Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.); Poetry as Survival – postscript:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
sub rosa 
Poetry as resistance. With this passage Williams answered both Pound and Arendt, after Hiroshima. It is Williams’ greatest poem, but, alas, Celan, who found he couldn’t turn from this dark riddle so easily, died of it nonetheless. Sometimes I think he would have been better off outside of Paris, with its cultures of abstraction, but where could he have gone? The language followed him. Handke seems to have found the path, however, in a world of kaleidoscopic surfaces.
it’s understandable; nothing could release Celan from his traumas – even so he managed to give form to some of his darkness before he went – .
This made me think of Dogen’s version of “Painted Cakes do not Satisfy Hunger”. Better explained or explored than I could, I offer this link: http://sweetcakeenso.blogspot.ca/2011/10/painted-rice-cakes-and-absolute.html
Thank you!
This touched me like a cool breeze.