[New-Poetry] Re: celan

Fri May 9 14:09:14 EDT 2008

I have a new chapbook out called _after Celan_ from Slack Budda Press, a series of mine that deals with the notions contained within the last three collections esp _atemwende_. I think a few of the poems are on Anny's site. Here is part of the forward that explains the project, I can send it signed for six dollars to the US, address below.

  --------------------

  A forward to the series

  These are from a series called After Celan, a serial poem-set started in late 2003, which might need some background information, specifically about Paul Celan's poems themselves. Pierre Joris spent twenty years translating Celan's book Atemwende and since I know what it is like to spend years putting together a book for the public to read through my experience editing and publishing Hands Collected The Books of Simon Perchik: Poems 1949-1999 I knew this would be a worthy book. Especially when considering Joris was already important in my mind for significantly contributing to Paul Blackburn scholarship by publishing a wonderful super-sized issue of _6 Pack_ dedicated to his work.

  Things typically take a few years to plumb with me, and when Fadensonnen / Threadsuns was released in 2000, I re-read Atemwende / Breathturn then left his work alone. Three years later I was thinking of something he said "through its strangeness a poem breaks open new reality" or, if my memory is correct, that Primo Levy attributed to Celan. I started re-imagining the poems without reading them; how a suicide, specifically his, might break open reality. 

  Anyway, I start seeing Celan at the top tower of a castle found in the Book of Thoth, it is a turned, bendy building, and tower itself translates to War in the Hebraic symbol, which makes perfect sense come to think of it, and he is taunting all with his words, an arrogant cusp of a man spitting on those below. The series changes some details, makes the country America, supplants the genocide of Jews with Indians, integrates Celan into the multi-dimensional framework of the hereafter. Shortly thereafter an entourage of suicides taunt me, a singer has an epileptic attack rolling around during a verse, about to tell me something pertinent, before his throat bucks in. A month long meditation on death appears in the mail from a friend after his sister cops an attempt, and in January Spaulding Gray finally submerged.

  In a recent study I read poets have a shorter life span than nearly all professions, except workers in the sex trade, drug runners, armed robbers, offshore oil rig workers and deep sea fishers. Against the standard set by the others, poetry is the ONLY life choice where high risk does not bring a reasonably outrageous cash return. 

  This in turn lead me to understand that in Celan's time where the most outlantish thing one could do against society was off oneself, whereas now, in a hyper-capital-conscious society, spending three hours writing a poem, an act which does not increase the Gross National Product, does not buy a Kenmore dishwasher, does not buy a cup of coffee, culturally fills the same social position. I wanted to write a series that further explored this new capacity for absence available to the modern poem.

  Thus came this series, whose methods were couched in the desire to have a translator spend a significant portion of their life working on transforming this project of mine into German as a revenge type of situation while at the same time I would live an unreasonable amount of time as a poet as a further reification of the ultimate defense of poetry, that of the body held beyond the poems need for one (just to see what would happen theory-wise). 

  As for the construction of the poems, it's as methodical as an obsession with recycling objects from a bleak landscape. Start with a word or phrase possibly in English, or another language, but unfamiliar enough where the reader is debased and unsure of the meaning and whether the word is in actual existence. The word is capitalized to make fun of Celan, to flip him off for infiltrating my days. Or else to imply the Victorian Period where capitalizing an abstract term gave it more "value." For instance, Valor, or Honesty, Love, Poop. After this word I give a brief definition of a wildly imagined word meaning; or what the word, when broken into components, would logically equate to; or else what it actually means. After this first line is attained the rules are easy, use as many words as possible that cannot be translated into German so that some person years from now spends a few decades trying to decipher the code. These words are often compactions of multiple words that
 rely on a kenning form of metaphor, specifically called a baratier, to work. While a kenning is a combo with a dash, take "whale-road" from Melville, meaning the sea is a highway for whales, and a portmanteau combines two words together “smoke + fog=smog” for a singular meaning, the baratier uses a fused multiword construct such as “utteristance” that each reader will come up with their own meaning for, thereby producing a wilder form of metaphor than what is currently called the “radical copular form,” A is B.

  What a reader will acquire from these I am unsure of. There are plenty of jokes in the series, in #8, the second line is a crack about code poetry; in some I use words that make me laugh, just try to come up with a funnier name than Twachtman for a painter; in #13, which appears in an online journal called poetic inhalation, I create a poem that rhymes but cannot be read aloud, as mouths do not work that way, let alone be translated. Ultimately, what I am hoping each reader will grasp from this series is a pen and their checkbook and mail six or more dollars to David Baratier / 321 Empire Street / Montpelier, OH 43543. And, if deciding these are your type of thing, you will encourage others to do the same for Slack Buddha Press.

  ------

Be well

David Baratier, Editor

Pavement Saw Press
321 Empire Street
Montpelier OH 43543
http://pavementsaw.org

Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at
http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1

---------------------------------
Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080509/f726a067/attachment.html