Zbigniew Herbert: “Preliminary Investigation of an Angel” (1969)
Preliminary Investigation of an Angel
When he stands before them
in the shadow of a suspicion
he is still all
composed of light
the aeons of his hair
are pinned up in a bun
of innocence
the blood is helped on
with instruments and interrogations
with an iron ferrule
a slow fire
the limits of his body
are defined
a blow on his back
fixes his spine
between cloud and mudpuddle
after [...]
“A Soft Spot for The Band”
Gary Sauer-Thompson has a post with a link to a video of the late Richard Manuel singing “I Shall Be Released.” This resonated with me because I just finished reading John Nivin’s novella Music From Big Pink, which is a lightly fictionalized account of the period during which The Band recorded their first album. (The [...]
More on Copyright
A couple of days ago, the Dean of Arts & Sciences at my school forwarded this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed to me & several other people with an interest in such matters:
Washington — So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, [...]
William Blake at 250
Blake’s work (and life) forms one of the central pillars of my poetics. I missed this piece by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian last month, on the occasion of William Blake’s 250th birthday:
Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and [...]
Pasta Dough
Pasta Dough
I’ve been meaning to post a picture of the pasta extravaganza from a couple of weeks ago. Amy came over & we started from scratch, making the dough, three fillings, and two sauces. I’ll need to practice more rolling out the dough & handling it, especially making ravioli. Surprisingly, very few of [...]
Powerful Resentment
Via Homunculus, I see that the poet Wendy Cope avers that she resents the fact that after she’s dead someone else will be collecting the royalties on her poems:
In the long run - if our poems survive into the long run - we’ll be in no position to benefit from royalties or permission fees. All [...]
Appreciation
After each of my two final class sessions yesterday a student came up to me, shook my hand & said “Thanks.” Others waved & said “See you around” as they exited. Much appreciated. Half-way through the semester I thought all my classes were going badly, but I made a few changes & two out of [...]
Rilke’s Birthday
There was a period in my life — my late thirties — when I poured obsessively over Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus & Duino Elegies. I even got a German dictionary & worked word-by-word through some of the sonnets. I collected different translations. Dana Gioia (now Commissar of the NEA, but then just an aparatchik on [...]
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