Meredith is a hot mess’s Reviews > Modern European Poetry > Status Update

(Benn)...In his tense, songlike, strongly rhythmic, almost (but not quite) "beautiful," sometimes severely parodistic poems, studded with neologisms, he has raised a latter-day Darwinian literature, so to speak, to its loftiest artistic level. With bitter mockery and an absolute ethics he attacked everything idiotic, "Bolshevist," everything smacking of artificially and sanctimoniously postulated "human freedoms"

(Gottfried Benn)...his work was aimed at the annihilation of the rational, causal, logical world. He performed autopsies on history and man's intellectual heritage as he did on the bodies which we see in his earliest poems. Artistically his goals became "the transmutation of words" and "the creation of a new lyrical syntax"...

Gottfried Benn

Looking at the world through his microscope he saw man as creature, "a poor braindog, draped and encumbered by God," and found that man's genius had brought him...total dissolution. For the poet the only answer to this was the work of formative, expressive artist. Clearly the so-called world of reality was not the true one. Benn's concern from the first was not the empirical but the metaphysical...

The Wind Is Quiet

The wind is quiet, lord of the oldest keening,
Shall I be the last to arm myself for the dead?
Already the fire is memory only and ashes
And sound of a wing folded, and sound of a face dead

Are you willing to love only iron of the grey water
When the angel of your night will come to close the harbor
And shed in the motionless water of the harbor
The last flickers of light caught in the dead wing?

Yves Bonnefoy p.88-94

Lovely intro to Bonnefoy on p.88

Includes: Theatre, Another Voice, Thus We Will Walk, The Wind Is Quiet, The Iron Bridge, Here, Still Here,

Translators: Galway Kinnell & Jackson Mathews (The Wind is Quiet, The Iron Bridge, Here, Still Here)

Festival of the Moon

He went away to find the lands where white
Sobs of demonic rivers overflow
His mouth was open to the cosmic snows
He held the image that he loved so tight
His body by itself cast two shadows

The night of the sea pressed his open eyes
The man glided down the slopes of day
The dead man drank from the ocean's lips
And lived again because he had known love

Robert Sabatier p.82-87

Includes: The Boatmen, Festival of the Moon, Mountebanks, Vegetal Body, Mortal Landscape, The Voyages, Living Light

,b>Claude Vigée p.75-81

Included poems: The Enemy of Spring, The Cosmic Comedian, The Phoenix of Mozart, Blues, Chorale in December, Song, April, Epiphany - all translated by Patricia Terry

René Char p. 67-74

The Rampart of Twigs (translated by Jackson Mathews)

-This poem is crazy. I'm not sure what it means but it's entertaining.

"Young men, choose the dew of women, their lunatic cruelty to which your violence and your love can retort, rather than the dead ink of pen-murderers. Be swift muscular fish, keep to the rapids."

Robert Desnos

The is great commentary on the poet on p.54

In spite of the quite extraordinary diversity of his work, it has an unmistakable unity of tone which seems, according to René Bertelé, to prove Desnos' assertion that a poet during his lifetime elaborates one great poem, of which only fragments can be brought to consciousness.