tinvan

On the Anniversary of Joseph Brodsky’s Death  (January 2001)   Archangelsk, the briny cold, the frigid Baltics, Children throwing snowballs at Soviet statues. The Arctic chill of the moon at midday, The trees wrapped, the pedestrians bundled. How the sun shivered behind the smokestacks Like a soldier frozen in place. At the dimly lit Museum of the Far North The subject was the poet’s internal exile, Metaphysics versus History, and the fateful Struggle between Poetry and Time, A Cold War that will never end. Also, his love for watery ports And stubborn cats, especially the Russian Blue that hailed from the White Sea . Afterwards, a slushy walk, salty air, Sleep in an overcoat in a converted barracks. All night I heard the muffled boots Of an army marching through the streets Under the thick cover of darkness. But in the morning, anniversary mourning, I woke to a magisterial silence. Snow occupied the city. -Edward Hirsch. NYRB, Feb 11, 2010 Tưởng niệm Brodsky nhân ngày mất của ...

  Ai Nothing But Color For Yukio Mishima I didn’t write Etsuko, I sliced her open. She was carmine inside like a sea bass and empty. No viscera, nothing but color. I love you like that, boy. I pull the kimono down around your shoulders and kiss you. Then you let it fall open. Each time, I cut you a little and when you leave, I take the piece, broil it, dip it in ginger sauce and eat it. It burns my mouth so. You laugh, holding me belly-down with your body. So much hurting to get to this moment, when I’m beneath you, wanting it to go on and to end. At midnight, you say see you tonight and I answer there won’t be any tonight, but you just smile, swing your sweater over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck. I hear you whistling long after you disappear down the subway steps, as I walk back home, my whole body tingling. I undress and put the bronze sword on my desk beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper. I smooth it open and read its single sentence: I meant to do it. No. I...

  Czeslaw Milosz , The Art of Poetry No. 70 Interviewed by Robert Faggen Issue 133, Winter 1994   A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation of modern man, one must live in exile of some sort. —Czeslaw Milosz, “On Exile”   Though Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz considers himself a Polish poet because he writes in that “native mother tongue,” he was not born in Poland, nor has he lived there for over half a century. Nonetheless, the poems of this sensuous mystic are inscribed on monuments in Gdansk as well as printed on posters in the New York City transit system. He was born in 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania, the impoverished estate of his grandfather, a gentleman farmer. Milosz remembers the rural Lithuania of that time as a “...