*
this is impressive:

http://www.kickingwind.com/readings.html

....

in the last ten/fifteen years, I've been invited to give/have given maybe four readings . . .

with my persona non grata status in the Pobiz, I guess it's amazing I got even four invitations!

...

actually, when I was younger I did receive invitations to read my poetry, and I did readings—

but then Poetry Magazine reported that I was afraid to give readings—

yes, before Poetry Magazine stated that I was afraid to give readings,

I was actually invited to give readings of my poetry,

but then of course after Poetry Magazine asserted that I was afraid to give readings,

all such invitations dried up . . .

which is not surprising, really:

I mean, when you know that Poetry Magazine has declared that I am "terrified" (the word they used)

of giving poetry readings,

then it's not too likely that you or anyone else

will invite me

to give a poetry reading,

is it?

The sponsors and organizers of poetry readings all know that I am afraid to read my work in public—they all know it because it said so right there in Poetry Magazine, so it must be true—

ergo it's no wonder they never invited me.

....



....

...

*
appreciation/transversion: "L'Horreur" by
Andrée Beidas


*
I could find only 14 google cites for her, all of which seem to be a listing of her two (her only two?) books . . . Which seems odd, given the bio note below. (Abebooks has nothing.)


This poem is on page 120 of "Poetry by French Women," edited and translated by Evalyn P. Gill, published in 1980 by Green River Press:


L'HORREUR


L'horreur
n'est pas une mer
dont chaque courbe de vague
serait le dos d'un monstre
ni même un ciel d'orage
qui pleurerait du sang
L'horreur
c'est ce visage
parfois
grimaçant de désir


*
Gill's enface trans. adds a stanza break (assuming the above was printed correct):


HORROR


Horror
is not an ocean
where each wave's curve
would be the back of a monster
nor even a stormy sky
raining blood


Horror
is this face
now and then
grimacing with desire


*
from the "Notes on Contributors" (p. 140):


Andrée Beidas, born in Beyrouth of Lebanese ancestry, is an actress and T. V. star, as well as a poet. She lived in London a year while acting in the Royal Opera. Her poems, which show a sense of the dramatic, are collected in Pages d'insomnie and Et Franchir le reveil.


*
"L'Horreur" is one of the two poems by Beidas in this anthol, which features 33 poets, including 3 who have had book-selections published in English translation: Vénus Khoury, Joyce Mansour, and Andrée Chedid.


*
Some of my efforts at transversion:


THE HORROR


Horror
is not the seashore,
the beach
where each


wave breaks
like a monster
with two backs—


Nor a stormy sky
that rains one's veins dry
with lightning fire—


Horror is a face
displaced, here,
by its grimace
of desire.




/
Horror is a face
above me placed,
fixed in its grimace
of desire.


*
I worked from Gill's trans., and from the original—


the wave's monstrous back made me think of Shakespeare's image for sexual intercourse: "the beast with two backs",


which perhaps Beidas was referencing . . .


My version reverses her ending (her climax) by making that grimacing face the Other's (the lover above me)


rather than the speaker's own: Horror is this face, she says,


this face I see in the mirror as I makeup for a performance—


or does that interpretation rely too much on her bio—


Gill's only comment on Beidas is in the bio note, which says that her poems "show a sense of the dramatic"—


as I remember it, I read the bio note before I went to her poems with curiosity as to what "an actress and T.V. star" would be writing about—


Horror is this face which now and then (parfois) grimaces with desire,


in desire,


on those (stormlike?) occasions when desire occurs—


My version may mirror her mirror.


*
Horror
is not the seashore
where each wave


breaks
beastbacked
like a monster—


Nor even the sky,
where a storm rave
rains its blood dry—


Horror
is a face
out of place


here,
in this grimace
of desire.


*


/
Horror is this
face, its grimace
of desire.


/
Horror is this face
in my mirror,
etched in its grimace
of desire.


/
Horror
is this mirror
here, my face


in this grimace
of desire.


/
Horror
is my mirror,
where desire


paints its grimace
on this face.


/


Horror
is a face
displaced


here,
by its grimace
of desire.


/


Horror
is a face
I occasionally


see,
this grimace
of desire.


/


Horror
is a face
I occasionally


paint as me,
titled "Grimace
of Desire."


/
THE HORROR


Horror
is not the seashore,
the beach
where each


wave's contour
breaks
like a monster
with two backs—


Nor is it shown higher,
in a stormy sky,
where the rain's out-racing / erasing
its blood veins dry—


Horror is a face
above me placed,
grimacing
with desire.






/




Nor is it shown higher,
in a stormy sky,
rain and fire / rain and bloodfire
every blood vein dry— / lightning's vein dry
/ where the lightning's fire
rains each blood vein dry—


Horror is a face
above me placed,
set in its grimace / fixed in its grimace
of desire.






*


The "final" version, as it appears in my collection of Transversions:


After: "L'Horreur" by Andrée Beidas


Horror
is not the seashore,
the beach
where each


wave breaks
like a monster
with two backs:


or a stormy sky
that rains one's veins dry
with lightning fire—


Horror is my face
displaced
by this grimace
of desire.






Note:
I worked from the original French poem, and from
Evalyn P. Gill's English version.


*
*
*

*
this was posted on Edward Byrne's blog yesterday:

As we recall today the events of September 11, 2001, I thought the following poem by Stanley Plumly would be appropriate to bring again to readers’ attention. “’The Morning America Changed’” first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and it was later published in Plumly’s excellent 2007 collection of poems, Old Heart (W.W. Norton). Although eight years have now passed since the terrible incidents of that infamous day, Stanley Plumly’s fine poem still resonates with its intimacy and immediacy, and its lines remind me once more of the intense rush of emotional reactions caused by those images seen on television screens all around the world.


“THE MORNING AMERICA CHANGED”

Happened in the afternoon at Villa Serbelloni. 

We’d closed up shop on the work for the day 

and decided to make the long descent down 

the elegant stone switchback path into Bellagio 

for coffee and biscotti. It was still Tuesday 

and a quarter to three and a good quarter hour 

to the exit gate or if you stopped to look 

at the snow on the Alps or at “the deepest 

lake in all of Italy” or looked both ways 

at once—as we say crossing a street—five, 

ten minutes longer. This day was longer 

because it was especially, if redundantly, 

beautiful, with the snow shining and the lake 

shining and the big white boats shining 

with tourists from Tremezzo and Varenna. 

And the herring gulls and swallows at different 

layers, shining like mica in the mountain rock. 

And the terra cotta tiles of the village roofs 

almost shining, almost close enough to touch. 

Judith was already in the pasticceria 

and I was looking skyward on Via Garibaldi, 

the one-way traffic lane circling the town, 

when I heard the rain in the distance breaking 

and then her voice through the window calling 

and then on the tiny screen inside 

pillars of fire pouring darkly into clouds. 



—Stanley Plumly 
 


Posted by Edward Byrne at Friday, September 11, 2009

...

**

to me, the only thing that "resonates" about this poem is how bad it is . . .

frankly I find it disgusting—it's not just that the plotting of it is a direct steal from O'Hara's The Day Lady Died,

which I find offensive—

a list of things I hate about this poem would include every line:

"Villa Serbolloni"— what the fuck is the Villa Serbolloni? whose "villa" is it? is it Plumly's? does he own it? is he renting it? is it a hotel, or what?

"We’d closed up shop on the work for the day"— who the fuck is "we"?

Me, Stanley Plumly, and who else?

and what on earth is this line saying, literally I mean—

what work? "we" are working on what?—

("closed up shop"—what does "closed up shop" mean? is this cliche phrase meant to foreshadow the "shop" at the end of the poem:

"Judith was already in the pasticceria"

(and who the fuck is "Judith"?))

.....

these incomprehensible first two lines

are followed by utterly boring and banal descriptive blather—

oh yeah that "stone switchback path" down which we make "the long descent" from our swanky "villa"

is just so elegant, don'tcha know—

jesus yuck.

O'Hara's digressive aporia in the Holiday poem are at least well written/intriguing/interesting, and filled with evocative suspense depending/suspending from the ominous title,

but Plumly's inconsequential trivia is just maddeningly pointless: its "poignancy" is calculated derivative and a worn-out literary device . . .

...

depressing to me that Edward Byrne finds merit in this trite verse . . .

Byrne's book "Along the Dark Shore" is a book I admire and have reread at since its publication—

Ashbery contributed a foreward to it, in which he aptly praises the "particulars" of Byrne's poems . . .

**

contrast Plumly's specious, dishonest smarminess

with a poem by a real poet—this one by Robert Pinsky:

9/11

We adore images, we like the spectacle
Of speed and size, the working of prodigious
Systems. So on television we watched

The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing
Until we were sick not only of the sight
Of our prodigious systems turned against us

But of the very systems of our watching.
The date became a word, an anniversary
That we inscribed with meanings–who keep so few,

More likely to name an airport for an actor
Or athlete than “First of May” or “Fourth of July.”
In the movies we dream up, our captured heroes

Tell the interrogator their commanding officer’s name
Is Colonel Donald Duck–he writes it down, code
Of a lowbrow memory so assured it’s nearly

Aristocratic. Some say the doomed firefighters
Before they hurried into the doomed towers wrote
Their Social Security numbers on their forearms.

Easy to imagine them kidding about it a little,
As if they were filling out some workday form.
Will Rogers was a Cherokee, a survivor

Of expropriation. A roper, a card. For some,
A hero. He had turned sixteen the year
That Frederick Douglass died. Douglass was twelve

When Emily Dickinson was born. Is even Donald
Half-forgotten?–Who are the Americans, not
A people by blood or religion? As it turned out,

The donated blood not needed, except as meaning.
And on the other side that morning the guy
Who shaved off all his body hair and screamed

The name of God with his boxcutter in his hand.
O Americans–as Marianne Moore would say,
Whence is our courage? Is what holds us together

A gluttonous dreamy thriving? Whence our being?
In the dark roots of our music, impudent and profound?–
Or in the Eighteenth Century clarities

And mystic Masonic totems of the Founders:
The Eye of the Pyramid watching over us,
Hexagram of Stars protecting the Eagle’s head

From terror of pox, from plague and radiation.
And if they blow up the Statue of Liberty–
Then the survivors might likely in grief, terror

And excess build a dozen more, or produce
A catchy song about it, its meaning as beyond
Meaning as those symbols, or Ray Charles singing “America

The Beautiful.” Alabaster cities, amber waves,
Purple majesty. The back-up singers in sequins
And high heels for a performance–or in the studio

In sneakers and headphones, engineers at soundboards,
Musicians, all concentrating, faces as grave
With purpose as the harbor Statue herself.

......

how would someone feel

*

here's a quote from Jonathan Mayhew's blog, "Bemsha Swing", date 09-28-2007:

Georg Trakl, César Vallejo, and Juan Ramón Jiménez were not "surrealists." I'm going off the "deep" end next time I see a quote about how James Wright translated "surrealist poets" like these! Whether Lorca was a "surrealist' is at least open to debate. It kind of depends on what your definition of 'Lorca" is. The "American Lorca" was a surrealist. The friend of Dalí, the Lorca of the drawings, might have been. The author of Diván del Tamarit was not.

Vallejo wrote an autopsy of surrealism, explaining its failings. Trakl killed himself 10 years before the surrealist manifesto. How would someone feel if encountering a list of "Language poets like Ron Silliman, Robert Hass, Frank O'Hara, and Bill Knott"? Would it matter that some died before language poetry existed, some hated it? The logic seems to be (1) Robert Bly and James Wright translated Trakl and Vallejo. (2) Robert Bly liked surrealism around this time. (3) Therefore these poets are surrealists.

*

*

—Mayhew's question in which my name appears made another question occur to me:

How would I feel if someone called me an "avant-garde" poet, which Robert Pinsky did indeed call me in his Wash Post column . . . ?

I would feel, and I did feel, hurt and insulted, (and I know Pinsky meant it to be an insult)

since I do not consider myself an avantgarde poet, I have never wanted to be an avantgarde poet, and in fact I dislike almost all avantgarde poetry:—

which means that if Pinsky is right in his aspersion, then I have failed in my ambitions and aspirations as a poet . . .

—Well, that is to say, I mean, I know I've failed: I am a failed poet, period; but if his pejorative label should somehow be correct, it would mean that I've failed even more, even worser than I think . . .

*

reprint

*

I'm reprinting an old post below . . .

(In asserting my civil right to end my life when and as how I choose, I may be transgressing the social norms, which of course poets have never done!

It seems to me that poets especially should appreciate and support this right. I'm not excluding other vocations, sculptors for example could receive such benefits from the Sculptors League, and etcet for every field of endeavor,

but I demand that the Poetic Institutions should aid poets particularly in this matter.

I demand their patronage at this acme of climacteric: they owe me (and needless to say, all other poets like me, we who have overpaid our lives into that metaphorical fund devotionally and are now due our parting pension) that much, they owe me this assisted demise.

This bequeath of death.

I can of course do it via the usual violent methods, but I feel that as a poet I deserve a painless deliverance granted by the Academy of American Poets or the Poetry Society of America or the Poetry Foundation or the Ingram Merrill Foundation or the heiratic Bollingen or similar endowers of poetic endeavor—

Or is it hopeless to expect succor from such evil and corrupt bodies? Must poets form their own self-help groups, auto-euthanistic societies. If those malevolent cabals listed above will not help poets in this quest, must I turn to poets themselves and beg for their individual or collective mercies . . .

I can attend poetry readings with a sign around my neck asking for contributions of the right prescription strength . . . I can write pleas to famous poets begging them to scrape their medicine cabinets for a bolus of panacea, a perk of peace ...

Yes it would be useless of me to protest picket the offices of the Academy of American Poets et al, though I will continue to proclaim that they are in arrears to me, that they are obligated to accord me this compensatory quittance in return for my lifetime of service.)

*

Once they get to a certain age, poets should be put to sleep; I don't mean all poets, not real poets, successful poets: but poets like me, second-raters, third-raters, whether run of the mill SOQhack like me or superannuated avant, we should get it in the neck. Our poems are already dead; we might as well follow.

Because what's the point. We're not going to write anything important now: I'm not going to, that's for sure. I'm through, I know it. Why hang on and keep going through the motions, which is all I'm doing now as anyone can see who reads the work I've posted here on this blog over the past year.

But there should be an easy out for old poets who've failed. A graceful goodbye, a painless dispensation. We should be helped to put ourselves away quietly. A "terminal dosage" should appear on our doorsill from some anonymous generous patron of the arts, to honor not our accomplishment but our sustained devotion to the bright cause. We don't deserve a prize for our lifelong failed poetic attempts, but surely by those laborious efforts we have at least earned a charitable bottle of sleepingpills! The American Academy of Arts and Letters could spare an OD, don't you think?

Is it too much to ask the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets to help euthanize the exits of old failed poets like me? Can't they set up a discretionary fund, an in-house Hemlock Society, to assist and sponsor such acts of mercy? If they had hearts they would.

Seriously, with all the millions the Poetry Foundation has, Christian Wiman can't take a little of that money and establish an Euthanasia outreach program for extinctist poets like me?

*

Expunge us from the scene. Wipe us off the screen. We're (I'm) just taking up space and attention that would otherwise and should indeed be going to younger poets.

I'm just taking up space a younger poet should be filling. My job, my publisher(s), my readership (all 12 of them) should be going to that younger viable poet.

*

Can no one hear us old failed poets begging for surcease? "Put me out of my misery" we whimper. Have pity on us. Is there no kind Benefactor who will aid our quietus, who will press into our hand the nepenthean vial?

*

(The CIA issues suicide pills to its agents. . . the CIA used to fund under-the-table most USA artistic institutions. . . why can't someone from the myriad Academies of American Coldwar Culture call up their former or current conduits in the CIA and say, Hey we got all these old failed poets cluttering up the mis en scene, can't you lend us some "escape-capsules" to help us delete this mess. . . The Academy of American Poets could benefit AmerPo most by scoring cyanide cocktails for terminal poets like me. . . .)

*

The CEO of Home Depot just retired with a 210 million dollar payout. I wasn't the CEO of PoBiz Inc, I was only a minor clog in the company: I don't expect 210 million, but can't they at least give me a crummy bottle of barbituates, some goodbye-Bill pills to ease my demise?!

If everybody reading this would scrounge their medicine cabinet and vouchsafe me a tab or two. Or if only some wealthy patron of the arts would find it in their hearts to mercifully anonymously endow me with the Terminal Sedation that would balm and dose me to a close.

*

suspect should be shot on sight

(a post from two years ago:)

*

Someone who runs a little poetry reading series here in Boston wants me to do one in their schedule before I leave the area next year . . .

Vanity (as always) tempts, but I can't do it.

My health is not up to it, first and firstmost. That in itself is sufficient reason to refuse,—

but also, as I've mentioned in earlier posts here, back when I was younger and did do readings I was by all accounts pretty bad at it.

And to say "I did readings" is not quite accurate, considering that in my three decades of residence here in the Boston area, I was almost never invited to give them . . .

which is not surprising, really, taking into account how terrible I was at doing them—

and in view of how the few readings I did give were so poorly attended—

it's no wonder I was asked to do them so infrequently . . .

The overseers of such venues knew how small a crowd my limited (meaning "bad") reputation as a poet would bring in. And they were right, of course.

In those thirty years there were certainly plenty of places where I could have been invited to read, most of the many colleges and universities in or around the Boston area had reading series, and there were always non-affiliated independent ones ongoing . . .

*

But lately I've been wondering whether my pathetically meager reading career might relate to the fact that the State Arts Council had at some point early on in my thirty years here pronounced me persona non grata . . .

and ergo the administrators of all those poetry-reading series knew that it would be *illegal* to recognize me as a poet, to invite me to read—

this is a metaphor, but poets live and die by metaphor, and I've died dozens at the hands of this one, so please stay with me while I tease it out a bit—

Laws are created not solely by legislation, but also by precedence and custom:

so if the State of Massachusetts, through its Arts Agency, has repeatedly and consistently ruled that my poetry has no merit and is not worthy of—

I applied I can't remember how many times, how many years for one of the poetry grants they gave over the course of those three decades to hundreds of other Massachusetts poets—

if the State has determined that I am a nonpoet, if they have rendered that judgement again and again and again, then,

does that not constitute a statutory mandate, does that not have the authority of an ordinance,—

does that not establish a Law, a commonlaw or corpus juris,—

does that not in jurisprudence enact an Edict that finds "Knott is not a poet"—

has not the State ratified, by precedence and custom, and decreed just such an embargo—

and if the State of Massachusetts has legally ordained by fiat that I am not a poet, then, ergo,

it would be illegal, wouldn't it, for citizens of Massachusetts to regard me as a poet?—

No wonder all those folks never invited me to participate in their reading series, when they knew that by doing so, they'd be breaking the law!

(It's obviously why the editors of here-in-state magazines always rejected the poems I send them—)

*

Yes, the metaphor sayeth: it is illegal for Massachusetts residents to read my poetry, or ask me to give poetry readings, or to consider me a poet in any way.

Hopefully whatever state I move to next year won't enact similar prohibitions.

I guess I'm lucky that Massachusetts didn't actually make it a criminal offense for me to be a poet, and sanction its police agencies to arrest me each time I tried to write a poem.

I guess it's lucky I'm not on Death Row by now.

My poetry career's on Death Row, but I'm not quite there yet. Won't be long, though.

*