In Memoriam

[Piscator]

A writer, a poet, and so much more, always swimming across, beside,under, and never within the mainstream went to a different beach today for more experiments with language and storytelling.

Here's an attempt of translating on of hers - early in her life she was an English teacher...

Mein Leben: / My life
ein Guckkasten mit kleinen Landschaften / a peep box with tiny landscapes
gemächlichen Menschen / unhasting people
vorüberziehenden Tieren / animals passing by
wohlbekannten wiederkehrenden Szenerien / well-known recurrent scenes

plötzlich aufgerufen bei meinem Namen / suddenly called by my name
steh ich nicht länger im windstillen Panorama / I no longer stand in a calm panorama
mit den bunten schimmernden Bildern / of vibrant gleaming illustrations

sondern drehe mich wie ein schrecklich glühendes Rad / but rotate like a horribly blazing wheel
einen steilen Abhang hinunter / downhill a steep slope
aller Tabus und Träume von gestern entledigt / devoid of yesterday's taboos and dreams
auf ein fremdes bewegtes Ziel gesetzt: / aimed for an unknown moving target

ohne Wahl / without choice
aber mit ungeduldigem Herzen / but a restless heart

thanks snow - I don;t know German but feel you have caught Mayröcker's spirit

I loved the last lines

 

[29wordsforsnow]

an article really worth to read about poet Sylvia Plath - and society itself...still a long way to go, I'd say

 

[Piscator]

Thanks 29 it is a good artivcle and certainly brings up good points concerning the continuing bias in attitudes to female writers,

In my continuing effort to connect with cultural icons I've missed I recently read "The Bell Jar," likely in response to a late night viewing of a film on the same name (Peerce - 1979 - I think). I t was a good if not happy novel (but not autobiography) although as with Cather in the Rye, I felt I was in the wrong place at the wrong time but can very much agree with many of the issues raised in the book, the one that most struck me was the parallel between the concern the electrocution of Rosenbergs and later descriptions of electroshock therapy.

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Damn,
Dusty Hill
Dead

The Hot Rod stutters
and Hot Legs stop
as a breeze tumbles a beard

The world 's buZZ turned down
the timbre less vibrant
the guitar strings silenced

by one third
last night
​

 

[Tzara]

Charlie Watts (1941-2021)

Anchor of The Rolling Stones' rhythm section since 1963 and a famously well-dressed man. He had a jazz-influenced style (his first idol was Chico Hamilton) that brought a level of sophistication to the Stones--not something they were usually known for.

He also wasn't the Stones' first drummer. Mick Avory, later of The Kinks, played the initial gigs, but was replaced shortly afterward by Watts.

Here are some classic Stones' tracks:

• Honky Tonk Women
• It's All Over Now
• The Last Time
• Start Me Up

And something from his joint project with fellow ace drummer, Jim Keltner: Max Roach.

 

[Angeline]

Anchor of The Rolling Stones' rhythm section since 1963 and a famously well-dressed man. He had a jazz-influenced style (his first idol was Chico Hamilton) that brought a level of sophistication to the Stones--not something they were usually known for.

He also wasn't the Stones' first drummer. Mick Avory, later of The Kinks, played the initial gigs, but was replaced shortly afterward by Watts.

Here are some classic Stones' tracks:

• Honky Tonk Women
• It's All Over Now
• The Last Time
• Start Me Up

And something from his joint project with fellow ace drummer, Jim Keltner: Max Roach.

Thank you for sharing this. It's hard to wrap my head around the loss of someone you thought would be around forever. And a big thank you for noting Charley's lifelong love of jazz. I honestly think he considered himself a jazz musician who played rock for a living!

Here he is with his Quintet playing a straight up jazz ballad very much in the style of Max Roach.

 

[Angeline]

Janis Joplin died fifty-one years ago. That's especially meaningful to me because it's two months, to the day, before my sister died. It all gets mixed up in my head sometimes, all the deaths that year. But I can't forget Janis, powerhouse that she was and this poem, Mama Loves Janis Joplin by Richard Speake, is a good tribute. Rest in power Sister Janis.


https://youtu.be/Qev-i9-VKlY

 

[Tzara]

David Wagoner (1926-2021)

Poet, novelist, editor, and creative writing professor. Wagoner was an extremely influential member of the poetry community in the Pacific Northwest. He followed his own teacher, Theodore Roethke, to the faculty of the University of Wasington in Seattle, where he taught for many years. He also edited the leading northwest poetry journal, Poetry Northwest, from 1966 to 2002. He was the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, succeeding Robert Lowell.

Here is one of his poems:

Do Not Proceed Beyond This Point without a Guide
David Wagoner

The official warning, nailed to a hemlock,
Doesn't say why. I stand with my back to it,
Afraid I've come as far as I can
By being stubborn, and look
Downward for miles at the hazy crags and spurs.

A rubble-covered ridge like a bombed stairway
Leads up beyond the sign. It doesn't
Seem any worse than what I've climbed already.
Why should I have to take a guide along
To watch me scaring myself to death?

What was it I wanted? A chance to look around
On a high rock already named and numbered
By somebody else? A chance to shout
Over the heads of people who quit sooner?
Shout what? I can't go tell it on the mountain.

I sit for a while, raking the dead leaves
Out of my lungs and traveling lightheaded
Downward again in my mind's eye, till there's nothing
Left of my feet but rags and bones
And nothing to look down on but my shoes.

The closer I come to it, the harder it is to doubt
How well this mountain can take me or leave me.
The hemlock had more sense. It stayed where it was,
Grew up and down at the same time, branch and root,
Being a guide instead of needing one.

Source: Collected Poems 1956-1976​

 

[Tzara]

Joan Didion (1934-2021)

Novelist, screenwriter, and one of the outstanding essayists of our time. Didion was the gold standard for writing about the 60s counterculture. She won the National Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking.

Here is a poem I wrote some years back about this portrait of her by the photographer Julian Wasser:

Joan Didion, with Stingray and Cigarette

The car is like an animal
whose long, low haunch she leans against
as if part of its pride, languishing
over a kill. The burn

and smoke at her mouth are her laugh.
Superiority,
as if Style equated to Life,
which I suppose it did

at some time in the 60s. Dylan
might have written a song about her reportage
if he hadn’t been loopy on drugs
or depressed by constant rain.

She is small, in this photograph. Thin
as a whip—but still supple, unweathered,
a pine on a rocky headland,
wiry from always facing into the wind.​

 

[Angeline]

In response to the death of the great Burt Bacharach, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan has written a sonnet for Burt. You can read it by following the link.

https://www.steelydan.com/#!/news/300154

 

[Piscator]

Robbie Robertson - Damn another great one gone. And a Canuck at that.

 

[Tzara]

Louise Glück (1943–2023)

Glück won both the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (for The Wild Iris) and the National Book Award (for Faithful and Virtuous Night) before becoming one of the few poets (and, I think, even fewer women) to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She also served as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Here are two of her poems:

Vespers

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.

By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
where are grown the unimaginable
apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.

If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion's share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
of the perishable, the immortal fig,
which does not travel.

Source: The Wild Iris (1992)

The Night Migrations

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds' night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won't see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won't need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

Source: Averno (2006)

 

[Angeline]

Louise Glück (1943–2023)

Glück won both the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (for The Wild Iris) and the National Book Award (for Faithful and Virtuous Night) before becoming one of the few poets (and, I think, even fewer women) to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She also served as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Here are two of her poems:

Vespers

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.

By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
where are grown the unimaginable
apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.

If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion's share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
of the perishable, the immortal fig,
which does not travel.

Source: The Wild Iris (1992)

The Night Migrations

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds' night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won't see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won't need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

Source: Averno (2006)

Thank you Tzara for posting this. She was one of the most-awarded poets in modern history and the U.S. Poet Laureate in the early 2000s.

I remember reading her in The Young American Poets anthology a long, long time ago. RIP.


Here is another of her poems.

All Hallows​

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.


(Source is The Poetry Foundation)