Aporetica

  Poems late in June 2021 – Part 1   I’ve been thinking about joy and presence The Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, and his poem ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ The word ‘mutilated’ has troubled me since I first read the poem years ago, and after seeing Cronenberg’s film ‘Crash’ (1996) ‘Mutilate’ – maimed, disfigure, cut-off - but before that, the word has an uncertain origin   Try to Praise the Mutilated World (2002) by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh   Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Rem...

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.   I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poet...

  PUZZLE by Nicanor Parra   I give no one the right. I love a piece of rag. I shift tombs back and forth.   I shift tombs back and forth. I give no one the right. I'm a ridiculous sort In the light of the sun, The plague of soda fountains Dying of rage.   I am a hopeless case, My own hairs accuse me On the bargain altar The machines give no pardons.   I laugh from behind a chair, my face fills with flies.   I am the one who can’t say what he means Talking in long rows of what.   I stutter, With my foot touches a sort of foetus.   What are these stomachs for? Who made up this mess?   It's best thing is not to let on. Thinking one thing I think something else. (Translated by W.S. Merwin) Rompecabezas   No doy a nadie el derecho. Adoro un trozo de trapo. Traslado tumbas de lugar.   Traslado tumbas de lugar. No doy a nadie el derecho. Yo soy un tipo ridíc...

  THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968)   Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow.   Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow.   Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow.   From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bo...

Music BY JUHAN LIIV TRANSLATED FROM THE ESTONIAN BY H.L. HIX & JÜRI TALVET   It must be somewhere, the original harmony, somewhere in great nature, hidden. Is it in the furious infinite, in distant stars’ orbits, is it in the sun’s scorn, in a tiny flower, in treegossip, in heartmusic’s mothersong or in tears? It must be somewhere, immortality, somewhere the original harmony must be found: how else could it infuse the human soul, that music?                                                                       *** Music   Reading through Juhan Liiv   From where she comes - the music and the soul   the immortal and the corruptible through the geometry of song entangled   we are fallen post harmony the original concordanc...

'Outside Logos, says Aristotle, is primary matter, the principle of indefiniteness, pure potentiality, absolutely unknowable in itself. Beyond the boundary of the eidos with it's unitary formula (logos), unformed matter would appear infinite predication, a limitless spread of particularization, which would be nothing but babble. The flux is the flux of particulars. The transcendental function of language is the heightening of the abstracting and generalising power of words. To know is always to categorise, and even for Aristotle the name of that which guarantees the unity and self identity of this individual here is the same as the name of it's membership in a category: eidos means both form and "species". All philosophy takes place within the medium of nous or Logos, within which form is possible.'  -- Henry Staten

4 Poems By William Bronk And One By Shelley  The four were selected from Bronk’s book Finding Losses , which was published by Elizabeth Press in 1976                                                                                     ***   THE INABILITY She wants me to say something pretty to her because we both know the unabettable bleak of the world. Make believe, she says, what harm? It may be so. I can’t. I don’t.   The inability, not able to - or, the in-ability (the in-side of make believe ) She says, say something beautiful. You can do it - ...