Jeremayakovka

Waiting For Good Ol' Republican Verse

Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" is a perfect specimen of ... bureaucratic verse, comments Adam Kirsch in The New Republic:

The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

Somewhat like the president's only occasionally exalted, often middling, prose....

BadLOANS

Sometimes I substitute into perfectly good songs what seem to me, at the moment, more apt lyrics. In this case: To hell with the bailout! Bruce Juice'll get the country back on track.

.
Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland
Got a head-on collision, smashin' in my guts man
I'm caught in a crossfire that I dont understand
But there's one thing I know for sure girl:
I don't give a damn for the same old played out scenes
I don't give a damn for just the in-betweens

Honey I want the heart, I want the soul, I want control right now
You better listen to me baby:
Talk about a dream; try to make it real
You wake up in the night with a fear so real
You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come
Well don't waste your time waiting

BadLOANS - you gotta live it every day

Strength Through Superior Critical Firepower

As hinted in a recent post, Mahmoud Darwish's dying affected me more than I'd conceived it would have. For any of us outsiders who have ever insisted that recognition of mutual Israeli-Palestinian interests is our best moral compass, he seemed to be the go-to guy among Palestinian writers. His death may be a good occasion to bury also the idea of Darwish as a great, "universal," national voice, as Joseph Klein suggests:

The great poet Barrett Browning once wrote that “Art's the witness of what is behind this show.”  Mahmoud Darwish betrayed his craft and his own people by turning his poems into weapons of war against Israel instead of reflection on the real cause of the Palestinians’ self-inflicted wounds.  He fed the fictional narrative of the Palestinians’ innocent victim status rather than bear witness to what was “behind this show.”

A Lifetime of "Resistance" Taught Him This

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.
-- Mahmoud Darwish (1941- August 9, 2008)

* * *

Update (08/11) - Afterthoughts:

According to the translator's introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish was well aware that he had been regarded as a "resistance" poet. Its reductiveness had annoyed him.

Most of his output, which includes editorial work as well as several poetry volumes, is unavailable in English and likely to remain so for a long time. A precise estimation of him by those of us not proficient in Arabic is out of reach. Still, one can try to be fair.

As a young man Darwish studied (briefly) in the Soviet Union where he began an acquaintance with the poetics of their revolution. Sacrificing his Israeli citizenship to do so, he was on the way to becoming a leading Arab (and foremost Palestinian) man of letters among "non-aligned" and "anti-colonial" trends of the Cold War.

Certain lines from Mayakovsky's poem "Back Home!" recall the bit that I know of Darwish's committed but critical work. One portion I can press effortlessly into service as a farewell. Fittingly, Mayakovsky began the poem on board a ship at sea, in no country at all. Also fittingly (and sadly), these particular lines, the intended ending, were cut from the finished version in favor of a more "ideologically correct" stance:

I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood--
what then?
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.

.
Update (08/12):

He ended his life as a sad person, because he felt that what the Palestinians had done to themselves was much worse than all the injustices and pain they had suffered at the hands of others.
-- Hanan Ashrawi (via BBC)

"Just Ask Henry Roth"

Just Ask Henry Roth

.

Humbly prevail
Or proudly fail,
Sly underdogs
Make good old dogs.

The enduring trick
(Healthy or sick)
Is: Do the time,
Not just the crime.
.

For Flag Day, "The Defense of Fort McHenry"

Thanks to Laurie for pointing out the complete source of the national anthem. More background from Eugene Volokh.

The Defense of Fort McHenry
by Francis Scott Key

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Now And Zen Cohen

I have abdicated the throne
both the temporal and the spiritual
-- Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

[Welcome, readers referred by online muses, Fausta's Blog and Atlas Shrugs and Alarming News.]

.
Yesterday I read the bestselling collection of latter-day Leonard Cohen poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. Read it start-to-finish and in silence, the way it's intended, I sense. For one thing, the bulk of it was written inside a Zen monastery.... A daintier presenter will give readers leave to "pick and choose" through this 229-page volume, but Jeremayakovka does not advise that.

.
Leonard's longing is longer than any of the Book of Longing's 100-something individual compositions and 40-something drawings. The little works smolder in the ear and/or eye, bolder than quips or limericks yet shy of odes or elegies. Taken individually in short-footed, almost sing-song cadence, their form contradicts the pretended gravity of Leonard's notoriously heat- (and wet-) seeking flesh. Some of the Book of Longing's freshest moments are stringent admissions of his own, often priapic, aporias. Out of context they would rateas just an old man's dirty dunceries. Here they ring in deadpan, almost comic relief:

still looking / at the girls / but there are / no girls / none at all / there is only / (this'll kill ya) / inner peace / & harmony (p. 207)

.
Leonard is neither gone nor forgotten of course, but either state can turn inert. Neither guarantees a just appreciation. For "appreciation" without estimation is flattery; if not, it might render one vulnerable to flattery. One thing Leonard reminds by the Book of Longing is that he's always longed for order. Not an angelic order (his order being baser), but something closer to that of Rilke who elegized Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me out of the orders of the angels?

Still, the Canadian Jew is not as transcendent as his German predecessor. Leonard's verses (as Rilke's) do not scream so much as murmur, murmuring of the heart while filtering through feminine flesh. This order is, as it must be, of Leonard's own devising. The trick (and this is every artist's acid bath) is that it also be a calling, and that the calling, if it doesn't do the devising, then revises it.

.
Whatever may be Crooner Leonard's proven power, Poet Cohen writes at times in the baffled habit of the ex-monk. The habit fits too close for confidence as well as for comfort. Wrestling not with an angel, the ex-monk eats the embarrassment of having stumbled out of that order. His witness  is always to a kind of beauty. It's just that the witness is sometimes lowly and at most just short of holy. Or holy only inadvertently (see p. 207, above):

taxes / children / lost pussy / war / constipation // the living poet / in his harness / of beauty // offers the day / back to g-d (p. 175);

Anyone who says / I'm not a Jew / is not a Jew / I'm very sorry / but this decision / is final "Not a Jew" (p. 158)

.
--Hypocrite Leonard,--mon semblable,--mon frère!
--Mon vieux,--mon pauvre,--mon debonaire!
.

the road is too long / the sky is too vast / the wandering heart / is homeless at last (p. 215)
.

* * *
.

(p. 167)

* * *

For you, Gentle Reader. Verses I jotted, and worked, since opening the Book of Longing:
. 

Fanfare

My genius is an anchor
Grappling o'er the waves.
Hauled 'weigh by steaming Rancor
The calm seabed it craves.

.
This Birthmark On My Skin

Thinking about my father
Gets in the way of thinking
About the men I admire.
Which is how he thinks
About his father.

.
California Hotel #1

Having me put out of mind
Once inscribed I on your heart,
     Your inmost rind
     Is where they'll find
Your torrents bloodying my mark.
.

California Hotel #2

Come! Nibble at my rotted heart.
Speed your tongue along wormworn trails.
Pay no heed when the thing falls apart.
     Feed then, Liebe. Bitte,
     Feed on the frittered entrails.

.
Tenderloin Hotel #1

You know it is no casting chore
     to lick you by the bushel.
Just nod a knee to bid me more
     or sigh my first initial.
How tyrant Time tricks every whore.
     Dare you defy the benevolent official?
Go, then! Anoint your imperious store
     whose lounging supple diadem
     wrings reign o'er brittle thistle.
.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 9) - "The O-Bomb Threat"

.
The O-Bomb Threat

That prickly old pear Uncle Sam
In '45 finally proved, Yes, we can
Crush foe Jap and German.
FDR's war was finished by Truman
Who acknowledged the next one
By dropping A-bombs on Japan.

Times today are as hopeful as grim
When enemies without and within
Swoon for "change" adorned by Guevara.
This makes Uncle Sam wanna holler
O America -- I ain't yo' Mama!
As all 'round Obama fallout descends.
.

* * *

Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.

Be My Valentine, Oriana

The tragedy of a man condemned to be alone because he makes everybody uncomfortable and serves nobody is measured finally by the desert he has to face when he emerges from his natural environment, politics seen as a dream, and enters an environment that is unnatural for him, politics understood as a profession.
-- Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), her novel A Man
.
.

.

An original sonnet for the occasion (first posted here):
.

When Late We Lie
.
When late we lie at the other's side
Our murmuring airs palpate the shrouds
Of skirted deaths that still preside
Over loves too meek and loves too proud
.
To brace our resurrecting aim
Whose righteous urges urge, and so
Betray no scruple and no shame
Retrieving forms where shadows go.
.
Now, lest we lay an early wreath
That misconstrues what's to be tried
When next we lay we down -- to Death --
.
When next we lie at the other's side,
May we recount with every breath:
"This death was never ours to die!"

.
* * *

Related: "Support Huckabee? In Your Dreams!"
"Show Us -- Not Your Tits, Hillary -- Show Us Your Blood!"
"Liberalism Delenda Est"
"When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"
"Recent Poem - 'The Poet and The Beautiful Mariposa'"

Samuel Coleridge, Romantic Poet Who Recognized Jihad

.
Mahomet
.
Utter the song, O my soul! the flight and return of Mohammed,
Prophet and priest, who scatter'd abroad both evil and blessing,
Huge wasteful empires founded and hallow'd slow persecution,
Soul-withering, but crush'd the blasphemous rites of the Pagan
and idolatrous Christians.--For veiling the Gospel of Jesus,
They, the best corrupting, had made it worse than the vilest.
Wherefore Heaven decreed th' enthusiast warrior of Mecca,
Choosing good from iniquity rather than evil from goodness.
Loud the tumult in Mecca surrounding the fane of the idol;--
Naked and prostrate the priesthood were laid--the people with mad shouts
Thundering now, and now with saddest ululation
Flow, as over the channel of rock-stone the ruinous river
Shatters its waters abreast, and in mazy uproar bewilder'd,
Rushes dividuous all--all rushing impetuous onward.
.
-- Fragment of an intended longer work; composed c. 1799, published 1834.
.

* * *

Curious to consider: while lamenting corrupted Christianity Coleridge not just marks Islam's fanatic expansion, but possibly also celebrates it....

More on S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) -- poet, critic, translator; with William Wordsworth founder of English Romanticism; enthusiastic, then disillusioned, observer of the French Revolution; opium addict.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Other links.

* * *
.
Join the Christians Against Leftist Heresy blogroll
sponsored by Faultline USA

Expectation

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag--
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

.
from "Waking Early Sunday Morning" by Robert Lowell
.

.

.

.

.

.

Audio interview with his biographer, editor Ian Hamilton.
Review of Paul Mariani's Lost Puritan.

"Because The Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution Needs A New York Chapter"

Earlier this year the anarcho-pacifist Living Theatre, led by its surviving founder Judith Malina and current co-director Hanon Reznikov, celebrated its 60th anniversary. Here's a public reading of a poem Reznikov wrote for the occasion (hardly a poem, more like some well-spun "free association"...) which he and Malina recited at a dingy basement gathering.

.
Almost 20 years ago on 3rd & C in the East Village, in a cabaret-style, black box basement storefront, I caught the Living's exuberant production of Else Lasker-Schüler's anti-Nazi allegorical play I and I. It was a night to remember. A high school friend, back from his first semester at Harvard, sporting first-growth sideburns and smoking Marlboro reds, joined me again in our native Manhattan. I'd bused in from Berkeley (3 days nonstop by Greyhound), having recently bought a $99 black motorcycle jacket and sticking to a still-pending "not guilty" plea for a minor charge incurred some weeks previously for civil disobedience. For two untested liberal New York Jewish teenagers to whom anti-Nazism was still the lone inherited pose of anti-fascism, I and I was, or seemed, just what die Frau des Doktors ordered.

The Living had decided to stage Lasker-Schüler's work -- a refashioning of Goethe's Faust as a condemnation of the acquiescence to Nazism --  as a musical. The musicality (choral more than instrumental) drove the play's points home that much more deeply. One reviewer quipped that Mephistophiles, played by a black actor, looked like Rick James in dreads and drag. Calling to mind Lasker-Schüler's ultimate years as a destitute German-Jewish refugee in Mandate Palestine, Malina (whose parents had fled Germany in the 1930s, little Judith in tow) played the small but by no means minor part of a withered, old, homeless woman. Barrel-chested and tight-fisted, under a single spotlight she belted out a sotto voce exhortation that put the rest of us more supply formed types to shame. (And, this more supply shaped type, to wonder....) Like a beggar's blessing or a mute's moan, it was a fitting theatrical gesture for the reigning grande dame of American anarchism. Since that time no cultural production I've taken in, other than The Living's I and I, has instilled such visceral resistance against the indifference, lassitude, resignation -- and betrayal -- which fascism starkly and in a way seductively imposes. Alas! If only I knew then what I know now about Islamofascism. If only all of us knew then. If only all of us knew now.

The Living Theatre is that most rare of anarchist groupuscules: people who (on their good days) love life more than they hate "the System." While the Left -- both long before and ever since that mesmerizing production of I and I -- has done so much more to discredit than to honor itself, I, me & myself confess an undying, wide-eyed admiration for much of what The Living has undertaken -- that is, envisioned -- during its exceptionally long run. To be sure their "program" (to the extent they have one) is unworkable and in hindsight politically suicidal. They picketed, for example, to spare the lives of condemned, guilty Soviet-American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and they were for nuclear disarmament from the get-go. Yet it would be disingenuous to act as if I don't know that their je ne sais quoi is a permanent gesture of earthy and even primal exhilaration delivered with bullish derring-do. With that The Living Theatre embraces the world, all of it -- the good & the bad, the beautiful & the ugly -- in an embrace as wide as it is firm. And also loose. To this day The Living Theatre remains, somehow like (and somewhere between) both desire and disease -- infectious.

Long live the spirit -- if not the letter -- of The Living Theatre!

Further reading:
* The Living Theatre's web site.
* Judith Malina's Diaries: 1947-57 and The Enormous Despair.
* About Else Lasker-Schüler.

Related (indirectly): "Arrividerci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well"

A Place To Rest Isn't Given Us

.
Holy spirits, you walk up there
    in the light, on soft earth.
            Shining god-like breezes
                  touch upon you gently,
                         as a woman's fingers
                               play music on holy strings.
.

Like sleeping infants the gods
      breathe without any plan;
        the spirit flourishes continually
            in them, chastely kept,
                         as in a small bud,
                                and their holy eyes
                                       look out in still
                                              eternal clearness.
.

A place to rest
    isn't given to us.
          Suffering humans
                decline and blindly fall
                       from one hour to the next,
                              like water thrown
                                    from cliff to cliff,
                                         year after year,
                                               down into the Unknown.
.

-- "Hyperion's Song of Destiny" by Friedrich Hölderlin.
.

Time For Some Jewish Resistance - "The Partisan," Performed By Leonard Cohen

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.
-- Edward Kuznetsov

Leonard Cohen, the most famous renderer of "The Partisan," performs live this originally Russian-French ballad of survival behind Nazi lines. He sings in English and French, with the video offering Spanish subtitles. Many songs of anti-Nazi resistance songs have been sung -- in Yiddish and in Russian, especially. This one's a treat for lovers of Romance languages everywhere.

That might be John Bilezikjian on the oud (I'm pretty sure that's an oud), I'm not sure. (He's one of the outstanding personnel on Field Commander Cohen).

"The Partisan": words by Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie [link in French only], music by Anna Marly. Described in her obituary as "the troubadour of the French Resistance," Marly was the daughter of deposed Russian aristocrats (pictured below).

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

For French & Yiddish songs, try Sarah Gorby's The Unforgettable Songs of the Ghetto [Gorby link in Russian only].

English version of the original "Chant des Partisans":

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Oh, friends, do you hear, workers, farmers, in your ears alarm bells ringing?
Tonight all our tears will be turned to tongues of flame in our blood singing!

Climb up the from mine, out from hiding the pines, all you comrades,
Take out from the hay all your guns, your munitions and your grenades;

Hey you, assassins, with your bullets and your knives, kill tonight!
Hey you, saboteurs, be careful with your burden, dynamite!

We are the ones who break the jail bars in two for our brothers,
hunger drives, hate pursues, misery binds us to one another.

There are countries where people sleep without a care and lie dreaming.
But here, do you see, we march on, we kill on, we die screaming.

But here, each one knows what he wants, what he does with his choice;
My friend, if you fall, from the shadows on the wall, another steps into your place.

Tomorrow, black blood shall dry out in the sunlight on the streets.
But sing, companions, freedom hears us in the night still so sweet.

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

While Greece Burns

.
...................................................Ode on a Grecian Urn
...................................................-- by John Keats (more here)
.
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
    Of deities or mortals, or of both,
        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
    What men or gods are these?  What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit?  What struggle to escape?
        What pipes and timbrels?  What wild ecstasy?


Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
    Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
        Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
        For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

O Attic shape!  Fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
.

 

An Ally of Civilization

It's official -- AWOL Civilization, whose blogger Gary Wolf attended last weekend's Blog Fest West, has named me an ally. A modest but distinct honor, and one to which duties attend. People like us have to prove that not only is beauty truth and truth beauty, but that power -- that is, the most mortals can know of it, the most they can exercise it -- derives from both of them.

AWOL Civ's banner calls to mind a lyric from Don MacLean's paean to Van Gogh, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you (below). But frankly, we have to do one better than Don MacLean. I hope this feeds you, Gentle Reader.

Now go feed Gary's beast.
.

The 8-Ball Meme: Eight Previously Unknown Facts

Ok, Irina, you asked for it. Eight previously unknown facts about me:

1. While a child, our household had a leatherbound Holy Bible that had been printed in 1876.
2. Also while a child, I was photographed with Mayor Ed Koch in New York.
3. While a young adult I introduced myself to pan-Africanist socialist [euphemism for Black racist, antisemitic] Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) in Berkeley, California to ask him his opinion (his advice, almost) about politics.
4. More than a decade later, returning from my informal political exile, I watched the 2004 Superbowl with Wesley Clark during a break from his presidential campaign in Flagstaff, Arizona.
5. I've spent a day in jail for something I (used to) believe in.
6. I've been to Windows on the World restaurant atop the former World Trade Center (when it was still possible) and have climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty, up to and inside her crown (when it was still permitted).
7. While a teenager, when I went to get Allen Ginsberg's autograph after a public reading, the NAMBLA member lanced a sexually provocative comment at me in front of the tiny crowd that had gathered around him. During my adolescence I had the good fortune to know some consistently (in some ways outstandingly) "appropriate" gay men. (Allen Ginsberg wasn't one of them.)
8. Also while a teenager, I had the good fortune to be introduced to and spend quality time with William Bronk. During our conversations, he offered more than one memorable lesson about poetry, including: ..........................

* * *

Eight other blogs "tagged" to answer this meme: West Bank Mama; Black Belt Mama; Cobb: Strictly Old School; Dancing in Tongues; Gay Patriot West; Right Truth; The Black Kettle; Bookworm Room. In addition to facts about yourself, you may also disclose "habits" (click to Irina's site for clarification).

Rhymes With Conservatism

Gabe on the importance of earnestly studying poetry.

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
.
.
By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
.
.
Almanac
.

The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

.
This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

Older Poem - "Naomi"

Naomi
.
my heart
torn from
her breast
.

The Heart of Germanness

Heartpiece
.
ONE: May I put my heart at your feet.
TWO: As long as you don' t soil my floor.

ONE: My heart is pure.
TWO: We'll see to that.

ONE: I can't get it out.
TWO: You'd like me to help you.

ONE: If you don't mind.
TWO: It's my pleasure. I too can't get it out.

ONE: (CRIES)
TWO: I'll take it out by surgery.
What do I have a penknife for.
We'll get this in a minute.
To work and not despair.
Well, it's done.
But this is a brick.
Your heart is a brick.

ONE: But it beats only for you.
.
- Heiner Müller (1929-95)
from Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, Carl Weber, ed.

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 7) - "San Francisco Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful"

Dear Lawrence,
San Francisco is here. Wish you were beautiful.
love,
Jeremayakovka
.
Like a war criminal "exposing" past infamies in the service of his horrid cause, long after the fact, long after remorse or retribution or even right recall are possible, mumbling bumbling memories to keep from nodding off, let alone for anyone else's enlightenment (or rather, entertainment) or like a soggy, sorry drunk kneeling in his puke on the stoop of a church basement as the town's last AA meeting of the evening is wrapping up, last month the last big Beatnik left standing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, related:

Before things went bad [in the late 60s], everything was light, in both senses of the word, light physically in the sky, and also in the sense of light versus heavy. After that year, everything got heavy. Things just degenerated more and more. I think it was that summer [of '67, the "Summer of Love"]. It's so long ago. I'm looking through the wrong end of telescope. It's hard to differentiate one year from another.
.
Here's the most incriminating gem Ferlinghetti related:
.
What if we're all wrong?

- Allen Ginsberg (below, left) to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
at the Human Be-In, Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, California
Summer 1967
.

 

On Obscurity (The Obscurity Of The Once-Bright)

Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,
And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.
Which was the real—the butterfly or the man ?
Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?
The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea
Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.
The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city,
Was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So must rank and riches vanish.
You know it, still you toil and toil,—what for? 

- Li Po

On Fame

On Fame
.
Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsey is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

- John Keats

Leonard Cohen - "The Window"

It's a tough tonic for a solitary Saturday night, but ... if you can take it ... you'll be the better for it on the morrow.

Using a violin for the bridge (and so late in the arrangement) was a flash of genius.

Oh! Happy Easter.

Older Poem - "Kafka"

.....................Kafka


.....................those eyes
.....................dark and bright
.....................deep set
.....................in a chiseled
.....................visage

.....................two shining
.....................black lamps
.....................lit by the flame
.....................that shone
.....................through stone
.
.
.
ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* Wrote it about ten years ago. It started out as a sentence in a journal entry that shattered, then set, into this little verbal crystal.

* I've blogged very little about Jeremayakovka's three great inspirations (Jeremiah, Mayakovsky, Kafka). The spiritual nourishment, however, that generating and offering "An Open Letter To Matt Sanchez" recently provided is akin to what this offers. Or to what this is evidence of.

* I'm not nearly as read in Kafka as are the professional litterateurs. His Diaries I find the most compelling, followed by his short prose, and only then by his novels. None of the novels have I read through to the end. (They just don't sustain my attention, can't say why.)

* The first (also lasting) impression Kafka made on me was thanks to an exhibit devoted to him at The Jewish Museum in New York during the 1980s. I didn't visit. It's just that every weekday of its duration our high school track team ran past that museum on the way to Central Park for our workout. The photo of Kafka that appears above figured prominently on the posters the museum had designed to advertise its exhibit. As one among many, mostly hale and hearty, mostly privileged, mostly Jewish, teenaged American boys, I would feel -- while fleetingly and somehow ashamedly looking up to watch -- Kafka watch us rush past him.

* Kafka, like Orwell, would doubtless have felt entirely violated had he lived to see his name neologized (Kafkaesque, Orwellian, etc.). As death closed in on him, he (now) famously demanded that his unpublished works be destroyed, a demand his best friend disobeyed. So the act of reading Kafka is, almost always, a conspicuous betrayal of his exceedingly private, ever-receding spirit. (Ever-receding as a man; as an author (auctor (Lat.): increase) he is diffusely immanent, ever-exodic.) Can someone say how many German lit professors and postmodern literary philosophers ever really (morally) weigh this? Of the ones who do, how many succeed in conveying that to their classroom charges? For to be visited and nourished by a (living) literary corpus is entirely different from swarming around and feeding upon a (dead) literary corpse. Given the nihilistic taint (if not intent) of postmodernism, how many are even capable of that? Or even care to? Or rather: How few?

* This is why, despite the leonine tendencies I sometimes display on Jeremayakovka, I always approach, always take leave of Kafka ... in silence.
.

Recent Poem - "The Poet And The Beautiful Mariposa"

.
The Poet and the Beautiful Mariposa


If I am dreaming, do not wake me
If I am walking, do not stop me
For I am seeking the beautiful mariposa
The mariposa that is looking for me.

And when I find this beautiful mariposa
The mariposa that is looking for me
If I am walking, do not stop me
And if I am dreaming, do not wake me.
.

.
* * *

.
.
ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* It's salvaged (savaged) from an unfinished short story. Have mercy on me, Muses -- though I know you won't!

* (Aside) What's the difference between wonder, horror, and desire?

Before wonder we say Oh! Wow!
Before horror we say Oh! No!
Before desire we say Oh! Yes!

JMK Supports Federal Funding For the Arts ...

... when it's this kind of federal funding for these kinds of arts: during the height of the Cold War the CIA reportedly funded the publication, in Russian, of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. For once the manuscript had begun to circulate, a terrible intrigue pursued this novel along its harrowing high-brow itinerary -- straight through the KGB, the CIA, the Nobel Prize Committee, and points in between. Thank G-d for the CIA!

According to WaPo:

A CIA role in printing a Russian-language edition has been rumored for years. [Here is] the first detailed account of what would rank as perhaps the crowning episode of a long cultural Cold War, in which the agency secretly financed literary magazines and seminars in Europe in an effort to cultivate anti-Soviet sentiment among intellectuals.

.
Dr. Z. is a tale of great sensitiveness and great sadness by one of the few, true literary survivors of the Russian Revolution. It chronicles, in the life of one man, the spiritual collapse of an entire society, through his imperfectly realized romantic needs and poetic output. Pasternak's attempt at the 20th Century's Great Russian Novel offers clues to what went wrong in the USSR and wherever any society comes under the sway of totalitarian dictatorship.

Another concern of mine is to what extent did Pasternak, as a thoroughly assimilated Jew who lent his bookish genius to the production and propagation of Western literature (including employing specifically Christian imagery), may have indirectly left behind traces of the spiritual collapse of one who has abandoned Judaism....?

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 3) - "Nox Praecox"

Nox Praecox

.
Shuddersummoning schemer
blistery Dylan sounds
angels' worsting lots

Couching near upon
our Devildancer guileless, whelmed
outstrutted before dawn

.
.
* * *

"Nox Praecox" ("Precocious Night"; more literally, "Ripe-Beforehand Night") has in mind, mostly, Israeli children killed by Palestinian terror.  It's a trimmed scrap from last night and this morning, after watching this video of Dylan Thomas declaiming:

A Refusal To Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London

Dylan wrote it in Wales, in the United Kingdom, sometime in 1944/1945. He had enlisted for home front media efforts, chiefly in broadcasting. During those years he also managed to apply his timeless capacities to other duties -- in this case, commemorating a child victim of belligerent, totalitarian terror.

[T]he danger, for what a reader aloud of his own poems so often does is to mawken or melodramatise them making a single simple phrase break with the tears or throb with the terrors from which he deludes himself the phrase has been born.
-- Dylan Thomas

As opposed to the actual terrors from which it has been born, terrors of which he may (or may not) be aware, quite. Even if he is not aware of them he still must force himself to go on.

* * *

Previous:

"Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 2) - 'You think I sing...'"
"Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 1) - 'Jews Item'"

The Gate of Mystery

Rocco continues his on-the-ground reportage from Iraq with his fifth installment, "The Gate" (links added):
.

And he (Virgil) then as initiate to novice:
"Here must you put all division of spirit
and gather your soul against all cowardice.

This is the place I told you to expect.
Here you shall pass among the fallen people,
souls who have lost the good of intellect."

So saying, he put forth his hand to me,
and with a gentle and encouraging smile
he led me through the gate of mystery.-Dante

A tall, polite American with a tight, painted smile greets me when I enter the house. After a brief chat he walks me to my room telling me that its permanent occupant will be returning from abroad in a few weeks. Until he does, the room is mine. I thank him, enter the room and close the door....

Charm School: Fausta-, Dorothy Parker-, and Grandmother-Style

(Welcome, Right Wing News readers. Thanks, John, for the nod.)

(Updates 12/11: After you read this, see Fausta take the discussion one step beyond.... Also: Alas, poor Dottie! JMK knows her better than ever.)

Gentlemen, pay attention! It's Chris Hitchens's light refracted though Fausta's prism. Hitch ponders a so-called "humor gap" between the sexes in "Why Women Aren't Funny." (btw, another, very refractive prism here.) Fausta ripostes:

[A] guy will tell you a lot about himself and what he thinks about you, and how comfortable he is when he's with you when he says something that makes you laugh.  He may not be trying to be funny, but you can find great honesty in humor.

The premium seems to be on honesty and hardly on charm. If honesty from the man -- to the woman's satisfaction, at least -- is not forthcoming, then it would seem, according to Fausta, that some manner of extracting or securing it becomes the woman's chief concern. Ah! all these mental tribulations while avoiding pain and seeking pleasure in pursuit of suitable companionship....

(Update, Fausta clarifies: I must clarify that I place a premium not on honesty as of itself, but in the comfort zone that brings in humor, self-disclosure, and a sense of fun. You can't have fun when uncomfortable. That, and hopefully what follows, will help us all breathe easier.)

* * *

Not exactly related (but not unrelated either and, besides, I've been wanting to blog about this for a while...): this brings to mind Dorothy Parker's "light verse." Such verse -- which formally resembles much of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poesy (including the sonnets) -- is for the most part a continuous, lyrical lament over troubles between the sexes. Her most famous poem, "News Item," is not even remembered by most as a  poem, instead having installed itself in American English as a popular quip. Gentle Reader, I bet you've heard "News Item," and you just didn't know it had appeared in Parker's collection Enough Rope (1926). It goes: "Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses."

If I didn't first hear that one from my grandmother, then I do recall that she remarked it to me a while back. We were having a pleasant, sit-down conversation on her Miami Beach couch about, oh, relations between the sexes. It was in that pleasant, old-school way in which an 80 year-old brings up the subject with a 20 year-old. (Like I said, it was a while back.) Such an old-school way is, unfortunately, a way that seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth (to everyone's loss and -- to those of us who know what we're missing -- chagrin). So my grandmother quipped away to the tune of Dorothy Parker. I might add that she quipped with, perhaps, an air of sly delight and even a little triumph. For she herself never had to wear glasses (except in her later years for reading).

The implied lesson, I figured, is to be appreciative of women whether or not they wear glasses, and, like the song says, to try a little tenderness around women who do. Now it just so happens that, yes, in the course of my life I have had occasion to offer feedback to significant women who wear glasses -- occasioned not because they have asked me to do so, but because they seem to have asked me not to do so. The occasion usually arises in a moment of grim, mumbled foreboding, something along the lines of: I have to put on my glasses now.... implying, more or less: Don't make a face! or If you love me, you won't say anything!

Then comes the moment of truth and misunderstanding. Because, really, deep down, I think glasses are cute. Not the Ray-Ban this and Ferragamo that. I mean simply a pair of specs on the face of The Most Important Woman in the World. Because, usually, when she puts them on the contacts have come out, the rest of the world is left out there, and she's settling in to her comfiest homebody self. And I'm part of what makes and keeps her homebody comfy. It doesn't get much better than that.

But then I ruin it. I ruin it simply by saying what's on my mind.

-You look wonderful in your glasses!
-Oh, please!
-Wait, I mean it, which I accent with a mild sigh.
-No, I don't.
-Oh, yes you do. You really do.... Offered in just the right tone, this should allow her to ignore, for just a little while, all that burdensome foreign matter splayed across her nose. But then I kill the moment, kill it by saying what I really feel: If you only knew how good you look right now.
-....
-To me! How good you look. To me.

To me, yes, but to no avail. She shakes her head, not relieved and definitely not amused, and makes a bee-line into the next room. I know the moment's passed because she's doing something practical like folding a dish towel or checking a stapler to see if it needs reloading. The charm -- if there was any -- is gone. Possibly the thrill, too. All because I was trying, sincerely trying to do right by my grandmother and by Dorothy Parker. Maybe the solution is to hook up only with women who have perfect vision (that, or entire cabinets full of contact lenses)?

* * *

Back to the drawing board. Here are two more examples from that volume of "light verse." Frankly, they are harrowing lessons in the harm inflicted by -- to say the least -- having neglected to work on one's charm:
.

De Profundis

Oh, is it, then, Utopian
To hope that I may meet a man
Who'll not relate, in accents suave,
The tales of girls he used to have?

Men

They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They'll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They'll try to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They'd make of you another person
They cannot let you go your gate;
They influence and educate.
They'd alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.

.
* * *

In conclusion, all I can say is that there must be a place for charm along with humor and honesty. There must be. I mean, there is a way to hail a woman as a star, because in that regard JMK has defied Dottie's expectations. (Not deified and not defiled them, mind you). So there must be a charming way to compliment a woman on her glasses. There must be!

What's so funny about that?

Bukowski - L'Ineffable Éructation Exécrable

* (02/19/08) Welcome, Stumbleupon readers. Actually, I was in North Beach today and I was invited to an upcoming poetry reading. *

Today's guest poet in JMK's "Burn that MFA!" series is ...  Charles Bukowski!

This may lose me invitations to return to North Beach to join upcoming poetry readings ... but ... I'm just not particularly a fan of Bukowski's œuvre nor of his status as counterculture icon. One exception, granted, is a poem in this anthology because it laments the rivers of sorry, derivative so-called poetry that typically pollute any poetry "scene." (I've heard more than my fill, as CharBu must have, too.) If you would like more info on the guy, try this guy who wrote a book about him. Or better, just read him.

Despite my admitted prejudice I recommend the following clip (below) of a Bukowski appearance on the French literary television show Apostrophes. It's the picture of a man who's followed his own path, who's being trailed by a pack of stiffer and stuffier Frenchies. The moderator does his best to handle what he was handed -- an unenviable job if there ever was one (though he ends up functioning as the dullards' point man, their enforcer). So stick with it -- even if you can't follow the French -- by letting its non-verbal aspects work on you. I can't deny that in a roundabout way CharBu makes me proud to be an American.

As for the cigarette-weaving, wine-slugging persona he projects, and, as you'll see in the video, him dropping comments about beautiful whores and panty hose, take them as saucy metaphors for living up to Baudelaire's thunderous exhortation to "Enivrez-vous" ("Get drunk"):

De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise!

See? It doesn't have to be -- usually shouldn't be -- from wine that we get drunk. More often than from wine, poetry! And more often than from poetry, virtue! I've tried all three and virtue works the best. There's the lesson to be drawn from CharBu! Or rather, despite him. For who gets drunk from virtue nowadays? I mean drunk ... but ... from virtue. Don't mistake it for quaint, because it's not:

Let's get drunk -- from virtue! 
(Start with any of virtue's definitions provided here.)

"But ... How ...?" you may ask, perplexed, and even annoyed.

Ah! that's for you to figure out ....

.
(Video clip found at No Pasaràn!)

Whew, what a mug! Looks like Bert Lahr with elephantiasis.

Tasso Delivered

Torquato Tasso is best and rightly known as the author of Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata) (1574), a prodigiously influential epic poem of the first Christian crusade against Muslim domination of the Holy Land. JMK highly recommends Jerusalem Delivered to counter-jihadists anywhere and everywhere.

Not long after completing the epic, however, Tasso was made to endure seven years' wrenching, solitary incarceration for offences rendered to (or perhaps merely perceived by) the Duke of Ferrara. The causes are the usual stormy stuff -- banished romance, drawn weapons, vindictive nobles, madness feigned or actual (more on all of it here). The results... the results of the confinement resonate with a startling pathos, insofar as the poet persevered in his output during those dreary years. He even composed laudatory sonnets to the very duke who held the power of Tasso's release (and who of course firmly refused it).

Those seven years have proven influential in their own right down through the ages. For example, after spending a day in Ferrara, Lord Byron composed "The Lament of Tasso," which JMK recommends as well.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

Tasso in the Hospital of St. Anne Ferrara, by Delacroix

.
"The Lament of Tasso" is a funny title, since the 200+-line poem is melancholic or rueful only in parts. Actually, it's riven with stirring affirmations -- of the calling of poetry and of the poet's legendary devotion to Leonora -- which on the whole proffer a lucid, balanced, and inspiring defiance. Byron's executed intent here is on the candle and its light, not on the darkness and its shadows. Delacroix seems to think so, too, n'est-ce pas?

I'll leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to take up "The Lament of Tasso" and La Gerusalemme liberata as you will. But, to whet an appetite:

                                      .... I stoop not to despair;
For I have battled with mine agony,
and made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow circus of my dungeon wall,
And freed the Holy Sepulchre from thrall;
And revell'd among men and things divine,
And pour'd my spirit over Palestine,
In honour of the sacred war for Him,
The God who was on earth and is in heaven,
For he has strengthen'd me in heart and limb.
That through this sufferance I might be forgiven,
I have employ'd my penance to record
How Salem's shrine was won and how adored.

* * *

A note on "The Lament of Tasso," from Byron's Complete Works (Vol. 2) (8 vols., Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1839 -- stiff-bound and gilt-edged, they populate JMK's personal library):

In a moment of dissatisfaction with himself, or during some melancholy mood, when his soul felt the worthlessness of fame and glory, Lord Byron told the world that his muse should, for a long season, shroud herself in solitude; and every true lover of genius lamented that her music was to cease....

Advice for a Poet

Animate, don't appropriate.
-- Lao Tze

It's good advice for life, actually. You just have to be very clear and very keen about what you are animating, and why, so you can protect both it and you while scheming to keep animating it. Or maybe it's just that poets are expected to take a certain license -- and to take it with a "silence, exile, and cunning" (plus additional subtle ferocities, as applicable) -- that few other mortals regard as within their reach. For extended prose advice for poets, please see R. M. Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigg and Christa Wolf's No Place On Earth. (btw, That novel of Rilke's provided the material (his comment on fame) for JMK's "birthpost.")

I came across Lao Tze's line a long, adolescent time ago. It had been printed inside a brittle, 1940s edition of the Tao Te Ching fitted out with a pale pink hardcover. A tiny, browned, flattened flower remained pressed between its pages -- a frail, fossily trace of someone's once cherished train of thought that the slender tome of ancient Chinese wisdom had animated....

If you have any of your own animating gems you'd care to share, won't you please leave them in the comments or zip me an email?

A Man

Here or there, they would eliminate you in the end. And not for what you wanted to do, armed resistance on the mountains, attacks on the barracks, radio stations to stir the people to revolt, but for what you were, for your singularity, the rebel poet, free of any restraint, any pattern, any taboo, even from the concept of licit and illicit, because of your uniqueness as solitary hero, clinging to the chimeras of the dream, the imagination. The rebel poet, the solitary hero, is an individual without followers: he doesn't sweep the masses into the streets, he doesn't provoke revolutions. But he paves the way for them. Even if he doesn't achieve anything immediate and practical, even if he expresses himself through acts of bravado or madness, even if he is despised and rejected, he stirs the waters of the silent, stagnant pond, he weakens the dams of repressive conformity, he saps the crushing power. Whatever he says or undertakes, even an interrupted sentence, a failed enterprise, becomes a seed destined to blossom, a perfume that hangs in the air, an example for the other plants in the forest, for us who haven't his courage, his clairvoyance and his genius. And the pond knows it, the Power knows that he is its real enemy, the real danger to be liquidated. It even knows that he cannot be replaced or copied: the history of the world has given us clear proof that when one leader dies another is invented, when one man of action dies another is found. But when a poet is dead, a hero is eliminated, there is a void that cannot be filled, and you have to wait until the gods resurrect him. The gods know where, the gods know when.

-- from A Man, by Oriana Fallaci

War Poetry

The Wall Street Journal asked its readers to submits poems on behalf of the war effort and received hundreds of submissions, several of which they just recently published.  If you are like me and was raised on your parents' early Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger albums, and the only "war poetry" you were introduced to in high school was Wilfred Owen's (and by a black-beret-wearing  English teacher who couldn't speak Spanish but in solidarity with the departed Allende government took pains to pronounce Chile, "Chil-lay"), then James Taranto's WSJ piece, "A Day of Poetry for the War," is for you.

The poems run the gamut in structure and subject matter, yet all are animated by this generation's uniquely American zeitgeist: "NO! to terrorism and YES! to those who have given, are giving, and/or will give all to fight it."

Here's one goodie:

The Soldiers

There they go, off to war,
Leaving loved ones, whose hearts are sore.
Children weep in their mothers' keep,
As they hear their fathers' leaving feet.
Wives and mothers cannot speak,
Watching them leave makes them feel weak.
But, they know they must be strong,
For they might hear the bells toll,
Dong, dong, dong, dong,
And sincerely hope that they are wrong,
That their beloveds, whose love they've won,
Will return to them when all is done.

--Amy Allison (12 years old)
.
.
Way to go, Amy! JMK thanks you and every one else who contributed to "A Day of Poetry for the War."

Lots to Do

Thanks for visiting and making this JMK's most fruitful week yet, with over 500 visits and counting! For a part-time blogger who doesn't Photoshop, barely knows HTML, and only recently marked 100 days throwing himself into this new media, I'll take it!  Thanks again for being a part of it.  More and better material to come. Promise.

Offline affairs are pressing, so there's no new material today. Heading into the weekend, then, please feel free to tool around the archives.  A few suggestions:

* My review in May of the preview of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is being confirmed now by the pros. (Shoving ten pounds of Vietnam War history into a five-pound parable of coming-of-age and lost-innocence made his Platoon one of the most powerful movie experiences I ever had. So I know Stone's got storytelling powers; what's to be seen is how he treats, or mistreats, history while telling this story.)
* Here's my stab at "talking to a liberal" (by choice).
* For late-night demon-wrestling, there's a whole lot of versifying (others as well as my own), plus other litterateuring, goin' on under the category, "Poesy".
* And don't forget my advice on which tool to pick out to deal with Hezbollah, "Home Improvement - Zionist Style."

Have a great weekend.
Shabbat shalom.

The Opposite of Bankrupt

Please join my good friend, the celebrated All Things Beautiful blogger Alexandra, as she pays tribute to the memory of her father, the distinguished Serbian writer Borislav Pekic.  Fourteen years ago he crossed permanently into the shades; but for her and through her his presence immanently abides, most of all on this fraught day. Alexandra's post sketches Pekic pere as a modest family man, by temperament withdrawn yet engaged, who has provided inspiration to thousands -- millions, even -- in his native Yugoslavia and beyond. It goes without saying that the father is a fundamental inspiration for All Things Beautiful, except that today is also ATB's first "blogiversary." Thus the daughter takes the occasion to state the inspiration.
.

The links Alexandra provides in her tribute plead that the world of the littérateur Pekic, while obviously inseparable from her own, would be our world too if only we dared to behold it, refracted through his mind. To me, it starts with the above photo: a figure shy and upright, outfitted but far from ostentatious. But more so, today, the daughter pleads that we behold her reaching to behold him (which includes beholding him through the eyes of others who beheld him):

[H]e always said to me "Look to yourself, not to others. Don't ever rely on others to fight for YOUR freedom. They never will. They will always fight for their own version of it, which is relevant to their own little world. Very few people in history have truly fought for the good of mankind."

The tension of blogging (like all artificing) manifests itself in the constantly competing strains of candor and posture, of levitas and gravitas, of companionship fast forged and solitude faster recovered, all rendered in each post's manifold transparency. However, not all blogs sustain such tension or even try to. Alexandra clearly cultivates it in her blog through its assiduous content, its breathtaking visual impositions, and the considerable exchanges generated in the comments sections.  For good reason did it garner instant notice from professional writers and established bloggers alike.

Yet today's tribute from the daughter is a witness to the particularly demanding, almost abject inheritance which gives rise to All Things Beautiful.  The inheritance belies a species of wealth that, for all its bounty, exhausts its recipient. It is experienced as an interminable debt, a debt which is the opposite of bankrupt. For the repayment of that debt makes the beholden daughter -- and makes the rest of us who arrive at feeling beholden to her -- all the richer.

JMK's consolation is extended today to Alexandra, and also our gratitude for her labor at the legacy of the one who for her illumines all things that are beautiful.

Patriotic Poem - "Rough Men"

From Vietnam to the blogosphere, JMK proudly brings you "Rough Men".   If poetry like this were taught and sung more widely, "gangsta rap" would lose its hold on the imaginations (and vocabularies) of many American youth. Via Michelle Malkin (via Mudville Gazette).
.
.
Rough Men
.
There's a character trait that's decided by fate
Comes (sadly) to many, far too faint, far too late.
They won't face the aggressor, stand up to his ire
They have not the will to fight his fire with fire.
So they bend over backwards to see all sides as fair,
Till they're faced with dragon breath fire in their hair.
Like our brethren in France, who'd know better than we,
Yet seem never to learn, seem doomed never to see.

Yes, it seems there are some who're determined by fate,
To possess not the courage to step up to the plate,
Who shrink from all threat because nothing's worth war.
But how can they know lest they've been there before?
Thank God some have courage, the will, yes, the grace,
To stand for the shirkers, stand strong in their place.
Thank God we have stalwarts who'll stand for us all,
Who will rise to the challenge at their nation's call.

The faint-hearted, who fear, whose reaction is flight,
Have no comprehension of those who will fight.
To hide their own trepidation they attempt to demean
The rough men, who defend them, as barbaric, obscene.
Yet these rough men stand ready, hard weapons to hand,
To put placaters behind them, draw a line in the sand,
To preserve for the peaceniks what they won't defend,
So their own unearned freedom won't perish, won't end.

To appeasers, rough men are coarse government tools.
To rough men, appeasers are dumb delusional fools.
.

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66
.
.
More Russ Vaughn poetry is featured at Pass the Ammo and Bittersweet Me.  His catchy and no-nonsense titles include: "Paristine", "When the World Dials 911", "Naught's Solved by War?", and "A Useful Death".

Older Poem - "Appetition"

Wrote this one shortly after returning from Bialystok (see previous post).
.

Appetition
.
.
I WANT TO BE
A GERMAN*
.
William Tell shot
an arrow
at son's
head
.
metal tip crushed
boy's pate
shaft deep sunk
in tree trunk
.
William Tell savored
the apple
fallen to
ground
.
sweeter from
warm blood
.....issue of cold
soft flesh
.....issue of hard
.
I AM
THAT BOY

.

*: from a Jewish boy's notebook, found in the Warsaw Ghetto after its destruction

.

[like all other original text and images on Jeremayakovka, "Appetition" is copyright by the blog's owner]

ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

1. As for this neologism "appetition," the English verbs "appetite" and "petition" derive from the Latin verb "peto, petere," which can contain many meanings: make for, go to; attack, assail; seek, strive after, endeavor; ask for, beg, beseech, request, entreat; fetch, derive from.  It can also describe an arrow in flight, as in, "seeks a target."

2. "Appetition" was originally published in the online magazine Ygdrasil in June 2000, albeit in mutilated form, for the editors lopped off the title when formatting it for their issue.  My introduction to the publishing world -- hmmph!

Recent Poem - "When Late We Lie"

Here's a sonnet I started early last year, then set aside before picking up again in October.
.
.
When Late We Lie
.
.
When late we lie at the other's side
Our murmuring airs palpate the shrouds
Of skirted deaths that still preside
Over loves too meek and loves too proud
.
To brace our resurrecting aim
Whose righteous urges urge, and so
Betray no scruple and no shame
Retrieving forms where shadows go.
.
Now, lest we lay an early wreath
That misconstrues what's to be tried
When next we lay we down -- to Death --
.
When next we lie at the other's side,
May we recount with every breath:
"This death was never ours to die!"
.

.

.

.

[like all other original text and images on Jeremayakovka, "When Late We Lie" is copyright by the blog's owner]

Recent Poem - "Miserere"

.
Miserere

.........................Se Mercé fosse amica a' miei disiri
..................................................- Cavalcanti

.
This fallen night the ancient girl
My hot agitated digits furled, and
These hands enjoined; they hailed her world.
Ave!
.
Yet flagrant grief incensed me.  Hence
I groped her gracious confidence--
Fessing high crimes that spurn defense.
Ave! Ave!
.
Silent condemnation thundered.
What whispered treaties were, were sundered
Into stupefied and wilding wonder.
O! O, ave!
.
Now blasted asters arch the night,
Loos'ning true, and failing, dismal light . . . .
Banish those allurements of the heights!
Ave, ave! O! Ave! Ave!

.

.
.
ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:
.

* After Saint Augustine, Miserere ut loquar ("Have mercy (pity) that I may speak"), Confessions, 1.5.5

* Se Mercé fosse amica a' miei disiri ("If only Mercy befriended my desires") is the first line of a sonnet by Guido Cavalcanti, contemporary and friend of Dante

* "Miserere" bestows concepts rooted in Judaism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, as well as in Europe's courtly lore and modern musical tradition. Its religious roots lie in the Penitential Psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143). In medieval times it referred to "the dagger of mercy" with which a wounded knight, lying under the weight of his armor, was finished off. The musical experiences it has given rise to include those of Josquin des Prez, Orlande de Lassus, and Arvo Pärt.

* "Miserere" is written from a kind of exile. I'm tempted to subtitle the thing "Carmen Oedipodionium" (Oedipean Song), but our middle-brow culture has castrated the grand sense of "Oedipal" to the point where the word often evokes snickers instead of the pity and piety properly due to the Theban king and exile.

"Fame . . . that public destruction of one in the process of becoming . . . ."

Gentle Reader:

Thus many years ago a poet recorded in his notebook , counseling himself, his immediate readers, and those curious few out of posterity who, eventually and inevitably, would fold pages out of that notebook into their own.   

Thus with faint trepidation but firmer determination now I step out of the cage . . . and into the arena.