Sitt ansiktes avtryck, eller stenens begär by Agneta Enckell

det fanns något jag vägrade, som jag har glömt.

var jag ska gå, den höga tonens brytningspunkt mot tystnad, glas, blickens avtryck.

vi drömmer kanske inte, har just vaknat.

kanske inte tänkta, avslöjade.                          den maktlösheten

(1998)

Disaster Supplies: June

Och tid förgår och tid sträcks ut, och tid

är som ett återfall i en lång sjukdom.

/ Rainer Maria Rilke, Rekviem

Disaster Supplies: May

Vad finns det kvar åt oss som nu behöver

vartenda ord som svarar mot ett gränslöst

i omätbara avstånd utlagt Hades.

Harry Martinson, Aniara (1956)

Robert Crawford on T.S. Eliot's "Marina"

Just found my favourite lecture at last year's T.S. Eliot International Summer School online: T.S. Eliot's Daughter, held by poet and professor of Scottish literature Robert Crawford. Not only is Marina one of the poems I keep the closest, but Crawford seemed to have a certain (poet's) understanding that really shone through in his lecture, something which I perhaps felt other lectures lacked.


There was a quite special moment afterwards, when Seamus Heaney, to end a rather excited discussion on the meaning of the poem's epigraph Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? (*) in relation to the rest of the poem's recalling the recognition scene in Shakespeare's Pericles (**), suddenly said that it must be understood as a tuning fork for the rest of the poem, and nothing else. Some of us sighed out of gratitude for that on point remark.


TSE reading Marina.


(*) "What place is this, what kingdom, what shores of the world?" Taken from Seneca the Younger's tragedy Hercules Furens, where these words are uttered by Hercules himself as he recovers from the insanity during which he has murdered his wife and children. 


(**) Pericles, in mourning for his wife and for Marina, the daughter who is for long thought to be dead, has left his kingdom for the sea. To hopefully rouse him from his despair, a young woman is put before him to sing. As she tells him her life story they both realize that they are in fact father and daughter.

Disaster Supplies: April

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton. 

Disaster Supplies: February

Var alla avsked i förväg, som vore de redan

bakom dig, liksom den vinter som gått. 

Ty bland vintrar finns en där den ändlösa ledan

givit ditt övervintrade hjärta sitt rikliga mått. /... /

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonetterna till Orfeus II:XIII


English, German.

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

Red on blue hurts the eye, but obviously makes for great covers. In a similar way, this moment happens to be both weird and perfect for finishing a collection like Birthday Letters. In the 88 poems that broke Hughes' (almost) silence 35 years after Sylvia Plath's death, he finally speaks of their life together.

All the prison animals had to be patient 

While we married. 

It must be one of the most emotionally complex and extraordinary collections of love letters ever written. 

Terror

Was the cloud of you

Birthday Letters was published in 1998, Ted Hughes' last year in life. 

Disaster Supplies: December

/... / En del ögon är alltid släckta
Där sover dåsiga drömska djur
som för alltid gått ur vintern
Drömdjur, skrämseldjur
Kallblodiga med förhårdnade naglar
I evighet utstötta ur rasen /.../


Katarina Frostenson, Huset är kvinnligt / Rena Land (1980)

Ann Jäderlund

Being a sucker for Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson, I'm wondering why I never got to reading any of her contemporaries. Perhaps because I never really felt the need to. At the moment, I'm going through some of Ann Jäderlund's work. I started off with the first three collections: Vimpelstaden, Som en gång varit äng, Snart går jag i sommaren ut and one of the later, I en cylinder i vattnet av vattengråt.

During my first read I had a hard time connecting to the work. It seemed to lack the friction, the consonants, the ugliness and the choruses I usually like my poetry to contain. It felt like the words were just pouring through the pages and that I failed to get a hold of them. Liking my poetry sort of harsh and German-like, Jäderlund's sentences seemed too French to me; too general, too romantic, too sensual, flowy and sleek. Ingratiating, perhaps.

Except for Snart går jag i sommaren ut, which is a horrific, haunting sort of tale, nothing else really did it for me.

But then I came around for a second read. Some time had passed and suddenly something had happened. A change of heart.

Jag har en stad i fickan, jag
har den här natten
som ska komma, hennes
spensliga hjärta

(from Sång för en man i solen, Vimpelstaden)

I suppose that quickly forming an opinion of poetry is always ungrateful. Plus, it has so much to do with mood. Reading the latest novel by Nina Bouraoui at the same time helped, though ('s what I said, Jäderlund + French = True).

Ah well. I am not done yet.

Du är en annan spegel det går inte bort

(from En stråle blod, originally meant to be contained in Som en gång varit äng)

Nabaneeta Dev Sen

"my time in the jungle is over, mother,
now the jungle lives in me."

Nabaneeta Dev Sen, The Jungle Story. Found via Bookake.

It's something more of a cry or a chorus than a great quote, really.

Jeanette Winterson on T.S. Eliot

"A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is."

Found a great article on the poetry of T.S. Eliot by the very wonderful Jeanette Winterson today, Shafts of Sunlight (originally from The Guardian).

Currently Reading: Barnes

«Tom said he had "wasted his life" (May 1954). I said, "So have I." He replied, "Yes, but think what you did when you were not wasting it!"»

Djuna Barnes on T.S. Eliot, 1981.

Svart som Silver by Bruno K. Öijer

I am amazed over the fact that a whole pice of work can seem so distant, right up to the very end, where it just suddenly grabs a tight hold.

ingen kan råna dej på din sorg

Bruno K. Öijer was my first favourite Swedish poet when I was younger. I saw him at Orionteatern a few years back, think it was in 2002, a year after Dimman av allt, the work that ended the magnificent trilogy after Medan giftet verkar (1990) and Det förlorade ordet (1995). In Dimman av allt, Öijer wrote about a dead mother; his mother, all mothers:



vad du än fick med dej
hoppas jag att du kan ta fram det ibland
och utan att bli ledsen
utan att längta tillbaka hit

This latest work seems to lack the dirt I always felt came with Öijer's poetry. It's cleaner, he seems older, more together; as if he was a voice in an awful world he has finally started coming to terms with. Not always a bad thing, but not that interesting either. Except for the ending.

Or is it that I am older?

A re-read or two might clear things up. After all, it's Öijer.

Constantly Reading: T.S. Eliot

What images return
O my daughter.

[.]

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.

[.]

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

[.]

Living to live in a world of time beyond me, let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.


From Marina

.
.
.

Sveda by Cecilia Persson

Recently read an interesting interview with Cecilia Persson in the latest issue of the great Swedish periodical called Slut (as in the Swedish word for end, nothing else), about her novel Sveda - on growing up with a mentally ill mother and, to some extent, about Sylvia Plath. The book contains a little bit of everything: clippings, poetry, prose, letters. It didn't really leave me with much, but made for a fairly good read, especially as the subject does interest me a lot.

Get it here.

Arboga

Always bad news from the Ouija board


Wiki

Copenhagen

Mostly reading Ted Hughes, though.

Terror
Was the cloud of you

Buoyancies #1

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by poet/choreographer/director/author/playwright ntozake shange is one of few books I never could have done without.

I remember my first time reading something by shange, a poem called People of Watts, inspired by Dana Lixenberg's portrait photography in a '93 issue of Vibe. There was something about it. Not long after I recognized her name in the Me'Shell N'degéOcello song Two Lonely Hearts (on the Subway), off her debut album Plantation Lullabies:

Here comes the train / Please don’t turn and walk away – stay / We could read some Ntozake Shange

In '95 I was in NYC for the first time in my life, hanging out at the Nuyorican Poets Café to catch a little something of the atmosphere surrounding shange and her friends; star-struck and overwhelmed by the opportunity to interview author/activist Lois Griffith about the café, the poetry slam scene and the disenfranchised of the U.S. and Sweden.

In the vintage section of the Strand Bookstore I found most of shange's work and I became obsessed, especially by for colored girls (...) which is a choreopoem for 7 women in 7 different cities of the U.S. It was first performed in a woman's bar outside Berkeley, California in '74, later moved on to Broadway, winning an Obie Award.

Lady in Orange:
i'm on the lower east side
in new york city
and i can't i can't
talk witchu no more

20 monologues/poems are intertwined with dance. It's about being an African-American woman in the 20th century, about love, race, gender and violence.

Lady in Orange:
i cdnt stand it
i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time
it's so redundant in the modern world

Years have passed and I've kept coming back to for colored girls (...) Evidently I had to pay tribute in my radio play on hip-hop and betweenship:

Nanna:
Svartvit. (Paus) Att slå upp ögonen varje morgon och
vara ingetdera. Och istället för att fundera på hur långt
regnbågen egentligen räcker, göra sig till den här
saken, för dem att se på, förundras över.

I didn't realise until now what it was I really saw in Ocean Harbour, South Georgia in February:



Lady in Brown:
& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide / but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows



Look inside the book here.

Listen to great gay rappers Deep Dickollective who have done a beautiful tribute to shange and the choreopoem called For Colored Boys here.

The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke

After a recent falling in love with the Duino Elegies, one would hope that his sonnets to Orpheus, written during the same time period as half of the elegies, would be as wonderfully insightful. To me, they are not. The only sonnets I kinda liked, that perhaps resemble the elegies a little are:

II:13
Be ahead of all parting, as if it were
behind you, like the winter you just weathered.
Because among the winters there is one so endless winter,
that, overwintering it, your heart recovers altogether.

II:26
How we are gripped by a bird's cry ...
any uniquely-created cry.
But the children, playing under open skies,
already cry beyond actual cries.

Cry the accident. Into holes
of this, of space (in which the whole
bird cry is received, like men in dreams -),
they drive the wedges of their screams.

Alas, where are we? Free, like kites
ripped loose from their moorings,
laughter-edged, we race half-height,

tattered by wind. -Arrange the criers,
singing god! to awaken roaring,
bearing like torrent the head and the lyre.


The whole thing can be found here.

Mon frère féminin by Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva answers Natalie Clifford Barney's Pensées d'une Amazone after their meeting in Paris in 1932. In short, she writes about the psychology behind a lesbian woman's choice to leave her older girlfriend for a man; for her utmost desire to have a child.

[It is not the day the child was born, it is now, three years later, that she knows what it has cost her.]

More Tsvetaeva.