(one tongue) covers aster and nester, nest and celestes.

But I digress. But there’s no digression but
Turns back to you.
Every thought, sound, syllable, Du Lieber-
’s a reference leading back (though German is even more my native tongue
Than Russian, my first was angel-ese!) no matter what the
Topic—since
there's no place left you don't abide, besides the grave.
All’s as it wasn’t and as it was.
—A little something about me, maybe?—
Or about your surroundings, Rainer, spirits?
Anything pressing, important?—
Your first glimpse of the galaxy
(that is, the poet’s)
and last glimpse of the planets,
only for you, for once—all’s one.

. . .
. . .

God must be a rioting baobab, right Rainer?
— not a Louis D’Or—
And he’s not the only one, right? Above him there’s another god, isn’t there?

Getting any writing done in your new place?

. . .
. . .

Reconfigurations

2008-11-27T11:34:00.004-05:00

reconfigurations, an e-journal of aesthetic inquiry/philosophy/research, has published a piece of my mandelstam research, along with my translations of his goldfinch poems from the second voronezh notebook (click here).

another spotting

2008-11-23T15:20:00.004-05:00

...and yesterday--two raccoons--mangy coats, coming out of the arboretum and crossing the road like gimpy spiders and disappearing into a driveway...

two new poems in e-ratio 11

2008-11-06T12:17:00.005-05:00

gregory vincent st. thomasino, editor of the on-line journal dedicated to poetry that experiments with signification and the community of the definition, has published two of my poems in e-ratio 11 (click here) .

the first, 'things shan't fly apart,' is a sort of associative transliteration of daniil kharms' измерение вещей ('the measure of things') sandwiched between two-and-a-half inevitable love letters to my wife (this kind of lyricism interrupts almost any poem i write these days). the point, and here there is one, is to stress process over procedure--and also an argument against kharms and aleksandr vvedensky's politics of unraveling signification, the argument being that language cannot be extricated, that organic association is too quick to allow anything perceived to escape its web/briar/gravity/andcetera. the poetry of kharms and vvedensky, along with other poets of their so-dubbed OBERIU/Chinar movement can be found in english in an anthology edited by eugene ostashevsky that is some of the most skilled translation from russian i know of: OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism.

the second, 'a s,' stands for aleksandr skidan--contemporary st. petersburg avant-garde poet and critic. it is a chimera of several of his thoughts and poems, especially a poem about heidegger which became my poem's main framework, translated into english. these composite translations (i've started calling them confusions) have become one of my favorite solutions for salvaging failed translations.