Malevich

You put a pencilled square on a piece of paper,
And then a circle, off center, then two squares
Perfectly balanced, and the public cried out in terror:
We are lost.

At last, having purified the intellect beyond example,
You painted a white square, on a diagonal axis,
In cool white, on a background of warm white,
Calling it White on White.

Those were the morning days, after the great revolution,
When the poet stood on the platform without speaking,
And came down, saying: That was my poem,
Which is silence.

But the going was rough, and Lenin said:
This is a disorder of Leftism, let us have no more nonsense.
Movies are what we need, posters and book jackets,
And sets for the theatre.

Something must have gone wrong: it is the intellectuals
Who reject you now, it is the new smartness to laugh
At your sort of thing. Who better than a simple person
Could understand a square?

Martyr who died in bed, entirely artist,
The circle and the square are impregnable.
They will survive a great deal of talking,
And a good many laughs.

From Seventy Poems (Alan Swallow, 1965)

Mallarmé and Rimbaud

The literary ideal,
Said Mallarmé, saintly and dapper,
Would be a blank
Sheet of paper.

But Rimbaud
Went the whole hog,
Became a business man
And lost his leg.

From Seventy Poems (Alan Swallow, 1965)

While Dan Sendecki is working to transform this site into a larger, more spacious production, with room for our RADIO AHADADA and more on-line chapbooks, we’re busy reading some exceptional books:

Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda Knight gives us the faces of Helen Adam, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, Eileen Kaufman, and Elise Cowan and for that alone the book is worth the price.

Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems (Carcanet) is a brick of a book that offers us way more than Tottering State, yet I can’t help liking the latter better for its friendlier feel. I recall buying a heavily thumbed and slightly beat-up copy of the latter in an Edinburgh Waterstone’s and feeling as if a silent bomb had gone off in my head every time I opened it up. Perhaps it’s the cheaper paper (now falling apart in Japan’s humidity) that warms my fingers and the book’s portability (just right to toss in a backpack) that does it. Still and all, great stuff.

Trilogy and Hagoromo by Yoko Danno. If Catherine Daley is the new Mina Loy for the 21st century, then surely Yoko Danno is our post-post modern H.D.

Wittengenstein’s Ladder by Marjorie Perloff. Interesting stuff, but I’m sure Wittgenstein would have found it all ridiculous, if not a bit insulting. Imagine trying to find a seat for Stein and her epigones above the salt at the Master’s table! No, better bring in Zane Grey, complete with cowboy hat.

Jacques Vaché

With murder and suicide you ended what Rousseau began.
The break with the classical tradition was complete.
It was not enough to go trading in Abyssinia:
The romantic movement had been a reaffirmation
Of life against art, in the narrow sense, but the revolution
Once started went headlong, it was not enough
To say: l’art est une sottise, the sickness spread
From member to member, until life itself became
Suspect, rejected, the ultimate sottise.
By what curious process did revolt against the neo-classic
Begin with Rousseau and with you, Jacques Vaché?

When you killed your friend with much applauded wit,
And yourself with an admired gesture, a sly overdose,
You negated everything once and for all; your disciples,
The dadaists, not wishing to die, were shown up as pikers:
Pierre de Massot said that he went on living
For love of death, which was rhetoric. He went on living,
Having his picture taken with hat on one side,
A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, tough as all hell,
But living and writing and becoming a communist,
Just as if everything were not a sottise, just as if
You had never negated everything, Jacques Vaché.

But perhaps you were right after all, say you ended
Art based on the conscious and the subconscious mind,
Seeing that there was nothing more to be done on those levels.
Below the subliminal mind of the individual,
The world of dream and hypnogogic illusion,
Lies the clear anima mundi without boundaries.
It has no language, none that we can spell,
But nothing less will content us in the end.
Are you laughing, Jacques Vaché, you that now share
The great unconsciousness of the minerals
And the omniscience of the universe?

From Seventy Poems (Alan Swallow, 1965.)