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Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature.
His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us, and inside of us.
Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche, and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and hunger of our experience.
Frank Bidart is the author of Metaphysical Dog, Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Frank Bidart
Half-light:
Collected Poems 1965-2016
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux –
Macmillan Publishers)
ISBN: 9780374125950
Frank Bidart Wins 2017 National Book Award for Poetry
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Marcel Schwob
Ik wil de wonderlijke wonden
van uw voeten zoenen, ik, de boetende,
en gij die reeds gekruisigd werd.
Ik weet ook gij
werd aan het kruis gekromd,
mijn stille kruistochtkind.
Gij zijt de stem van de Doper,
doch ik ben niet de Tetrarch.
Gij zijt het gans gebeuren.
U tegenover zal ik niet zondigen,
want uwe wonde ken ik,
zonder dat mijn hand hare kilte voelt.
Van uwe lippen wil ik de liefde drinken,
was ook uw lijf nog slechts een vreselijk offer,-
de melaatse kluizenaar in de woestijn.
Mijn handen zijn nog niet doorwond,
de koorden snijden enkel het vlees
van mijn arme armen.
Doch zeg slechts een woord, gekruisigde,
en de lichten in mij zullen zich omzetten
tot de kaarsen van het paradijs.
Paul van Ostaijen
(1896 – 1928)
Gedicht: Marcel Schwob
Marcel Schwob (1867 – 1905),
was a Jewish – French symbolist writer.
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C’est Lou Qu’on La Nommait
Il est des loups de toute sorte
Je connais le plus inhumain
Mon cœur que le diable l’emporte
Et qu’il le dépose à sa porte
N’est plus qu’un jouet dans sa main
Les loups jadis étaient fidèles
Comme sont les petits toutous
Et les soldats amants des belles
Galamment en souvenir d’elles
Ainsi que les loups étaient doux
Mais aujourd’hui les temps sont pires
Les loups sont tigres devenus
Et les Soldats et les Empires
Les Césars devenus Vampires
Sont aussi cruels que Vénus
J’en ai pris mon parti Rouveyre
Et monté sur mon grand cheval
Je vais bientôt partir en guerre
Sans pitié chaste et l’œil sévère
Comme ces guerriers qu’Epinal
Vendait Images populaires
Que Georgin gravait dans le bois
Où sont-ils ces beaux militaires
Soldats passés Où sont les guerres
Où sont les guerres d’autrefois
Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880 – 1918)
Poèmes à Lou
C’est Lou Qu’on La Nommait
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Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare’s drama and poetry.
Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies.
Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature.
The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism.
Works from Shakespeare’s entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.
Queer Shakespeare
Desire and Sexuality
Editor(s): Goran Stanivukovic
Published: 13-07-2017
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 424 pp
ISBN: 9781474295246
Imprint: The Arden Shakespeare
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
Bloomsbury Publishing
$144.00
Queer Shakespeare. Desire and Sexuality
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On The Train
I
The lady in front of me in the car,
With little red coils close over her ears,
Is talking with her friend;
And the circle of ostrich foam around her hat,
Curving over like a wave,
Trembles with her little windy words.
What she is saying, I wonder,
That her feathers should tremble
And the soft fur of her coat should slip down over her shoulders?
Has her string of pearls been stolen,
Or maybe her husband?
II
He is drunk, that man —
Drunk as a lord, a lord of the bibulous past. [sic]
He shouts wittily from his end of the car to the man in the corner;
He bows to me with chivalrous apologies.
He philosophizes, plays with the wisdom of the ages,
Flings off his rags,
Displays his naked soul —
Athletic, beautiful, grotesque.
In the good time coming,
When men drink no more,
Shall we ever see a nude soul dancing
Stript and free
In the temple of his god?
III
She comes smiling into the car
With irridescent bubbles of children.
She blooms in the close plush seats
Like a narcissus in a bowl of stones.
She croons to a baby in her lap —
The trees come swinging by to listen,
And the electric lights in the ceiling are stars.
Harriet Monroe poetry
(1860 – 1936)
On The Train
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Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan.
On October 13, 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognizing his countless contributions to music and letters over the last fifty years. Some months later, he delivered an acceptance lecture that is now memorialized in book form for generations to come.
In The Nobel Lecture, Dylan reflects on his life and experience with literature, providing both a rare artistic statement and an intimate look at a uniquely American icon.
From finding inspiration in the music of Buddy Holly and Leadbelly to the works of literature that helped shape his own approach to writing—The Odyssey, Moby-Dick, and All Quiet on the Western Front—this is Dylan like you’ve never seen him before.
Bob Dylan
The Nobel Lecture Hardcover
32 pages
Hardcover
October 31, 2017
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1501189409
ISBN-13: 978-1501189401
$10.73
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Having no history
Having no history we are
What we do, not who
We have been—so there is no-one
Who is not with us.
Our time is not filled
With imperatives, but passes as it must—
Each year brings content
Of its own kind for us.
Our towns are each in the centre
Of nowhere, and each is its own.
We cannot feel life as apart,
And our days are belonging.
We do not have your ‘progress’—
But always try for betterment.
Untruth cannot flourish here,
Because what must be is.
We have never thought we can
Be other than this, we do not live
For what should be, can be,
As what is is plain in view.
John Leonard
John Leonard lives in Canberra, Australia.
More poetry on website: www.jleonard.net
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Wie Elsschot zegt, denkt niet meteen aan poëzie. Toch zijn het juist enkele van zijn dichtregels die iedereen zal herkennen: ‘tussen droom en daad staan wetten in de weg en praktische bezwaren’, bijvoorbeeld. Willem Elsschot. Dichter bevat alle gedichten uit Elsschots enige bundel.
Een select gezelschap van vijfentwintig scherpzinnige lezers geeft er commentaar bij, aangevoerd door Elsschotkenner Koen Rymenants en poëzie-expert Carl de Strycker. Ze verhelderen Elsschots proza met behulp van zijn poëzie en omgekeerd. Ze tonen ons Elsschot als gelegenheidsdichter en -vertaler en brengen onvermoede verwantschappen aan het licht: met Guido Gezelle en de gezusters Loveling, de Bijbel en Victor Hugo, maar ook met Herman de Coninck en Kees van Kooten.
Koen Rymenants (1977) promoveerde op een proefschrift over Elsschot: Een hoopje vuil in de feestzaal. Facetten van het proza van Willem Elsschot (2009). Hij publiceert over literatuur en is bestuurslid van het Willem Elsschot Genootschap.
Carl de Strycker (1981) is directeur van Poëziecentrum en hoofdredacteur van Poëziekrant. Met Yra van Dijk en Maarten De Pourcq stelde hij het boek Draden in het donker. Intertekstualiteit in theorie en praktijk (2013) samen.
Willem Elsschot. Dichter
Koen Rymenants, Carl De Strycker
Paperback
ISBN 978-94-6310-290-2
€ 22,50
Paperback
Formaat 140 x 215
Aantal pagina’s 304
Publicatiedatum 5 okt. 2017
Uitg. Polis Antwerpen
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Que voulez-vous que je vous dise ?
À Théodore Fraenkel
C’est la pure vérité
Comme un manchon
Ma belle dame mettez vos deux mains
dans le bec de gaz
nous y verrons plus clair
Vous êtes perdue si vous ne m’égratignez
pas un peu
pour voir
plus clair
Un bateau s’arrête et fait son
testament
Les champs de blé réclament longuement la coiffure à la frégate.
Le mystérieux concierge enfonce
avec précaution sa clef dans ton œil
après vingt ans on est prié de dire son nom
mais la postérité n’exige pas de carte d’identité
à vos souhaits
Les miens sont simples
me donne à boire durant toute la mort
qu’on me fiche la guerre.
Robert Desnos (1900 – 1945)
Que voulez-vous que je vous dise ?
À Théodore Fraenkel
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Vincent Berquez©: Sunset Beach
Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet
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Zelfportret met schijnbeeld
Vannacht was ik een Bolognezer. Een ieder
die mij op de Piazza Verdi passeerde deelde
ik zebravinkjes uit, ontelbare zebravinkjes.
Wat een geluid maken die vogeltjes. Het lijkt
het hardste marmer te kunnen doordringen.
Uit alle ramen van de universiteit staken
gezichten met vraagtekens. Ik weende niet.
Bert Bevers
Bert Bevers is a poet and writer who lives and works in Antwerp (Be)
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When I founded the Cabaret Voltaire, I was sure that there must be a few young people in Switzerland who like me were interested not only in enjoying their independence but also in giving proof of it.
I went to Herr Ephraim, the owner of the Meierei, and said, “Herr Ephraim, please let me have your room. I want to start a night-club.” Herr Ephraim agreed and gave me the room. And I went to some people I knew and said, “Please give me a picture, or a drawing, or an engraving. I should like to put on an exhibition in my night-club.” I went to the friendly Zürich press and said, “Put in some announcements. There is going to be an international cabaret. We shall do great things.” And they gave me pictures and they put in my annoucements. So on 5th February we had a cabaret. Mademoiselle Hennings and Mademoiselle Leconte sang French and Danish chansons. Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry. A balalaika orchestra played delightful folk-songs and dances.
I received much support and encouragement from Herr M. Slodki, who designed the poster, and from Herr Hans Arp, who supplied some Picassos, as well as works of his own, and obtained for me pictures by his friends O. van Rees and Artur Segall. Much support also from Messrs. Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Max Oppenheimer, who readily agreed to take part in the cabaret.
We organized a Russian evening and, a little later, a French one (works by Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, A. Jarry, Laforgue and Rimbaud). On 26th February Richard Huelsenbeck arrived from Berlin and on 30th March we performed some stupendous Negro music (toujours avec la grosse caisse: boum boum boum boum – drabatja mo gere drabatja mo bonooooooooo -). Monsieur Laban was present at the performance and was very enthusiastic. Herr Tristan Tzara was the initiator of a performance by Messrs. Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco (the first in Zürich and in the world) of simultaneist verse by Messrs. Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, as well as a poème simultané of his own composition, which is reproduced on pages six and seven.
The persent booklet is published by us with the support of our friends in France, Italy and Russia. It is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is the publication of a revue internationale. La revue paraîtra à Zurich et portera le nom “Dada” (“Dada”). Dada Dada Dada Dada.
Zürich, 15th May 1916
Hugo Ball
(1886-1927)
From Cabaret Voltaire – Issue 1
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More in: Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Ball, Hugo, Dada, DADA, Dadaïsme, LITERARY MAGAZINES, Pablo Picasso
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