BERNEVAL

Gjertrud Schnackenberg makes me want to want to read Osip Mandelstam. There is a passage in her poem about the poet that has him restored to health and return to his native city and observe the winter scene. The whole experience is cast in the conceit of a delicious pastry. It is utopia in the key of Cockaigne. Its mention of apricot glaze sent me in search of where Mandelstam may have made a reference to glazes. And I found…

Against pale blue enamel, the shade
That only April can bring,
The birch tree’s branches swayed
And shyly it was evening.

The pattern, precise and complete
A network of thinly etched lines
Like the ones on a porcelain plate
With its carefully drawn design,

When the dear artist creates
The design on the glaze’s hardness,
At that moment his skill awake,
No thought for death’s sadness.

1909

from Osip Mandelstam’s Stone translated by Robert Tracy available at the Poetry Foundation in a slightly different version.

Not quite sure if Schnackenberg had this poem in mind when she wrote. But the combination of artistic skill and “no thought for death’s sadness” ring true to the theme Schnackenberg tackles.

from “A Monument in Utopia” in A Gilded Lapse of Time

Even if the avenues will be mobbed
With former prisoners from that time,
A non-person will be free to survive the winter,
To observe, from the comfort of his own coat,
His native city by lamplight
Along the black ice of the frozen river,
With its frilly crust
Of half-lit, golden snow
Like a mille-feuilles
Glimmering with apricot glaze
And ready to crumble beneath the tooth,
Whose sugar grains melt on his tongue —

Richard Eder in a review of A Gilded Lapse of Time observed

Rich, even ornate at times, Schnackenberg’s poetry carries its weight as if it were no weight at all, partly by its thematic intensity and partly by the sheer beauty of its imagery.

city — mille-feuilles — apricot glaze — sugar grains melting on the tongue — freedom

And so for day 2601
26.01.2014

In case you hate the long read …

Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did. There are varieties of interpenetrating demands subsumed under the word “poetry” — to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognized socially or, à la Whitman, to achieve universality by being irreducibly social, less a person than a national technology; to defeat the language and value of existing society; to propound a measure of value beyond money. But one thing all these demands share is that they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems. Hating on [sic] actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry, and the jeremiads in that regard are defences, too.

[…]

Poets are liars not because Socrates says, they can fool us with the power of their imitations but because identifying yourself as a poet implies you might overcome the bitter logic of the poetic principle, and you can’t. You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.

Ben Lerner
The Hatred of Poetry

The idiom of “hating on” in the sense to criticize is new to me. The preposition seems superfluous but not unpoetic.

And so for day 2597
22.01.2014