Rilke’s Dubious Advice to a Young Poet

 

The first few phrases quoted from Rilke’s letters are followed by the English in parentheses.  Subsequent references in the body of the essay quote my rendering in English with the original German relegated to endnotes.  

 

     Can advice benefit a poet’s practice?  When writers speak or read their work or appear at signings, they often entertain questions from less accomplished authors seeking clues to literary success. Do you write at set hours daily?  Should I pursue an M F. A.?  Do you discuss unfinished works?  Since writing, like weight-lifting, is a performance activity, probably the most reliably useful counsel anyone could hear is simply to write and write some more.  Beyond that writers at all levels of experience must shape their work habits not by reasoning but by productivity.  What proves useful for one young writer may be harmful to another. 

     Most such guidance is ephemeral.  Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is an exception, though it was the recipient, and not the writer, who chose to preserve and publish the letters. [1]  The book is regularly called a classic and Penguin, publisher of an English translation, describes the book as “arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century.”  This opinion is not universal.  To poet J. D. McClatchy, for instance, the letters are nothing but “sententious twaddle” by a “selfish poseur.” [2]  Whatever value critics have found in the book, most have approached the letters as a source of biographical and psychological understanding of Rilke rather than for their value to aspiring authors or as literary theory.  

     While adopting a grand magisterial tone, Rilke himself casts doubt on the value of his teaching by cloaking his subject in mystification.  In the first paragraph of the first letter Rilke establishes his identity as the custodian of the holy unknown by cautioning that poetry’s truth cannot be known, and, if it were known, could not be expressed.  At the very outset the poet assures his young correspondent that most experiences of all sorts are “full of mysteries” (“geheimnisvolle”) and “ineffable” (“unsagbarer”).  The very possibility of meaningful advice is all but denied.  “I can say virtually nothing that might help, that might be useful.” (“Ich fast nicht sagen kann, was hilfreich ist, kaum etwas Nützliches.”)  The poet’s chief concern, he says, is to encounter what is “strangest” (“Seltsamsten”) and “most inexplicable” (“Unaufklärbarsten”) in experience [3].

     Having established that he possesses esoteric secrets, Rilke challenges Kappus to match his own dramatically heroic (if soi-disant) commitment to art, telling him that, unless the younger man feels he cannot live without writing, he should not write at all [4].  If he proceeds in art, according to Rilke “a particularly blessed and pure way of living” [5], he may aspire to create something “very big and infinitely important.” [6]

     Grand this is, if not grandiose, but impossibly vague.  Why should the writer be “purer” than others?  In what way is his work so very important?  This looks suspiciously like self-puffing, unashamedly camouflaged by obscurantism.  The writer works always “in the dark, the ineffable, the unconscious.” [7]  It is fruitless to search for answers [8].  If only one cleaves always to the difficult, our dragons will turn to princesses, since “everything horrible” is likely to be in fact “something helpless that needs our help.”  Apart from this mythic reassurance, the writer should not inquire.  “Why do you want to bother with questions of “where it all comes from and where it is headed.” [9]  One should, it seems, simply live the mystery and seek no explanations.

     Apart from all this self-important sublime ambition cloaked in a smokescreen of obscurity, Rilke does offer a suggestive analogy for the creative process.  Doubtless influenced by Freud, Rilke likens the creation of art to the sexual act, a comparison that in his use sheds little light on either.  His rhetoric resembles that of D. H. Lawrence when he says that in “its pain and its pleasure” the making of art is “unbelievably close” to a sexual experience [10]. 

     Rilke presents a view of sex as a mystical dynamo, distilled and ennobled in an artful thought and serving as well as a wellspring for writers of the future.     

In a single creative thought live a thousand forgotten nights of love, filling it with loftiness and sublimity.  And those who come together in the night, who embrace in swaying pleasure, they perform an earnest labor and accumulate sweetnesses, depth, and power for the lyric of a future poet, who will appear, to say the unsayable bliss.

For Rilke, lovers must “undergo in common, simply, seriously and patiently, the weight [responsibility?] of sex that is put upon them.” [11]

     The comparison is applicable as long as his only meaning is to foreground the urgency and profundity of both aesthetic and sexual experiences, and their link to pleasure.  Where the correspondence breaks down reveals Rilke’s theoretical weakness (and, arguably, the weakness of much of his verse).  For sex is likely to have more to do with desire than with beauty.  In spite of centuries of female nudes in art that conflate appetite and aesthetics, in the end pictures must be judged by the latter.  To a starving person an advertising picture of a pizza may seem the most beautiful thing in the world, but such judgements are not applicable in the realm of art.

     Furthermore, the act of love-making is altogether mutual, whereas the artist makes an object which a reader receives.  The lover has little regard for prior models, while the writer’s work will generally imply the digestion of earlier works in search of significant influence, models, and allusions.  Perhaps most decisively, the lover has no wish to create a lasting object to preserve the passionate night or the entire relationships.  Rilke’s use of the sexual analogy is primarily affective, conveying little more than the emotional intensity he feels proper to art.    

     The sexual image is incongruous with the letters’ insistence on the poet’s lofty solitude.  It is all very well to suggest that Kappus avoid reading the critics, but Rilke categorically advocates a more general isolation to the point that he begins to sound neurotic.  “You are looking outside yourself, and that of all things you must not do now.”  “Dig into yourself.” [12]  What is valid is only that which “comes out of your own will, out of some need of your own self.” [13]  His suggestion is unequivocal: the writer should seek solitude, great inner solitude, going-into-oneself and for long periods never encountering another.” [14]

     While no one will deny that reflective periods are conducive to artistic productivity, this isolation is valuable in combination with the communion with earlier writers implied by influence and the need to communicate with readers.  In particular for a novice, the study of masters and the imitation of great predecessors is valuable in any field.  The complete artistic autonomy on which Rilke insists from the start surely can be justified only with maturity. 

     Some have wondered why Rilke took the time to correspond with this youth, and persisted for years in maintaining their connection, though the poet himself did not envision publishing their correspondence.  Surely the simplest answer is that Rilke was flattered by adulation and welcomed a disciple.  His picture of the grand spiritual mission of the writer and of the deep mysteries in which he deals is surely meant to impress his young admirer.  His conjuring about poetry and sexuality is likely to be just the thing to awe the inexperienced, and his insistence on a heroic aloneness makes him sound like a very belated Byronic hero.  Virtually nothing Rilke says amounts to useful guidance; it seems all designed to promote himself in the role of divine poet.  

     Rilke wholly neglects the roles of craft, convention, and tradition, all critical to a writer’s training.  He implies in fact that enlightenment will descend on the poet is he remains quiet, alone, and attentive.  “All that is necessary,” he says, is “that we are in circumstances that from time to time confront us with great natural things.” [15]  This is hardly a formulation that would serve a learner well. 

     The present focus is on the celebrated letters themselves.  His biographers have recorded a less than flattering portrait of the artist, but that is irrelevant in the face of great poems.  Yet the defects evident from a serious acceptance of the letters on their own terms as advice to a younger artist may appear to the reader of Rilke’s poetry as well: a vague and self-important spirituality, a greater attention to the drama of his own sensibility than to the specifics of a single poem, a privileging of the vaguest of themes over craft, and an exaggerated gravity in which pleasure and beauty, though the motive of every poem, find little place. 

 

  

 

1.  These. letters, written to Franz Xaver Kappus who had first contacted Rilke while still a military academy student, continued until 1928 and were published by Kappus three years after Rilke’s death with the title Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) and frequently reprinted since.  In 2017, the German scholar Erich Unglaub discovered that Kappus’s letters had been stored in the Rilke family archive all along. In 2019, he published both sides of the correspondence for the first time. Last fall, an English translation by Damion Searls appeared.

2.  J. D. McClatchy, “Antagonism: Rainier Maria Rilke,” Poetry, October 2004.

3.  August 12, 1904.

4.  "Es genügt, wie gesagt, zu fühlen  dass man ohne zu schreiben leben könnte, um es überhaupt nicht zu dürfen." August 12, 1904.

5.  “Eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens,” July 16, 1903.

6.  “Sehr gross und unendlich wichtig,”  April 23, 1903.

7.  “Im Dunkel, im Unsagbaren, Unbewussten,” April 23, 1903.

8.  “Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach Antworten,” July 16, 1903.

9.  “Alles schreckliche . . . im tiefsten Grinde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will,” “Wir uns immer an das Schwere halten müssen,”  “Warum wollen Sie sich mit der Fragen verfolgen, woher das alle kommen mag und wohin es will,” August 12, 1904.

10.  “Seinem Weh und seiner Lust,” “unglaublich nahe”  April 23, 1903.  These phrases are followed by a passage remarkable for its time, though having little to do with poetry, in which Rilke denounces selfish, male-centered lovemaking. 

11.  “In einen Schöpfergedanken leben tausand vergessene Liebesnächte auf und erfüllen ihn mit Hoheit und Höhe.  Und die in den Nächten zusammenkommen und verflochten sind in wiegender Wollust tun eine ernste Arbeit und sammelt Süssigkeiten an, Tiefe und Kraft für das Lied irgendeines kommenden Dichters, der aufstehn wird, um unsägliche Wommen zu sagen.”

“Um einfach, ernst und geduldig das schwere Geschlecht, das ihnen auferlegt ist, gemainsam zu tragen.”

12.  In the letter of April 23, 1903, Rilke writes “Read aesthetic and critical essays as little as possible.” (“Lesen Sie möglichst wenig äesthetisch-kritische Dinge.”)  “Sie sehen nach aussen, und das vor allem dürften Sie night tun.”

13. July 16, 1903: “Nehmen Sie das was kommt in grossem Vertauen hin, und wenn es nur aus Ihren Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es aus sich.”

14.  December 23, 1903 “Einsamkeit, grosses innere Einsamkeit.  In-sich-Gehen und stundenlang niemandem begegnen.”

15.  December 24, 1908  “Und, das wir in Vernhältnissen sind, die uns vor grosse natürliche Dinge stellen von Zeit zu Zeit, das ist alles, was not tut.” 

"Rot" by Johannes Becher

This poem first appeared in Kurt Pinthus’ influential 1920 anthology titled Menschheits Dämmerung (The Twilight of Humanity) with a subtitle “Symphonie jüngster Dichtung” (a “symphony of the youngest poets”). The collection opens with Jakob Van Hoddis’ “Weltende” (“The End of the World”) and includes work by Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Iwan Goll, Franz Werfel, Gottfried Benn, and others.

The career of Johannes R. Becher traces many of the most significant artistic and political developments of the first half of the twentieth century. At the age of nineteen he participated in a last gasp of German Romanticism by entering a suicide pact (he did admire Kleist) with his lover whom he killed with a bullet though he only wounded himself. His first book Die Gnade eines Frühlings (“The Grace of Springtime”; 1912) contains thoroughly Romantic poems. While coping with morphine addiction he associated with Futurist and Expressionist groupings in the art world and with revolutionary organizations such as the Spartacist League and then the Communist Party in politics. His pacifist novel, (CHCI=CH)3As (Levisite) oder Der einzig gerechte Krieg was banned in 1925 and he was indicted for "literarischer Hochverrat" or "literary high treason.” And that was under Weimar. When the Nazi regime took over, he escaped arrest by going into hiding, then making his way to the Soviet Union where he likely found he had little choice and eventually declared his adherence to the socialist realism of Zhdanov. Implicated in the purges of suspected Trotskyites, he informed on others, then suffered depression and attempted suicide again. After the war he returned to the eastern zone of Germany to accolades as the great poet of the new era. He was made Minister of Culture in 1954. His business had become the suppression of young dissidents such as he himself had once been. He wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. In his memoirs, unpublished until thirty years after his death, he renounced not just his service to the East German Stalinist government but to socialism itself as the great mistake of his life.

In “Verfall” (“Rot”) Becher expresses a real punk sensibility, insisting that the most appropriate images for the age are ugly, even disgusting. For all Becher’s leftist activism, his taste resembles that of the fascist anti-Semite Céline.


Our bodies already rotten,
let us dig while singing
these intoxicated evenings,
awash in night storms and the sea,
our hot blood dried up,
an abscess of pus trickles away
mouth ear eye in disguise
sleep dream earth the wind.

Yellowish carrier worms
on a narrow-wounded passage,
throbbing rolling storms,
our eyelashes, blood red and long.
“Am I a crumbling wall,
a silent pillar by the roadside?
or a tree in mourning
that leans over the abyss?”
Ah, the sweet smell of decadence
filling the room, the house, the head!
In the flowers, the waving grasses,
in the birds, in their songs!

”Yes, the trunk is rotten.”
Mold. Groans. Moans.
Flight under a teeming sky!
A frightful clamor ensues.
Kettle-drums! Tuba grunts.
Thunder and wild flames of light!
Cymbals. A sound of percussion.
A drum-roll. It’s breaking up!

I gave myself to you,
wide world, ah! too easily trusting,
see how the poor flesh fails
yet my mind looks still homeward.
Oh, night, your sleep’s a solace
The mouth rests deep and poor.
Bright day, you dissolve me
in total and harmless unease.

There’s no way out,
Oh, I’m torn in two!
Blinkered, soon, soon blind and bandaged.
No kiss can heal me!
That I find no way out,
I'm the only one to blame:
A wild current, wind of blood and fire.
Shame, impatience.

The day brings sharp bitterness!
May night bring dreams and wisdom!
Shit, contortion, cut and tear!
A cool resting place –
everything must be far off –
far, oh so far from me –
blooming aloft in the shine of the stars –
my home, there! above!

One day I will stand by the road,
pensive, gazing at a metropolis.
Light falls through the dull clouds’ course.
Enchanted forms, wrapped in white,
My hands make the move
toward heaven, filled with gold,
instantly opening doors of wonder!

The fields and the forests rise,
Waters roll on. Bridges.
A roof. Endless streams are running.
Grey mountain ridge.
Red and dreadful thunder rises.
A dragon. Earth spews.
Torn throat. The sun roars.
Disgust. Laughing. Cries.


Fade to black. The taste of dirt and blood.
A ball. A huge bloodbath . . .
. . . “oh, timeless day, when will you dawn?
Is there still time?
When will you blow, oh sounding horn,
are you screaming the tide’s time?
Out of the underbrush, the moorlands, tomb and thorns,
Calling the sleepers here”

A Mixed Bag of German Translations

These move basically back in history. Most have brief historical notes attached which in some cases have only the most tenuous reference to the poem that follows.


1. During the Soviet era, Uwe Kolbe published a poem in a government-sanctioned anthology which contained an acrostic undetected by censors: "EUREM HELDENTUM WIDME ICH EINEN ORGASMUS / EUCH MÄCHTIGE GREISE ZERFETZE DIE TÄGLICHE REVOLUTION" ("To your heroism I dedicate an orgasm/ you powerful greybeards the daily revolution shall slash").


Museum Day in Sofia


The poet’s holiest parts
were preserved in a vitrine:
pale organs between two panes.
How my heart beat when I saw his
in the glass, and how my mind
confronted his! until . . .
all at once I found myself
old and at peace and ready to die.



2. Joachim Ringelnatz (the pen name of Hans Bötticher) was condemned by the Nazis already in 1933 as a degenerate artist.


Kassel

They’ve got them in the shop
in an intimate tank.
There they may bathe
outwardly a bit frazzled, a little raggedy,
but innardly they seem
ever so much alive.
They murmur magic-worker’s spells
(as though they could thereby clean their water).
Quiet they masticate mayonnaise in their muzzles
and dream of being shaved against the grain,
and then cleaned and killed and heated and garnished
on a silver dish.
They end up in rich men’s bellies,
where the funniest of their bones
may go down the wrong way.
Their souls, I think,
are just like wood-lice
doing deep knee bends.
Yes and in Kassel there was very little else
either to excite or trouble me.



3. Georg Trakl’s poem about a site of slaughter takes a place by Wilfred Owens’ horrifying WWI poems. After attending the soldiers in Grodek, Trakl tried to shoot himself. Though he was prevented, he died shortly thereafter from a cocaine overdose.


Grodek

Evenings, the autumn forests ring
with the death-guns’ sound, the golden meadows
and blue lakes over which the sun
darkly passes, till night embraces
the dying fighters, the mad moans
of their lacerated mouths.
But in silence! over the cow-pasture!
a red cloud gathers, wherein dwells a furious god.
The spilt blood itself. The coolness of moonshine.
Every street is turning to black putrefaction!
Under the golden branches of the night and stars
her sister’s shadow shimmies through the silent grove
to greet the spirits, the heroes, the bloody heads,
and faintly the reed’s tones, autumn’s darkling flute.
O proud mourning! For the altars you once had
the hot flame of the mind feeds today a monstrous pain,
the descendants yet unborn.



4. Carl Zuckmayer was a WWI veteran, who came to the US as an exile and returned to Europe in the fifties.


To the red wine stains on the tablecloth of a French restaurant

I look at you with gravity and joy,
and push the plate aside that tried to hide
you and toast with my first drink
the man that dined before me in this seat.

From the wine’s furthest lilac reach
your soft daydreamy drinker’s gaze looks out;
the shape’s a silhouette of a place abroad,
Madagascar maybe, or Mozambique.

My place is strewn with golden crumbs
of bread he mindfully broke and ate.
You land of lovely sounds and Burgundy’s bouquet,
are you still like that kingdom that once was,
whose people paid their tax in kegs of wine?

You land of latter days whose evening sun slips low
whose light breaks bright through a ripe tongue’s prism!
Where geniuses and shamans and customs men make art,
till god himself forgets where heaven is.

I saw you stuck with steel and dripping blood,
I lay against your body in fear and pain –
It may have been this amiable overweight sommelier
that tried so hard to shoot me.

Did I not drink at your fountain of tears?
I underwent with you pain unto death.
Sister land, I kneel down at your door,
and kiss each stain of blood and wine.

He pours me more. It glitters at the bottle’s mouth.
So, drink, tablecloth! Drink up this offering!
A foreigner salutes this charming hour,
and then heads off northward, toward the fog.



5. From the immortal Christian Morgenstern.


A Knee

A lone knee through the landscape went.
It’s just one knee and nothing else!
It’s not a tree! It’s not a tent!
It’s just one knee and nothing else!

In war one time a man was shot,
shot up from toe to face.
The knee alone remained unhurt –
as if it were a sign of grace.

And then through all the world it went
It’s just one knee and nothing else!
It’s not a tree! It’s not a tent!
It’s just one knee and nothing else!



6. Heinrich Heine published several poems, including Die schlesischen Weber, in Karl Marx's journal Vorwärts.


Sunset

The lovely sun
has sunk in peace into the sea;
the water’s waves have only the hue
of the dark night,
though sunset strews yet
some golden sparks,
and the roar of tidal force
pushes white waves to the shore.
They frisk so happy and so fast
like woolly herds of lambs
driven home at night
by a shepherd boy with a song.

“The sun, it is so fine!”
So said my friend after standing silent long,
the one that walked the beach with me,
and half-laughing and half-sad,
he insisted this was so: “The sun,” he said,
“is a lovely lady. She married the old sea-god
for convenience’ sake.
She wanders every day in joy
through heaven’s heights, resplendent in purple,
glittering with diamonds,
beloved by all, admired by every
creature of the earth,
for all earth’s creatures love
the glory, the warmth of her gaze,
though at night, depressed and driven,
she enters again
the wet house, the barren arms
of her aged spouse.”

“Believe me,” added then my friend,
and laughed and sighed and laughed again,
“they have down there the tenderest of marriages.
They’re sleeping there or else they squabble,
So that the sea must bubble up on top,
And the seaman hears in the sounds of the waves
The old one shouting at his wife:
‘You big fat cosmic whore,
beaming bitch,
the whole day-long you’re bright for all the rest,
and at night for me, you’re cold and dropping with fatigue.’
And after such a talking-to,
you’ll understand, that proud sun
breaks into tears, and she laments her wretchedness,
and she laments so loud and long, the sea-god
gives up all hope, jumps from his bed,
swims swiftly up to ocean’s top,
some air and maybe sense as well to grab.”

“Last night I caught a sight of him myself,
emerged from the sea down to his breast.
He wore a yellow flannel jacket,
a lily-white night-cap,
and a wrinkled face.”



7. Edward Mörike was a leading Romantic who wrote lyrics so popular many were made into songs in both popular and concert hall stylings.


It’s here!

Spring lets loose its pennants of blue –
they fly again in the wind –
sweet and well-known scents drift too
suggestive on the land.
Violets in dreams are wound –
tomorrow their blooms will bring..
Listen! The far-off harper’s sound!
You’re it – o spring!
It’s you I hear!

Hymn to the Night II {Novalis}

Must morning always dawn?
Has earth’s power no end at all?
Unholy dealings consume the divine approach of the night!
Why can’t life’s most secret sacrifice burn eternal?
Light was
given its time,
but timeless and boundless is the realm of Night.
Sleep’s time will never end.
Blessed sleep! Don’t favor too seldom those dedicated to the night
in this diurnal labor.
Only the dim mistake you
knowing nothing of sleep but that shadow
with which you kindly cover us
in the gloaming of true night.
The golden flood of the grapes
they’ll never know,
nor the wonder of almond oil,
and the poppy’s brown juice.
The cannot know it’s you
who hover about the tender maiden’s breast
and make a heaven of her lap;
they never guess it’s you that steps to meet them,
opening heaven’s doors, from the oldest tales,
and with the key to the halls of the enlightened,
silently bearing endless secrets.

Translations from Hans Arp

     Child of an Alsatian mother and a German father, Hans Arp was born in Strassburg at a time when it was German. When it became French again at the end of WWI, French law mandated that he call himself Jean. Thus his very name draws attention to the nationalist contention that struck him as absurd. An originator of the Moderner Bund (“Modern League”) and an exhibitor with the Blaue Reiter group prior to being a founding member of dada in 1916 Zürich. The creator of sublime abstract sculpture and other visual work, Arp is also a major poet. 

      Educated as an artist in both France and Germany, he was already dodging the draft in Switzerland when he was called up. He recounts writing the date in the first blank of a stack of forms, then proceeding to write the date in every other space, after which he painstakingly added the column of numbers thus produced. He then took off all his clothes, folded them with care, placed the paperwork on top and presented the stack to the officer in charge, upon which he was told he was unsuitable for the military. Later associated with the highly political Cologne dada group, he also participated in the first Surrealist show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. During the ‘thirties he worked with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création whose members, including Mondrian, Kandinksy, and Mary Cassatt, considered Breton’s Surrealism to be dogmatic. 

     Arp pioneered abstract art, though his early association with Kandinsky is evident in his preference for van Doesburg’s term “concrete” as more appropriate for forms that originate in the mind and occupy space. Regarding “the law of chance as the highest and deepest of laws,” he employed aleatory elements in works such as his randomly tossed papiers déchirés. He loved to reshuffle image sets (as here in “Roses Stroll the Streets of Porcelain” and “Westoily Roses”). His poetry strikes me as a pyrotechnic display of images, a one-man band, a word-collage. He shares with a prominent school of poets today the proposition that, as Jacques Riviére said of the dadaists in general, for them language "is no longer a means; it is an entity." If his lyric persona is sometimes difficult to follow, this is hardly surprising given his goal of “break[ing] down the language into atoms, in order to approach the creative.” 

     In Arp the background is a vast and cosmic laugh and he does not shrink from whimsy, yet he insisted to the end that dada was no farce. Using the same religious language favored by Huelsenbeck, he notes of his circle of young revolutionaries “our lot of earthly joy was meager. But by way of recompense we were visited by angels.” 

Opus Null 

1. 

I am the great great Thisthatthey 

a rig or ous re gime 

the stem of ozone prima qua 

the nameless one-percenter 

The P. P. Tit and trom as well 

trombone without a mouth or hole 

I’m Hercules’ great earthen bowl 

the left foot of the right right chef. 

I am the entire lifetime long 

the ovary’s dozeneth meaning 

totality of Augustine 

in cellulose gown preening 

2. 

He pulls from out his coffin black 

one coffin, then another 

he wraps himself in a black crepe sack 

and weeps with his front end. 

Half wizard and half maestro 

without a cane the time he’ll beat 

a greeny clockface on his hat 

and falls down from the driver’s seat 

With that he pokes the ghetto fish 

off his well-equipped easel. He 

finds his long cubistic socks are torn 

twice in two and thrice in three. 

3. 

He sits with himself in an arc.

A circle sits right by his side. 

A bag that holds a comb that stands 

must be his sofa and his bride. 

The of-of and his left-hand skin 

his own bag and his own life 

and tick and tack and tipp and top 

he own body falls from the wife. 

4.

His steam dynamo turns out 

hat upon hat from his hat and then 

he stands them in formation in 

a ring just as one does with army men. 

He greets them then and tips his hat 

and three times greets them all as friends 

They always trust a caca-you 

replaced by him with caca-too. 

He sees them not but greets them still.

He’s with them and they’re all about. 

The hats are all included 

they screw the top from his ego.

Roses Stroll the Streets of Porcelain 

1.

just on the edge of the fairy-tale 

     the night knits roses for itself; 

the tangle of things resolves into 

     storks, fruits, pharoahs, and harps. 

death puts down its nattering wreath 

     by the root of the void. 

and the storks chatter on chimneystones! 

and the night is a stuffed fairy tale. 

2. 

and the roses stroll the streets of porcelain and 

knit from the tangle of their years 

     one star after another. 

between stars there sleeps a piece of fruit. 

the empty lands stuffed years laughing foot-

lockers dance! 

the storks eat the pharaohs. 

from chimneystones roseblossoms! 

3.

death eats one year after another

and pharaohs eat storks. 

between fruits sleeps a star. often it laughs lightly 

in its sleep like a porcelain harp. 

4.

growing chimneystones eat harps porcelain 

wreaths dance. 

pharoahs have roots of roses! 

the storks pack chimneystones in their footlockers 

and fly off 

     to the land of the pharoahs! 

The Swallow Testicle 

Oh no, oh no, good Kaspar's dead! 

Who now will hide the burning banners in 

cloudbraid 

     and daily build a black mare's nest? 

Who now will turn the coffee mill in its old, old 

barrel? 

And who will lure the idyllic deer 

     from its petrified paper bag? 

Who'll blow the noses of ships, parapluies, wind-

udders, ancestral bees, ozone spindles, 

     and who will bone the pyramids? 

Oh no, no, no, our good Kaspar is dead! Pious 

bimbam Kaspar's dead! 

The shark will rattle his teeth with heartrending 

grief when he hears his given name -- so 

     I sigh on -- his last name Kaspar Kaspar Kaspar. 

Why hast thou forsaken us? In what form has 

your great and beautiful soul 

     transmogrified? Are you a star? or a chain or 

water hanging from a hot whirlwind? or 

     a transparent brick on the groaning drum 

of rocky BEING? 

Now our tops and toes dry up, and fairies lie half-

charred on the funeral pyre. 

Now the black bowling alley thunders behind the 

sun, and no one winds up compasses 

     and pushcart wheels any longer. 

Who now will eat with the phosphorescent rat at 

    the lonely barefoot table? 

Who now will chase the siroccoco devil when he 

wants to fuck the horses? 

Now who'll explain the monograms in the stars? 

His bust will grace the mantel of all the truly noble men, 

but that's no comfort, no tobacco snuff for a 

deadhead skull. 

 Second Hand 

that I as I 

one and two is 

that I as I 

three and four is 

that I as I 

what time now 

that I as I 

it ticks, it tocks 

that I as I 

five and six is 

that I as I

seven eight is 

that I as I 

if it stands it 

that I as I 

if it works then 

that I as I 

nine and ten is 

that I as I 

eleven and twelve is. 

Baobab 

And she was delivered of a healthy strong boy 

who enjoyed the name Baobab. 

The boy grew and grew 

and grew up to the blue of heaven. 

And Baobab’s people liked to look 

right in the eyes of interlocutors.

However, for one as tall as Baobab 

this no longer could be done. 

So they dug out lots of soil 

and opened a great abysmal hole 

in which Baobab entered by choice 

for he too could never bear 

not to look into the eyes 

of those to whom he spoke. 

The earth that they had dug 

they tossed over their starlet’s edge 

into the bottomless space. 

And after Baobab had had passed 

a hundred years in this hole 

he began to dwindle. 

Every day he was smaller and smaller 

until in the end he evanesced. 

Now those who dwelt in that small star 

sat there with nought 

    but a great abysmal hole 

        and one small strip of land around the hole 

and they looked now into the starlet’s abysmal hole, 

 and then over the edge 

     of their small star 

         into the bottomless space 

Westoily Roses 

1.

the roses will be crucified on hats the lips 

the roses fly forth 

the bloody organs drip on the visible 

throne of the half-grown Near Eastern stones and 

on the white skulls the three shaven 

summers and the three shaven 

crosses stagger forward on crutches like the May 

the lyre body tells of bloody slaughter 

against the hairy stones, 

the lyre body shoots out 

a poison foam 

stony crutches bloody noses hairy stones against 

the shavehead skulls 

2.

the lyre body drips blood on the white shirtfronts 

as though in a battle unpacked and tosses its 

three snowballs behind its three summers. 

from the retorts roll the skulls of the Itosis. 

the lips of the hats return on crutches. 

gloves will be crucified on hats. 

the crosses support one another half-human like 

by the bridegroom and the other half-mannish 

by the bridegroom 

3.

the lyre body tells of the birth from foam of a 

half-grown Near Eastern stone must certainly and 

heath-soul sits on a visible throne and 

tosses the bloodier parts of the foolhardy and 

carthardy 

on the fifth of May. then the foam birth shoots 

poisonous accent-hens against the signature-organ of 

the lyre body clings to the clapper by their balled-

up wings 

and rings out and the winged words fly forth. 

wings shave the hairy hearts. 

the air of the bit shakes and calls who goes there. 

and that’s the way it goes up and then down 

like in a letter. 

4.

it rings out in the heart. 

The foam birth wraps white May air in a 

 snow-letter. 

the half-grown Near Eastern stone throws its 

three gloves over its three hats and clings 

to the roses. 

the lyre body shaved the slaughter-clapper. 

winged roses fly to the snow-lyre.