Poetry Koan Free Association Radio

Brigit Pegeen Kelly reads for Wallace Stevens' poem "Poetry Is A Destructive Force" and we then discuss.


Poetry Is a Destructive Force

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazón, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.


TOPICS COVERED: Acceptance, Aggression, Animal nature, Appetite, Blood as essence, Civilization's facade, Consumption, Destructive instincts, Dominance and submission, Ego and identity, Ethical paradoxes, Experiential essence, Fear and survival, Flesh consumption, Human-animal dichotomy, Hunger (physical and metaphorical), Inner violence, Innocence as facade, Instinctual heritage, Joy in presence, Killing for pleasure, Love and connection, Man as predator, Meat industry cruelty, Misery's depth, Moral contradictions, Nature of happiness, Nietzsche's philosophy, Pain and suffering, Pleasure principle, Poetry's power, Predatory behavior, Primal fears, Romantic love, Sacrifice and consumption, Sexuality, Social constructs, Suffering's universality, Survival instincts, Violence inherent in life, Vulnerability of being, Wagner and Beethoven (cultural references), Words vs. experience, Yorgos Lanthimos's "Poor Things"



Sources and influences: BBC's "The Moral Maze," Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems," Nietzsche's writings on transformation and values, Yorgos Lanthimos's film "Poor Things". Music = Fela's Zombie, Tokens' Lion Sleeps Tonight, and System Of A Down's Chop Suey.

Are there any connections to be made between Miroslav Valek's poem Killing Rabbits (read here by the American poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly), and Craig David's R&B "banger" Seven Days from the year 2000?

Many.



Killing Rabbits


On Sunday after breakfast,
when air is halfway to ice,
and thin flutes of mice
squeak in the chimney.
On Sunday after breakfast
to walk on virgin snow
to the hutches.

For the pink right to remove your gloves.
To stick them on the picket fence
like freshly severed palms,
and to blow smoke through the wire-net door.
Then to insert a searching hand,
and speak sweet words
through smoke-stained teeth,
cajolery, fine words,
to pity a bit,
to grab the skin firmly
and to lift it from the cosy straw.

On Sunday after breakfast
to sniff ammonia.

With your left hand to hold the head down,
watch the ears turn purplish,
tenderly to stroke the nape,
blow on it,
and suddenly with the right hand to strike the nape.

Once more to feel on your hand
the pushing off for the unrealised leap,
to feel a heaviness in your hand,
sweetness,
to hear Rabbit Heaven open,
and big clumps of fur falling down.

Viennese blue,
Belgium Giant,
French Baron,
Bohemian Skewbald Dappled.
But even the mongrel with all kinds of blood,
each dies as fast as the next
and without a word.

On Monday to have rings under your eyes, silent.
On Tuesday to consider the lot of the world.
On Wednesday and Thursday to invent
the steam engine and discover stars.
On Friday to think of others,
but mainly blue eyes,
all week to pity orphans
and admire flowers.
On Saturday to scrub yourself pink
and fall asleep on her lips.

On Sunday, after breakfast,
to kill rabbits.

--

The image I've used for this episode was created by the Oracle after being shown a photograph I'd taken earlier on in the day of a cute little slug and spider duo hanging out together on my windowsill. I asked GPT to commemorate their loving connection through a portrait in the style of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717).

Maria Sibylla Merian's work is known for its unparalleled attention to detail, especially in her studies of insects and plants. Merian's work in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was groundbreaking, not only for its artistic beauty but for its scientific accuracy. She meticulously documented the life cycles of insects, making detailed observations that were far ahead of her time, integrating precise scientific detail with artistic elegance. Her dedication to capturing the minutiae of her subjects has left a lasting impact on both art and science, making her work an exceptional example of the fusion of detailed observation and aesthetic beauty.

All we need is love. For something and/or someone.



Also poetry.

Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize, I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot.

I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Kenneth Rexroth with the following words: “Of all the poets of the classical period, she has, to my mind, the deepest and most poignant Buddhist sensibility.”

Can the latest Oogly Woogly Google tech finally solve riddles that have puzzled human readers and thinkers for centuries?

--

Things I Want Decided


Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?



-Izumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield)

An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer":



SENTENCE

It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found
in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence
in a language you don't know.
And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your
life. Also to this cell.
And you'd spend years trying to decipher the sentence,
until finally you'd understand it. But after a while
you'd realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant
something else entirely. And so you'd have two sentences.
Then three, and four, and ten, until you'd created a new language.
And in that language you'd write the novel of your life.
And once you'd reached old age you'd notice the door of the cell
was open. You'd go out into the world. You'd walk the length and
breadth of it,
until in the shade of a massive tree you'd yearn
for that one single sentence in a language you don't know.

TATTOO



You do know, right,
that between the no-


longer & the still-
to-come


you are being continually
tattooed, inked


with the skulls of
everyone


you’ve ever loved—the you
& the you


& the you & the you—you don’t
sit in a chair, thumb


through a binder, pick a
design, it simply


happens each time you
bring your fingers to your face


to inhale him back into you . . .
tiny skulls, some of us are


covered. You, love, could


simply tattoo an open
door, light


pouring in from somewhere
outside, you


could make your body a door
so it appears you


(let her fill you) are made
of light.
THE ANSWER
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good, does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is a silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everyone was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
the upper floor of a plain white stone house.



TOPICS COVERED: Alienation; Analytical preparation; Ashberry's trees; Authenticity; Birth and self-discovery; Boundaries of essence; Communication dynamics; Confinement vs. liberation; Consciousness; Contemplation of existence; Cosmic symbolism; Cultural backgrounds; Daily Mail controversy; Deciphering life's language; Developmental path; Disorientation and discovery; Emotional reactivity; Enlightenment and insight; Estrangement and alienation; Ethical boundaries in therapy; Experience of reading a poem; Exploration of self; Expression and concealment; Fowles' "The Magus"; Genie metaphor; Gilbert's "The Answer"; Goldilocks metaphor; Human existential trajectory; Identity construction; Illusion of continuity; Individuality vs. collective unconscious; Intercostal nerves and pain; Interpersonal misunderstanding; Interpretation of symbols; Introspection and growth; Kabbalah and symbolism; Language as a cage; Language's role in suffering; Liberation magic; Life-defining tattoos; Linguistic clichés; Locked cell metaphor; Masson's "Final Analysis"; Merwin's trees; Misunderstanding as growth; Mystic union with God; Narrative construction; Neurological aspects of communication; Personal biases; Physical and mental isolation; Poetic inspiration; Potential for exploitation; Psychoanalytic dynamics; Ramanujan's trees; Recycled materials of past experiences; Relational nuances; Revelation of self-awareness; Rites of passage; Self-awareness dawning; Semiotics of Hebrew letters; Silence and bliss; Social contexts; Spiritual symbolism; Stafford's "The Interior Castle"; Symbolic language complexity; Symbolic realm's labyrinth; Symbols interpretation; Tattoo as therapeutic act; Therapeutic boundaries; Transformation through language; Unraveling of human story; Vulnerability and humility.

[⁠Transcript of episode⁠]

Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called Float comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here.

This essay, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent", is also linked to my favourite poem in Float which can be found in the chapbook Candor, written originally for a performance piece with dancer Rashaun Mitchell.



COULD I

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.



I've called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" an essay, but I prefer to think of it as An Event, or a kind of Performance - or a weird and delightful lecture.

If you’re anything like me, finding such a koan is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to share. Hence. 



POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS EPISODE:

Fragment 286


In spring, on the one hand,
the Kydonian apple trees,
being watered by streams of rivers
where the uncut garden of the maidens [is and vine blossoms
swelling
beneath shady vine branches,
bloom.
On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season.
Nay rather,
like a Thracian north wind
ablaze with lightning,
rushing from Aphrodite
accompanied by parching madnesses,
black, unastonishable,
powerfully,
right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being.


-Ibykos (translation by Carson)



Tubingen, January


Eyes talked over
to blindness. Their—
riddle is the purely
orginated"—, their
memory of
swimming Hölderlintowers, gull-
whirredaround.


Visits of drowned joiners to
these
diving words:

Came,
came a man,
came a man to the world, today, with
the lightbeard of
the prophets: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could,
only stammer and stammer,
over-, over-
againagain.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")



-Paul Celan (translation by Carson)

TOPICS/THEMES:



Adam and Eve,

Aphrodite,

Artistic representation and interpretation,

Authenticity and translation,

Bacon, Francis,

Catastrophe as a creative force,

Celan, Paul,

Cliché and its avoidance,

Communication barriers,

Consciousness and self-awareness,

Divine versus human language,

Greek lyric poetry,

Historical and cultural translation,

Hölderlin, Friedrich,

Immortality and the divine,

Individual versus authority conflict,

Joan of Arc,

Language's limitations and potential,

Madness as a method of understanding,

Metaphorical versus literal interpretation,

Mythology's influence on art and literature,

Nature of reality and perception,

Personal identity and expression,

Power of silence and absence,

Rembrandt,

Relationship between language and thought,

Role of the translator,

Sacred versus profane knowledge,

Struggle against conventional norms,

Subjectivity of experience,

Untranslatability and the ineffable,

Violence and its representation