What I’m reading when I’m reading as I am always reading now:
Two translations of Paul Celan, Pierre Joris’ magnificent THREADSUNS and John Felstiner’s rendering of selected poems and prose. This,in Felstiner’s mirroring of the man in anguish, from“The Meridian,” to remind me: “Art creates I-distantness. Art in a certain direction demands a certain distance, a certain path.”
Selected Essays 1934-45, Simone Weil. “A Medieval Epic Poem,” re an epic fragment poem “Song of the Crusades Against the Albigensians.” A girl does love her heretics.
“Songs and Stories of the Ghouls” by Alice Notley which I blurbed but don’t remember, described by Wesleyan as “an epic poem of genocide, designed to create to create power for the dead.” Hmm. I say: “Songs and Stories of the Ghouls makes thrilling claims for the power of dispossession.”
I-distantness. Lost poems. Forgetting and dispossession, and other severe forms of freedom.
A Desert Book of Flowers. Many, including the Globe-Mallow, Purple Verbena, and red sage, I see looking up from the book, are just flowering now.
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