baudelairies

Odysseus Dying - Sheila Wingfield

Rodney Ewing: My Country Needs Me (1996)

Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise, your wandering silences and bright trouvailles, dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish… Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them, the archetypal voices sing offkey; the old actor cannot read his friends, and nevertheless he reads himself aloud, genius hums the auditorium dead. The line must terminate. Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope; the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten, nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Marcel Duchamp: Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (1910)

by Anne Stevenson We were the wrecked elect, The ruined few.  Youth, Youth, the Café IrunÞa And the bullfight set, Looped on Lepanto brandy But talking ‘truth’ – Hem, the 4 a.m. wisecrack, The hard way in, That story we were all at the end of And couldn’t begin – We thought we were living now, But we were living then. Sanctified Pound, a knot Of nerves in his fist, Squeezing the Goddamn iamb Out of our verse, Making it new in his Archaeological plot – To maintain ‘the sublime’ In the factive?  Couldn’t be done. Something went wrong With ‘new’ in the Pisan pen. He thought he was making now, But we was making then. Virginia, Vanessa, A teapot, a Fitzroy fuss, ‘Semen?’ asks Lytton, eyeing a smudge on a dress. How to educate England And keep a correct address On the path to the river through Auschwitz? Belsen? Auden and Isherwood Stalking glad boys in Berlin – They thought they were suffering now, But they were suffering then. Out of pink-cheeked Cwmdonkin, Dylan with his Soho grin. Planted in the fiercest of flames, Gold ash on a stem. When Henry jumped out of his joke, Mr Bones sat in. Even you, with your breakable heart In your ruined skin, Those poems all written That have to be you, dear friend, You guessed you were dying now, But you were dying then. Here is a table with glasses, Ribbed cages tipped back, Or turned on a hinge to each other To talk, to talk, Mouths that are drinking or smiling Or quoting some book, Or laughing out laughter as candletongues Lick at the dark – So bright in this fiction Forever becoming its end, We think we are laughing now, But we are laughing then.

Adrienne Rich

“First, they had a voice not because they’d been given a platform to “mouth off”, but because their opinions had been structurally linked to the levers of power. That’s what having a voice really means; anything less than that is a sham. It is shouting into the void.”

Dream Song 29, John Berryman

e.e. cummings

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster