Category Archives: Letters

Veracity and Other Stories, poems by Sarah Clancy

Thanks For Nothing Hippies, 2012

Thanks For Nothing Hippies, 2012. Sarah Clancy

The following two poems are by Sarah Clancy  from a forthcoming collection of prose and poetry, called Friction.

Veracity and other stories

 
for Alice Kennelly
 
I’ve lived in four different decades today
stepped onto three continents
I took no visas no tickets no passports
I wrote my own bill of passage I forged it
and what of my fraud if it served us?
 
I inhabited flesh that wasn’t my own
I scratched it kneaded stiff shoulders
with hands that emerged from some other wrists
some forearms some oxters then I left it
 
I walked from it and encountered new bones
new ligaments new eyes with which I saw
what I wanted I decided you were an abstraction
so I tried to walk through you but couldn’t
I put my palm on your chest but it met
with resistance I got caught in your substance
 
then fuck it I lied about it said you meant nothing
that your whole existence was a blip a pot-hole
that no-one was fixing and I burst a tyre or might have
I buckled my wheel rims in it didn’t I?
but then I gunned it and drove on
 
I read my old diaries as page turners with no idea
what might happen from one page to the next
I took guesses blind stabs at historic events
to see if it seemed like they’d happened me
then whatever I remembered what I wanted
even if I had to invent it I swore it as fact
rose to my feet to defend it
 
it was my truth in that moment and there wasn’t
a chance I’d let it be rebutted and as a result
I found myself heartless my past cast off
all reinvented and I liked it I was made light by it
 
and as to the future all those futures I’m writing
I’m telling you I’ll inhabit several actions at once
and believe what I want
I’ll pay no dues to this fiction
this tyrant
this actual bastard
reality?
I’m over it.
 
©Sarah Clancy January 2013
 

Gullible.
 
I met the take-it back man down in the shopping centre
where he was soap boxing, waxing lyrical and I drank his potion.
It was said that it could cure the worst of all the words
you’d ever spewed out in fury or in disappointment
and if a cure was beyond the bounds of either language or elixirs
it could reclaim the offending utterances and put them in storage
so long as you swallowed and didn’t spit that is. It could make
happenstances fall from their standing, go over old ground
and make it new sown, it could undo the damage sharp tongues
had inflicted on the unsuspecting, the suspicious and the blameless.
It could pale the blushes from stupid outbursts, cool them
before they ever hit your cheekbones – if that is you took
just two small mouthfuls and vowed to stay quiet for the duration
of its troubled ingestion. It could banish shame before it ever
caught your tonsils and traipsed its way down your resistant gullet
I know it sounds far-fetched but I for one swallowed it.
 
©Sarah Clancy November 2012
 

 

Ilya Kaminsky on Paul Celan, Poetry Magazine

Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky

Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013.  A Publication of the Poetry Foundation

Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley)

Later, I went on to acquire the book, Paul Celan  Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner which has a chapter entitled, ‘A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith’, detailing Felstiner’s approach to the translation of Todesfuge. I blogged my reading of Todesfuge  here .

In many ways I do not feel as if I will ever finish with the reading of that poem. I feel that this blog space is too limited to write about Paul Celan and his dedicated translators including, Ian Fairley, Pierre Joris, and John Felstiner. However, when an interesting article or translation of Celan emerges I link to it here. Poetry Magazine (January 2013) has an article on Celan’s poetry, including some discussion of Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge. The text of the Felstiner translation of Todesfuge is included in Of strangeness that Wakes us by  by Ilya Kaminsky.

Here Kaminsky discusses Celan’s alleged hermeticism , which the poet himself denied. He looks at the issues of expressing the experience of the Jewish poet Post-Holocaust and at Adorno’s exhortation that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust’.

Poetry had to be written after the Holocaust, as art had to occur. Weil or Tuominen would describe poetry written in cataclysmic times as a poetry of necessity. 

The expression of the WWII diaspora poet in the great Todesfuge becomes, in Felstiner’s words an encapsulation of or/ the Guernica of Post-War European Literature. Those readers of Celan who come to Poethead to link to Celan’s works will be intrigued by Kaminsky’s discussion on Celan’s poetic-process, his approach to language, to the creative-process, and to his expressing of  human catastrophe

On Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge Kaminsky says,

‘In my private library, this is one of the great translations of the twentieth century. But the word “translation” to my mind is misleading. This translation (or any great translation, for that matter) is not a mirror. While one appreciates Felstiner’s haunting use of German words interspersed with English, this striking and powerful juxtaposition of languages doesn’t happen in Celan’s poem.’ (Of strangeness That Wakes Us )

The sheer brokenness of the mother-tongue in Celan’s expression is precisely what allows for linguistic multi-layering within a translator-approach to the poet’s work. It is precisely this that Felstiner divines and uses in his translation, and whilst it may not appeal to the purist, it is that seamless juxtaposition and use of the German that gives the Felstiner translation its evocative quality.

Get Poetry Magazine and read the entire Felstiner translation which is embedded into his wonderful article on Paul Celan.

Note:  I linked a Pierre Joris essay on Paul Celan here in August 2010, regarding Todtnauberg , as well as numerous references to Celan’s work. Essays on Celan and his translators are too all-encompassing to limit to (or add to) existent blog-posts. I recommend that readers with an interest in Celan  visit Poetry Foundation, Pierre Joris’ Nomadics blog, and Jacket 2 for further discussion on the work of Paul Celan.

Poetry FoundationYouTube of Todesfuge.

Text Translation of Todesfuge

My blog on Todesfuge

At the Crane Bar ; Crannóg #31

Crannóg magazine celebrated its 10th Birthday with readings last evening, (26/10/2012) in Galway‘s The Crane Bar. I went along because I have a little poem in the issue. The 2012 Autumn Edition of Crannóg Magazine is available to buy at link, and there are free back issues in .pdf format for collectors of good poetry, writing, and stories. In a short time, the issue will be available in pdf and I will link it beneath this post. I believe that the thing was recorded as well, so there may be a Vid/Audio link too, soon.

My first poem published by Crannóg is linked in this back issue (pdf) , issue #26  and is entitled Descent from Croagh Patrick (P.54). The text of the poem is on this blog, but is currently password-protected, due to its publication in Crannóg. I keep forgetting to edit it !

The poem that I read for Crannóg’s Birthday issue is linked here !

List of contributors for the 31st issue of Crannóg:

Fiction

Caroline England, Geraldine Mills, Cróna Gallagher, Mark Haughton, Simone Howells, Seán Kenny, Johanna Leahy,  Mari Maxwell, Ashlie Schweitzer , Many Taggart, Patricia Burke Brogan , Margaret Faherty, Ger Burke.

Poetry 

Mark O’Flynn, Alan McMonagle, Maria Bennett,  John Gosslee, Nicola Griffin, Mark Hart, Clare McCotter , John McKernan, Susan Adams, David Starkey, Ann Howells, Jeffrey Alfier, Bernie Ashe, Gerard Beirne, Peter Branson, Maurine Curran, Mairéad Donnellan, Thomas Alan Holmes , Éamon Mag Uidhir, Mark Mitchell, Christine Murray, Bradley R. Strahan, Boguisa Wardein, Ciarán Parkes, Sandra Bunting , Betsey Carreyette, Sean Donegan, Jarlath Fahy, Mary Dempsey,  Joan McBreen, Breid Sibley,  Mary O’ Rourke, Lars Gustafsson, Tony O’ Dwyer.

Thanks to  the Crannóg Editorial Board : Sandra Bunting, Gerardine Burke, Jarlath Fahy, and Tony O’Dwyer for ten years of innovative arts , poetry and fiction publication. It was nice to be invited back to read again on such a special evening for you all, and the Crane Bar is always good craic.

On saying goodbye to Doris Lessing’s poems in October 2013 (now)

Edit 01/11/2012:  Olivia Guest of Jonathan Clowes Ltd. has informed me today that they are willing to extend my Doris Lessing licence for one year and so I have returned the poems here. Thanks to Olivia and Jonathan Clowes for an extended opportunity to share Doris Lessing’s work on Poethead until November of 2013.

I spent some time in 2011 looking for permission to host two Doris Lessing poems on Poethead. In 2011 Lessing’s literary agents, Jonathan Clowes Ltd. very kindly permitted a limited copyright for ‘Fable’ and ‘Oh Cherry Trees You Are Too White For My Heart’ to be carried on this blog for a period of 12 months. That time will be up in October of 2012. I will remove the two poems to a folder, and they will remain offline from mid-October of 2012.

I  have blogged about Doris Lessing, Nobel Laureate, writer and poet both on this blog and on Open Salon blogs. I thought to publish the Lessing search-engine terms and statistics since my publication of the poems in 2011.

Doris Lessing’s Poems, statistics (to date)

 

I have recently opened Poethead on Open Salon as an experiment in widening out the blog’s readership. Blog hits both on Lessing, and on Dorothy L. Sayers‘ translations of The Commedia have increased since then . The following is a link to the Salon post on the Lessing collections at the McFarlin Library,University of Tulsa.

Discussion about the permissions and transcription process for the Lessings are available here.  For my last month of hosting the works I will likely Tweet the poems on a weekly basis at http://www.twitter.com/Celizmurray .