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2006-01-10, 10:22 a.m.:
Two great sequences from Coralee in the new Slope. These are my favorite pieces by her yet. 0 comments
2006-01-08, 10:20 a.m.:
After a couple days of proofing galleys and taking a ridiculous stab at trying to capture cover art with colored pencils and computer printouts and contemplating different "author photos" (here, "the look" not quite right, here you are simply too goofy for a book entitled The Language of Exile,* here's a nice shot of your hair but totally pretentiously arty otherwise, here's a great background compliments of Gigantis, The Fire Dragon on the wall behind your shoulders) and agonizing over my dedication and my bio and my et cetera etc., I am spent. (* Peter kept making me laugh before taking the pictures and I told him that would be fine - for my next book, Yuk Yuk: Poems.) And I still feel the otherwise free-floating sense of dread. I realize I haven't written very much at all since early December. Everything since has been very much about tying up loose ends in submissions, corresponding with editors, proofing things I wrote long, long ago. And, most recently, having to actually change line breaks in some very old poems. Discouraging. I feel as if I'm going backwards. All the journals that announced they'd be up by the first of the year - with poems of mine in them - are not. All these so-called achievements feel invisible, intangible, dust. But I did have a pleasant few days reading some German poets whom I've not read in awhile: Celan, Sachs, Laske-Schueler, Enzensberger, Goethe, von Eichendorff, Toller, Tucholsky. I had chosen a snippet of a Paul Celan poem (itself already a snippet) as epigraph and was curious about it, what others may have written about this mysterious little nut. (I also read as much Rabassa and Borges on translation as I could find on the Internet; I must get Rabassa's new book.) Some say that snow in Celan's poems always refers to the lot of the Jews, Jewish culture, in the aftermath of the Holocaust (this poem with its "deepinsnow"). Some say that the lost "sand art" of the title refers not to culture and people but to poetry, to language. I see the poem as a perfect way to talk about translation slantwise (with Celan, you can never really say you are looking at something face on, vulgarly "talking about" something), or about what goes missing between experience and language. What goes missing between thing and word. That's my little violin tune I am constantly plinking at. KEINE SANDKUNST MEHR Keine Sandkunst mehr, kein Sandbuch, keine Meister.
Nichts erw�rfelt. Wieviel
Stumme? Siebenzehn. Deine Frage � deine Antwort.
Dein Gesang, was wei� er? Tiefimschnee,
Iefimnee,
I � i � e. 0 comments
2006-01-04, 7:58 p.m.:
Proofing the galleys of my chapbook, a task I find oddly distressing. There is a problem of line length, and yet I'm loath to change my breaks, even if that will mean that the poems look better on the page (and potentially take up fewer pages). How to alter the faces of poems whose final form has been, well, final for so long? And why am I not more excited about getting into print? Why do I seem to dread it, even? I guess we go to press by February 1st. 1 comments
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