Fleurs du Mal Magazine
For the Marriage of
Faustus and Helen
“And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
And profane Greek to raise the building up
Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force
Of King Abaddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,
And Aben Ezra do interpret Rome.”
The Alchemist
I
The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes.
Across the stacked partitions of the day–
Across the memoranda, baseball scores,
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;
Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd
The margins of the day, accent the curbs,
Convoying divers dawns on every corner
To druggist, barber and tobacconist,
Until the graduate opacities of evening
Take them away as suddenly to somewhere
Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.
There is the world dimensional
for those untwisted
by the love of things irreconcilable . . .
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall,–lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
Still flickering with those prefigurations–
Prodigal, yet uncontested now,
Half-riant before the jerky window frame.
There is some way, I think, to touch
Those hands of yours that count the nights
Stippled with pink and green advertisements.
And now, before its arteries turn dark
I would have you meet this bartered blood.
Imminent in his dream, none better knows
The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words
Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.
Reflective conversion of all things
At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread
The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread
Impinging on the throat and sides . . .
Inevitable, the body of the world
Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus
That winks above it, bluet in your breasts.
The earth may glide diaphanous to death;
But if I lift my arms it is to bend
To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
The press of troubled hands, too alternate
With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
You found in final chains, no captive then–
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.
Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,
Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous, to hourless days–
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.
II
Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
Glee shifts from foot to foot,
Magnetic to their tremulo.
This crashing opera bouffe,
Blest excursion! this ricochet
From roof to roof–
Know, Olympians, we are breathless
While nigger cupids scour the stars!
A thousand light shrugs balance us
Through snarling hails of melody.
White shadows slip across the floor
Splayed like cards from a loose hand;
Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters
Until somewhere a rooster banters.
Greet naively–yet intrepidly
New soothings, new amazements
That cornets introduce at every turn–
And you may fall downstairs with me
With perfect grace and equanimity.
Or, plaintively scud past shores
Where, by strange harmonic laws
All relatives, serene and cool,
Sit rocked in patent armchairs.
O, I have known metallic paradises
Where cuckoos clucked to finches
Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
While titters hailed the groans of death
Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
This music has a reassuring way.
The siren of the springs of guilty song–
Let us take her on the incandescent wax
Striated with nuances, nervosities
That we are heir to: she is still so young,
We cannot frown upon her as she smiles,
Dipping here in this cultivated storm
Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.
III
Capped arbiter of beauty in this street
That narrows darkly into motor dawn,–
You, here beside me, delicate ambassador
Of intricate slain numbers that arise
In whispers, naked of steel;
religious gunman!
Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,
And in other ways than as the wind settles
On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:
Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.
We even,
Who drove speediest destruction
In corymbulous formations of mechanics,–
Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice
Plangent over meadows, and looked down
On rifts of torn and empty houses
Like old women with teeth unjubilant
That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:
We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers
The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,
The mounted, yielding cities of the air!
That saddled sky that shook down vertical
Repeated play of fire—no hypogeum
Of wave or rock was good against one hour.
We did not ask for that, but have survived,
And will persist to speak again before
All stubble streets that have not curved
To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm
That lowers down the arc of Helen’s brow
To saturate with blessing and dismay.
A goose, tobacco and cologne
Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,
The lavish heart shall always have to leaven
And spread with bells and voices, and atone
The abating shadows of our conscript dust.
Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,–
The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,
Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;
Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,
O brother-thief of time, that we recall.
Laugh out the meager penance of their days
Who dare not share with us the breath released,
The substance drilled and spent beyond repair
For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.
Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile
Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height
The imagination spans beyond despair,
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
Hart Crane
(1889 – 1932)
Recitative
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A self-proclaimed “vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial,” poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers.
The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century—a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics.
Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind.
“It takes all of us seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling to be one,” she says, embodying these words in her work.
Every sense is amplified as the poems, carefully arranged, pull the reader into their worlds. While each poem stands on its own, they flow together throughout the collection into a single cohesive body.
The book quickly sets up its own rhythms, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes, dark and light, and other spaces both ecological and spiritual.
These narrative, and often visionary, poems let the lives of animal species and the power of natural processes weave into the human psyche, and vice versa.
Okpik’s descriptive rhythms ground the reader in movement and music that transcend everyday logic and open up our hearts to the richness of meaning available in the interior and exterior worlds.
dg nanouk okpik is a resident advisor at Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. Her poetry appears in the books Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas.
Corpse Whale
by dg nanouk okpik
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Series: Sun Tracks
Publication Date: October 11th, 2012
Language: English
Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780816526741
ISBN-10: 0816526745
$16.95
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Dans un chalet au milieu des montagnes, une femme et son amant se retrouvent en secret, sans que son épouse ne soit au courant.
Tous deux vivent une idylle, une parenthèse hors du temps. L’amoureux succombe d’une crise cardiaque en quelques secondes.
La narratrice se retrouve seule avec le corps sans vie de son amant. Elle décide de garder le corps et, pour surmonter son chagrin et la violence de l’événement, commence à écrire des lettres à l’épouse et lui raconte cette histoire d’amour infidèle.
Une initiation sentimentale: Auprès du corps inerte de celui qu’elle a tant aimé, toute sa vie sentimentale refait surface : les hommes qu’elle a côtoyés, ceux qui l’ont blessée ou ont abusé d’elle.
Elle repense à ses échecs, jusqu’à la rencontre de cet amant qui l’a révélée.
Pour la première fois, elle a appris à aimer. Maintenant que plus rien ne compte à ses yeux, un seul objectif lui donne le courage de vivre : lui offrir la plus belle des sépultures.
Une nouvelle facette d’Adeline Dieudonné: Après le détour par le récit choral avec Kérozène, l’autrice de La vraie vie revient au roman.
Adeline Dieudonné est moins féroce, moins surréaliste, mais plus touchante, amoureuse.
Adeline Dieudonné est née en 1982, elle habite Bruxelles. Elle a remporté avec son premier roman, La Vraie Vie, un immense succès. Multi-primé, traduit dans plus de 20 langues, ce livre a notamment reçu en 2018 le prix FNAC, le prix Renaudot des lycéens, le prix Russell et le prix Filigranes en Belgique ainsi que le Grand Prix des lectrices de ELLE en 2019. Il s’est vendu à 250 000 exemplaires.
Reste
par Adeline Dieudonné
Littérature
Date de parution: 6 April 2023
Format: broché
Editeur: Éditions de L’Iconoclaste
Format: 13 cm x 18 cm
Nombre de pages 282
EAN 9782378803544
SKU 5254195
€ 20.00
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Eine Zierde zwar ist das Alter des Geschlechts
Eine Zierde zwar ist das Alter des Geschlechts,
aber eigentlich doch nur eine Aufforderung,
den Ahnen ähnlich zu werden.
Ulrich von Hutten
Ritter und Dichter
(* 21.04.1488, † 29.08.1523)
Eine Zierde zwar ist das Alter des Geschlechts
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An Old Man’s Thought of School
[The following poem was recited personally by the author
Saturday afternoon, October 31, at the inauguration
of the fine new Cooper Public School, Camden, New Jersey]
An old man’s thought of school;
An old man, gathering youthful memories and
blooms that youth itself cannot,
Now only do I know you!
O fair auroral skies! O morning dew upon the
grass!
And these I see—these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning—these young lives,
Building, equipping, like a fleet of ships—immortal
ships!
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the Soul’s voyage.
Only a lot of boys and girls?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a public school?
Ah! more—infinitely more;
(As George Fox rais’d his warning cry, “Is it this
pile of brick and mortar—these dead floors,
windows, rails—you call the church?
Why this is not the church at all—the church is
living, ever living souls.”)
And you, America,
Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
The lights and shadows of your future—good or evil?
This Union multiform, with all its dazzling hopes
and terrible fears?
Look deeper, nearer, earlier far—provide ahead—
counsel in time;
Not to your verdicts of election days—not to your
voters look,
To girlhood, boyhood look—the teacher and the
school.
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Poem: An Old Man’s Thought of School
Published in THE DAILY GRAPHIC, NEW YORK, Tuesday, November 3, 1874
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The extraordinary true story of the Stasi’s poetry club: Stasiland
East Germany’s secret police were convinced that writers were embedding messages in their work.
This reveals how soldiers had monthly meetings to learn how to write lyrical verse, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy.
A literary detective story with spies who were moulded into poets; poets who spied on fellow writers.
Philip Oltermann grew up in Schleswig-Holstein and studied English and German literature at Oxford University and University College London.
As a journalist he has written for Granta, the LRB and the Guardian, for whom he is the Berlin Bureau Chief.
The Stasi Poetry Circle (Hardback)
Philip Oltermann
Publ: Faber & Faber
Date Published 17.02.2022
ISBN: 9780571331192
Hardcover
Price £14.99
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Avondgeluiden
Er moeten witte hoeven achter de zoom staan
van de blauwe velden langs de maan
‘s avonds hoort gij aan de verre steenwegen
paardehoeven
dan hoort gij alles stille waan
van verre maanfonteinen zijpelt plots water
– gij hoort plots het zijpelen
van avondlik water –
de paarden drinken haastig
en hinniken
dan hoort men weer hun draven stalwaarts
.
Paul van Ostaijen
(1896 – 1928)
Avondgeluiden
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A Poet to his Beloved
I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams,
I bring you my passionate rhyme.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
A Poet to his Beloved
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Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982).
Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution.
Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.
Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent’s Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is his first original book.
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors
by Ian Penman
Published by Semiotext(e)
ISBN: 9781635901887
Published: May 02, 2023
Paperback
200 pages
$16.95
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When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person.
But that didn’t happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love.
Using Joni Mitchell‘s seminal album Blue – an album that shaped Key’s expectations of love – as her guide, she examines the unexpected life she has created for herself.
Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.
With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure.
The result is a singular work – a beautifully-written and essential book about building a life on your own terms, which inspires us to live and love more honestly.
Arrangements in Blue
by Amy Key
Poetry
English
Vintage Publishing
(Ww Norton & Co)
6 April 2023
ISBN: 9781787333895
Hardback
224 pages
Price: 27,99 euro
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Clive Branson (1907–1944) was born in Ahmednagar, India, the son of a major in the Indian army.
He studied at the Slade School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was just 23. Five of his paintings are today in the Tate. His daughter is the painter Rosa Branson.
In 1932 Branson joined the Communist Party. He taught for the National Council of Labour Colleges, spoke at weekly open-air meetings on Clapham Common and with his wife Noreen managed a Party bookshop. He took a leading role in driving Mosley’s British Union of Fascists out of Battersea, was responsible for the formation of a local Aid Spain Committee and fought with the International Brigades in Spain.
Taken prisoner at Calaceite, he spent eight months in Franco’s prison camps. After he was repatriated, Branson toured Britain raising money and support for the Spanish Republic. During the Blitz he painted Battersea street-scenes for the Artists International Association. Conscripted in 1941, he served as a tank commander in the Royal Armoured Corps. He was killed in action in Burma, aged just 36.
The Selected Poems of Clive Branson brings together, for the first time, the best of his surviving poetry. Passionate and committed, it’s a first-hand account of the most violent years of the twentieth-century – Britain in the Slump, Spain during the civil-war, Fascist prisons, the London Blitz, the cultural shock of India and its poverty, the war against Japan – recorded with a painterly eye and a communist faith in the power of the people.
Richard Knott (Editor) is a writer and poet. He has written extensively on aspects of modern history, including the experience of war artists (The Sketchbook War); war correspondents (The Trio); and most recently the surveillance of writers and artists by the Security Services over three decades: (The Secret War Against the Arts). He has also published two collections of poetry.
On Being Questioned After Capture: Alcaniz
I stood before my questioner who asked
‘Why leave home?
Why have you come?
Why?’ He must have guessed
‘Because he is a Communist.’
I thought of all the answers I could give
whether death is correct or whether to save
life for a rainy day
and told a lie to cheat his bullet with a word
to use a bullet afterward
On him the bigger lie – a conscript
‘volunteer’ to rape Spain where she slept
to save his own skin
he had come when he sought ‘The Leader’ on his hands and
knees
To crush a thousand years in half an hour
To make Guernica
a wilderness.
I could wait and so could lie
for adjournment to another court
meanwhile to live on my bended knee
to make occasion for another start.
I could imitate the victor, cringe
till I and the world beyond
take our revenge.
1939
Clive Branson
(1907–1944)
Selected Poems of Clive Branson
Edited by Richard Knott
Paperback
Release date: 01 May, 2023
Publisher: Smokestack Books
Language: English
122 pages
ISBN-10:1739173007
ISBN-13:978-1739173005
Price: £8.99
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November 2026. De Franse presidentsverkiezingen komen er weer aan, de zittende president kan na zijn tweede termijn niet worden herkozen, dus het hele veld ligt open en radicaal rechts maakt een goede kans.
Dan verschijnt er op internet een onmogelijk realistische nepvideo waarin een van de voornaamste kandidaten wordt geëxecuteerd. De verantwoordelijkheid voor het onderzoek komt terecht bij topambtenaar Paul Raison, en over hem gaat dit boek: over zijn pogingen om een grote terroristische dreiging te pareren, maar vooral ook over zijn privéleven, zijn relatie met zijn vrouw, zijn familie.
Michel Houellebecq (1958) is Frankrijks onbetwiste sterschrijver van dit moment. Hij publiceerde essays en poëzie voordat hij zich in 1994 met de roman De wereld als markt en strijd, die bekroond werd met diverse prijzen, opwierp als belofte van de Franse letteren. Die status bevestigde hij met Elementaire deeltjes (Prix Novembre en Impact Dublin Literary Award), dat hem terecht de faam van groot schrijver bezorgde, en Platform. In 2011, 2015 en 2019 verschenen zijn grote romans De kaart en het gebied, Onderworpen en Serotonine. In juni 2022 verscheen een nieuwe editie van zijn essays onder de titel Nader tot de ontreddering. Zijn veelvuldig bekroonde en wereldwijd vertaalde werk is in het Nederlands vertaald door Martin de Haan.
Vernietigen
Michel Houellebecq
Roman
Vertaling: Martin de Haan
Nederlands
Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers
Hardcover
2023
608 pagina’s
EAN 9789029545884
€29,99
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