EDITORIAL  (Jan 2010)

Welcome to Issue One of the new Chanticleer Magazine The previous paper issue was 21, so this might also be considered to be 22. 

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages of producing an online magazine. It will never have the feel or be as satisfying to produce as a paper one, perhaps because it is so much less work. That might be thought an advantage, but sometimes the more work you put into something the more satisfying it can be. Not that I’m propounding a work-ethic philosophy here. The only work that is really satisfying is the work you do for yourself or with others, not the work you do for or under others in order to make them rich. However, “time’s winged chariot” and all that: something had to give and that something was the satisfaction of actually producing a less ephemeral thing that I could hold in my hands. The advantages are that it reaches more people, costs them nothing and costs me next to nothing to produce and I can include more material, so it’s really swings and roundabouts in the end. What you gain on one side you lose on the other.

Since this is Issue Twenty-Two as well as Issue One - which as everyone knows is the number of undifferentiated wholeness, the ‘ruling’ number, the one number (integer) that is in all other numbers (integers) - it behoves me to consult my ‘bible’ - The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols - on its significance. The number twenty-two “symbolises the manifestation of being in all its diversity, and during its allotted span, that is in both space and time.” There then follows a whole lot of fascinating stuff about Kabbalah and the Zoroastrians, the symbolic thought of the Dogon and Bambara which supports the thesis advanced. In short, Issue Twenty-Two has a lot to live up to, and I only hope that you think that it does.

Those of you who read Issue 21 will perhaps remember a report about an American poet who was arrested and interrogated for 18 hours at Stanstead Airport as if she was a terrorist and then deported for no other crime than that she’d come to Britain to read her poetry - for which, by the way, she was not getting paid - and play her serengi on the radio without having the appropriate documents. (Non-EU artists now require a special visa to ’exhibit’ their work. Reading poetry in public, I guess, is classed as “exhibiting” work. The new laws are also aimed at ‘freethinkers’.) The irony is, of course, that had she just told them she’d come as a tourist, she would have got through without any problems. Well, many months later, the Guardian published an article by Henry Porter, highlighting the more high-profile case of a group of non-EU poets who’d been refused entry for coming here to read at the Hay Festival without said documents. This article was placed in the online Guardian blog, Comment is free (Cif). All I have to say about that is read ye some of these comments and tremble oh ye poets, because they were amazingly eye-opening not just about attitudes to immigration but also to poets and poetry. I had known there was a lot of indifference to poetry out there, but on reading many of these comments, I became aware that a lot of this was not just indifference, it was outright hostility at the barefaced audacity of poets in being so high-faluting and downright elitist as to have the gall to inflict their form of self-indulgent narcissistic onanism on the long-suffering world. That poets were also naïve and ineffectual, unrealistic and impractical - not to say thick - went without saying. After all, they must have been all of these things if they were unaware of the need to have visas to read poetry in this country, though no such visas had ever been required for their previous visits. Of course, the fact that writing and reading poetry was a minority activity  meant that poets were also an absolutely useless bunch of unwashed wankers and losers. Not only that, but they have never done anything worthwhile for 'their country' - unlike those who have marched 'heroically' to their deaths in its numerous glorious wars.   Reading some of these comments and feeling the vindictiveness behind them, I was reminded of the high-ranking Nazi who said “When I hear the word culture I go for my gun.” And this was the Guardian, not the Mail or the Sun. Something about poets and poetry seems to reduce some people to apoplexy. Why? I don’t know. I can only hazard that they feel threatened by something they don’t understand and cannot relate to. Poetry, perhaps, challenges their amour-propre for some reason or other and when they encounter it or those who write it they come out in boils and rashes. Of course, all this was aggravated by the fact that they were ‘foreign poets’ and we should be promoting British not foreign culture. May we coin a new word here to add to the ‘politically-correct’ lexicon of our benighted times - poetaphobia? It is interesting that in many of these Guardian blogs, science doesn’t get nearly as rough a ride as these poets got in this blog simply for being poets. Is this due to the inherently utilitarian bias in our culture? Or does it have something to do with the fact that poetry is “inscaped” in the way science is not, and is therefore more of a threat. (I think we can safely leave it to the Daniel Dennetts of this world to write books called Darwin's Dangerous Idea!) In science, the inner reality of the world is reduced to the terms of its outer manifestations, whereas poetry moves in the opposite direction. As I have said, I have no real answers to the questions I’m raising, but I think it’s good to bring them to people’s attention.

Anyway, nuff said about that. Time to move on to the real stuff I think. There are a number of writers in this issue that Chanticleer readers will be familiar with, but the good thing about going online is that it casts a far wider net. More poets and writers read it, and so I get a wider selection to choose from. Going online is also convenient because it enables poets and writers to see what kind of work the magazine publishes before they send in their own. Hopefully, that will save me the embarrassment of rejecting work which isn’t satisfactory or simply doesn’t fit in. In this issue I would have liked to publish more women writers, not for the sake of politically-correct tokenism, but because, for some reason or other, women often have different preoccupations to men, and that makes for a much better balance. Anyway, despite this obvious lacuna, I hope you enjoy what’s on offer.



CONTENTS



Poem - Karen Margolis

Short Story - Ian MacFadyen

Poems - George Held

Shards - John Bennett

Essay and Translations - Thomas Ország-Land on Miklós Radnóti

Poems - David Waddilove

Poem - R. D. Armstrong

Short Story - Hugh Fox

Poems - Arthur Coleman

Essay - Richard Livermore on Lorca’s Politics

Poems - A. D. Winans

Essay-Review - Richard Livermore on Jeremy Reed’s Genet

Review - Richard Livermore on Louise Landes Levi’s Banana Baby

---

 

 

POEM - Karen Margolis


The rising cost of loving
for Richard L.

It comes as a surprise
to realise
that prices don't obey
the law of gravity

mesmerised we watch
their upward trajectory
like jet trails vanishing
into the skies:
twin tracks
of progress
and destruction

day by day
a mounting curve
of waste and want
graphs and bar charts
illustrate our plight
without filling the gaps
where ends don't meet

loving, meanwhile
isn't getting cheaper either
if you add
the wear and tear
of fractured hopes
to the extra cost
of crisis care
patching up families
and hunting new sources
of surplus energy
to warm up hearts
and souls gone cold

the dominant mode
of global discontent
and wars of attrition
drains away
the flow of passion

sad to report:
a bunch of flowers
cheap sexy underwear
foot massages
scented candles
or a night on the town
have lost their power
to banish the prophets
of gloom and doom

everybody's talking
about silver linings
predicting resurgence
of human values
& the probable return
of love that fled
in the hour of reckoning
when the gas bill came

a new language
of fabricated optimism
tells us there's a way out
if we don't mind the wait

but speechless lips
dried up
from fear
and desperation
are no fun to kiss

the cost of loving
rises & rises
stimulated
by insatiable demand
& heightened
by mounting desire
to put our money
where our mouth is

statistics reveal
in times of crisis
the sale of lipsticks
shoots up
in the high streets

　


SHORT STORY - Ian MacFadyen
　

CHAMPAGNE FOR BREAKFAST

My young friend has left on a little errand. I asked him to pop out and get some champagne, just for the two of us – very cosy. He took the money out of my wallet – rather too much, naturally, and there won’t be any change, needless to add, but it does put things on a more agreeable, equitable footing. Share and share alike. What’s mine is yours. Help yourself. “Do hurry home,” I said, as he disappeared from view. It’s a wintry morning, slow snow flakes falling from a leaden sky, but it’s never too early or too cold for a little celebration, not in my little red book. “What are we celebrating?” he asked. “Oh, I’ll think of something,” I replied. I must say he looks very fetching in my plum-coloured cashmere scarf from Liberty. “Here,” I said, as he was leaving in his thin leather jacket and t-shirt, “this will keep you warm.” And then I watched him from the window as he unwound it for maximum glamour, quite regardless of its insulating properties, geometric snow crystals dissolving on his eyelashes and lips. (Such lush stuff is first nature to me now, I just can’t resist over-egging the pudding – oh well, the fault and the pleasure are mine, all mine). Naturally, my scarf now belongs to him – that goes without saying. Everything he touches will be his without asking for the next few short years, whoever the source of those treasures may happen to be, and I’m truly happy for him – he simply cannot believe that one day he will suddenly find himself no longer young and desirable, the very idea is utterly alien to him, the careless, carefree, uncaring darling. He pities me, I know, but he makes such extraordinarily inept, ineffectual, peremptory efforts to disguise the fact, I want to give him a peck of endearment on his smooth cold cheek and ruffle his spiky, tawny crop. He’s sweet, and quite heartless, and we’re worlds away and so many years apart – God only knows what I’d do without him. Find another one, I suppose. (But who? But where? Don’t even think about it).

Of course he doesn’t know who I am. Thinks I’m rather grand and cracked, with my old style airs and graces. I’ve been tempted to tell him about all the years I spent in prison, paying penance for my terrible crime, but that would spoil the whole setup, it would complicate our roles quite unnecessarily, and besides, one must keep one’s little secrets. I told him I had been a diplomat, at the Embassy in Moscow, many years ago, way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s (he knows a bit about the ‘60s), and he was quite taken by my accounts of my escapades and shenanigans. He doesn’t need to know that I was only a humble clerk, and utterly hopeless to boot. But as is so often the case, there’s a real truth in that little white lie because I may have been a mere factotum, but I certainly didn’t behave like one, oh no. I remember Captain Bennett, the Naval Attaché, harrumphing away and warning me that the higher ups were “somewhat concerned” that I was “moving in circles too high for your station at the Embassy, old boy.” Silly old fool. Jealousy, of course, but could I help it that my social engagements diary was chock a block? Was it my fault that I was so popular, so showered with invitations to soirees and salons and glittering galas? Those old fuddy duddies had no style, no taste, no élan, no charm, no brio – stuffed shirts to a man, they had attended all the right schools, the great Oxbridge colleges, yet they resented poor little me, so middle class, despite the posh vocals, such a complete nobody, and furthermore, an absolute screaming pansy. Well, I hardly attempted to cover it up. “Look at the silly mincing queen,” they’d say, “but of course he’s really quite harmless.”

They mocked me, but they tolerated me – after all, I was company for their wives, and absolutely no risk in “the bedroom department”, as they referred to it. They called me ‘Vera’ and loathed my effeminacy, but it pleased them too – I served to highlight their rude manhood. I adored the opera and the ballet, which for them was a total bore and a chore, and I liked to gossip with their spouses at the dressmakers and the hairdressers, while my original yet tasteful suggestions appertaining to décor were very much sought after. And I was a real shoulder for those lost, stranded girls to cry on. (They cried a lot. I’m sure they even cried in their sleep). I may have been hopeless at even the most routine administrative duties, but I made an ideal chaperone for the Diplomatic Wives Club. More than a safe escort, I believe I truly understood those lonely women, obliged to play out their allotted roles as acceptable societal accessories and breeding units. They started to drink early, in both senses – and that too was part of the script. Speaking of which, I remember the Embassy Amateur Dramatics Society, we put on a version of Harlequinade by Terence Rattigan – weeks and weeks of rehearsals and fun and games, while the paperwork piled up in the office. The Ambassador himself gave me a very favourable notice, I was the star of the show, and it was a long, long way from dreary old Whitehall and my poor old parents in St John’s Wood. “This is the life,” I repeated to myself like a mantra, as I sucked out the core.

Where’s he got to? I can feel the old malaise, the terrible ennui coming on, and the snow is swift and steady now . . . Well, at least the champage will be sufficiently chilled in transit. “At least the champagne will be sufficiently chilled in transit.” What complete fucking twaddle, what total shitty campery, but I simply can’t help it, you see, the stuff comes like dictation, decades of talking like some ponce on the Med in the 1920s, all that cod public school hauteur and yah-yah loghorrhea – utterly deadly, of course. Even prison couldn’t knock it out of me – it’s fake, but it’s fixed forever, it’s evidently who I am, and like it or not, it’s who I must always be. It began as a necessary impersonation because I wanted to get on, I wanted to enter society, I wanted to taste La Dolce Vita, to live the high life, and so I adopted it, tried it on for size, and then found I was stuck with it for life, parroting away like a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy. “You’re all mouth and no trousers, Vera,” the Captain would say – brilliant, so incisive, he got me to a T. But in those dim, doomed decades, it was the way one spoke which decided everything – nothing was more important than your accent,

dahling, and the mastery of the diction of deference and indifference. I speak the parlance, therefore I exist. Enunciate and it shall be so. The abracadabra of the tongue wriggling its way through the niceties of civilized, asinine chatter. And always the unsaid, slyly secreted in the spoken, and the knowing, imperturbable tone of the initiated as they ritualistically intoned the cabbalistic upper crust code. It was the language of liars, the discourse of duplicity - perfect training for a traitor, for one who was always less than diplomatic, though hidden in plain view.

The boy speaks as he finds. Estuary English. Couldn’t give a toss. Absolutely no grammar to speak of. Good for him. Of course, he’s so guileless he can wound one dreadfully without even thinking. But better by far his true tongue than the mouthing nonsense of yours truly. (Where on earth is he? Hurry home, do.) Actually, it was the most marvellous time. I felt feather light in the Moscow night, and the comrades were beautiful and dutiful and fun and kind. I would indulge, and I would be indulged, I would live the kind of life I had always craved and imagined, and I’d do just as I pleased, over and over again. What was it the Attorney General said at my trial? (I’m being disingenuous, I’m being rhetorical, flippant, superficial, fly, sly, wry, devious, dangerous, as is my wont, as is my irredeemable and unredeemable way. I mean, really, how on earth could I ever possibly forget what that old reprobate said?) “Entrapped by his lust,” he declared, “he had neither the moral fibre nor the patriotism to alter his conduct.” Straight onto the front pages – a real ‘marmalade dropper’* as the journalists called it way back then, in the relative infancy of inky-fingered damnation. Well, ”Dearie me,” I thought at the time, and still do so – though I must admit he got me “bang to rights”, as we used to say in the slammer.

No, I could not honestly claim that the old reprobate was incorrect, except in the most important respect – it wasn’t just lust, it wasn’t love alone. To my philistine overlords I was a paper shuffler, a bower and a scraper, and the most awful faggot, don’t you know, and a paid attendant upon their vanity and whim. Theirs the power and prestige, my role a walk-on at best. Absolutely, Sir. Grovel with style. Be grateful, my boy. Who did they imagine I was? They couldn’t imagine anything. Everything they said about the world was true, but I disagreed – on principle. I despised them, beyond all loathing and contempt, mine was an absolute and unconditional hatred. The editorials claimed that I did not betray my country because of my communist ideals – I had none, they screamed, and it was “mere lust” that did for me. Queer, you see. No moral backbone. No morals at all. Well, it’s true I didn’t have time for Marx. Have you ever tried reading the Grundrisse? Be honest. Well, no one else has either. The poor man must have suffered from truly terrible digestive problems. Still, I knew all I needed to know about alienation and social organization and the movement of capital. No, I didn’t do it just for money and sex. I didn’t do it because I was being blackmailed. I did it because I was nobody’s vassal, slave or bondsman. I did it, quite simply, because I wanted to. I was “someone of no consequence”, apparently, and I wanted to push that non-existence to the limit, to rid myself of all responsibilities and trusts and confidences, to feel what it was like to be beyond all codes and restraints. I would sell my country down the river, with a click of my fingers, and I would enjoy it, I would relish it, and damn them all to oblivion. Why not? It was revenge, it was quite strategic – and at the same time it was utterly careless, like tossing a tapestry cushion onto a chaise. Olé!

It’s a regular blizzard out there. He’s been gone for hours. Probably being chatted up by the wine merchant, a terrible old roué with a smokescreen wife and family no less . . . Oh well, you can’t keep them by hanging on to them. He’s free as they come, and as free as they go. I know he likes it on the Heath. Chance encounters by moonlight, all that. The exhibitionists and the voyeurs - and the ghosts of the 1950s. He likes the danger and the mystery. The secrets, the anonymity. Out in the open, but hidden. Re-enacting a past when the danger was truly appalling - something he knows nothing about and will never experience, though he runs his own risks, of course. Not my style, even way back when. There were clubs you could go to, and I did, strictly mum’s the word. And my pied-a-terre in Dolphin Square, paid for by my ill-gotten gains, my “Russian blood money”. Then it all came out in the wash when I was found guilty. Spreads in the News Of The World and the Sunday Pictorial. Yes, a real secret society of perverts revealed. And detailed accounts of my flat for the prurient paper peepers - my bedroom was “strictly a female’s bedroom”, with dozens of bottles of ladies’ perfume, and powder compacts, and silk lingerie, and cuddly toys, and pictures of sporty hulks exhibiting their musculature, and a smuggled icon of the Virgin and Child . . . “I washed my hands on a bar of his soap and they smelt nasty for two days,” one reporter wrote, the absolute lout, adding “it was a room that only a fairy queen would have.” That set the scene nicely for my entry through the prison gates, I can tell you.

It may be that he is not coming back at all. Something must have turned up en route. Or perhaps he had an appointment, he’d meant to mention it, but forgot, or worst of all, an accident of some kind has occurred – no, no, no, put that thought out of mind this very instant. But you know, I will miss him. I will miss him very badly indeed, if indeed he has flown. I will miss the rare, thrilling sound of the bell (it can only be him), his muttered, abbreviated hello (“’Lo.”), his trainers (incredible, I know, but he has never actually ever worn a pair of real shoes), his deliberately torn jeans, his cannabis cigarettes. His shy smile. Everything, I mean absolutely everything about him. Where was I? I was in the past, as usual. Revisiting old haunts, time travelling back to those temporary shelters from the storm, those shabby West End club basements where we embraced and moved in step around the tiny dance floors as the stacked ‘45s dropped onto the turntable. Back out on the windswept streets we’d dematerialize again, turn ghostly, the invisible men drifting back to our anonymous locales, our pedestrian milieus. Above all, don’t draw attention to yourself. Learn to disappear in the grey world. That was my education in hypocrisy and self-abnegation, and my crime was a validation of the great lesson I had been forced to learn – the absolute necessity of deceit and betrayal. I merely did what I had been trained to do all along. Special pleading, you might say, but I couldn’t care less what others think of me now, and besides, aren’t we all spies, locked inside ourselves, gathering the evidence, always watching others, observing and taking notes, while keeping our own little secrets hidden, we hope . . . It’s there from the very beginning – I’m in here, you’re out there, and our whole lives are spent in a futile attempt to break through the impenetrable screen. And for those like me, and for myself, in those days it was axiomatic – to be a spy in your own body, constantly on the lookout for warning signals. Don’t betray yourself. Don’t ever give them a clue. But I refused to submit, I advertised what I was, who I was, and that is the beauty of it all – I exposed myself to their ridicule, and that proved the greatest disguise of all. Their “trust” in me was only a measure of their condescension and I duly, royally paid them back in kind. Entrapment? I saw the Russians coming a mile off, and I welcomed them right in. It was a blessed release, and besides, they were most understanding, they were charm incarnate, and they venerated Pushkin and the poetic genius of the individual. What more could you ask for? Still, I know that nothing but death will kill that interminable dialogue with ourselves, within ourselves, which never stops, which goes on and on, around and around - the endless self-examination, the torture of the conscience chamber, the labyrinthine interrogation without cease, without mercy, without limit, God’s little spy inside, asking us endlessly – “And was it good? Was it what you desired? Are you satisfied, finally?”

The bell, the bell! The dear boy is back, the bearer of liquid gifts! A most decadent libation, cold and silver, the rising bubbles mimicked in slow motion and in reverse by the soft falling snow out there, behind the rattling sashes. How could I ever have doubted him? It is exactly what I wanted, now and forever and always, Amen.
 
* The term "marmalade dropper" was used by journalists and editors who worked on the scandal sheets of the 50s and 60s - it refers to their desire to find a sensational scoop story full of sex and juicy details which would make readers at breakfast gawp and forget the piece of toast in their hand, the marmalade sliding off the toast in the process. We still have the equivalent term, "jaw dropper", but I used "marmalade dropper" because it's so redolent of that period. I. MacF.

　

　

　

POEMS - George Held


Get It Right

Nietzsche is famous for claiming that "God is dead," but what he actually said is, "God is dead … and we have killed him!"

So next time you quote this famous aphorism,
Get it right.

Even your radical professors
Nursed on the spoiled milk of the Weathermen
Cheat and abbreviate the full statement.

They don’t want you to know
It’s our fault, not just a cosmic burnout.

So next time look deep inside
To see if any deity resides
There, and if so,

Have the strength to acknowledge it
Or the guts to kill it for good.

　

To Continence

You teach the virtue of putting constraints
on desire, the way a muzzle controls
the urge to bite. You counsel, Deny minutes
of pleasure for a lifetime of withdrawals
from temptation, hardening the carbon
of character into the diamond
of the soul. It’s not that I abandon
my admiration for a slender hand
or ankle, but that I tighten the leash
on my setter, pointer, and retriever.
Retired from the chase and lacking a lash
to drive lust on, I’m just a spectator.
   Leaving the world of the concupiscent,
   I acquire the cool calm of the continent.

　

Why Old Men Are Grumpy

They ache from arthritis
And hurt from grief

They rue the end of success
Or they rue their failures

Impatience dogs every slow step
And halting withdrawal from the memory bank

They mourn each dying chum
And every dwindling day

Inflation depletes their fixed income
As they contemplate death

They pray for a good one
and curse the bad ones they have seen

Therefore they are grumpy

　


SHARDS - John Bennett


Eat the Pain

Collapsed lungs, stubbed toes, moss on the wrong side of a tree, static in the attic where the bare wires tangle, trench mouth for the opera singer, arthritis for the quick-handed magician.

This pain is chronic, and when it kicks into the red zone it drops me to the floor. It did that last night and put me flat out in bed with a rolled towel under my neck. I got up without sleeping and sank into a tub of hot water, lay there until it turned tepid. I dug my neck brace out of the bottom drawer and went out the door to work.

The one quick fix is a week of steroids, but when I called the doctor his nurse said he can't call it in to the pharmacy, even though it's what we do about once a year. She said I have to drop $60 on an office visit first, and they can't arrange that until next week.

I cut her off in mid-sentence and hung up.

Fuck the medical profession and the health plan it rode in on.



The Major Tom Fiasco

Fiasco may be too strong. Misunderstanding perhaps. Mass confusion. Well, mild perplexity. A kaleidoscope of hope and fear.

I want to supercharge rainbows of color into a drab existence. Not mine but the one mine is mired in. Yours too, but if you don't realize it, it hardly matters.

I hold the palm of my hand over the candle flame. "This is not what candles were made for!" I'm admonished. "This is not romance!"

I know that much. It's a form of discipline. A way to learn not to cry out and give away my position when the pain torques. If I had my way I'd turn the whole world to metaphor.

What information I possess is like a pored-over smörgåsbord. The mangled remains of what's eatable. Tidbits and scraps. When you travel fast and non-stop, odd things from everywhere cling to you.

People in the know write back that David Bowie, who created Major Tom, is a musical genius. One in-the-know individual made mention of Peter Shilling, a German who did his own spin-off on Major Tom, which threw another turnip into the potpourri of my mishmash information.

Those who never heard of Major Tom grow agitated when David Bowie is mentioned. The more unknowns get tossed into the salad, the more vehement they become. "You're making things up because you can't handle reality!" they scream.

I can't handle screaming. I let out some tether and float off into space.

"Come back here!" they scream. "You can't just float away!"

Someone else has a hunch that Major Tom was my commanding officer in the army, and they want to know what took him out. Something took him out if he no longer exists like it says in the poem, Shard, whatever the hell I'm calling them these days. Was it in Nam? Somalia? Afghanistan? Was he still a major? A colonel? Maybe a one-star general? This individual is a frustrated historian who longs to take part in a literary seminar, and so launches deeper into inference: Am I still a soldier at heart? Am I about to wage war?

"What right do you have to bombard people with this esoteric blather?" ask the totally out of it. "What right do you have to write this way?"

Let's see now. When I went to school at the age of seven, I could read and write. When the nun got through with me, I no longer could do either. I had to start from scratch, and this is how far I've got.

The right to write? What goes around comes around, unless you kill it dead.

We live in a culture shattered like a huge pane of glass. I'm just a clown with a tube of super glue, sweeping up the shards and pasting them together willy-nilly while longing to float into space.

Me and Major Tom, off on the great adventure.



A Little Bird Told Me So

Wading thru a labyrinth of equations, Quantum Physicists discovered what Zen Monks realized 1500 years earlier--that everything from the universe to a tea cup spins out of Nothingness simultaneously. Except until recently they overlooked simultaneously, which the monks find highly amusing.

Space and Time are the inventions of perplexed minds. Reality is a freeze-frame, and God is the ultimate politician, hiding Dark Secrets behind scientific Pat Answers.

Don't linger too long on such matters. Anything you try to grab hold of erases you. It's a reshuffling of energy that results in the termination of personal perception.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, but there's no way around it.

I know, because a little bird told me so.


John Bennett's most recent collection of Shards, Drive By,  is to be published by Lummox Press in February. For more information and images just follow this link:
 
　http://animoto.com/play/wPmbBXFwxbBvXDE4JOtcvA





ESSAY - Thomas Land

HOW THE MURDERER OF A POET HAS BECOME A HERO
IN HUNGARY


THE COMMANDER of the death-squad personally responsible for the murder of Miklós Radnóti -- perhaps the greatest poet of the Holocaust well known in English translation -- escaped retribution for the deed. His remains rest in official burial grounds reserved for the heroes of the Hungarian republic.

　　　　　　　　　　　 This has been established by Tamás Csapody, a noted jurist and sociologist. His revelations, published prominently by the country’s leading literary and political journals, coincide with the centenary of the poet’s birth in 2009. They are of particular interest in the context of widening current antisemitism sweeping Eastern Europe.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Radnóti was shot at the age of 35 shortly before the end of the Second World War, a victim of the National Socialists’ attempt at the “ethnic cleansing” of Europe. He was condemned with a group Jewish-Hungarian prisoners because of their inability to keep up with a Westward “deathmarch”. Their bodies were dumped in a mass grave.

　　　　　　　　　　　 But his best poems contained in a notebook were recovered after the war when the bodies were exhumed. They are treasured today as some of the most flawless modern additions to Hungary’s poetic heritage.

　　　　　　　　　　　 The circumstances of the massacre are even worse than the many myths current about the event. It was carried out by the Royal Hungarian Army, not some “foreign” ethnic Germans hitherto blamed by the literary establishment. And two members of the five-man death squad positively identified in secret inquiries after the war were allowed to go free. The reason: they had by then joined the ruling Communist Party.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Radnóti would have been a great poet even if the Holocaust had not happened. When it did, he deployed with devastating effect his mastery of refined classical metre to the description of chaos and brutality.

　　　　　　　　　　　 His “commitment to truth and form was -- quite literally -- ultimate”, write the English poet Clive Wilmer and his Hungarian advisor and language informant George Gömöri whose lifelong partnership has produced a remarkably accurate Radnóti translation.

　　　　　　　　　　　 The other great writers of the Holocaust -- Anne Frank, Imre Kertész, Éva Láng, András Mezei, Elie Wiesel among them -- were children at the time. Paul Celan and Primo Levi were very young men eventually compelled by their grief and outrage to protest in poetry against the inhumanity of their experience for which they had been totally unprepared.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Radnóti does not protest. He records with compassion.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Unlike many others, he had plenty of opportunities to escape forced labour and death at the hands of the Nazis. He was at the height of his literary powers when he chose to enter the storm, notebook in hand, deliberately seeking to transform the horror into poetry, as he put it, “for reminders to future ages”. His last poems transcend the limits of race and tribe in a universal appeal to humanity.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Radnóti had been caught up in his generation’s zeal for assimilation into Hungarian culture. He was born Glatter but changed his surname after Radnót, the settlement where his grandfather had been a tavern keeper. He even converted to Catholicism, although his subsequent poetry remained full of references to the Torah, the five Books of Moses comprising the basic tenets of Judaism.

　　　　　　　　　 Born in Budapest and educated at Szeged University, he was prevented from pursuing an academic career because of his racial origin and Leftist leanings. He was obliged to make a meagre living by producing what are recognized today as brilliant translations from classical Greek and Latin as well as English, French and German poetry.

　　　　　　　　　 Some of his original poems were seized and others not allowed to be published at all. Most of Radnóti’s contemporaries never heard of him at the time.

　　　　　　　　　 Read in chronological order, the poems follow the author “along the highways, down the soul’s appalling deep chasms” to his clearly anticipated death. These intensely autobiographical pieces describe a writer stripped of all the security and comfort of civilized existence and caught up in history’s insane march towards collective destruction, who yet maintains his stubborn personal dignity and fierce concern for the future.

　　　　　　　　　 Radnóti went on publicly fighting back until the end. According to the legend that has grown up around his figure -- which I have checked against reality in interviews with survivors of the same camps and the eventual “deathmarch” -- the poet bribed his Hungarian guards to smuggle his work to the outside world. The notebook containing his final and most moving poems and found in the end on his body had been going around from hand to hand, giving encouragement to fellow prisoners.

　　　　　　　　　　　 A facsimile edition of the notebook, containing the work in careful, even handwriting and complete with printers’ instructions, was published in Hungary in 1971. Popular demand necessitated an immediate second printing. Many further editions have followed.

　　　　　　　　　　　 His poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages. Radnóti is probably the most-translated Hungarian poet, especially into English.

　　　　　　　　　　　 But there are problems. Many of the native Hungarian translators of his poetry are not poets. Some foreign translators are, but they tend not to understand Hungarian. They also often lack the comprehension, skills and talent essential to balance successfully in their own languages the potent mix of subtlety and passion of Radnóti’s original.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Radnóti’s Hungarian readers have also fared badly at the hands of their own literary establishment. In common with the opinion shapers of the rest of formerly Soviet-dominated Europe, most of Hungary’s teachers and editors have not even begun to digest the shameful role their country played during the war. This in fact explains the vulnerability of this region to neo-Nazi agitation today in a climate of insecurity generated by the markets at times of financial turbulence.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Holocaust poetry is therefore an irritant here. Generations of Hungarian school children have been required to recite Randnóti by heart, but they have been taught that the poems were about the general horrors of war rather than genocide. They have been told that the poet had met a “tragic death” -- but not that it was racist murder committed with the approval or connivance of the majority of Hungarians at the time.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Under strict orders, “the establishment in the Communist era deliberately fed to the public a distorted image of the war,” writes historian János Gyurgyák in his landmark study, The Jewish Question in Hungary (A zsidó kérdés Magyarországon, in Hungarian, Osiris Press, Budapest, 2002).

　　　　　　　　　　　 It depicted the occupying Germans and certain of their prominent Hungarian allies as the perpetrators of all horrors, Gyurgyák goes on. This falsified the truth and, what is even more important, sought to relieve society of its moral burden without any attempt at confronting the past.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Yet the spirit of Radnóti’s poetry has miraculously survived and won the affection of the nation. Among all its poets of the recent past, Radnóti today is perhaps the best loved by the Hungarian public. His name fills auditoriums. His lines are quoted at public meetings. Hence indeed the prolonged furore over the revelations of the circumstances of his murder.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Despite the prolonged public interest, his murder has been hitherto shrouded by misinformation. But unknown to the public, the facts were reliably established shortly after the war by confidential inquiries conducted under the authority of the interior ministry here in order to forestall any hitch to the smooth administration of the Communist order. The archives of the ministry at last exposed to researchers are belatedly rewriting history.

　　　　　　　　　　　 We now understand that the state inquiries had been ordered to enable the regime to respond with authority to any conclusions turned up by persistent private investigations conducted by historians Ábel Kőszegi and Gábor Tolnai. The two were following in the footsteps of András Dienes, a deceased colleague, whose own extensive manuscript on Radnóti’s murder had disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1962.

　　　　　　　　　　　 The archives now provide the core of Csapody’s evidence, corroborated by the records of slave labour camps in Serbia where Radnóti and some 6,000 other Hungarian Jews were deployed in the war, about half of whom perished. Csapody matched his findings with testimonials by survivors and material in the archives of Jad Vasem (Israel), Belgrade, Berlin and Budapest.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Csapody is a widely published, highly respected intellectual and author of Civil Scenarios (Civil forgatókönyvek, in Hungarian, Századvég Publishers, Budapest, 2002), a collection of essays on principal aspects of the Hungarian transition process. He has also published several specialist papers during recent years on his researchers into Radnóti‘s murder and the Serbian slave camps near Bor.

　　　　　　　　　　　 But the issue has burst into the public domain only in 2009 through the publication of major articles by him in the authoritative Népszabadság newspaper and the literary journal Élet és Irodalom. These articles have been reprinted by many other newspapers, and the subject taken up by many other writers.

　　　　　　　　　　　 The truth of the murder is of considerable public interest because of the affection in which Radnóti is held by poetry readers and also because the revelations coincide with an upsurge of neo-Nazism that upsets a lot of people.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Csapody writes that the Bor camps were supervised by the Germans but administered by the Hungarians with senseless brutality. They were vacated late in 1944 as part of the German retreat, its inmates despatched westwards in an infamous “deathmarch”.

　　　　　　　　　　　 The frightened, exhausted and starved captives were driven at a forced pace across wild mountain terrain under the blows of their armed escorts who were themselves being harassed by the Serbian partisans. People were being murdered at no provocation.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Those who had the strength supported their limping fellows. The condition of the prisoners was such that their guard allowed them to march through civilian settlements only by night for fear of outraging the residents.

　　　　　　　　　　　 In a rare gesture of humanity, Radnóti and 21 others who could not keep the pace were put on horse-drawn wagons under the command of Sergeant András Tálas. He was ordered to take them to hospital. He tried to do that, but no hospital would take them in.

　　　　　　　　　　　 He might have decided then to abandon them in the prevailing chaos with probable impunity. He chose to murder them instead. The post-war records of the interior ministry include witness testimonials stating that Tálas drew his handgun and led the massacre. Radnóti perished wearing a white armband signifying his conversion to Christianity.

　　　　　　　　　　　 All the perpetrators escaped punishment for this. But Tálas was recognized after the war in a tavern by a former Bor inmate. He was subsequently tried and executed in 1947 for other war crimes. His body was buried in parcel No. 298 at Rákoskeresztúr cemetery in Budapest, together with other war criminals.

　　　　　　　　　　　 But in the heady days of regime change after the eventual collapse of Soviet administration here, a simplistic public honours committee mistakenly assumed that all people executed by the Communists had sacrificed their lives for freedom. Or was this a deliberate act of neo-Nazi mischief? The burial grounds of shame thus became a resting-place reserved for the “martyrs” of the nation.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Today, Tálas’ grave is furnished with all the trappings of honour the living can lavish on the dead. His name has been at last removed from the list of “heroes” borne by a commemorative marble plaque. But the grounds still regularly receive ceremonial visits made by state dignitaries and school children. Csapody and many other lovers of Radnóti’s poetry believe that at least this should cease until another, better advised honours committee thinks its way out of the memorial mess.

　　　　　　　　　　　 No-one argues that the confusion has been cleared up by the removal of Tálas’ name. According to incomplete and often unreliable records, the human remains in parcel No. 298 include those of at total of 51 people condemned for war crimes. But their status is uncertain because the notoriously unprofessional, Communist-controlled, post-war tribunals that tried them often handed down hasty and harsh sentences driven by political rather than judicial considerations in the tradition of the Moscow show trials.

　　　　　　　　　　　 The issue thus reflects the confusion of values in Hungary’s current, painful transition from a humiliated subject state to a robust democracy -- one hopefully capable of confronting its past as well as the neo-Nazi challenge of the present. The controversy is therefore a matter of great symbolic significance because the declared choice of a country’s public heroes may influence the behaviour of its leaders in the future.

　　　　

TRANSLATIONS FROM HUNGARIAN
by Thomas Orság-Land



1 The Eighth Eclogue


Poet:
Greetings, handsome old man, how swiftly you climb this rugged
mountain path! Are you lifted by wings or pursued by an army?
Wings lift you, passion drives you, lightning burns in your eyes --
greetings, grand old traveller, I comprehend that you must be
one of the ancient wrathful prophets -- but, tell me, which one?


Prophet:
Which one? Nahum am I, from the city of Elkosh, who cursed
the lewd Assyrian city of Nineveh, chanted the holy
word with a vengeance. I was a vessel brimming with rage!


Poet:
I know your ancient rage as your writing has survived.


Prophet:
It has survived. But evil multiplies faster today,
and the Lord’s purpose is still unknown to this very day;
for clearly the Lord has said the majestic rivers would dry up,
Carmel would weaken, the flower of Bashan and Lebanon wither,
and mountains would tremble and finally fire consume it all.
It all came to pass.


Poet:
The nations rush to slaughter each other;
like once Nineveh, now humanity’s soul is degraded.
Did proclamations and ravenous, hellish, green clouds of locusts
serve any purpose? man must be surely the basest of creatures!
Tiny babes smashed to death against brickwalls in many places,
church towers turned into flaming torches, houses turned
into ovens, their residents roasting. Factories go up in smoke.
Screaming, the streets run with people on fire and stumble and faint.
Stirring, the heavy door of the bomb-bay opens above, leaving
corpses on city squares lying shrunken as cow-pats on meadows.
All you have prophesied is fulfilled again. So tell me,
what made you leave the primeval vortex again to return
to earth?


Prophet:
My anger. That man should remain so utterly lonely
all this time while surrounded by armies of man-shaped heathens --
Also, I’d like to behold again the fall of the sinful
cities, to see and to tell, to bear witness to future ages.


Poet:
But you have spoken already. The Lord has said through your words:
Woe to the fortifications laden with loot, to the bastions
built of corpses! Tell me, in all the millennia, what
has fanned your anger to rage with such obstinate, heavenly burning?


Prophet:
Back in ancient times, the Lord touched my mis-shaped lips
with his burning coals (as He also touched wise Isaiah’s), thus He
searched my heart; the embers were hot and glowing, an angel
held them with tongs. “Behold,” I cried to the Lord, “I am waiting,
ready to go out to spread Your word.” Once sent out
by the Lord, one neither has age nor peace ever after;
the fire of heaven burns in one’s lips through the ages. And how long
is for the Lord a millennium? Only a fleeting instant.


Poet:
You’re very young, I envy you, father! How could I presume
to measure my life by your awesome age? Already, my time
wears me down -- like rushing rivers wear down the pebbles.


Prophet:
Only you think so. I know your latest poetry. Anger
keeps you alive. The rage of prophets and poets is similar,
food and drink to the people! Those who want to survive
can feed from it till the birth of the kingdom promised by that
young pupil, the rabbi who has fulfilled the law and our words.
Come with me to announce that the hour is already near,
that country about to be born. What might be, then, the Lord’s purpose?
Now you can see that it is that country. Let us set forth
and gather the people, bring your wife and cut two staffs,
for staffs make good companions for wanderers. Look, I’d like that one,
I like a firm, knotty hold on a staff that is strong and uneven.

(Lager Heidenau, August 23, 1944)

　

11 Letter to My Wife

Mute worlds lie in the depths, their stillness crying
inside my head; I shout: no-one’s replying
in war-dazed, silenced Serbia the distant,
and you are far away. My dreams, persistent,
are woven nightly in your voice, and during
the day it’s in my heart still reassuring --
and thus I keep my silence while, profoundly
detached, the cooling bracken stirs around me.

No longer can I guess when I will see you,
who were once firm and sure as psalms can be -- you,
as lovely as the shadow and the light -- you,
whom I could seek out mute, deprived of sight -- you,
now with this landscape you don’t know entwined -- you,
projected to the eyes, but from the mind -- you,
once real till to the realm of dreams you fell -- you,
observed from my own puberty’s deep well -- you,

nagged jealously in my soul for a truthful
pledge that you love me, that upon the youthful
proud peak of life you’ll be my bride; I’m yearning
and then, with sober consciousness returning,
I do remember that you are my wife and
my friend -- past three wild frontiers, terrified land.
Will autumn leave me here forgotten, aching?
My memory’s sharper over our lovemaking;

I once believed in miracles, forgetting
their age; above me, bomber squadrons setting
against the sky where I just watched the spark and
the colour of your eyes -- the blue then darkened,
the bombs then longed to fall. I live despite them
and I am captive. I have weighed up, item
by painful item, all my hopes still tended --
and will yet find you. For you, I’ve descended,

along the highways, down the soul’s appalling
deep chasms. I shall transmit myself through falling
live flames or crimson coals to conquer the distance,
if need be learn the treebark’s tough resistance --
the calm and might of fighting men whose power
in danger springs from cool appraisal shower
upon me, bringing sober strength anew,
and I become as calm as 2 x 2.

(Lager Heidenau, August-September, 1944)

　

111 À La Recherche…

Gentle past evenings, you too are ennobled through recollection!
brilliant table adorned by poets and their young women,
where have you slid in the mud of the memory? where is the night
when the exuberant friends still merrily drank the native
wine of the land from slender glasses that sparkled their glances?

Lines of poetry swam around the glow of the lamps
and bright green adjectives swayed on the foaming crest of the metre
and still the dead were alive, the prisoners home, and the dear
vanished friends wrote verse, those fallen long ago whose hearts
lie under the soil of Spain and Flanders and Ukraine.

Some of them charged forward gritting their teeth in the fire and fought
only because there was nothing they could do to avoid it,
and while their company fitfully slept around them under
the soiled shelter of night, they remembered their rooms of the past,
calm caves and islands, their retreat from this society.

Some of them travelled helpless in sealed cattle trucks to places,
some stood numbly waiting unarmed in freezing minefields,
some also went voluntarily, silent with guns in their hands
for clearly they saw their personal place and role in the fighting --
now the angel of freedom guards their great dreams in the night.

Some... doesn’t matter. Where have the wise, winy evenings vanished?
Swift swarmed the draftnotes and swift multiplied the poetic fragments
as did the wrinkles around the lips and eyes of the wives
with enchanting smiles. The elf-footed girls grew dull
and heavy in loneliness over the silent and endless war years.

Where is the night, the tavern and, under the lime trees, that table?
Where are the living and where are the others trampled in battle?
Still, my heart hears their voices, my hand still holds their handshakes,
thus I quote their works and behold their proportions and stature,
silent prisoner myself in Serbia’s wailing mountains.

Where is the night? Such a night perhaps may never recur, for death
gives always a different perspective to all that has vanished.
They still sit at the table, they hide in the smiles of the women,
and they will sip from our glasses, the friends still unburied and waiting,
lying in distant forests, asleep in foreign pastures.

(Lager Heidenau, August 17, 1944)

　

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent based in Budapest. His last major work was DEATHMARCH: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of Miklós Radnóti (Snakeskin, UK, 2009).

　

　

　

POEMS - David Waddilove

　

Dawning

the night is
long tunes
play in the mind
                            accustomed
tunes and snatches of
time stolen or anyway
misappropriated
                              much
is grasped in
darkness the warrior
returning grasps for
a sword to
                   decapitate
the night



　

Detourne

scavenger city replete
with the dessication of
dream the risk and
opportunity of a fertile
grime
          we clean away

on the bench the old men
come and go drinking tennents
extra in order to show
the death-suited how
death may be re-enacted
regularly
               the species
lives and dies by
repetition
                 wars dreams
and more wars

we carry the shabti within
purely ourselves and the
purity ensures
                          enslavement
making models to carry
to the temple designing
the future paradises
                                    to enact them
                                    in oceans of blood

stumbling godless yet
fallen unchallenged stumbling among
noise of the heart’s
industrial repetition dodge
that traffic!
                   buying and
selling the trinkets to
store against what imagined
ruin what presumed
authenticity

the check out man says
his rating has improved he
will not now be
redundant just
quicker
              the spin
cycle throbs with
pained and mechanised
tempo
            it is the
velocity of immolation
traffic of pace and
non-existence

the celandines grow
in the cracks the
pigeon sits circumspect
under the arch
they are unobserved self
preoccupied not referenced

the women in pencil
skirts issue from solicitors
tripping in haste and heels

and out of the heart’s
intention the city is
burnished
                   the homeless
sleep in the forecourts of
charity shops
the windows
boarded the benches
gone
          the public
space confined to
shopping
                  aristotle strolls
the malls but finds no
conversation
                         we have
become ourselves product
                  ego and
                  dissipation

if the city were legible
would we know 
                 the bridgeways out?

　

　

　

POEM - RD Armstrong

　

Hard Truth

Once I wrote
“The past eyes
Me like a hungry dog”

I was cockier
Back then
Believing I still
Had my mojo
But that was before
I saw my last
Days before I
Knew the pain
And the real true
Fear that
A hungry dog
Might be drawn to
Investigate

But now I fear
That no dog is hungry
Enough to make
The effort
Choosing
Instead to
Keep searching

When I see that
Dog again
He will merely
Sniff once
Twice
And move on

　

　

　
SHORT STORY - Hugh Fox


And Then The Wind

　　　　　　　 I like Thornton Wilder's work, especially his one-act plays, although all you ever see is Our Town, nothing else on DVD or anywhere else, and Our Town is a deathbed sermon, you know, we'll both walk out of here ready to make insecticide whirlaways,
drink um down and whirl-away.....

　　　 His wife in the Little Girl's room, him liking the looks of this babe, even if she was 70, 80, who could tell, all the surgeries and creams and pills around these days, perfect legs and saltless butter hair and furrowless eyes and mouth, dressed in a bouncy , feathery red-orange-yellow dress that said Amazon-rebirth more than the Think-It-Out-Playhouse down the street from the university in Tampa (Duane Lock territory).

　　　 "So you're in theatre, writing?"

　　　 "How do you spell that-- RE or ER?"

　　　 "I'm talkin' it, not spelling it.... Where are　 you originally from, Dublin or Athenry?"

　　　 "Chicago...."
　　　
　　　 "Come onnnnnnnnnnn...."

　　　 Loving the way her onnnnnn went onnnnn and onnnnn.....full of sheets and comforters in a mid-winter seventy-degree bedroom, just the right combo of hizziness and warmth.

　　　 "Raised in an Irish neighborhood. Irish nuns and Christian Brothers of Ireland...."

　　　 "It really rubbed off, didn't it!"

　　　 "So your field of study?"


                                                              2.

　　　　　　　 "Animal science...."

　　　　　　　 "Animal science?"

  　　　　　　 "Not exactly a Vet, but close. New Hampshire. That's where you really need them. Winters, you know....but I got so scratched up...," putting her leg up on his knee, flesh like beige watermelon skin, reaching down to touch, no scratches in sight.

　　　　　　　 "No scratches in sight."

　　　　　　　 "Well," breathing close in on him now, her breath full of, what was it, mangos, Irish Creme Liquor, a trip through Amazonas? ,"I've used creams......I do mainly stained glass art these days....here, let me give you a card," reaching down into her bosom and pulling out a yellow I.D. card with bright red info on it.

　　　　　　　　　　　 Corinthian De Bare

　　　　　　　　　　　　 CDB@AOL. Com

　　　　　　　 "Real-world address?"

　　　 　　　　　　　 "There is no more real world than cybnernetics nowadays....I can send you photos of my work....you never know...."

　　　　　　　 "Your husband?"

　　　　　　　 　　　 "Which one? There were four....all dead....."

　　　　　　　 "How....."

　　　　　　　 "She's coming back...."

　　　 And she was, his tiny little Brazilian M.D. wife, Dr. Perfection, a frozen smile fixed on her face as he picked up the ultrasonic signals passing between Corinthian and her Erin Go Bragh slave.

　　　　　　　 "I hope you've had fun!"

　　　　　　　 "Act three...,maybe it's time for me to leave," Corinthian suddenly getting severely serious.


　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　3.

　　　　　　　 "Why? What's wrong with Act Three?" asked Miranda, genuinely curious, big cytotech pathologist researcher.

　　　　　　　 "Requiest in Pace!" sighed Corinthian, suddenly up and vanishing down the stairs and out of the theater, Roger unwillingly studying her legs as she went. Old fashioned heels, turning a stair down-walk into The Firebird ballet.

　　　　　　　 "Forget them and everything that goes with them!" said Miranda, seeing the card in his hand, reading it, then tearing it up and putting the scraps down between her breasts as the lights went on and the funeral continued.　

　

　

POEMS - Arthur Coleman

　

Twelve Haikus

The pen and the knife,
silver and black, lie side by
side on the red cloth.

*****************

What do Buddhists know
about the closeness of death,
living in retreat?

*****************

Sadness whispered, “Touch
me.” She held me, guided me
slowly, deeply in.

*****************

How gracefully soar
the pigeons: garbage eating
winged rats of the air.

*****************

There are streets never
touched by darkness. There are skins
that never shiver.

*****************

I enter a place
and sit down. Gradually,
everybody leaves.

***********

The present is an
insatiable vacuum that
we are forced to fill.

***********

Ancients threw their most
beautiful virgins to drown
in the dragon’s lake.

***********

A headless, tailless
coin flips and flips. It never
settles any bets.

***********

Words are stepping stones.
Leap from one to the next or
sink into the muck.

************

A styrofoam lid
tumbles over its edges
in the taunting wind.

******************

Feedlots and slaughter-
houses I am fine with, but
birds kept in cages?



　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

ESSAY - Richard Livermore

POETRY AND POLITICS - THE CASE OF GARCÍA LORCA
                                                                 
                                                                  “A wall of bad dreams
                                                                   Divides me from the dead.”
                                                                                            Federico García Lorca

In August, 1936, the poet Federico García Lorca, along with one lame schoolteacher and two anarchist bullfighters, was executed in the early hours of the morning in a field near Granada. A certain mystery surrounds the circumstances of Lorca’s death which has provoked a great deal of speculation. Conflicting theories circulate, one of which suggests that Lorca’s flight to Granada from Madrid was due to the fact that he was beginning to sympathise with the fascists. It has even been suggested that he was shot by disguised republican forces who wanted to use his death to discredit the fascists. The evidence for these theories is quite circumstantial. At the time of his arrest, he was hiding out with a younger poet and great admirer of his work, Luis Rosales, who was an - apparently reluctant - member of the fascist Falange Party. (His two brothers were ardent members who had pressurised him to join.) It has been suggested, as I have said, that Lorca left Madrid to go to Granada to show his support for fascism and that, if he was executed by the fascists at all, the reasons were more personal than political. Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who was in charge of the party which arrested and executed him, had a long-standing grudge against Lorca, calling him “the one with the swollen head”. That he’d also been thrown down the stairs, hit and taunted for being “queer” on a previous occasion when the Falange came to his parents’ house to interrogate him suggests that the ‘personal’ reasons why he was killed included his homosexuality. However, on the occasion of Lorca’s arrest, when asked why he was being arrested by the wife of Rosales, Alonso simply replied “His works”. Later to the son of Rosales, he said “He’s done more damage with his pen than others have with a pistol.” It therefore seems to me that whatever personal grudges Alonso might have borne against Lorca, the reasons he was executed were primarily political. Of course, this does not mean that Lorca was not trying to come over to the side of the fascists at the time, but all things considered, I think it is highly unlikely.

So let’s get back to Lorca himself. All the really concrete evidence suggests that he supported the antifascist cause and that his politics - in as far as he had any - were on the left not the right. For example, in an interview he is quoted as saying:

“I see it clearly. Two men are walking along a river bank. One is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly, the other pollutes the air with his yawns. The rich man says “Oh what a pretty boat I see on the water. Look at the iris flowering on the shore.” And the poor man grumbles “I’m hungry. I don’t see anything. I’m hungry, very hungry.” The day hunger disappears from the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever known. Men will never be able to imagine the happiness that will erupt on the day of the Great Revolution.”

Elsewhere, Lorca expressed “great affection” for the workers of Spain and praised their quest “for a more just, more humane society.” On another occasion, when Lorca read The King of Harlem and The Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard to a packed auditorium in Barcelona, the largely working-class crowd jumped to its feet and shouted “Long live the poet of the people!” and stood for an hour and a half to shake his hand afterwards. Lorca was so moved by this experience that he felt a lump in his throat. Marvelling at those who had come to hear him, he said, “artisans, old workers, mechanics, children, students. It was the loveliest act I have experienced in my life.” Moreover, although he believed that no one was more Spanish than he was, he also denounced nationalism and said “I am a brother to everyone, and I loathe the man who sacrifices himself for an abstract nationalist ideal.” Furthermore, he had been very critical of the Catholic Reconquest of Arab Granada in 1492, describing it as: “a terrible moment, even though they say just the opposite in schools. An admirable civilisation was lost, and a poetry, astronomy, architecture and delicacy unique in the world, in order to give way to a poor, cowardly, narrow-minded city inhabited at present by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain.” And to cap it all, he was gay, and fascists don’t usually take kindly to gays. It seems to me, therefore, very unlikely that such a poet would suddenly turn round and throw in his lot with the fascists.

But there is, nonetheless, an intriguing conundrum about Lorca and that conundrum consists in his peculiar kind of poetic personality. For all his support for the working-class and left-wing causes, he joined no political party and, though he considered social questions important to his work as a poet, he refrained from writing political poetry and criticised poets like Rafael Alberti who did. Not only that, but his expansive and highly charismatic personality drew many people to him from all parts of the political spectrum. He made no distinction on a personal level. He had friends on both the Left and the Right, including Manuel Azaña the Socialist leader and also José Antonio de Primo who founded the fascist Falange. He simply did not allow politics to influence his personal relations. The truth is, I suggest, that Lorca understood that what it means to be a poet is to be a contradiction, to be open to all kinds of influences, even to the extent of their cancelling each other out. He could entertain the idea of collaborating again with Salvador Dalí, even though Dalí was making pro-Hitler and pro-Franco noises. I have known people on the left who would have been scandalised by Lorca’s uncritical attitude here. But Lorca’s response to the world was not a political one, but a poetic one and though he believed that poetry should embrace both social and sexual questions-- he was becoming increasingly open about his homosexuality-- he knew that politics itself was a trap for a poet and so kept his distance. He once laughingly told a friend that he was “an anarchist-communist-libertarian, a pagan-Catholic, a traditionalist and monarchist…” In other words he did not want to be pinned down or pigeon-holed, for he knew instinctively that that was a sure way of losing his freedom of action as a poet. Poetry is what mattered to him. Everything else took second place.

It all comes down to what it means to be a poet - and I mean to be a poet, not just write poetry. To be a poet means to lay yourself open on a very fundamental level to the world in all its contradictory manifestations; it means to absorb what’s around you in a quite uncritical way. Of course, once you start writing poetry, your critical faculties come into play. Meanwhile, your ‘unconscious’ is playing the field. That’s what it means to be a poet, I believe, and this is what we must bear in mind when considering someone like Lorca. Was he about to announce his conversion to fascism? I very much doubt it. However-- let’s humour those who believe that he was-- if he was about to convert to fascism he’d be an anarchist the very next day; for, basically, that’s what it means to be a poet - to live out one’s contradictions completely. It means to be out of control, not to know yourself from one day to the next. However, I believe that there is always a certain consistency unconsciously working itself out through these surface contradictions, which is why I find it so hard to believe that Lorca was about to declare himself as a fascist. Fascism seems to me to be against everything that was working itself out in him as a poet.

One or two words about Lorca’s actual poetry would not come amiss before we finally wind up. When I taught English in Madrid I was often surprised by the hostility some of my students showed when the subject of Lorca cropped up. But this was Calle Velazquez and Calle Nuñez de Balboa in the wealthy heart of Madrid, so, all things considering, perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised. On the other hand, Lorca was an experimental risk-taking poet, who could sometimes be a bit hit and miss in some of his methods, especially in those poems most influenced by Surrealism. However, let’s not forget that when he did hit the mark, he produced some of the most extraordinary images and metaphors that any poet has ever produced. His work could also be criticised from the contemporary perspective of ‘political correctness’, especially The King of Harlem, which romanticises blacks, and his Ode to Walt Whitman, which isn’t as fair as it could be to ‘queens’. But such forms of criticism are always anachronistic. Poetry as a whole is a work in progress and no poet can be blamed for writing in an age when the battle-lines were somewhat differently drawn.

So back to Lorca’s flight to Granada; the truth of this is probably a lot more mundane than revisionist historians would have us believe. He was frightened in Madrid, frightened of the tensions there, of all those guns going off. He was very highly strung and hated violence and war. Furthermore, he wanted to be with his family, his mother and sister, both of whom he was extremely close to. Granada was his home and there is always something about ‘home’ that makes you feel safe, safer anyway than he thought he was in Madrid. He also believed and is on record as saying at the time, “Granada is surrounded by republicans, and the revolt will soon fail.” Tragically, he did not know just how mistaken he was.

　

　

POEMS - A. D. Winans
　

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

She drove a hummer
And shopped at Walmart
Had a bad smoker’s cough
Restless leg syndrome
Chattering teeth
And a rash that doctors
Had no explanation for

She owned two homes
Had no debts
A good job and money
In the bank
But shopped for clothing
At the thrift store

She shed men like a baby
Sheds diapers
Liked to talk poetry
But only her own
Liked cunnilingus
But fellatio was not
On the menu
Her motto:　 “When in Doubt
Don’t put it in your mouth.”
Which didn’t apply to Starbucks
Or dining at Yuppie restaurants
And she asked why
I thought we weren’t compatible


Porm For An Old Lover

She started off front-page news
Became a crossword puzzle
And then the obituary column until
IOUs became her calling card
And debts accumulated like autumn leaves
Buried in the bones of mutilated lovers
A frail starving vampire searching
For an open wound
Leaving behind wolf tracks
That courted the face of dawn
An angry cat with arched back
Hissing at that which she never knew

　

　

　

ESSAY-REVIEW - Richard Livermore


WAY TO GO

In 1965, when I was 21, a 25 yr. old American I had met and gone home with the previous evening, showed me a copy of a book he had brought from America with him when he came to this country. It was called Our Lady Of The Flowers and the author was one, Jean Genet, a name I had never heard of till then. On the front cover, there was the Brassaï photo of Genet as he was in 1947, in which he looked like a rather sensitive pugilist with short cropped hair and flat broken nose. His thin arms were thrust into his trouser-pockets. He wore a slightly rumpled shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up, and a thick belt held up his trousers. His head looked enormous, with sunken expressive eyes and a full sensuous mouth. It has always been my favourite photo of Genet, and here it was fronting a book I’d never heard of by an author I knew nothing about. That photo itself persuaded me that this was a writer I wanted to read.

“Skip the introduction by Sartre.” my new American friend advised me. So I went straight into Genet and have never looked back. In fact, I became obsessed with his writing and devoured all of his novels and, later, his poetry and plays. More than any other writer, more even than Proust, who I fell in love with a little bit later, he became some kind of icon for me. Indeed, if there was one writer I wanted to be, it was Genet. This obsession was with the man as well as the writing and it led me into reading several biographies, including Sartre’s monumental ‘existential psycho-analysis’, Saint Genet - Actor and Martyr, as well as the two very pedestrian English biographies which appeared in the 1960s. The fascination, if not the obsession, has stayed with me ever since; more recently, it induced me to read Edmund White’s much more definitive and exhaustive biography, Genet, which was the first to do real justice to Genet’s life and literary output. The great strength of White’s biography lies in its obvious sympathy with its subject, a sympathy which no doubt stems from the fact that he shares Genet’s sexual orientation. However, there was no real attempt to enter Genet from the inside and really empathise with him. It was, in other words, a conventional ‘objective’ biography and one that needed to be supplemented by the far riskier ‘subjective’ approach of the poet. And it is such an approach which lies at the heart of Jeremy Reed’s biography entitled jean genet: born to lose - an illustrated critical history.

Unlike White’s, Reed’s strategy is definitely inward. He not only attempts to present Genet from the inside, as it were, he clearly identifies with his subject and renders him passionately. In other words, he risks the investment of himself in his subject and it is this fact which makes jean genet: born to lose such an exceptional and singular work. There are of course, dangers in this approach, not least of which is that one is not always sure where Jeremy Reed ends and Jean Genet begins, but at least Reed has taken the risk and that outweighs, in my opinion, any negatives that might accrue from such an approach.

Reed presents Genet thematically rather than chronologically. Such a method of presentation is certainly much more conducive to the approach he adopts than the ‘objective’ method of other biographers. The 28 short chapters have titles like two punks: rimbaud and genet, jaques guerin: the man who owned proust’s bedroom, a woman’s story: violette leduc and jean genet, drugs, genet’s photographs and death. Anything in fact which allows Reed to get an imaginative handle on his subject and render him from within. It is, in my opinion, a highly effective approach to Genet and allows Reed to present aspects of Genet which would be absent in a more conventional approach. What comes across in the most forceful way is the manner in which Reed’s own inner poetics is used to illuminate Genet’s inner poetics. This, as I’ve said, has its dangers, but it does give the book as a whole a consistency and aesthetic unity which a more ‘objective’ approach would have lacked. What Reed brings out very vividly is the extent to which the alienating brutality of Genet’s childhood and adolescence spent in reformatories such as Mettray drove him into himself in ways that made daydreaming become “his focal point”. Reed goes on: “Writing is neither a substitute for life, nor a therapy aimed at rehabilitation, but a pursuit in which inner and outer realities find reconciliation through imagination. What Genet filtered through his unconscious at Mettray became in time the reality of his fiction. To imagine is to suffer, and Genet’s courage in confronting his past was the precise quality which made him a poet.”

Despite Reed’s passionate identification with his subject, his study does not gloss over the less salubrious aspects of Genet’s behaviour and writing, although it is refreshingly free from any taint of moralising or political correctness. It is always better, after all, to give writers who lived in a different age to ourselves, the benefit of the doubt concerning their particular outlooks. One of the things which most appealed to me about Genet when I first read him, was his very direct and unselfconscious treatment of homosexuality. Nowadays, with the advantage of post-feminist hindsight, it is easy to see that he expressed many attitudes - such as misogyny - which, when I first read him, I tended to take at face value and no longer do. Reed himself brings out the internalised homophobia that was always close to the surface in him and which was perhaps the source of his decline as a writer from the truly transgressive works of the 40s to the more anodyne political works of the 50s and 60s. I am in complete agreement with Reed in seeing in Genet’s later work a falling off of his creativity. This goes no less for Prisoner of Love than for plays like The Blacks and The Screens. (I still think The Balcony, however, is a play of extraordinary insight.) In his later work, the source of his original inspiration began to dry up. I do not believe that an identification with particular political causes can even begin to make up for that loss. In fact, I regard it as some kind of diversion, a way of not confronting the real issue of his own sexuality, especially after his links to his criminal past had become severed and criminals no longer became the subject of his writing. Had not Genet carried with him the baggage of internalised homophobia, Eros would have set him free to develop as a writer rather than wither. This internalised homophobia is partly why he fell in love with straight rather than gay men - in other words, as Reed says, he chose emotionally sterile bonds to ones which were not. But, of course, this pattern was set very early on in his life, so there was probably not very much he could do about it, even if he had wished. His internalised homophobia was undeniably connected to his identification with his earlier life in reformatories and among the (homophobic) criminal fraternities of his youth. So in a sense, in being homophobic, you could say that he was still being true to himself and his past. We should not, after all, see everything in terms of an abstract post-gay liberationist or feminist political perspective, because that would entail the loss of imaginative focus which Reed has brought to his portrayal of Genet.

As I have said, the approach has its dangers. To give one example, when Reed mentioned Cocteau’s refusal of the dedication of Funeral Rites out of fear for his own reputation and having his name linked to Genet’s “pro-Hitlerian sympathies with Aryan youth”, I couldn’t help thinking that these sympathies were more aesthetic and erotic than political, which the term “pro-Hitlerian” suggests. (Genet’s actual fantasised portrayal of Hitler in Funeral Rites would have hardly endeared him to the Nazi Party hierarchy!) His aim, in other words, was purely transgressive. He had a hatred of France - and probably quite rightly, given the way it had treated him. That would be reason enough to identify with an enemy - any enemy. And as a criminal whose whole Eros was soaked in the underworld he came of age in he probably identified with the purely criminal aspects of Nazi Germany as well, though whether that made him an ideological Nazi is another question entirely. Nor should we overlook the equation between homosexuality and betrayal in the relationship between Riton, the traitor, and Eric, the German soldier in the novel. Genet was very keen on that theme. Many 50s and 60s British spies for Russia - Burgess, Maclean and Vassall especially - were homosexual. After all, considering the post-war treatment of Alan Turing, who might be seen as something of a saviour for Britain during the 2nd. World War, there was not much incentive for gays not to betray their country. Also, not to be forgotten in this context is the fact that in The Thief’s Journal Genet said that he could not fulfil himself as a criminal in Nazi Germany because the whole country was dedicated to crime. It was the poetic and erotic element of criminality and transgression, along with the idea of betrayal, which appealed to Genet in Funeral Rites, not, I suspect, Nazism as an abstract political philosophy.

Another aspect of Genet which deserves more attention - though this is no reflection on jean genet: born to lose - is the fact that he hailed from a Catholic country and his writing is saturated with Catholic imagery. I think it is only completely intelligible in that context. The same is also true of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, of course. I don’t think that a writer from a Protestant background would be quite so concerned with rituals such as the Mass and Holy Communion, which seem to have fascinated Genet. I mention this because I think it is as important in the overall critical equation as Genet’s androgyny and the transvestism of character’s like Divine in Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet’s peculiar kind of sainthood, seems to me to be an inverted Catholic sainthood, and it is one aspect of Genet which someone from a Protestant background such as myself would not find so easy to identify with. Then there’s the question of Genet’s pre-occupation with Evil. This also seems to me as religiously inspired as Baudelaire’s was in his Flowers Of Evil. Nietzsche, who wanted to go beyond these categories of Good and Evil, was the son of a Lutherian pastor and perhaps for that reason was able to shake free of these concepts. In Catholicism, the eschatology of Good and Evil, sin and redemption, seems much more intrinsic than in Protestantism, because it is much more institutional, permeating the religious and secular culture that Genet grew up in much more completely. Sartre, I believe, came from a Protestant background, which perhaps explains his pre-occupation with freedom and the idea of choosing one’s path in life-- echoes of the Protestant Kierkegaard?-- not to mention his bizarre Kantian belief that in choosing one’s path in life, ethically speaking, one chooses for everyone else. (Kant’s background was also a Protestant one.) Protestantism depends much more on the idea of individual conscience and choice, and is not so heavily invested in Good and Evil as metaphysical forces. I recall, when I was younger, and Genet’s work was first being discussed here, that he was invariably referred to as The Poet of Evil by his critics, but I could never quite relate to those concepts, and that was perhaps because I was not raised in a Catholic environment and had therefore never absorbed them. That, of course, didn’t prevent me responding to the power of his writing. After all, we still respond to the power of Homer without believing in the religious concepts which inform so much of his work. This is not a criticism of jean genet: born to lose, since Reed has his own individual focus to which a discussion of these particular questions would not have been relevant. However, I do believe Catholicism is an important variable in the overall critical equation of Genet and this is often lost sight of. (I recall a friend of mine saying, after he'd read some Genet, that Genet would return to the Church at the end of his life. But I think Genet, like Rimbaud, was too intelligent for that.)

All this aside, jean genet: born to lose is a unique biography based on an approach which risks a great deal, but is carried off with extraordinary panache. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the approach to lesser writers, but Reed pulls it off fantastically well. It is just a very great pity that Creation Books, which originally published the work, has gone bust, because it provokes thoughts and feelings about its subject in a way that few biographies do.



　

  REVIEW



BANANA BABY - Louise Landes-Levi, Supernova Edizione srl
Via Orso Partecipazio, 24, 30126 Venezia Lido, Italy, € 10.
ISBN 978-88-88548-67-X. email: info@supernovaedizioni.it


To fully appreciate Louise Landes Levi (LLL)’s poetry, I think it is important to grasp the fact that it is visual no less than it is verbal, that it falls in a certain way on the page which allows the verbal and visual aspects to come together and reinforce one another in a kind of dynamic unity. Often, while reading Banana Baby, I was reminded of Pound’s Cantos and his use of Chinese ideograms as kind of visual markers. Derrida said of Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms, “this irreducibly graphic poetics was...the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition.” This “most entrenched Western tradition.” is, of course, the logocentric tradition, in which the written word is seen as a mere supplement of the spoken word. LLL does not use Chinese ideograms, but the overall effect of her work is no less a product of her own kind of graphic poetics than Pound’s, though the underlying ‘politics’ of her work, of course, tends in a rather different direction.

There is a method in LLL’s visual ‘tricks’ in that they draw our attention to salient aspects of meaning by underscoring certain words. The following should give us a good idea of what’s involved in her method, although the online formatting does not permit me to reproduce it exactly.

as
if the oil was ours

as if the   Air & Water
were ours, as if these

were not our      spiritual  Mother and Father



as if the 5 elements
were not
                          you

                                       &

                                                  me.

  It is true to say that there is a strong political dimension to LLL’s poetry and that she is very opposed to the toxic manifestations of George W Bush’s America, its wars, and the impact those wars have on innocent people in places like Afghanistan, who, in one of the poems, she remembers because of their kindness to her when she “started to vomit on a bus / travelling to Kabul.” But there is a strong spiritual dimension as well, often expressed in offbeat ways which are a strong part of the poems’ attraction:

Instead
of devoting so
much time to holding
back the Sea, the Dutch
ought to devote some time
& energy to
Making
a
            Mountain

Fr.
the height of a
Mt. man communes
w.
          God
               or
                       “the
                                               Gods”.

LLL doesn’t often write in a more conventional format, but when she does, the result can be striking. This is most apparent in her opening poem, the almost incantatory Herat, which begins. “Herat, / O sea wind of strength, / O oval-eyed city, / O delicate grove in the green / of your cypressed sea, / Herat.” The last poem, Banana Baby, also in a more conventional format, is autobiographical.

This is an Italian bilingual publication with the English originals. on the left page and the Italian translations on the right. The book is prefaced by 3 very apt quotes by Gregory Corso, Kazuko Sharaishi and Philip Whalen, plus an introduzioni by Alessandro Tuoni, who is their Italian translator. It is difficult to describe the spiritual drift of these poems, but perhaps one would do best to say that they are shamanic, tending towards Zen Buddhism and this influences the poetry in an almost haiku-like way, though they are not haikus. I am thinking more of the offbeat terseness of expression which sometimes gives them the feel of haikus. Yet it’s all done in a way which is peculiarly her own.

I’m
definitely weird, just like everyone
says, but is strange not also beautiful  ? Is my
strangeness

NOT
                        my
                                                                 ornament,

Not everyone will present their poetry in this graphic way. And some I’m sure will condemn it, because of their preconceived ideas about what poetry should or should not be, as if somehow they felt constrained to do battle with difference wherever they encounter it. There are no truly objective criteria here. Subject and object constitute a field, and this, of course, is very true of our interaction with poetry. For me, Louise Landes Levi’s mode of presentation works very well because it is part of the complete experience of her poetry, which is something to enjoy and to savour.

                                                                                                  Richard Livermore