Deadpool and Poetry.
Jan. 20th, 2008 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishI was looking for this one poem by Adrienne Rich "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," because snatches of it have been going through my head for several days now. I found it online, only later to find as I was, for reasons unknown to me, going through my old Livejournal posts, and stumbled on this old post of mine.
It's a list of all the stuff that I used to keep on my computer desktop in the Stickies program so that I could have some poetry in my life without having to hunt it down. It includes "Valediction" and is again taking a place on my desktop. (I had stopped doing this sometime last year when I got frantic, because the level of disorder I can tolerate directly decreases with how much stress I am under- finals period at Wellesley is a bad time for me, and my desktop just seemed to *full*)
But the post clearly had much more on it than just well-known poems. The section from Deadpool that I transcribed is actually one of my favorite bits from that series- it's a broken life wrapped up bleeding in shreds of humor. And while that's far from how I'm exactly feeling right now, it does strike the right tone.
I also renewed my slight acquaintance with Ms. Rich's poetry. Finding poem sort of blew my mind. Cartographies of Silence - Adrienne Rich
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.
2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
The syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word
3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
5.
The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan
Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words
stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.
6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others
7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew
If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn
till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare
8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child's fingers
or the newborn infant's mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain
for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
It's not quite how I'm feeling about speech/silence/my friend, but it's got something of that pondering enraged feel to it. I'm really kind of annoyed at not being heard- again, perhaps on of the inherent dangers of living in a foreign language, and depending on technology.
I feel like I might get some good philosophizing to myself about the nature of language, communication, and self-exploration from this whole thing. And of course, about silence.
In the meantime, I've finally figured out to how to order coffee at a Starbucks in Vienna without a) revealing my Americanity by ordering in English and making the server think they should speak English to me, and b) confusing the staff by using the German translation of a thing they only talk about in English themselves. Speak English with a fake German accent. Then you sound like a German ordering something with an English name, but they don't automatically switch to English to ask what size/ if you want milk. It's so corny, yet so right.
Ich hätte gern ein tall Koffee off the Veek, bitte.
It's a list of all the stuff that I used to keep on my computer desktop in the Stickies program so that I could have some poetry in my life without having to hunt it down. It includes "Valediction" and is again taking a place on my desktop. (I had stopped doing this sometime last year when I got frantic, because the level of disorder I can tolerate directly decreases with how much stress I am under- finals period at Wellesley is a bad time for me, and my desktop just seemed to *full*)
But the post clearly had much more on it than just well-known poems. The section from Deadpool that I transcribed is actually one of my favorite bits from that series- it's a broken life wrapped up bleeding in shreds of humor. And while that's far from how I'm exactly feeling right now, it does strike the right tone.
I also renewed my slight acquaintance with Ms. Rich's poetry. Finding poem sort of blew my mind. Cartographies of Silence - Adrienne Rich
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.
2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
The syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word
3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
5.
The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan
Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words
stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.
6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others
7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew
If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn
till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare
8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child's fingers
or the newborn infant's mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain
for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
It's not quite how I'm feeling about speech/silence/my friend, but it's got something of that pondering enraged feel to it. I'm really kind of annoyed at not being heard- again, perhaps on of the inherent dangers of living in a foreign language, and depending on technology.
I feel like I might get some good philosophizing to myself about the nature of language, communication, and self-exploration from this whole thing. And of course, about silence.
In the meantime, I've finally figured out to how to order coffee at a Starbucks in Vienna without a) revealing my Americanity by ordering in English and making the server think they should speak English to me, and b) confusing the staff by using the German translation of a thing they only talk about in English themselves. Speak English with a fake German accent. Then you sound like a German ordering something with an English name, but they don't automatically switch to English to ask what size/ if you want milk. It's so corny, yet so right.
Ich hätte gern ein tall Koffee off the Veek, bitte.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 08:03 pm (UTC)Have you begun introducing yourself to Germans using a fake German accent on your name? I found it was the only way I could get French people to even remotely understand my name or say it right. I always have a really difficult time swtiching accents midsentence, so ended up saying obviously American words in an American context with a French accent and felt...very weird. Actually, most mixing of English and French felt and still feels very weird to me. Like, I should be speaking one or the other, not both. Can you mix German with English?
no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 08:57 pm (UTC)Mixing German and English feels very strange to me, and hearing German-speakers just stick an English word in a sentence still confuses the heck out of me sometimes. I really can't mix German and English much at all without getting confused. (Though these days, I feel like I'm getting German and Spanish confused in my head....)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 09:33 pm (UTC)