after Celan

by David Baratier

These poems start with a word or phrase possibly in English, or another language, but unfamiliar enough where the reader is debased and unsure of the meaning and whether the word is in actual existence. The word is capitalized to make fun of Celan, to flip him off for infiltrating our days. Or else to imply the Victorian Period where capitalizing an abstract term gave it more "value." For instance, Valor, or Honesty, Love, Poop. After this word appears a brief definition of a wildly imagined word meaning; or what the word, when broken into components, would logically equate to; or else what it actually means. After this first line is attained the rules are easy, use as many words as possible that cannot be translated into German so that some person years from now spends a few decades trying to decipher the code. These words are often compactions of multiple words that rely on a kenning form of metaphor, specifically called a baratier, to work. While a kenning is a combo with a dash, take "whale-road" from Melville, meaning the sea is a highway for whales, and a portmanteau combines two words together “smoke + fog=smog” for a singular meaning, the baratier uses a fused multiword construct such as “utteristance” that each reader will come up with their own meaning for, thereby producing a wilder form of metaphor than what is currently called the “radical copular form,” A is B.

Poems first appeared in Big Bridge, Cranky, 88, Poetic Inhalation, Journal of the Short Poem, One less and Fieralingue.

20 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

David Baratier's poems have appeared in hundreds of literary journals and in anthologies published by University of Iowa, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, Univ. of California, and many others. He is the editor of Pavement Saw Press, a large small-press poetry-only publisher that prints books in limited editions of 1000 to 1650 copies.
Poetry collections include: _A Run of Letters_, _The Fall Of Because_, and three different collections of Estrella’s Prophecies. He has edited over 60 poetry collections including _Hands Collected: The Poems of Simon Perchik (1949-1999)_ which was nominated for the National Book Award.
A creative non-fiction epistolary novel _In It What’s in It_ appeared from the New York City based publisher Spuyten Duyvil. The press he runs can be found at http://pavementsaw.org He can be reached at editor @ pavementsaw DOT org (spelled out to stop spam).