“One reason why he was so resistant to reading in public was his concern that audiences “believe so readily that some special insight has been communicated to them because the poet’s voice is authentic and true and inward, and so the whole mystery of the poem is presented to the ear of the audience. This belief is completely false, in my impression totally misguided, misleading, untrue and false.” He considered the memory of a poet’s voice to be “a really serious obstacle, and I detest to present obstacles to the freedom of the reader.””
Haiti Inter sur Johnny Nicholas (Jean Marcel Nicholas). The Search for Johnny Nicholas, Hugh Wray McCann, David C. Smith, David L. Matthews (1982/2011).
Yesterday we walked apart, Separate and cold and mortal. Now the mystic kiss has joined us, Now we stand inside the portal
That permits of no returning, And my heart is strangely burning.
I know not what the word may be, Or what the charm, or what the token, That has filled us with this glory. But never let the charm be broken.
Let it stay a mystery For all time to be.
Yesterday, with lighter joys, We wantoned at the outer portal. Now, with love’s old alchemy, We have made ourselves immortal.
The long love that in my thought doth harbour And in mine heart doth keep his residence, Into my face presseth with bold pretence And therein campeth spreading his bannèr. She that me learns to love and suffèr And wills that my trust, and lust’s negligence Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence, With his hardiness takes displeasùre. Wherewithall unto the heart’s forest he fleèth, Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry, And there him hideth, and not appearèth. What may I do when my master fearèth? But in the field with him to live and die For good is the life, ending faithfully.
Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; The delicate music is lost In the blare of home-going crowds And a midnight paper.
The night has grown martial; It meets us with blows and disaster. Even the stars have turned shrapnel, Fixed in silent explosions. And here at our door The moonlight is laid Like a drawn sword.
What is poetry? Is it a mosaic Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought Into a pattern? Rather glass that’s taught By patient labor any hue to take And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught, Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught With storied meaning for religion’s sake.
We two, how long we were fool’d, Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes, We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side, We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any, We are two fishes swimming in the sea together, We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals, We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down, We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets, We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey, We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead, We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other, We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious, We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two, We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.
« Quand une personne a vraiment atteint la capacité de créer, son unique devoir est de manifester cette puissance à l’écart des attentes et des jugements. » (Forough Farrokhzâd (1935-1967)) via Librarie Petite Egypte
Perhaps life is a choked moment where my gaze annihilates itself inside in the pupils of your eyes— ?????I will mingle that sensation with my grasp ?????of the moon and comprehension of darkness.
In a room the size of loneliness, my heart’s the size of love. It contemplates its simple pretexts for happiness: the beauty of the flowers’ wilting in a vase,
the sapling you planted in our garden, and the canaries’ song—the size of a window.
Reborn, Forugh Farrokhzad. Translated By Sholeh Wolpé
Behind his project lay the understanding that social life is “a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another” Benjamin Kunkel on Fredric Jameson.
