[Recent work by Eliot Cardineax offers a new twist on Robert Duncan’s dictum: “I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters.” In his derivations from Celan and Mandelstam, along with the author’s note attached thereto, Cardineaux’s poetry & poetics stands as a refutation, too, to Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” as a necessary foundation for strong poets & strong poetry. What follows, of course, is not translation or transcreation either, though part of a continuum with translation, for the best & most adventurous among us. (J.R.)]
AFTER CELAN
I
See,
those knifecords —
a knot in the blood
overblown with margins
at that
enclosure —
wolfskinned.
Witness,
wisteria blowing
deep
into matter
and deeper.
II
Finch,
the lymph node swells
in the bark,
beneath it;
your translucent
hammertrunk,
it sleeps through the keyhole.
What the way,
hacks-through,
hacks-into,
the throat can give,
maybe weighs: this
branch.
III
Take these trimmings —
of whose shadow,
to whom
I belong,
round as a month
or a lunar
mouth’s-word —
at mouth’s-worth.
Horse-fetched
or Time-lent
still,
do they
flutter and bray?
IV
Lilac,
those soft
misty evenings
of decay
lent
your stole
a new scenting;
truth-rooted.
Paler than violets,
iris, the yolk-
stained hunger;
grounds in the morning
dew.
Does the round-empty day
not empty, also
the fading circus?
Who will inform,
return
to it
V
Excess,
the torpor-outridden —
the more-than-
stupor,
outrid
of its other,
my unaware,
distranslated
melancholy
breadmaker.
Bloodsucking second
hand-darkened,
of the pleat-enfolding
matterstopped tongue,
begun to rewind;
its thoughts,
blurted.
FOR OSIP MANDELSTAM
I
Lightlid, you tenderly shed
what soft and flaring
black sunbeams
bled to become.
The Jessamine’s
five suns faded
translucent as wax,
or the pale noon sun
of elsewhere
embraced by brambles.
Those witness, the mourners
and those
who attended the vigil
unsafe in the light of candles
even the acme of a twisted smile
longs to embrace, but can’t unmake.
And the red glare of sacrifice
finally forever
begins to silence
those parched singers;
never in my life
have I heard such music.
Author’s Note. The poems presented here were the start of a year-long cycle, Around the Faded Sun, that began as an interpolation on the influence of Paul Celan & Osip Mandelstam on my very beginnings as a poet, & led, coincidentally & not, to my return to the poetry of Adonis, whose work I was in awe of but never inhabited — until — vis à vis Pierre Joris, I discovered their “Conversations in the Pyrenees.”
Dealing with monotheism, these poetics in dialogue between Pierre, the poet & prolific translator of Celan, & Adonis, the great innovator of modern Arabic verse, opened in me a cavity which I was forced to attend to with the instruments at my disposal at the time. Regarding analysis, the market, gender, religion, & myth through the questioning lens of allegory, I took on the persona of the modern poet in order to challenge within myself all assumptions clinging at the root of my identity, sense of justice, & unknowing; the factory worker of my own philosophy as poet & as laborer per se. I felt the act of negation, deep at the heart of Adonis’ earlier poetry, & the acts of courage it enabled him, which I discovered for myself as I read more deeply into his later work. I hope these poems allow for a multiplicity of readings that extend beyond this explanation, which is mostly for myself. I thank Jerome Rothenberg for inviting my work into the sphere of Poems & Poetics, without whose poetry as well, this project never would have proceeded along said course, which to me has been fertile.
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