satyrica anarchica

behind
grey deadened sky.

there it lies.

island
small in profundity of ease
a basilicus bush and
a snake in its shade
demands respect and
so do I.

the horizon’s seam
in gradual split
lingering a hotty-red tongue
of barren land.

i proclaim myself as mountain.

modesty.

debuto

This was blurry, somehow inexplicable,
for those who raise their glass with emphasis
above the dinner table…Now for an idiot to enter a debuto…where angels breathe…
Time to give in to a testimony but, is this poesis…
When thundery sounds heard from afar…is it thunder or
A dispersed snake winding parade in the shiver of noon?

T. S. Eliot, The historical sense

From “Tradition and the individual talent (The Sacred Wood)” IF THE ONLY form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. (…) Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.    

Tony and Tonya

Tony!
Tonya!

Tony…
Tonya…

Toonyy
oh Toonia

yes Tony
mmm Tonya

T o n y
T o n y a, T o n y a, T o n y a!

no Tony, no
yes, yes Tonya

no ( sigh ) yes Tony
yes yes yes Tonya

( sigh ) no no no Tony
why why why, yessss!Toonya

Tony Tony Tony Tony
Tonya? Tonya?Tooonya!

aaahhh Tony, yes more, more m o r e TONY!
Tonia, my Tonia, oh. oh…

mmmmmTony ( sigh )…Tony
Tonya.

Tony! Tony!
zzzzzzzzz……

chaos

how they travel,
like soft river fish
glittering in chaos.

they could not
distinguish whom
I carried tonight or
who’s been there
years now.

All green
with shining
lively flesh.

their juice
circulates tirelessly
singing.

mmmmmmm

ease

deadened sky

leafs jostling for an inch
of light, weaving trunks and
the reserve of distant whispers

peaks

peaks lost in nothingness.
landscapes slip away in
an oily smoothness.

Traces of gratitude

Although They Are

by Sappho

Although they are
only breath, words
which I command
are immortal

TO ONE WHO LOVED NOT POETRY

by: Sappho

HOU liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.

This English translation, by Edwin Arnold, of ‘To One Who Loved Not Poetry’ is reprinted from Greek Poets in English Verse. Ed. William Hyde Appleton. Cambridge:

The Riverside Press, 1893. 

Sappho

Sappho de Mytilène
“I served beautyWas it in fact for me something greater?” … Sappho

The first woman poet Lesbos, the great Greek island opposite Asia, 2,500 years ago…

From that time, from that island, we possess a treasure of radiant beauty and, more charged with emotion still than the most admirable object of marble or ceramic: some 650 lines, with cries of love, revolt and anguish, springing for the first time from a Greek mouth — and this mouth was that of a woman: Sappho.

But with the passage of time, her work has come to represent, even her name alone — the very existence of her work being generally ignored — the pernicious, and for some fascinating, mystery of forbidden love.

But she, the woman, the poet, where is she? Who is she? With her works torn to shreads, scattered and buried deep in the sands, in the night of Egyptian tombs, she was deprived of her poems, divested of all historical reality — modern authors have treated her as an imaginary poet born of legend.

But a journey or 2,500 years through works and arts, through customs and ideas, reveals that her glory was dazzling and she was the first modern poet.

Baudelaire certainly sensed it, although he knew only a few of her verses, and in welcoming her into the garden of his Fleurs du Mal did not wish to separate the lover from the poet. Despite the admiration that the ancients had for her, it is only in our time that Sappho can perhaps be completely understood.

It is not only the fragmentary form of her work which contributes to giving her the face of a modern poet. Even in their original state, the poems by the woman who really invented personal poetry were very short, between four and thirty lines and no one else in Greece was to follow this path which seemed too narrow for those used to epics, great odes or tragedies.

In this wonderful world of ancient literature, Sappho was the only feminine voice, the only vision of a woman thrown into the ancient world that we know only through men.

But by a strange coincidence this woman is a rebel; she says no! No to men who refuse women the right to love. No to the democratic tyranny which was to destroy the aristocratic society in which she was a leading figure (and it exiled her!) and no again, sometimes to the gods.

Sappho was finally the first in an often tragic line of people accused in the trials that morality imposes on genius. She was, in her works, burned and broken, as according to legend, Orpheus has been. But if one can tear to pieces the work of a poet as one can the body of a god, one cannot kill her voice.

from Edith Mora
“SAPPHO — THE STORY OF A POET”
Flammarion
Paris 1966
(from the French)
from http://travesti.geophys.mcgill.ca/~olivia/SAPPHO/

Jose Saramago

Written by Portuguese author Jose Saramago, the 1998 winner of the nobel Prize forLiterature, Blindness is a tale that takes us through the depths and heights

(excerpt)
The green light came on at last, the cars moved off briskly, but then it became clear that not all of them were equally quick off the mark. The car at the head of the middle lane has stopped, there must be some mechanical fault, a loose accelerator pedal, a gear lever that has stuck, problem with the suspension, jammed brakes, breakdown in the electric circuit, unless he has simply run out of gas, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened. The next group of pedestrians to gather at the crossing see the driver of the stationary car wave his arms behind the windshield, while the cars behind him frantically sound their horns. Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind. 

I am blind. Somebody please help me, I am blind! Imagine the feeling. One moment you are fine, going about your daily routine. You’ve left work early, hoping to catch your wife at home. Suddenly, your vision is filled entirely with a white luminescence. Not the darkness one would normally associate with blindness, but a whiteness. You panic. What is happening to me? Where is my home? How can I find my way home? A stranger offers to drive you to your apartment, then offers to stay with you as you wait for your wife to arrive. You refuse, fearful. After leaving you at the door of your home, the stranger steals your car. The day progresses and others are struck blind, just as sudden and without warning as you were. Your wife. The car thief. A policeman. The blindness spreads rapidly. An emergency is declared, and the first of those to lose their sight are rounded up and placed in an unused mental hospital, guarded by the military, left to their own devices, quarantined to prevent an outbreak of the epidemic, this “white sickness.” But it is too late. Soon, the entire city, perhaps the world, has gone blind. All except one. 

Blindness by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero(Translator) 

Published by Harvest Books 

ISBN: 0156007754