Discussion of a poem by Tom Hennen, from his collection “Darkness Sticks to Everything” (Copper Canyon Press). Does this become a way of reclaiming poetry for the non-poet? A way of making a connection with popular culture via poetry?
Categories: ZiR • Tags: Darkness Sticks To Everything, depression, Las Vegas, movies, poetry, Steven Seagal, Thomas Hennen
If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is particularly hard not to like now when the hopes and “Marxist humanist” analysis underlying it have come to seem a Romantic pipe dream. “[A]lles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung,” Marx and Engels wrote in the not-Marxist-humanist […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Alain Tanner, capitalism, dreams, film, Frederic Jameson, French, Jean-Luc Godard, John Berger, Marx, Marxism, politics
Martin (to his wife): So I lost my erection last night not because I’m not prepared to talk, it’s just that taking in technical information is a different part of the brain and also I don’t like to feel that you do it better to yourself. I have read the Hite report. I do know that women have to learn to get their pleasure despite our clumsy attempts at expressing undying devotion and ecstasy, and that what we spent our […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: comedy, playwriting, sexuality, theater, writing
Everything after aches river & bones & the unsaid naming itself endlessly. He comes to me in dreams, and I reach for needle & thread to close the tear at his knee. This morning I found ants in the saltshaker, a pattern repeated in new snow peppered with black walnuts. I confess, with my tongue I press His body to the roof of my mouth, sometimes I feel rose petal, sometimes blister. — “Notes On Mirrors, Already Lost” by Patty […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: elegy, grief, poetry, relationships
. . . re-embracing one of lyric poetry’s most traditional themes: the hopes and dismay of intimate, romantic relationships. . . . the LANGUAGES OF SELLING AND POLITICS never stop invading all of us and putting the same emptinesses on all of our tongues. Writing poetry today, I am tempted to say, is as difficult as learning to live by oneself.
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Emily Dickinson, language, love, philosophy of language, poetry, relationships, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering these lines from the poem Going Back, which was written in Catalan by Gemma Gorga; translated to English by poet, linguist, and translator Anna Crowe; and published in Six Catalan Poets (Arc Publications, 2013). This poem might be one of those rare gems that transcends those large questions of poetry in translation, such as whether the conversion should focus on the vocabulary, the overall sense, the meter and rhyme, or something else […]
“Counting” is a beautiful little Philip Larkin poem that I had not read before encountering it in a bilingual collection, with French translations: La vie avec un trou dedans. Thinking in terms of one Is easily done — One room, one bed, one chair, One person there, Makes perfect sense; one set Of wishes can be met, One coffin filled. But counting up to two Is harder to do; For one must be denied Before it’s tried. This may also […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: New York Review of Books, Philip Larkin, poetry, translation, Victor Hugo
In 1949, the French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau wrote a few lines about French politics at that time, lines that might help Americans today view their own political battles with more optimism than usual. In my translation: I know well that in 1949 politics are a big deal and the clashes of different factions seem more important than lovers’ quarrels. But, just between us, don’t these political battles feature the same injustice and bad faith as lovers’ quarrels? […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, France, Hollywood, Jean Cocteau, Le Journal des Goncourt, Museum of Modern Art, Picasso, technology, toys, United States of America
By Andrew Bass Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, enables us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects by condemning himself to perpetual darkness? — Samuel Johnson When asked whether he had read all the books in his library, my father once replied that he had: “Every title and most of the jackets,” he said. Tongue planted firmly in his cheek, […]
Categories: Essay
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