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A Postscript for Marianne Moore
No one exactly knows
Exactly how the clouds look in the sky
Or the shape of the mountains below them
Or the direction in which fish swim.
No one exactly knows.
The eye is jealous of whatever moves
And the heart
Is too far buried in the sand
To tell.
They are going on a journey
Those deep blue creatures
Passing us as if they were a sunshine
Look
Those fins, those closed eyes
Admiring each last drop of the ocean.
I crawled into bed with sorrow that night
Couldn’t touch his fingers. See the splash
Of the water
The noisy movement of cloud
The push of the humpbacked mountains
Deep at the sand’s edge.
Dear Lorca,
This is the last letter. The connection between us, which had been fading away with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of Garcia Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen.
It was a game, I shout to myself. A game. There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim.
Yet it was there. The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important then my other friends, but now achieving a different level of reality by being missing. Today, alone by myself, it is like having lost a pair of eyes and a lover.
What is real, I suppose, will endure. Poe’s mechanical chessplayer was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, and when the man departed, the games it had played were not less beautiful. The analogy is false, of course, but it holds a promise and a warning for each of us.
It is October now. Summer is over. Almost every trace of the months that produced these poems has been obliterated. Only explanations are possible, only regrets.
Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost, once loved, departing will never reappear.
Love
Jack
Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I’m happy for a time and interested
I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I’d like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so
Alcuni giorni fa un amico nel corso di una conversazione mi ha dato, letterariamente parlando, dell’emarginata. Ho accolto questo attributo come un complimento poiché nell’ambito della discussione che stavamo avendo mi aveva inorgoglito il fatto che lui, persona il cui modo di scrivere ammiro moltissimo, avesse accomunato la sua condizione alla mia, e malgrado il valore negativo che si accompagna a quella parola essa mi era sembrata una delle cose più belle che mi sia stata detta riguardo a ciò che scrivo.
Un paio di anni fa fui invitata a far parte di un blog letterario collettivo, e seppure non molto convinta accettai. Quell’esperienza durò pochissimi giorni, alcune incompatibilità mi spinsero ad uscirne. Scrissi una cortese e-mail spiegando le mie motivazioni che fu accolta piuttosto freddamente e la cosa si concluse lì. È normale d’altra parte che fra più persone possano nascere delle divergenze e che la convivenza, seppur letteraria, possa fallire e che si senta la necessità della separazione, ma ciò che dell’episodio mi lasciò perplessa fu il fatto che, quasi istantaneamente, tutto quanto potesse riferirsi ad una mia, seppur breve, presenza nel blog fu cancellata. Le poche cose postate, il mio nome, quello del mio blog, tutto sparì. Puff… Read the rest of this entry »
da : Asunder
On the fire escape of your rented room
we sat and felt the empty city
sweat and fret we passed a cigarette
back and forth as once we passed
words like these between us without
hope of keeping
Now I write
without hope of answer to say
that what we gave each other nakedly
was too much and not enough
to say that since we last touched
I am not empty I hear you named
and my heart starts the pieces of your voice
you left are interleaved with mine
and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes I miss how love
may make us otherwise
Dear Lorca,
Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone introduces into the poet’s life ( and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) he loses his balance for a moment, slips into being who he is, uses his poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet , for that instant, ceases to be a dead man.
I, for example, could not finish the last letter I was writing you about sounds. You were like a friend in a distant city to whom suddenly unable to write, not because the fabric of my lige had changed, but because I was suddenly, temporarily, not in the fabric of my life.i could not tell you about it because both it and I were momentary.
Even the objects change. The seagulls, the greenness of the ocean, the fish – they become things to be traded for a smile or sound of conversation- counters rather than objects. Nothing matters except the big lie of the personal- the lie in which these objects do not believe.
That instant, I said. It may last for a minute, a night, or a month, but, this i promise you, García Lorca, the loneliness returns. The poet encysts the intruder. The objects come back to thier own places, silent and unsmiling. I again begin to write you a letter on the sound of a poem. And this immediate thing, this personal adventure, will not have been transferred into the poem like the waves and the birds were, will, at the best, show in the lovely pattern of cracks in some poem where autobiography shattered but did not quite destroy the surface. And the encysted emotion will itself become an object, to be transferred at last into poetry like waves and the birds.
And I will again become you special comrade.
Love,
Jack
Dear Lorca,
When you had finished a poem what did it want you do with it? Was it happy enough merely to exist or did it demand imperiously that you share it with somebody like beauty of a beautiful person forces him to search the world for someone that can declare that beauty? And where did your poems find people?
Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody and anybody physically capable can receive them. They may be beautiful (we both written some that were) but they were meretricious. From the moment of their conception they inform us in a dulcet voice that, thank you, they can take care of themselves. I swear that if one of them were hidden beneath my carpet, it would shout out and seduce somebody. The quiet poems are what I worry about – the ones that must be seduced. They could travel about with me for years and no one would notice them. And yet, properly wed, they are more beautiful than their whorish cousins.
But I am speaking of the first night when I leave my apartment almost breathless, searching for someone to show the poem to. Often now there is no one. My fellow poets ( those I showed poetry to ten years ago) are so little interested in my poetry as I am in theirs. We both compare the poems shown ( unfavourably, of course ) with the poems we were writing ten years ago when we could learn from each other. We are polite but it is as if we were trading snapshot of our children- old acquaintances who disapprove of each other’s wives. Or were you more generous, García Lorca?
There are the young, of course. I have been reduced to them (or my poems have) lately. The advantage in them is that they haven’t yet decided what kind of poetry they are going to write tomorrow and are always looking for some device of yours to use. Yours, that’s the trouble. Yours and not the poem’s. they read the poem once to catch the marks of your style and then again, if they are at all pretty, to see if there is any reference to them in the poem. That’s all. I used to do it myself.
When you are in love there is no real problem. The person you love is always interested because he knows that poems are always about him. If only because each poem will someday be said to belong to the Miss X or Mister Y period of the poet’s life. I may not be a batter poet when I am in love, but I am a far less frustrated one. My poems have an audience.
Finally there are friends. There have been two of them in my life who could read my poems and one of that two prefers to put them in print so he can see them better. The other is far away.
All this to explain why I dedicate each of our poems to someone.
Love,
Jack
Solo di recente sto iniziando ad avere percezione di quale possa essere il fascino che alcuni libri riescono ad esercitare e perché esiste un mercato di collezionisti del libro. Il primo “fremito” l’ho avvertito all’incirca un anno e mezzo fa quando, leggendo le note biografiche di Jack Spicer, scoprii che lui stesso spesso auto-produceva le sue raccolte in quantità minime, copie che amava poi distribuire agli amici. Ne curava l’aspetto grafico, disegnava la copertina, le numerava talvolta con numeri e lettere. Di After Lorca, ad esempio, ne furono stampati solo cinquecento esemplari dalla White Rabbit, di un paio di quelle prime ne ho trovato le tracce, tramite internet, in alcune librerie americane specializzate in libri antichi e rari, una delle due potrebbe essere fra le mie mani per la “modica” cifra di mille e passa dollari.
Non credo che potrà finirci, però per un po’ ho assaporato quel gusto che pensavo potesse appartenere solo a qualcosa di unico, come potrebbe essere un dipinto, una scultura. Read the rest of this entry »
Ieri finalmente mi sono stati recapitati alcuni libri che aspettavo. Non ho scartocciato subito il pacchetto che è rimasto per un po’ ben sigillato sul tavolo. Credo sia una mia abitudine allungare i tempi, è come se adottassi per certe cose una specie di sabato leopardiano con cui “orno” la quotidianità per prolungare la fanciullezza che è racchiusa in ogni cosa prima che si sveli.
Poi il momento è giunto e finalmente mi sono messa tranquilla a sedere nella mia stanza con i libri fra le mani. Ho cercato subito le poesie che avevo intenzione di tradurre. Le avevo sentite già dalla voce del poeta ma dall’audio non avevo compreso alcuni versi, e le ho lette con attenzione cercando conferma di quel piacere provato nell’ascolto. Poi, sfogliando qui e là, ne ho lette altre ma molto rapidamente, lasciando alcune lacune laddove di alcuni termini mi sfuggiva il significato e avevo bisogno di controllarlo sul dizionario, di qualche altra mi sono detta entusiasta – bellissima, traduco anche questa per il mio blog –
Quando la soglia di concentrazione si è abbassata ho interrotto la lettura, ma mi sono soffermata sulla copertina di uno dei libri. È una bella foto in bianco e nero che ritrae in primo piano un giovane uomo che stringe sotto il braccio quella che mi è subito sembrata la custodia di una tromba. Alle sue spalle un ragazzino e un uomo aspettano la metropolitana. È una gran bella foto. Mi piacciono le vecchie foto in bianco e nero, e quella valigetta nera mi ha incuriosita. Sono andata perciò a cercarne l’autore sul retro del libro. Il giovane uomo è il trombettista jazz Don Cherry e la foto è di Ole Brask. Read the rest of this entry »
Conversiamo a lungo, sommessamente
l’uno di fronte all’altro quasi cercando
l’urto delle parole
il suono cieco dell’impatto,
l’aprirsi delle onde magnetiche che provengono da Marte
io ci sto bene qui, ti dico,
Summer is over
sì, ci siamo divertiti
fuori dal prezzo della poesia e dal vezzo della compassione
e ti amo quasi, senza la perdita che c’è
in ogni parola amore (manomessa)
poesia (manomessa)
vita (manomessa)
cazzo (manomessa)
e allora ti amo
amo la tua morte
che mi parla dell’innocenza che c’è
quando con segnali radar
conversiamo a lungo, sommessamente
l’uno di fronte all’altro cercando
l’urto delle parole
il suono cieco dell’impatto,
l’aprirsi delle onde magnetiche che provengono da Marte.
È qui che io sto bene, ti dico
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