xerxesxerxesxerxes

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

At a conference in Budapest in 1976, I fell in with some young Slovak scholars, tentatively, I imagined, in love with one of them. I wrote this poem recapitulating their description of their lives, trapped in Iron Curtain domesticity.

Later, back in Canada, I glued a copy of Sylvia Plath’s latest collection into the covers of Alice in Wonderland and, per instructions of the one who had caught my eye, mailed it to Bratislava.

Never heard back if it made it through the censors

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

Thanks to Guillaume Apollinaire for the title to this little ditty, one of the rare short poems I've written in French.

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

A fourteener I wrote a while back.

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

First stanza of Gabriele D'Annuzio's Rain on Pines.

For the full translation go to https://alteritas.net/pastis/translations/after-dannuzio/

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

A poem by Don Paterson

Rain

I love all films that start with rain: rain, braiding a windowpane or darkening a hung-out dress or streaming down her upturned face;

one big thundering downpour right through the empty script and score before the act, before the blame, before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone beside a silent telephone or the dress lies ruined on the grass or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source along their fatal watercourse. However bad or overlong such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through or when the boom dips into view or when her speech starts to betray its adaptation from a play,

I think to when we opened cold on a starlit gutter, running gold with the neon of a drugstore sign and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood – all was washed clean with the flood we rose up from the falling waters the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Don Paterson

Listen to Don Paterson read his poem.

Image: Andie MacDowell from Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

A haiku.

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

... There are no maps to trace

the slopes we shared, only limbs

bared in the sweep frost ungirds,

cold which leaches light away,

loss no beauty can allay.

Thanks to Steven Knepper for hosting two poems of mine in New Verse Review: "Québec" and "Early of Late.

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

A simple translation of Rimbaud's simple sonnet. For the French and a short comment, go to https://alteritas.net/GXL/?p=4252

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

Kierkegaard was one of the fav philosophers of my youth, even though he was a commited Christian. At least he was one in more than name, not what a wag might call a #CHRINO

(Our whirlwind this-is-Saturday-it-must-be-Copenhagen tour of Europe continues. More pix coming.)

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

Another interesting genre occasioned by death is the epitaph.

Traduttore = traditore

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

Richard and Debbie were passionate about birdwatching, for which I never developed a taste. Could never get the names right.

On one of my several trips to Mexico in the early 80s, they took me on a long hike to Cascada las Brisas, a waterfall near Cuetzalan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. There had been reports of a sighted trogon.

Our trip took us through a cloud forest and alongside a coursing stream up to the Falls themselves. It was a fabulous experience but I don’t have a trogan on the list of birds seen Debbie carefully prepared for me afterwards.

Two decades later I turned this expedition to allegorical purpose. The missing trogan became not only a poem but a poem about failing at poetry or, more generally, the failure of poetry.

This is paradoxical since “Rara avis” is among my favourite poems of my own, and starts out with a simulacra couplet of meter and rhyme, as any honorable Ars poetica should do.

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

I know virtually no Russian but thanks to a wonderful collaborator I had 40 years ago I have dared to translate this poem by Osip Mandelstam. Once a week we'd meet for glass of wine and she'd go over line by line one of her favs, of which this became one of my own.

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

I'll be in Mexico City next week, first time since 2006. To mark the occasion I'll be curating and gathering into a liitle plaquette the poems I have written about Mexico. Here is the title poem. Stay tuned.