New Charles Bernstein Poem

 

Charles Bernstein reading in front of a Kandinsky

Charles Bernstein, the major American poet-critic, has written a new translation of a Kandinksy poem. Or adaption. He has kindly offered it to Eyewear to publish online, with this accompanying photo, taken by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Song

So sits a man

In tighter loop

In tighter loop

Encircling scents

What a fluke
He’s got no ear

Also missing eye.

Blush of sound

Sun goes round

Senses won’t be found.

What’s overthrown

Now stands as home.

No speech’s tongued

The sung is song.

So it's the man

He’s got no ear

Also missing eye

Flush of sound

Sun goes round

Senses finely ground.

After Wassily Kandinsky, “Lied” (Klänge, 1912)

POETRY FOCUS: STEPHEN BURT

Eyewear is thrilled and delighted in equal measure to feature two new poems from the new Stephen Burt book, Belmont - from Graywolf Press.  Burt is quite simply one of the best and most influential poet-critics in America today.

The New Burt Book

His two previous books of poetry are Parallel Play and Popular Music, which won the Colorado Prize. He is also the author of several works of critical nonfiction, including Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Believer, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other newspapers and journals. He is Professor of English at Harvard University, and he lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

IN MEMORY OF THE ROCK BAND BREAKING CIRCUS

You were whiny and socially unacceptable even

to loud young men whose first criterion

for rock and roll was that it strike someone else

as awful and repulsive and you told

grim stories about such obscure affairs

as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge-

laden marathon runner from Zanzibar

who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth

Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate

sarcastic showtunes abject similes

feel like a piece of burnt black toast

for example threaded on a rusty wire followed

up by spitting too much time to think

by fusillades from rivetguns by cold

and awkward bronze reverberant church bells

percussive monotones 4/4 all for

the five or six consumers who enjoyed

both the impatience of youth

and the pissiness of middle age

as if you knew you had to get across

your warnings against all our lives as fast

as practicable before roommate or friend

could get up from a couch to turn them off

We barely remember you in Minnesota we love

our affable Replacements who modeled a more

acceptable form of rage who thought of girls

and cities boys and beds and homes and cars

as flawed but fixable with the right drink

right mates and right guitar strings whereas you

did not and nothing in your songs resolved

except in a certain technical sense as a drill

resolves contests between drywall and screw

Your second bassist took the stage name Flour

your second drummer copied a machine

Somebody else in your hometown took credit

for every sound you taught them how to use

I write about you now since nobody else

is likely to and since even appalled

too-serious flat compliments like these

are better than nothing and because to annoy

perseverate and get under everyone's skin

beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world

which is to fade into silence entirely which

will never happen to The Ice Machine

to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse

to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown

in the eyes of any audience that is

I should say not until it happens to me

----

TO SUBARUS

In poems autobiographical information serves the same purpose as references to birch trees or happiness or Subarus.

-David Orr, The New York Times Book Review, July 20, 2008

Whose silver is lead in sunlight, whose maroon

looks like the rust on a storm drain,

whose popular Forrester also comes

in dead pine-needle green,

with rounded roof and trapezoidal frame,

you seem to mean

that I will never surprise anybody again.

So studiously unglamorous, at rest

in our one-car driveway, you seem to claim

that to be adult is simply to care less

about doing your own thing on your own,

and more about what other people require:

to care less for the space cleared by new brooms,

for the fast lane and the fine line

that might, or might not, separate

romance from folly, and more

for Dr. Harvey Karp, who taught new parents how to calm

their infants with attempts to recreate

the volume and vibrations of the womb.

Poems by Stephen Burt, copyright 2013.  From his new collection, Belmont.

POEM BY TERRANCE HAYES

THE CARPENTER ANT

It was when or because she became two kinds

of mad, both a feral nail biting into a plank

and a deranged screw cranking into a wood beam,

the aunt—I shouldn’t say her name,

went at the fullest hour of the night,

the moon there like an unflowered bulb

in a darkness like mud, or covered in darkness

as a bulb or skull is covered in mud,

the small brown aunt who, before she went mad,

taught herself to carpenter and unhinged,

in her madness, the walls she claimed

were bugged with a tiny red-eyed device

planted by the State or Satan’s agents, ghosts

of atheists, her foes, or worse, the walls

were full of the bugs she believed crawled

from her former son-in-law’s crooked mouth,

the aunt, who knows as all creatures know,

you have to be rooted in something tangible

as wood if you wish to dream in peace,

took her hammer with its claw like a mandible

to her own handmade housing humming,

“I don’t know why God keeps blessing me,”

softly madly, and I understood, I was with her

when the pallbearers carried a box

made of mahogany from her church to a hearse

to a hole in the earth, it made me think

of the carpenter ant who carries within its blood

an evolved self-destructive property, and on its face

mandibles twice the size of its body,

and can carry on its back, as I have seen on tv,

a rotted bird or branch great distances

to wherever the queen is buried--Kingdom:

Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Tribe: Camponotini,

the species that lives on wood is, like mud, rain,

and time, the carpenter’s enemy, yes,

but I would love to devour the house I live in

until it is a permanent part of me,

I would love to shape, as Perumthachan,

the master sculptor, carpenter and architect

of India is said to have shaped, a beautiful tree

into the coffin in which I am to be buried,

I know whatever we place in a coffin, the coffin

remains empty, I know nothing buried is buried,

I don’t know why God keeps blessing me,

I don’t know why God keeps blessing me.

poem copyright Terrance Hayes, 2013. 

KURT BROWN HAS DIED

Sad news - the fine American poet, anthologist and organiser of many events, Kurt Brown, has died, I have just heard.

Poetry Focus On James Grinwis

Eyewear is very pleased, this rather grey April Saturday in London, to offer readers a chance to get to know one of the best of a new generation of American poets, with a selection of seven recent poems.

Grinwis is a significant American poet

James Grinwis (pictured) is the author of The City from Nome and Exhibit of Forking Paths, which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the major National Poetry Series (America) in 2010 and published by Coffee House Press in 2011. He co-founded Bateau, a letterpress journal and chapbook press, in 2007, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. His work appears regularly in US journals and reviews, and has appeared in the UK in 20 x 20.

HYMN FOR FLUTE

There is a scribe on an animal claw chair

surrounded by palm bearers

looking out on a landscape of creepy individuals.

My baby was growing up with the hunters

in a forest of snake trees.

A Titan 3 Centaur rocket

blistered off, peeled from the sky

a vestige of unknown. A series of abstractions:

nail them to a wall, she said. A real wall, as is found

in the hearts of men, she said. The truth in a single

shaft of sunlight. Okay, she sees the bonfire

in the tundra south of Oolik

and questions the motivations of the hunters

who have built it: to entice

bachelorettes to their bedsides, the fire

having the effect of a lure, or a hook?

Or much simply to make of darkness

a plaything? Because so large a fire

it must have powers beyond warmth.

It gets fuzzy, the interior

of a skull, like fishery workers

burning fresh bones on the dock. To dig

through vessels and wastes

in order to find things, that was what had to be done

though the dark was riddled with stars.

ETUDE

A stemlessness.

An opening like a dead dog on the cement.

Boniness as nation state.

Bellies of children.

Puzzles.

One who knows the names of stars

another who knows constellations.

A stemlessness.

Unfamiliar.

Troposphere. To write one word.

Suspended by the aroma of tea.

Fragments meshed into a hole

through which to breathe.

Cantique: a short, easy, popular song.

Algol, the eclipsing: spooky changes in brightness.

A Chaconne repeats a harmony.

A claymore is a kind of sword.

A stemlessness.

A soul torn apart by beaks?

IMAGE SET 2

Satie: “haunted by whiteness.”

Pieces froides, Son of the Stars, Gnossienes.

Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.

My son, learning his alphabet, my daughter,

focused on plastic golf clubs out in the abandoned lot.

I was in the driveway, filling the car with piles of brush.

Avec conviction et avec un tristesse rigoureuse.

Reexamination: the art of it: like sitting in a dance hall,

surrounded by exuberance, pomposity, and mirth.

“Everyone seeks to transcend.” My friend this

was the nature of the country when I thought no, I love the country.

Scenes of greatness, scenes of many lights

leaping up.

THERE IS A CONNECTION

Watching birds will bring infinite rewards.

You must wait and watch and it takes time

to let the world open up to you.

The way an extremely new member of the family

enters the familial consciousness: like moss.

A man just then let the world open up to him by becoming

a yawn, as in a bomb-proof box fully opened in a playground in the sun.

Also: My wife was driving and ran over the bird.

If I was driving, I thought, I would have seen him.

NO ONE’S IN A MILLION

Conglomeration, as in sheet music

where each note serves the purpose

of another, the way a bunch of rocks

can fuse into one. Igneous rocks

are born from fire, metamorphic

from force. In Hindu philosophy

there is something like three waves

inside every person, in Medieval thought

there were four humors.

I was walking through town,

regret dropping off of me

like nematodes clamped to a defunct satellite

on the bottom of the sea.

There are times when one

seems only to have that kind of stuff.

The full-bellied moon did something

to the whole planet

that night of extreme leaving.

But a speck of one in a million,

a similar event going off somewhere,

like a dime store gum machine

dropping its bright red globes,

the kids scooping them out

and chucking them at telephone poles.

THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS

Men can beat the crap out of each other

then get hungry and treat one another to lunch.

When having an organ transplant

one will have a drug called mycophen

shot into the body

in order to keep the new organ there.

Immiscible means they just don’t mix,

but it sounds sexy and permanent.

“They’re passion was immiscible.”

In the aisles of the market place,

I passed a beautiful woman;

she was my wife once.

Having a hard time stopping to love somebody

is having a mean saint on a dead cloud inside you

that will get absorbed by other saints and clouds,

they say one can become a shield,

a stretch of sky, or a river.

When walking into a cave, it is good

to locate oneself and look around first.

SQUIRRELS ARE NEAT

It’s better when it’s bland, the relationship,

Christen said, the up and down nature

of being involved with someone

taking its toll in the very fabric

that takes it someplace. And squirrels,

they are very neat, running around like that,

like drummers, errant cruise missiles,

stuff. Like that word the elderly woman

said to you, going out the door of the five

and dime, ‘fuck you’ she said,

and that is okay, you didn’t mind it,

just wanted to let her feel at peace somehow.

When my dog goes chasing after a squirrel

I know it is hopeless, but then

she catches one, and it breaks my heart.

All this up and down nature to the universe,

it’s as if you were a gut instinct

mated to a way of philosophically

thinking about things. And there you are,

my friend, not making anything up,

looking for stones

that really look right at you,

as if they had eyes, which they do,

the eye of a stone

something not to be messed with.

all poems appear with permission of the author, and are copyright James Grinwis, 2013.