UNCLE LUKA'S ANTHOLOGY OF MODERNIST POETRY.

G'DAY LUKE HERE as i feel responsible for the middlebrowification of dissensus i am going to do penance by creating for you, the ungrateful reader, an anthology of mainly european moderenist and proto modernist poetry. i will type up a poem every few days and post it here. no one will read it but it will be a good resource all the same. here are some of the poets we will cover in this course
pavese
cavafy
seferis
celan
holderlin
michaux
david jones
rilke
rimbaud
ungaretti
reverdy
montale
pessoa
bonnefoy

i hav an aversion to poetry in the spainish language but if there are aficianados we can come to an arrangement. you can type up some paz, or some neruda or vallejo if you must. i doubt i'll include any americans either.

im gonna start by pasting in things i already have typed up or can steal off interent.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegy #9

Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away
as laurel, a little darker than all
the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border
of every leaf (like the smile of a wind): - oh, why
have to be human, and shunning Destiny,
long for Destiny?...
Not because happiness really
exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss.
Not out of curiosity, not just to practise the heart,
that could still be there in laurel...
But because being here is much, and because all this
that's here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this
having been once on earth - can it ever be cancelled?

And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it,
trying to contain it within our simple hands,
in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless heart.
Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather
hold on to it all for ever... But into the other relation,
what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we've here
slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one.
Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life,
the long experience of love; in fact,
purely untellable things. But later,
under the stars, what use? the more deeply untellable stars?
Yet the wanderer too doesn't bring from mountain to valley
a handful of earth; of for all untellable earth, but only
a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -
possibly: Pillar, Tower?... but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose
of this sly Earth, in urging a pair of lovers,
just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them?
Threshold: what does it mean
to a pair of lovers, that they should be wearing their own
worn threshold a little, they too, after the many before,
before the many to come,... as a matter of course!

Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home.
Speak and proclaim. More than ever
things we can live with are falling away, for that
which is oustingly taking their place is an imageless act.
Act under crusts, that will readily split as soon
as the doing within outgrows them and takes a new outline.
Between the hammers lives on
our heart, as between the teeth
the tongue, which, in spite of all,
still continues to praise.

Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you
can't impress him with the splendour you've felt; in the cosmos
where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show him
some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,
till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.
Tell him things. He'll stand more astonished: as you did
beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how guileless and ours;
how even the moaning of grief purely determines on form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing, - to escape
to a bliss beyond the fiddle. These things that live on departure
understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for
rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.
Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts
into - oh, endlessly - into ourselves! Whosoever we are.

Earth, is it not just this that you want: to arise
invisibly in us? Is not your dream
to be one day invisible? Earth! invisible!
What is your urgent command, if not transformation?
Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need
no more of your spring-times to win me over: a single one,
ah, one, is already more than my blood can endure.
Beyond all names I am yours, and have been for ages.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is Death, that friendly Death.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
are growing less.... Supernumerous existence
wells up in my heart.

im gonna hav to type up holderlins patmos cos the translation online is hideous wait for me

the duino elegies were my introduction to poetry. im struggling with this holderelin a bit.

i got two translations at home and i found one online and they're all horrible in one way or another. i am forced to frankenstein my own one which will probably be even worse.

this is the first part of Patmos, a poem by Holderlin. IM having difficulty with it. im taking the 2nd half into the bath to look at before i post it.

Near and
Hard to grasp is
The God.
but where there is danger,
Deliverance is also.

The Eagle
dwells in darkness
The sons of the Alps
cross chasms
on fine-boned bridges
knowing nothing of fear.
Therefore,
Since the peaks of time are heaped
High all around
And loved ones dwell
Nearby, languishing
On the most isolated mountains,
Give us becalmed
Water, give us wings
With truest mind to travel
to cross over, and to return.


So I spoke
And a spirit
Swifter even than I had anticipated
Caught me up and
Carried me a long way from my house
to a place
I had never thought to go.
The dark forest,
Darkened
In incipient dusk,
And rivers of my native land yearned;
These places had become strange to me;
But soon
the first tendrils of smoke crept
ambiguously in sun-haze,
quickly it rose
with sunlight's footsteps, culminating
in a thousand fragrant peaks,

Asia, exploding in flower, welled up inside me
And dazzled
I squinted against the light, and searched for something familiar,
a stranger
to the wide lanes down which
Paktolus travels, flashy with gold,
to Tmolus,
And the place where Tauros stands,
to Messogis, and to The Garden,
full of flowers,
A quiet fire, but in the light
High up, the glinting of sliver snow;
And, witness to the life immortal,
On walls we cannot reach, the primordial ivy grows
And held high
By living pillars of cedar and of laurel
perch
the solemn pavilions of the gods.

i dont speak german. i had to just piece together 5 translations and use a dictionary to fill in the gaps. the tnedrils of smoke passage is incredibly knotty synatically and also vry vague.

you should prob say who wrote that.

its neither european nor modernist. but i will try not to take a proprietorial attitude to this thread.

i disagree. who cares. nice poem thanks.

Questions For The Time Being
JH Prynne

All right then no stoic composure as the
self-styled masters of language queue up
to apply for their permits. That they own and
control the means of production (or at least
the monopoly of its more dangerous aspects)
seems not to have struck home. But it
must, or hysterical boredom will result and
we shall all think that creative paranoia
has now finally reached these shores- and
if we didn't invent it anyway, as Wyndham
Lewis tried so fiercely to explain. And in the
face of the "new frankness" in immaculate
display in the highest places, why should
the direct question not be put: if any discrete
class with an envisaged part in the social process
is not creating its own history, then who is doing
it for them? Namely, what is anyone waiting
for, either resigned or nervous or frantic from
time to time? Various forms dodge through
the margins of a livelihood, but so much talk
about the underground is silly when it would re-
quire a constant effort to keep below the surface,
when almost everything is exactly that, the
mirror of a would-be alien who won't see how
much he is at home. In consequence also the
idea of change is briskly seasonal, it's too cold
& thus thee scout-camp idea of revolution stands
in temporary composure, waiting for spring. All
forms of delay help this farce, that our restrictions
are temporary & that the noble fiction is to have
a few good moments, which represent what we know
ought to be ours. Ought to be, that makes me
wince with facetiousness: we/you/they, all the
pronouns by now ought to know how to make a sentence
work with ought to, and the stoic at least saves
himself that extremity of false vigilance.

Yet living in hope is so silly when our desires
are so separate, not part of any mode or con-
dition except language & there they rest on
the false mantlepiece, like ornaments of style.
And expectancy is equally silly when what we think
of is delay, or gangsterism of the moment, some
Micawbereish fantasy that we can snatch the controls
when the really crucial moment turns up. Not with-
out asbestos gloves we can't, the wheel is permanently
red-hot, no one on a new course sits back and
switches on the automatic pilot. Revisionist plots
are everywhere and our pronouns haven't even
drawn up plans for the first coup. Really it's
laughable and folks talk of discontent or waiting
to see what they can make of it. How much
cash in simple gross terms went through the
merger banks in the last three months? Buy one
another or die; but the cultured elite, our squad
of pronouns with their lingual backs to the wall,
prefer to keep everything in the family. The up-
shot is simple & as follows: 1. No one has any right
to mere idle discontent, even in conditions of most
extreme privation, since such a state of arrested
insight is actively counter-productive; 2. Con-
tentment or sceptical calm will produce
instant death at the next jolt & intending
suicides should carry a card at least exonerating
the eventual bystanders; 3, What goes on in a
language is the corporate & prolonged action
of worked self-transcendence - other minor verbal
delays have their uses but the scheme of such
motives is at best ambiguous; 4. Luminous
take-off shows through in language forced into any
compact with the historic shift, but in a given con-
dition such as now not even elegance will come
of the temporary nothing in which life goes on.